"I didn't actually eat dinner, because I wasn't sure what would be safe. Do you have anything I can take?"

It's almost like he's spoken an incantation. He's suddenly surrounded by house elves trying to give him as much vegetarian food as they can.

Scott proceeds to have a late dinner, then.

They will give him food until he can't have any more food.

He does eventually hit that point, for certain values of "eventually". What value of eventually is it, anyway? It's probably getting late.

Yep, late enough that the fruit bowl painting opens up to reveal one Professor Horace Slughorn. "Mr. MacDougall, I believe you should be in bed!"

He looks appropriately contrite.

"Sorry sir. I wanted to talk to the elves about my food, and I thought I should do it before breakfast."

He nods. "That's all well and good, and I commend going after what you want, but you would have done well to look into other avenues to reach your goals. This kind of complaint and request should be made of your prefects and, ultimately, Head of House—that being me. We're your first port of call."

"Isn't it better to go directly to the source? Or is that too obvious?"

"Too obvious. In general it's better for no one to know your hand was involved at all. Or even better, do have your hand involved but in a way that makes people not believe it." He laughs. "Anyway, you'll learn how to Slytherin from your older years, I'm sure they'll have a lot of fun teaching you how to plot. Now let me show you to our Common Room."

He follows, ever the dutiful son student. 

The painting is on the first floor corridor; they have to go into the dungeons, down a few flights of stairs, turning around here and there in the mazelike structure, until they stop at an unremarkable point in the middle of a corridor. "Strategy and patience," Slughorn says aloud, and one of the walls starts opening up into a secret passage.

Scott tries to look totally indifferent to living in the dungeons.

Slughorn bids him good night and then he's in the Common Room. It's surprisingly cosy for a dungeon, if terribly austere—high ceiling, statues, paintings. There are very few people up, all of them upperclassmen. A couple of them look up from whatever they're doing, but most don't pay him any mind.

In that case, he decides to go to the first years' dormitory.

How obvious is the way there?

Pretty obvious.

There are three other boys already there and four beds, total. One of the other boys is Sadde, reading. He looks up from his book and sits up. "Hi," he whispers, since the other boys are trying to sleep.

Scott waves, but decides not to disturb everyone else.

"Good night," he whispers, and tries to sleep.

"Good night," he says back, and resumes his reading.