Killian's explanation about the Bureau of Balance didn't clear much up for Lup, but it did even less for the boys, who apparently couldn't even hear it. And things only got more confusing when she heard them talking about the void fish. Fisher? It was the only explanation she could think of - but she'd never heard of anybody drinking its tank water. And what was Fisher doing here? Magnus would never have let anyone abuse his pet this way if he had remembered it. Another piece that didn't seem to fit in this bizarre puzzle.
At least it seemed to clear up their strange inability to hear anything. The Bureau people referred to it as being inoculated. Lup thought it sounded creepy.
And then she heard Lucretia.
She was relieved for a moment, even when the boys failed to recognize her, too, and she seemed not to know them. But then Lup heard her dear friend say the unthinkable: "I'm going to need you to hand over the gauntlet so we can destroy it promptly."
Destroy it? Lucretia! The others seemed to have forgotten, but Lucretia—what have you misremembered to make you believe that the Grand Relics should be destroyed? They were the only thing holding this world together! The only thing keeping the Hunger at bay!
To add insult to injury, she heard Lucretia ordering Davenport to help her. Davenport. Her captain. The man who should have had the most authority to stop her, to override her, as he'd done before when they'd come up with their desperate plan and convinced her not to cut off this plane from everything so thoroughly that it would destroy everything.
Lup raged against the inside of her prison, but nothing came of it. She could only listen as Davenport took her Gauntlet away to destroy it.
Thankfully, the journey to this Bureau was long enough to give her a chance to meditate and gather some power about her. She didn't know what she was going to do with it, yet, but she had it at her disposal.
And then Lucretia put them in some sick trial. Like, what the hell was she trying to accomplish with that little show of nonsense? Lup couldn't see, stuck in Taako's bag, but she could hear - and she heard her brother's wand snap. And felt his rising fear.
"Fuck, no." It wasn't as much power as she'd wanted to muster, but she wasn't going to let him get trampled by whatever nonsense Lucretia had set up for them. Had she just snapped, trying to deal with what they'd done? What was her deal?
She let the heat build and build until the whole staff was shaking with power and she could barely hear or see. And finally Taako pulled out the staff and pointed it at the ogre he'd been fighting, and Lup savors the moment for just a second before she explodes all the energy she'd stored up, firing with him out of the staff.
If she had knees, they'd be shaking.
She went back to meditating, but she didn't miss Lucretia talking about the Red Robes. How dangerous they were. How none of them were left. How they had been the ones to create the Grand Relics. Conveniently leaving out some very pertinent information.
What the hell was all of this about?