all in all, a not so terrible morning

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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à_la_mort

… this is deeply weird.

She’ll go… sit with Alexei? Because he tolerated her before she caught Scorpius’s eye, and she knows what loyalty is? But this is so weird, she has no idea how to navigate cafeteria politics when she’s actually a participant instead of a weird outcast girl looking on from afar.

dead_reckoning

They give her space to sit and none of them give her disgusted looks.

Alexei looks down at her general stomach area before looking back up at her face, raising an eyebrow very slightly in a wordless "How are you feeling?" question.

à_la_mort

They also mysteriously have one extra seat open too, right near her. How strange and unexpected.

The concern gets a very slight (and only a little pained) smile, and a tiny shrug. Which is to say: yeah she’s still recovering from a stab wound, and it hurts like a bitch (especially now, after the long trek to the cafeteria) but she’s handling it well enough. She’ll be fine. Probably. She’ll probably be fine. And having people be weirdly welcoming to her is… useful? While injured?

dead_reckoning

He nods and turns back to look at the people who were already at the table.

But Natalya looks at her and asks, "Hey, would you swap for milk? The lower tray was looking weird, I steered clear," while gesturing at an untouched spring roll on her plate.

mouse_leficer

(And here's Liu, coming out of the queue and looking for somewhere to sit.)

à_la_mort

“Yeah, sure,” says Yvette, who is unaccustomed to actually having trade offers. This is a strange time.

But she might as well use it, right? She gives Liu a welcoming wave and a smile. Look, there’s an open seat and everything! Not at all saved for someone else!

mouse_leficer

...isn't it? Saved for someone else?

But, well, Alexei seems to be fine with it, himself, and, well...

..........

She likes Yvette.

So she'll go over there and ask, "Is this seat taken?" in English.

dead_reckoning

"No," he says, also in English, before anyone else can say anything.

And if you're paying really close attention the corner of his mouth is twitching a tad.

mouse_leficer

And so she sits, to the visible dismay of everyone else (except Natalya, who maybe looks only very slightly guilty for some reason).

Scorpius Lake

year_book_hero

(Why is Yvette great, he has no idea, but she is, and he wants more of her in his life.)

Scorpius, who's been kind of lowkey watching this exchange from afar, is gonna sit with some Argentinian kids and even try valiantly to do a little bit of Spanish in their direction rather than force them to speak English for his sake, which when the school is always looking for the first opportunity to dump you with five classes of a new language is not just corteous it is downright friendly, even if at least one of English or Mandarin is pretty much mandatory to get in anyway.

à_la_mort

Yvette isn’t dismayed. In fact, she’s the opposite of dismayed. She’s downright bubbly, even, though not really sure how to… engage with most of the people at this table. Instead she can gently entice Liu into small talk about classes, because they’ve ever actually conversed before Yvette drew the attention of the school hero.

mouse_leficer

Sure, they can do that.

"Have you finished your artificing project?" she asks, after she's gotten going enough to not really be shy. "What was it anyway?"

à_la_mort

"I have not," she sighs. "It's, um." Incredibly risky and likely to turn evil? "... a dagger."

dead_reckoning

"A dagger?" Alexei asks, his first words this afternoon. "Even artificers stay away from it." He remembers belatedly to make his accent thicker then asks, "Why did you choose it?"

à_la_mort

"My other options were significantly worse," she says wryly. And they were, the other available artificing projects were 'cup that poisons any liquid in it' and 'literal bomb,' but the literal bomb could be used against a bunch of mals all bundled together and be safe, and the dagger is, well. A dagger. Technically speaking, it's an athame, meant to stay eternally sharp, cut through many materials daggers shouldn't be able to, to keep the things it cuts fresh for longer than it should, steer itself a bit to find the perfect weak point, and enhance the power of things she uses from, that sort of thing. And, if she pulls it off correctly, cut through magic warding. Which, for the record, she wants to use for cutting through mals, which also sometimes have magic warding, but obviously when it comes to her, everyone will think the worst. A sharp knife is an ordinary Freshman project, like mana batteries, and for her to go for a dagger now, at the end of Junior year, putting actual power and knowledge into it instead of just 'stay sharp,' well. It implies things, about how she will intend to use it for more than just self defense. A knife made by a Junior could do some real damage, and everyone with a brain here knows it. So, sort of alarming to mention as one's end-of-term project. This is kind of why she kept a lid on what she was doing.

But it's bound to get out eventually, and this is the best time for it to do so, so soon after she killed a literal maleficer in self defense and everyone's feeling sympathetic for her. It's not that bad to make a murder implement her Junior year? Right? ... Right???

"And... I could really use something for self defense, if something gets too close to me. Incanter track. You know."

dead_reckoning

"Going to join your new boy on his adventures?" asks Sofia.

Alexei is still frowning, though. "So if you're Incanter Track, then..."

à_la_mort

"I expect I'll need an artificer's help, yes." She gives Sofia's comment the attention it deserves, which is none at all. "And possibly also an alchemist's, but I might be able to manage that myself."

dead_reckoning

"And do you have an artificer?"

à_la_mort

"Not... currently, no."

dead_reckoning

"Hmm." Chew chew om nom food. "What's it worth to you?"

Which, on the one hand, yes is still framed as a trade, but on the other hand is still an actual offer, clear as day.

à_la_mort

"Well it is my end of term artificing project," she points out wryly, "So quite a lot."

Which is to say: nothing she's going to offer here in the middle of the cafeteria! It helps that furthermore she doesn't actually know!

dead_reckoning

"Hmm," he repeats, and doesn't continue pursuing this line of inquiry. They can discuss price later.

mouse_leficer

"Do you know any alchemy-track kids who would want to help?"

She's trying to be casual but she knows people don't really......... like........ Yvette, the recent bout of attention caused by Lake notwithstanding. It's probably related to the way being around her feels like everything is about to go wrong, like you were expecting a package in the mail that you were really excited about but when you answer the door there is someone wearing black looking somber instead, and they have a letter, and you're not sure what the letter is but it's not your package and it's probably way way way worse than your package. Like that.

And Liu is sympathetic, or she would be? This kind of aura is what maleficers get after a while, she's been bracing herself for years, but recent stuff indicates Yvette is actually not a maleficer, not at all, and so nothing makes sense anymore.

à_la_mort

"At least one," she says, in a perfect deadpan that does not involve her looking at Scorpius at all, nope. "But the alchemy side of things is pretty straightforward, it's primarily an artificing and incanting job."

mouse_leficer