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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Natalya Levitskaya

"Nothing to it. Let's get to work."

à_la_mort

"Yeah." She'll just, uh, get to doing that. She's got a billet to get together; she'd worked out the tricky and finicky alloy ratio and painstakingly gathered the necessary materials, it's just forging all of them together and getting a solid basis to work from. Which of course means that if she messes up here, she'll be screwed and working from a disadvantage from then on. And also Alexei would absolutely notice, and probably be disappointed in her, which is admittedly more motivating than just having a subpar knife.

Natalya Levitskaya

Out of everyone in there, Natalya is the one who seems... the least unfriendly. Even maybe a bit friendly, it's unclear. Certainly she's the only one who found no good reason to not sit at a table next to Yvette's.

à_la_mort

Huh. That's strange. But it's fine, and anyway she doesn't care about the petty intricacies of adolescent wizard social drama. She has a billet to very carefully get right. A proper artificer would know how to cheat, or where it'd be okay to cut corners, but since she is not one of those, well. She will have to make up for it with careful measurement and double checking and being very, very, very sure that her alloy is the same composition all the way through.

And also keep a general eye out for mal ambushes. For herself, and also, she guesses, for Natalya, since she's, you know. Right there. Not that she cares.

No mals attack them this time either. Maybe she managed to burn the mals in the vents, too, or something.

à_la_mort

She had been absolutely aiming to also burn the mals in the vents, because she's nothing if not thorough, so: good. But almost three years in this hellish place has firmly entrenched her paranoia, so even if she theoretically handled it in advance, she will check again.

By the end of shop, she has a billet that she deems acceptable, shaped and flattened into the proper dimensions. It even actually looks like a dagger, now, but there are some finishing touches before the quenching process that she doesn't think she could pull off alone. What with needing to sing to it in Latin, while the thing is getting shaped, and at the same time, do the final preparations for the very specific alchemical oil that the blade will be quenched in. Two things she could plausibly juggle, maybe, but three? Yeah, no. Not if she wants the result to be any good, which she does.

Oh, and while she's here she grabs the materials she needs for her door to be fixed, again, and to make the Sanguine Blossom crystals. Just for efficiency.

Next up: Maleficaria Studies! This one is shared by every junior so they all have to go.

à_la_mort

Yaaaaaaay.

This does involve taking a massive bag of stuff to Maleficaria Studies, but such is life. At least they have a large group on the way to the class, so she presumably doesn't need to have her hands free in case of ambush.

Natalya Levitskaya

Natalya joins the other Russians when they get there.

Cora Dube

And Cora joins Jowani and Nkoyo.

Ibrahim Haddad

And Ibrahim joins Yaakov.

Yi Liu

mouse_leficer

And Liu joins the Mandarin speakers.

And Yvette...?

à_la_mort

Is in a bit too much pain from the trip to give a shit about the social maneuvering, and has long resigned herself to always being stuck in the front. So, she doesn’t even make an attempt to try to figure out where she might want to sit if she were not a pariah. She will be sitting at the front, near the door, so she doesn’t have to walk very far.

year_book_hero

And oh look someone else is sitting at the front next to her.

à_la_mort

Of course he is. Of course.

“…. Hi,” she says, too cranky to manage anything witty. Gut wounds: do not mix well with fucking gigantic schools, nor carrying things in them.

year_book_hero

"Hello, dear. How did shop go?"

à_la_mort

“I am not your dear,” she sniffs immediately, but yes, fine, she’ll answer the question. “Well enough. The hunk of metal I worked over for ages is nearly indistinguishable from other hunks of metal of similar size, but such is artificing. It will likely do for my purposes.”

year_book_hero

"And you need it for your new blade, yes? An athame?"

à_la_mort

“Has the rumor mill already been busy, or are you just fond of dropping eaves, hm?”

year_book_hero

"Yes."

à_la_mort

“Mhmm. Well, Scorpius, I know neither of us are typical examples, but I am nonetheless quite sure that in ordinary human interactions this goes a bit more like,” and she puts on a fake American accent, closer to Scorpius’s than her earlier mockery of Jack’s, “‘Hello, Yvette! How has your day been? What project are you working on?’ or something.”

year_book_hero

"Hello, Yvette! How has your day been? What project are you working on?" he says, imitating her imitation of his accent.

à_la_mort

“I’ve a half healed gut wound and I go to school here, how do you think my day has gone? And it’s too late now to pretend ignorance, you’ve already played your hand.”

year_book_hero