all in all, a not so terrible morning

year_book_hero

The Scholomance really, really hates it when kids room together.

It's an incentives thing. Outcasts and other socially-disadvantaged kids already have a harder time surviving at all than popular kids, enclavers and the like. If you start letting people room together, that's yet another way in which they get fucked over: all of the kids with a choice are going to room together, in threes and fours, cramped sure but still better for their survival than being alone, they can sleep in shifts and keep any mals out and that's a straight-up improvement over regular shields. Meanwhile the kids who don't have such social capital are going to stay alone, and be disproportionately targeted by everything that goes bump in the night. Spreading targets evenly is better for survival, and the Scholomance is playing nothing but a numbers game.

There's also graduation. The entire senior hall gets shuffled as the whole school spirals its floors down one level every year, and then it's locked out of access to the rest of the school and the only way they can go is down: to the graduation hall, where they have to run past the hordes of maleficaria that await. If seniors could just go to the freshmen's rooms that night, free of consequences, and not be forced to graduate, they would. One more year in the Scholomance means one more year to learn more spells, get more well-prepared, be more likely to survive out there. But there are not enough resources for that, not enough food and supplies. Everything is budgeted tightly, and having five rather than four cohorts of students in the school at the same time is just infeasible.

So it's for these and other similar reasons that the Scholomance really, really hates it when kids room together. Each student gets one room, full stop, and they have to be in said room from curfew start to curfew end. And what happens to students who flaunt this rule and decide to try to spend a night together anyway is they become a cautionary tale. When you get in at induction and the sophomores and juniors and seniors tell you all of the horror stories, that's typically enough to scare most kids straight. Not all, though, and every year you have a few hapless souls who decide to try it anyway. Their screams echo in the night as they bang on their colleagues' doors, asking for help, any help, until they are caught and dragged away by the maleficaria that the school has specifically sent their way, killed and eaten or perhaps just eaten without being killed first, depending on which level of bad luck they have on their last day of life.

Of course, these kinds of rules don't really apply very thoroughly when Scorpius Lake is involved. Not that the school isn't sending mal after mal his way, weakening its own wards just to make sure these kids learn in the most permanent way how bad an idea it is to spend the night together. It does that, with a vengeance. Mal after mal is broken against the shield of Lake's resolve, and more pragmatically the actual magical shields he has to renew every now and then. Yvette Villeneuve sleeps, perhaps not very peacefully, but at all, needing all the energy she can get to heal from the stab wound she got from Jack Westing last night. Scorpius wouldn't let her spend the night alone, not with said recent stab wound, not when she was about to be assailed by mals all night long anyway—they can smell the blood in the water, so to speak, and she would be low-hanging fruit. If mals are coming for her anyway, Scorpius reasoned, he might as well spend the night there and keep her from dying. Mal after mal, all night long, being killed and destroyed and pulled apart, each death fueling Scorpius's next spell, systematically and thoroughly.

By the last couple of hours of curfew, most mals who would come have come, and he gets stretches of even up to half an hour to rest. Not that he can sleep, obviously, not if he wants to stay alive, but he can at least sit and wait a bit, breathe more calmly. And as soon as the first bell rings in the morning, he flops onto the ground and breathes a sigh of relief. It's... over, finally.

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year_book_hero

"Yours won't, Ibrahim's might."

dead_reckoning

Oh we're rapid fire psychoanalysing everyone now okay.

à_la_mort

"And that's your problem how? It'll probably be good for him."

year_book_hero

"If I didn't think my image was useful I wouldn't have cultivated it, now, would I?" Here's the workshops, now to find somewhere to do the work.

à_la_mort

"Ah, yes. Peace of mind. Surely this is a worthy altar for human sacrifice, no? Be this thing, always, for someone else, and make no attempt to find an alternative or help him grow as a person."

Finding a place to work isn't too difficult, it's finding a safe (as can be expected) place to work that's a bit more so. Still, she has practice at this sort of thing, and she'll carefully pick out a work station that is far away from the vents, the door, and has a lot of open space around it to let them easily spot anything trying to get them. From there it's the typical check to make sure there's nothing under the table, nothing under the chairs, so on, so forth, nothing will be sneaking up on any of them if she has anything to say about it. And she does.

year_book_hero

"Who has the time to help four thousand kids grow as people," Scorpius mumbles but yeah he'll help with that.

dead_reckoning

...are they dating or are they not? This really looks like they're dating.

