"You're doing me a service. ...if you're desperate to pay me back, buy a hat."

"Am I going to have to wear it, too? I like my hair," or lack thereof.

"A hat doesn't have to cover your whole head. I could see you in a boater. No - not straw, that would be idiotic, but maybe something in silk. It'd still show off enough of your scalp to keep you recognizable, but it'd give you a roguish charm."

"I'll buy a hat, and you'll have to convince me to wear it. Not now, though, or we will be late for lunch."

"Then I shouldn't drag you into my room and use you as a mannequin. At least not yet."

"Not yet," he laughs, "but I'm willing."

Lex sits with Liu again at lunch. Usually he doesn't like to spend too much time with one person, in case his miasma offends them more on extended contact, but Liu's good people.

Liu's fine with it, and it's not like people want to be around her much more than they want to be around Lex. She may have no aura of doom but she still looks... off.

Which Scorpius of course clocked when he talked about the telltale signs. Lex would have been able to know, the way his affinity goes, that she's a maleficer even without the appearance changes, but they're still minor enough no one brings it up. Not a great idea, in general, to piss a maleficer off, even one that looks as harmless as she does. Relatively speaking.

She's one of the good ones, though. Not like Westing, not going up and out in a blaze of inglory. Like some people are reputed to be, in her family, she's one of the careful ones. Probably used up all of her weight allowance on a bag of hamsters or something and has been slowly draining malia from them over time, building her power base. Her family is on the cusp of building their own enclave, and Lex knows she's got two cousins coming next year, so the power she's getting is for them, too. Then once she's out she can spend ten years doing no more magic and her anima might recover by enough to completely cleanse her of the effects of malia, for a nice thought.

But for now it still adds up to most people not wanting to be around her.

And Scorpius plops down next to them like he belongs, which of course he thinks he does. The various hopefuls who are wondering if he's gonna sit with them today look disappointed, but there's always another day, it's not like Scorpius really sits with anyone in particular too many times in a row anyway.

(Liu does not nearly jump out of her skin when he shows up unannounced like that but only because she is a Scholomance junior and if you still jump at unexpected harmless things here you will have a very short life.)

"Lake. Here to nanny me?"

"Yep," he says, placing an apple on Lex's tray... and another on Liu's. And he has an apple of his own, too.

"You and your damned apples."

But he takes it, and bites into it, and makes only a slight face. "Do you ever wonder if there were better cultivars even back in Sir Alfred's heyday? I've never met anyone who cared for Red Delicious or Granny Smith, but they're the only ones that seem to crop up in this pit."

"Isn't that New York's fault...?" asks Liu before she thinks better of it, and then she starts stuffing her face.

"Yeah it is," says Scorpius, shrugging. "Chloe's... grandfather, I think? Back when New York took over from London after the war. They used to eat pure nutrient sludge in the Scholomance, before, but New York got their best artificers and alchemists to build something that can transmute the nutrient sludge into something that looks like food. So they were the ones who picked it, seventy years ago."

"I've wondered occasionally if I might not like the sludge better. Sludge doesn't compete with anything. It's sludge. It feels like the imitation of real food is just insult to injury."

"I hear it tasted absolutely disgusting but of course that would be the party line I'd be fed, in New York."

Liu pauses in her chewing to look at Scorpius with a curious expression on her face.

"New York, New York, it's a hell of a town, they lie to their children to keep the victuals down." Food in food hole because he's a good lad. 

"Got a gift for you later, by the way," he tells Lex.

"Oh, what? This is the absolute edge of enough. I'm already eating for you."

He picks up a forkful of mashed potato and lets it fall to the plate, as punctuation.

Scorpius wrinkles his nose. "Fine, next time I won't tell you about it until you're done eating."

...on the one hand Liu feels like the gay boys need some time for themselves here, but on the other this is such GREAT goss. A gift? Gosh!

"- Liu," Lex says as a thought occurs to him, "what kind of assignments do you get, like, in shop and alc? I was going to ask earlier but then the conquering hero decided to pretend he was my mother."

"—um?" she says, surprised to be addressed. "Uh... n-normal things? Uh." She looks down at her plate. "My affinity's animals. I often get... stuff for familiars and, and all that."