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

"Thanks! So what about you, are all of your projects on track?"

Yi Liu

mouse_leficer

"Yeah. I got my shop assignment in English for language credit this time, too, and it's going okay, and my alchemy assignment should be done next week."

à_la_mort

"Oh, well done. Let me know if you need help?"

Yi Liu

mouse_leficer

She blinks a couple of times then nods slowly. "Sure. But I think I'm fine."

Read: she doesn't really have anything to trade for it right now.

à_la_mort

Yvette gives a sad smile and nods. She hates that the school works like this! She hates it so much!

"Okay," she agrees, anyway.

Lunch proceeds apace, and the kids around them eventually get over the fact that Yvette didn't bring Scorpius and they don't even try to finish eating before she does.

à_la_mort

This is so deeply weird!!! Does she even have to do any kind of footwork to have company to get to her next class?

Yi Liu

mouse_leficer

Well, yes, but that may just be because her next class is shop, which everyone who has already completed their end of term project can just skip, Liu included. She will probably need to find the handful of kids who have shop at the same time as her and also still need to work on their projects.

à_la_mort

Oh, good. Blessed normality. She knows what to do with this. Fortunately for her, she keeps somewhat obsessive tabs on who has classes when she does and whether they might plausibly need to go to it or not, because that is how one gets by when one is a ghost haunting the hallways. Natalya is one such person, but Yvette did just mention she was going to shop to make a dagger, as her end of term project, so she should use someone else as her in for getting into the handful of kids. Make it too awkward for people to kick her out after she's already managed to get in, for fear of earning her wrath or whatever it is people fear her for. Ibrahim, maybe? He's probably more likely to tolerate her with her... whatever it is that she has... with Scorpius. She might have to pay in telling him Scorpius gossip, but, well. That's a price she'll pay for (relative) safety to shop class. Even if she'll hate him, and also herself, and the entire world and everyone in it. Okay, this plan decided, so she'll then need to look for an opening to execute it, where is he sitting, has he already started mingling, who are his likely buddies to go along to shop with...?

Before she can spot Ibrahim, though, Natalya calls her attention and says, "Hey, you're going to shop for your project, right? Do you want company?"

à_la_mort

... what.

There's an awkward pause as she processes this insanity of an invitation. What????

"I," she stutters, off guard, "I would appreciate that, thank you."

"Ibrahim has shop now, too, and I think Cora?"

"...yeah."

à_la_mort

"Right. He does." Uh. Um. Well, she did manage to actually find Ibrahim, so, she can in fact assist with this attempt to gather people for a necessary trip. With... her included. As the first person Natalya asked. ????? "I, think I saw him over," and she motions towards the table she spotted him at.

"Villeneuve!" he says to her once he's joined them, more cheerful than she's probably ever seen him. "I heard about last night. Awful, terrible."

à_la_mort

And people say she's a sadist. ... Admittedly she kind of is, but, look, she points it at mals instead of her peers, that's clearly much better.

Natalya inviting her along early makes some sense this way, because clearly she can be used as a bribe, and it is her job to placate the fanboy. Joy.

"You want a complete play by play of everything that happened, don't you."

"You know how it is, you just can't trust these rumors. Why don't you tell me all about it on our way to shop?"

à_la_mort

"Fine," she sighs, and then, yes. She will, in fact, give him (and everyone else in their group) the rundown of what happened. While sounding just a fraction dead inside and like she'd rather chew off her own arm. She wouldn't, but it's more about the tactical loss of losing an arm than anything else. If she could avoid this indignity and then also have both arms at the end of it, well. That'd be different. And at least the taste would be a nice change from the transmuted nutrient slurry of the cafeteria.

It's always great when people have positive-sum trades like these! They are a sufficiently large group of sufficiently powerful people that they don't have any issues with the pair of mals that try to attack them.

And then they get to the shop room and...

"Did someone set this room on fire or something?"

à_la_mort

One member of the pair of mals gets very firmly stomped on, over and over again, until it is paste, no magic necessary. Her? Getting out latent aggression?? What a silly thing to think, ha ha, she's just being thorough.

..... this is totally the work room that she torched with Mortal Flame, isn't it. Yeah, uh. Yeah it is. Um. She'll just... pretend she has no idea how that happened, how about.

"Probably gives us better odds of slightly less mal ambushes?"

"Unless whatever did set the room on fire was one of the mals..."

Cora Dube

"Is that... a melted chair? Aren't these chairs fireproof?"

à_la_mort

"True, but that's a pretty terrible ambush, isn't it? Setting the place on fire before we even get here? ... I guess it might have eaten someone else."

She is just resolutely ignoring the comment about the melted chair. Resolutely.