So the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik stars Galadriel Higgins, a girl whose father consigned himself to the Torment Nexus so her mother could escape and whose grandmother prophesied she would bring doom and destruction on untold scale to the world. While, as of the books' beginning, she hasn't, it's purely for lack of trying— she has a natural affinity for spells of mass destruction and a perfect gift for ripping people's souls out should she make the slightest effort, which she generally goes out of her way to avoid.
Also featured in this series is the titular Scholomance, an enormous clockwork thing built in a pocket dimension infested with wizard-eating monsters trying very badly to consume the children (high school aged) inside; the 25% survival rate of Scholomance students is five times the survival rate of wizard children outside the school, because the entire world has a wizard-eating monster problem and keeping them out is expensive enough that the wizards of London built a nuclear bunker (the titular Scholomance) to keep them out.
Life in the Scholomance is a strict routine of watching out for monsters, doing strenuous and delicate work to generate the mana you need to cast the spells you need to finish your schoolwork and keep yourself alive, and constant politicking with the other students who are also trying to keep themselves alive, even if it means getting someone else killed.
This is made much easier if you find people you can trust to join you in an alliance, a tight-knit strategic bond where you do whatever it takes to keep each other alive and intact until you can graduate, returning to the outside world with the skills and knowledge necessary to keep yourself alive to adulthood. Galadriel Higgins has difficulty finding or establishing one because her affinity causes a constant sense of low-level unease in everyone around her, who can tell there's something wrong even if they don't know what; when she does find allies, it's because one of them is willing to look past that sense of unease and confront the reality of who she is, even when she isn't willing to admit it herself.
Do you see where this is going, yet?
(El also has a bargaining chip because everybody thinks the school's resident hero and monster-hunter is in love with her, but that's not immediately relevant.)
ALL OF THIS TO SAY:
i think polytrix where they're stuck in this kind of resource-scarce intense survival scenario, trusting each other far beyond the bounds of reason, and having to figure out why rumi has a problem possesses some serious spice. there's also another AU rolling around in my head where instead of Galadriel Rumi swaps with Orion (monster hunter) but that's much more spoilery and I don't remember if tumblr has spoiler tools other than tags, which ime are often not very good for that
You can insert a cut and put a spoiler warning above it.
Also, I feel like Huntrix and Galadriel would get on like a house on fire.
Fuck, I want to write this now.
