"Sounds like a plan." 

Liu goes and gets it. "Do you want to spray it on yourself or should I?"

"--I'll do it." She's pretty sure she won't accidentally eat Liu but she wants more than pretty sure, for this. 

She spritzes some on her wrist. She does not manage to eat it on the first try. 

It stiffens her up - that arm is totally immobile and the rest of her is distinctly disinclined to bend, though she's bigger than a mouse and it's not completely overpowering her diagonally opposite toes or anything.

She doesn't growl, because that would be a motion and she isn't that invested in making it happen, but she thinks growly thoughts, and she forces the finger on the spritzer to twitch again, and--

The container is much lighter. 

"Hm," she manages. 

"Did it work?" Liu asks.

"...Ish." 

She jerks her arm a bit to demonstrate how the thing is not making a sloshy noise. 

"Can you move where you sprayed, or did it only work the second time?"

"Second thing." She awkwardly flops her arm a little bit. 

"That's still pretty cool."

"I ate all the rest of the stuff by accident, so it's a good proof of concept but not very promising for not accidentally eating people. I'll probably brew a huge batch of something cheap and pointless and keep practicing." 

"I wound up making a prototype bead back when that was still on the table, it was rather off the mark and now it's too leaky to sell and not leaky enough to help you even if you still wanted that, do you want to try eating it next time we're in the shop?"

"Might as well." 

Aadhya takes this down in her planner.

The next time they're in shop, Lucia spends almost forty-five minutes focusing on the bead in her hand, before relaxing. 

"Proof of concept," she says, holding the de-magicked bead. 

"Whoa. You definitely needed another way to be totally ridiculous, way to go."

"I see a lot less call for disenchanting things than for my usual wheelhouse but it is nice to expand my repertoire past murder!"

"Could be handy in case of assassins."

"I still want to do a lot more practicing before trying this in a live-fire situation involving people but if I get good enough to confidently eat spells out of the air without also eating a person that would be great, yeah."

"Preach."

Lucia quickly discovers that instead of brewing vast swathes of low-potency somethingorother herself, it's more efficient to buy junk projects off of underclassmen. Usually freshmen; the decreased potency of junk doesn't matter for her purposes and they're cheaper to buy off. 

She practices. 

She doesn't practice all the time; she has other things to do. But she does spend a lot of time practicing. 

And then Field Day rolls around, and she heads down to the gymnasium with her team, only occasionally darting away to kill something that was about to devour a hapless underclassman. 

Aadhya favors relay races and has the strongest opinion of any of them in this matter.

Lucia is fine with relay races! 

Relay races are kind of fun. 

Lucia is just passing the baton to El when there are some ominous rumbling noises on the opposite side of the nearest doorway. 

The fuck is making that noise. (El accepts the baton, but is somewhat distracted from running by trying to see.)

The doors burst open, and--

It's not like what comes out into the killbox. These are the kinds of ordinary mals that infest the school under ordinary circumstances, not graduation mals like groglers and siren-spiders. 

But there are a whole fucking lot of them.