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.

Total: 663

Posts Per Page:

‹ Previous 1 2 … 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Next ›

« First ‹ Previous 26 of 27 Next › Last »

year_book_hero

He makes a face. "New York is... complicated. I have very complicated feelings about them. Suffice to say that I'm not actually friends with any of them and would have a hard time doing that because of all the shared history."

dead_reckoning

"And Yvette is new."

year_book_hero

"Nnnnnyes but that's not... exactly..." Hum. "Yvette is Yvette. I like her. I like her for who she is, I know you're gonna say that I've only known her for a week but that's not..." He shrugs. "She leaves a strong impression."

dead_reckoning

"She does."

year_book_hero

"And it's not just that but people often get creeped out when I point out that I often get more out of interactions with them than they think they're giving me and I can get to understand a lot about a person from very little, objectively. And I want to be Yvette's friend."

dead_reckoning

Wanting to be Yvette's friend is objectively correct and it's not Alexei's fault that most people have awful taste and don't realise this does that imply that Scorpius has good taste. Is that what he's thinking, here.

"Mm," is what he says instead.

year_book_hero

"I got a lot more out of your 'mm' than you think you're giving me, as a case in point."

dead_reckoning

"...what?"

year_book_hero

"You were thinking that obviously I want to be Yvette's friend, who wouldn't, except for all those shallow people who can't take a teensy bit of maleficer aura that isn't even maleficing it's just rotten luck, and objectively speaking Yvette is awesome and being her friend is a privilege."

dead_reckoning

aaaaaa???????

year_book_hero

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to spook you. ...well, I knew you were going to be spooked and I said what I did in full knowledge of that because I thought it was better than not saying it but if I had a way of saying it that wouldn't spook you I'd have done that instead. I just kind of think you find the inherent content of that kind of spooky."

dead_reckoning

"Yes."

year_book_hero

"Do you want me to explain how I got what I got?"

dead_reckoning

"Yes!!!" At least if—

year_book_hero

"At least if I try to explain it it won't be a mysterious black box that may be out to get you in strange surprising ways, which are terrifying because this is the Scholomance and anything that is strange or surprising is dangerous," he says, not literally echoing Alexei's thoughts word-for-word but being kind of scarily close to it. "Although I expect I won't be able to explain it to the point where you can reproduce it at home because a lot of it is social intuition and gut feelings that I have no idea how to transfer."

dead_reckoning

aaaa.

year_book_hero

"So the thing is, I have little models of people in my mind, right? Well, everyone does, really. You consult those models when you go, 'what would they do?' to predict them, or to try to understand them. And that little model has to make sense, it has to be, like, consistent with everything they've said and done so far. If your model tells you a person would act in a certain way and then they act a different way, that means your model was wrong, and you need to incorporate the new thing into it."

dead_reckoning

...okay... That seems all very common-sensical even if it's not really a framing he'd made explicit in his mind.

year_book_hero

"But then that model isn't just for things they do, right? You can imagine what other people are feeling and thinking, even if in only rough or superficial ways. I didn't know Yvette that well at this time last week but now with what I do know it's very obvious to me that she'd chew me out for doing what I had been trying to do. It's very obvious to me that she'd have been hurt. She is a prideful person, a headstrong person, and she is so, so lonely, and she has watched me offer small morsels of attention to everyone everywhere and she doesn't want that, she doesn't want a morsel of attention, she wants someone who really cares for her, she wants something real. She wants someone to deserve her, because she is worth it, she is a person who should be treated like one and who deserves to have someone who wants her. If I don't want her then she doesn't want me. She doesn't want scraps, she doesn't want leftovers, she wants to be, pardon my reference to old songs, the starring role in someone's heart, not just support."

dead_reckoning

That doesn't explain anything. Like, yes, Scorpius is right, that is how Yvette is, but... how does he know all of that after just a week?

year_book_hero

"I mean a lot of that is kind of the way she wears her heart on her sleeve, right? Some of that she explicitly said, and—okay so, she dresses well. For the Scholomance, but still. And she has her poison-detecting lipstick. She cares about her appearance, she showers more often than most people, at least most indies. Her room has personality, which lot of enclavers' do but most indies' don't." He doesn't look around at the mostly-bare room of Alexei's to make his point, but he thinks it's been made anyway. "What kind of person is that, hmm, I want to say 'vain' but not in the negative sense, in the sense of—proud of her image, of how she looks, how she comes off—and acts in the way she did when she turned me down, says the things she said? Yvette is the kind of person who does that.

"So now I have a little Yvette in my head that is a lot closer to the real Yvette than she was before last week, and I can consult that little Yvette to try to understand what the real Yvette might be thinking or feeling."

dead_reckoning

"...and you have that for me. But we've barely spoken."

year_book_hero

"Your silences are incredibly communicative. Your choice of when to speak is communicative, you mostly don't at least compared to the average. And it's... I pay attention to this stuff. And I have a good memory for it. I knew Yvette must be someone who cared a lot about her image even before we started hanging out last week because of how she dressed. And I'm paying attention to you, and there's a little you in my head, and you really care about Yvette and she's probably your closest friend here, even when counting Natalya and Sofia. You like her, you give her affordances that you don't give others, I would not be surprised if you ended up in an alliance with her, I know it's kind of taboo to mention that but something tells me that you will not mind."

dead_reckoning

Okay so Lake isn't literally a mind reader since he apparently doesn't know that Alexei and Yvette kind of... already decided they're in an alliance. The other day. They haven't written their names on the wall yet but...

...wait, are they in an alliance? He guesses they didn't specifically say so but he's pretty sure that's what she meant? Shit now he's second-guessing himself.

...squint. "Are you inferring things about my silence now?"

year_book_hero