"Yeah, okay. Time to find out if mals look shiny in a mirror, too." 

"Shiny?" asks Aadhya, snipping a bit of the sheet metal off to polish up.

"--Oh--mals look sort of--shiny--to me. Stronger mals look shinier. It's not exactly a visual thing, it doesn't interfere with seeing them normally and I've got a spell that lets me use it at range to find them." 

"At range but I guess not through walls?"

"I can use it through, like, library shelves, but the wards between us and what's on the other side of that wall don't let it through." 

"There are wards left? That grogler was tearing through them like paper maché."

"There aren't wards left on the wall, but there are wards left on the floor, and there isn't anything high enough up for the wards on the floor not to get in the way of the angle of view, unless it works through the mirror."

"Well, here you go then," says Aadhya, handing over the shined bit of metal.

She angles the mirror in, and murmurs a small, cheap light spell. 

She hastily withdraws the mirror and snuffs the light. 

"Okay! Good news and bad news. They're the same news. There is absolutely a mal in there I can kill for lots of mana, and the conditions are cramped enough that I can almost certainly kill it before it manages to wiggle its way out even if we take the whole wall down. Because it's a fucking enormous argonet." 

"Well, that doesn't call for ice, are you all set to go or do you require warmup exercises, grenade potions, a cheer squad?"

"Nah, I just figured you guys would appreciate, you know, a warning." 

"I do! Thank you! I will stand over there."

There are some extremely unpleasant noises, as the argonet makes its way up with great difficulty and a not-insignificant quantity of grogler slime. 

Lucia briefly entertains thoughts of the argonet's eye appearing at the aperture, and immediately putting her sword through it, but actually the argonet can navigate pretty well without looking directly at things, so when it does get close enough, she has to choose a much less dramatic weak point in its skull. 

There are some more unpleasant noises; Lucia didn't have a good angle for a fast kill. 

By the time she draws her sword back, dripping with argonet blood and cerebrospinal fluid, she's glowing brighter than she had the night Jack stabbed El. 

"- you feeling all right there?"

"We might want to leave it there while we repair the wall but maybe I could get a few bits out laprascopically?"

"I think what I want to do is leave it in until we're ready to fix the wall, and then when we take the wall down we can see what we can salvage from where we can reach it. I feel fine, just--conspicuous." 

"We can swing by my room, pick up a few more crystals before too many people see you."

"Awesome. Hey, El, does the Junior Prophesied Dark Sorceress Kit happen to contain any dark, concealing cloaks?"

"...huh, let me think. Uh - no, I think that'll make you radioactive - hm - not sure I can avoid accidentally making a nightshroud if - okay, got it, top me off?"

"--Well, I was joking, but sure!" 

Uhhh how much is too much--right the night they met--she passes over an approximately mortal flame sized amount.

El whispers in ominous Kauravi and Lucia is engulfed in a pillar of blackness. It gives Lucia a kind of HUD, like a low-saturation video game except for all the apertures and people in her field of view popping up in red. "You don't want to do that in direct sunlight but we're not so much as swinging through the caf," El remarks lightly.

"What a fascinating life you lead."

"Amazing. What happens in direct sunlight?" 

"Oh, the spell absorbs light and turns it into a low grade sterilization field, I got it when I wanted to disinfect a cut but the original fellow wanted to both look ominous and kill anyone who got in his personal space while withering all the grass where he walked. It's related to the one that would've made you radioactive but in this light it won't even give us sunburns."

"You get the most amazing spells. Next time you need to clean a cut I have disinfectant." 

She starts moving towards the stairs.