El is sitting with poor Yi Liu today! They don't have much conversation, but they have enough for other people to overhear. Soon the conversation is both more plentiful and - all about Lucia and how she ~*~saaaaved~*~ El's life, and fixed her door, and gave her mana, and El looks like she wants to faceplant into her macaroni.

Oh no. Poor El. Like, this is slightly hilarious, but definitely in a "poor El" way.

...On the other hand, this is plausibly related to El sitting in a better spot. You win some, you lose some?

One of the other New Yorkers catches Lucia glancing at El and tells her in hushed tones that El is a maleficer. Lucia does not roll her eyes, and extra special does not inform them that if El had been a maleficer she could have taken more mana than Lucia was willing to give when she gave it; New York has learned through necessity to tolerate Lucia giving things away to non-New Yorkers but it reduces the social friction if she doesn't rub it in their faces more than necessary.

Although...hm. 

Since the people around her have decided to talk about El anyway, it probably won't hurt to ask a few questions? 

That evening, when everyone else is in their rooms just before curfew, she leaves a note just outside El's door. 

It has the incantation for a plain English cleaning spell she coaxed out of her maintenance kid, and the addendum: 

Sorry about my fanboys. Do you know why people seem to think you're a maleficer? 

-Santa

with a little doodle of a Santa hat on top of the S of the signature. 

Dear Santa, this year I would like a belt and a shirt and a well behaved pair of scissors.

Is this spell supposed to be so fiddly? It's like a tongue twister and a Rubik's cube had a baby, which I suppose is reasonable if it's meant to more than pay for its own first fifty uses by the time it's learnt provided the wizard doesn't chip her teeth on it first.

I think it's just a convenient label to slap on people they don't like.

She doesn't ask why people don't like her; it's probably the same snippiness that's why Lucia does like her. Or something else, and either way, poking it is unlikely to help. 

The next note is atop a bundle of fabric and leather with a pair of scissors that haven't gone bad buried in it. 

I tried it and it doesn't seem fiddly at all to me, that's weird.

Thank you Santa, I've been a very good strict mana girl all year!

I will probably figure it out eventually but fortuitously there is no longer mal goop on my floor so it isn't urgent.

Wait, are you actually strict mana or is that a joke

All year, all my life, all actually.

Good for you. 

My dad has a theory that the reason mals have gotten so much worse is that all the cheating adds up when the wizard population increases. So--thank you. For not being part of the problem

Delighted to have spared you some work.

Frankly the work I do is, like, the least troubling aspect of the situation.

The notepaper is starting to run out of space. El draws a checkmark in the last blank corner and returns it, expecting that to be the end of it.

The next day at breakfast Lucia does something that she is known to occasionally do, which is do a solo raid on the school supply closet and then bring a huge mal-free haul to the cafeteria for everyone else to pick over. 

El has never gotten to the front of the pack at one of these things before but she does need ink and paper and might as well try. She has a haircut, done herself but in the mirror with the scissors; she hasn't found anything to use as a belt buckle yet, but she's gotten the fabric punctured and crocheted at the edges into a sort of sleeved poncho thing.

Lucia is more careful about looking at El, this time. She glances at her out of the corners of her eyes, doesn't stare at the group she's in. 

Does engineer an open space at the right moment for El to take advantage of it. 

Oh, score. This is pencils, not ink, but beggars can't be -

- can't be not elbowed in the side by some tosser, apparently; she doesn't fall but she stumbles.

Lucia smacks the tosser in the elbow. 

"Be nice," she warns him. 

"I didn't see her," he protests.

"Be careful, then. I don't want my deliveries devolving into a brawl."

El grabs a couple pencils and makes her exit without further mishap.

Good enough. 

It's a long day. She's starting a new language, for mortal flame purposes, and she doesn't actively have trouble with languages, but they're neither effortless mal-slaughter nor something where she can just bribe someone else to do her homework, which means it's harder than most of the things she gets up to on a day-to-day basis, so as a bonus she also spends a few minutes berating herself for being annoyed by something that's still less stressful than the entire rest of the school has to deal with. 

She goes on a nice, cleansing hunt through the freshmen dorms right before dinner, which leads to her eating by herself because everyone is so put off by the stink of something that emitted a lot of noxious but not, actually, toxic, goo when she killed it, and she picks the least safe spot in the entire cafeteria to do it because otherwise someone would take the opportunity of her sitting alone to try sitting next to her, and having someone she doesn't know pretend the smell doesn't bother them when it clearly does, in order to kiss up to her, is like, concentrated essence of what she doesn't like about interacting with everyone except El. 

After dinner, Lucia has a very thorough shower, and grabs a bundle with another pencil and three pens and a notebook, and is lurking in the hall nearish El's room to drop it off, when she sees Jack Westing knock on El's door. 

Lucia ducks out of sight. 

Jack Westing is... a problem. Lucia is pretty sure he's a maleficer. If he is, he's gone straight past Liu's black fingernail stage and is down to the charming stage of a destroyed anima. 

Lucia is pretty sure she hasn't caught every maleficer in their year, let alone the whole school; he isn't necessarily the one who got Luisa, if Luisa was even got by a student maleficer and not a particularly discreet mal. 

She doesn't know what he wants with El, but it's probably not good. 

The safe thing to do would be to bust in and demand to know what he was doing, but, uh--that would be pretty counter to her established policy of not publicly getting Santa Lucia all over El. Unless she kills him, but she's never killed a human being yet and doesn't really want to do it over probably not good. 

She watches. 

(The fact that she is upwind of them does not occur to her as relevant.)

El opens the door at his knock, saying, "Would it've -"

And then he stabs her.

What the fuck!?!?!?

Out of all the problems she'd thought Jack might be, randomly stabbing El was not, actually, on the list! 

Who randomly stabs people in the stomach where they won't even die fast enough to not get off a retaliatory shot. What the fuck. 

Her mind is busy being bewildered, but her body knows what to do; reflexes honed since she was old enough to walk have her dashing down the hall, school supplies abandoned on the floor. 

When she reaches the room, the door is shut. She kicks it open--dammit, that is the second time she's broken El's door, this needs to not become a habit.

Jack is kneeling over El with blood smeared on his mouth, what the fuck?

Both of them look up when the door smashes in, Jack starting to turn and El's eyes rising--good, El isn't dead yet--

Lucia's favorite Boa-Zande sweeps through Jack's neck before he can finish turning. She doesn't look to see whether she severed his spinal cord or if the body is still in one piece; she drops down beside El to assess the damage.  

"Tool chest," El gasps. "Down the left side. Packet. And some - goop - packet first."

She opens the tool chest, fumbles for the packet, opens it and pulls out a thin square of cloth. 

"Wipe up the blood with one side. Okay if it gets dirty. Take out the knife and put the other side on. Goop on top."