“Yes it is. I have decided I like agglos.”

"The googly eyes make it a charmer." French toast om nom.

“You said your mum helps maleficers, right?”

"Once in a while, yeah."

“Would you be able to recognize if someone had done it by accident?”

"Had done - what, maleficing? You can't do it by accident, that's like - okay, I don't know what you might be able to do -"

“Orion can pull mana from mals he kills and now so can I.”

"Well that's nothing like normal at all."

“It struck me as pretty weird but I’m still very new at wizardry.”

"Most people cheat, they'll pull a little of what they need out of an anthill or their bedpost or something - something they don't care about, something that can't resist. If it resists, if it's a rodent or something, trying to take it hurts. Wizards can hold onto ours a fair bit tighter than a normal person, so getting anything off us is harder still but more rewarding obviously. Mals - well, they're not building their own mana, now, are they, everything they have on them should already be malia, to say nothing of how he or you is getting it out again, but..."

“…The mana isn’t slurpable until it’s already dead, does that matter?”

"...I guess it might?? I'm strict mana myself, and the maleficers who've come to Mum's circle don't like me more than anyone else does, I'm going off books."

“That’s fair. I was really going off the latter, hoping you could help. Aadhya said it felt clean, when I passed some to her. It’s…probably fine? But I’m trying to find out as much as I can before I start handing out the ability.”

"His clavemates've got to know, I assume he's got a power sharer."

“Mm, yeah. Some of them tried to talk him out of coming down to the gym with me.”

"It's a pretty mad thing to do, though he looks all right and so do you."

“Yeah, he was absolutely fine. He—the mals were there, right, because we were breaking curfew, but—they were scared of him.”

"...what, the school steered them into the gym and then they tried to run right out of it again?"

“Oh, no, me they went after.”

"Including after you did the thing?"

“Yeah, whatever he has going on is more than what I got. Which is standard, I don’t get everything from anyone I dragon-fairy-elf-witch.”

"Huh. I don't really know Lake more than, you know, anyone else whose life he's saved a couple times."

“Yeah, I don’t know. If I can’t find out anything wrong with what I copied in the next few days, I’ll find someone who wants to test it out.”

"The poor mals, they'll be so scared."

“You know, I am okay with that.”