Alexei does not know why this makes him feel kind of sad.

He has never been one to let his emotions show or stop him from doing anything, though, so while the other two do their obligatory mal-checking procedures Alexei will start cleaning the surface and laying out the materials and instruments.

à_la_mort

"Nobody, sometimes you need to give people space to grow themselves," is her reply, but then yeah they really need to get properly set up, they have a lot to do.

Because this is smithing, that 'a lot to do' is mostly to heat the metal up and then let it cool down again, several times, occasionally beating it into the correct shape. But it's all got to be done properly, see, the timing is a bit tricky and she will be incanting over it at certain parts and meanwhile there's a quenching oil to brew,. Inconveniently, the instructions are a bit jumbled together, not neatly written out for each person doing their part, instead written for what should be done first. And in her handwriting. Sort of like she had been expecting to do all three complicated parts of this by herself.

... Damn, she really should have thought to rewrite the instructions to cover that a bit, she's about to get yelled at for being stupid, isn't she.

dead_reckoning

...no? He's mostly just... concerned... that she was planning to do that on her own but now he's here and he can help her so.

year_book_hero

Yeah, no. He kind of wants to be sarcastic about it because of fucking course but also she clearly felt like there was no one she could ask and besides it's not useful to be sarcastic and she'll get defensive. So no yelling.

Scorpius is not really an incredibly competent alchemist, he's passable, but passable alchemy track is still more alchemy practice than what incanter tracks get, and he's pretty diligent. In practice this means he needs to pay more attention to and think more about his job than Alexei does but he executes it well.

dead_reckoning

Huh. Okay. This is going pretty well, then? He's mildly surprised.

à_la_mort

Oh. Okay. Well, good. Alexei's a better smith than she is, so it's also going quicker than she'd expected it to, and soon enough she's crooning to the nascent dagger in Old French, about how it'll be such a good athame, yes it will. The actual lyrics are more impressive than that, but that is essentially what she's doing.

Just as Scorpius gets done with the requisite brewing of the quenching oil, he might notice that some kind of web is being carefully woven around them.

year_book_hero

He doesn't notice the web.

He does notice the soft clinking like windchimes as a sirenspider mostly-quietly drops down onto one of the metal tables behind him. He starts turning around with a "Motherfucker" on his lips but he doesn't get past "Motherf" before they can hear a second set of wind chimes. Two sirenspiders. Just their luck.

"Take over for me," he says, grabbing a sledgehammer and turning around to go to town on them.

dead_reckoning

.....shit?????? Sirenspiders are bad?????? If they complete their song all three of them will be paralysed and incapable of taking any actions while they become living nests for their eggs and—

à_la_mort

They are really extremely bad, but fucking up a project midway through right when they're about to quench the damn blade that she's reaching a crescendo in her song for is also really extremely bad, so. She'll trust Scorpius to be good at his real area of expertise, and fill in for him. She already knows how this part goes, anyway. It's pretty straightforward.

Blade gets to go into oil at the same time she finishes her spellsong, and now she can see if Scorpius needs some kind of backup or something. Is he fine? He's fine, right.

year_book_hero

Well, there's a whole cacophony sounding like six pipe organs collapsing and he's dancing around the enormous metallic maleficaria's sharp appendages with a manic grin on his face, which is definitely loads better than a non-cacophonous chime-song and a petrified Scorpius, so probably?

dead_reckoning

à_la_mort

Yeah, he's fine. Instead she gets to checking for a third one. There is not a third one, but there could have been, and it causes her to spot the web they'd set to catch them if they'd tried to do the sensible thing and run. Sneaky little fuckers, aren't they. Well, that's fine, she can murmur something (in Old German, this time) that sets it alight in brilliant violet flame, bright and then gone shortly after.

dead_reckoning

"Those were two sirenspiders. Large ones."

year_book_hero