"They look great. What should we make next time?"

"I was originally thinking cupcakes but they're kind of bulky. On the other hand, now there's two of us, and you have more cupcake carrying capacity than I do. Think we can bring enough for everyone if we try hard and believe in ourselves?"

"That's his only skill."

"Sure, cupcakes sound good. Should we make this a weekly thing?"

"Weekly cooking lessons! It's a deal."

And Solvei's house is empty of Cooking Friend and Paranoid Friend. 

She tidies up after the truffle escapade. It's important to keep a clean house. Nothing less than the best for Aunt Ghys.

The next day, she brings the entire truffle selection to school.

Is she just carrying it around to her classes? 

The teachers might have something to say about that. 

No, no. The truffles stay neatly packed up in her locker until lunchtime.

Some people are here to learn!

Some might be here for the truffles. 

Stiles does not interrupt math to demand one, though he glances her way occasionally.

A truffle appears on his desk. Solvei is very short and sitting two seats away and couldn't possibly have reached this far without getting out of her seat and coming over, and you'd think someone would've noticed her doing that, and yet: truffle.

Solvei is a goddess who leaves no prayer unanswered and also a spy from the cold, frozen wasteland that she called home.

But he'll definitely eat the truffle. No way she snuck any poison in while he was supervising.

And after they've had enough differentiating for one day, Stiles runs into her in the hall.

"Just wanted to thank you for the gift. How many 'natural talents' do you come installed with?"

"Plenty," she says. "But it's skill, not talent. What happens is, I hear about something cool, and I think to myself, 'there are people in this world who can do that and I'm not one of them. Intolerable!' and then I learn how to make candy or pick locks or play the cello, and I've been doing it since I was eight, so they all start to pile up."

"Sounds like a good habit to have. I hope Beacon Hills gives you a lot of skills to pick up."

And next she has English. 

English! How's Matt doing?

He seems more stable than she last saw him.

He doesn't wave or greet her, but nods his head.

She smiles and nods back in a friendly fashion, and then focuses on English class.

Focusing on class works.

Today, they'll be discussing whether Antigone or Creon is the true tragic hero.

The teacher is here to mediate a healthy discussion; the class will be leading themselves.

Would anyone like to offer their input?

Few of the students offer their input.

Solvei has input!

"I think that depends what you mean when you ask the question," she says. "Antigone is clearly the protagonist, and getting buried alive for doing right by your family is the sort of thing we'd tend to call tragic in the colloquial sense. But Creon also ends up ruining his life, and I think he has the more classically tragic trajectory of the two of them. Antigone basically decides that she'll take whatever comes as long as it ends in her brother's body not being eaten by dogs, and having decided this, immediately makes an open-eyed beeline for death and ruination. She knows exactly what she's doing and gets exactly what she wants - at a terrible cost, granted, but one she knew about in advance. That's not tragedy, that's success."

"Isn't that like, her tragic flaw though?"

The teacher turns, surprised, to a boy in the back, and gestures impatiently for him to go on.

"Uh, I mean, that's what makes a tragic hero, right, that's what you keep telling us. Antigone thinks that what's right is better than what's real, so she hurts her still living sister to avenge her dead brothers."

"That's true, but I don't think it fits the definition of a tragic flaw, at least not in context. For one thing, it was Creon who was putting the mortal above the divine, and that's pretty much the biggest available no-no in ancient Greek society, right? Like, Polynices committed a crime, so by law it was right to punish him. But the jurisdiction of mortal law ends with the life of the mortal, so Creon overstepped his bounds by denying him a proper burial. I'd almost call it a war crime, if I had to translate between their standards and ours."

"Aristotle invented the tragic hero. He wasn't talking about some natural category, that all Greeks agreed on. He wasn't even talking about any ideas about divine law. Just poetics, just stories. A tragic flaw isn't anything that destroys you, it's something that humbles you as it does. Antigone isn't a tragic hero, because she doesn't fall from grace. She dies without ever falling. Best way to go."