Bella gets out her notes for the morning at lunchtime, once she's sat down at the table Suze-and-friends reserved for her. She starts trying to condense them into a journal entry, and - keeps stopping and checking them again, stopping and checking, frowning at her notebook.
She points Suze at Alexius, who she can see still in the lunch line, and Suze buttonholes him on her way out. "Hey, Bella wants to talk to you, she's over there."
Clavemate has flopped back down and is pretending there aren't strangers in their room.
"Happy to wait, I'm not in urgent need right now except -" She points at herself and mutters the soneta again.
Angie nods, and Alexei peers at Alexius from under his hand, upright but half-hunched over on the bed, "Hey, Marcus. More testing next time, yeah?"
"I...don't know if I even can test my potions on other people, anymore. Not with risks like these. One of the sophomores had seizures."
Angie grips Zed's shoulder really very hard for a moment!
"...Mm, maybe stick to what you learn in lab, or from the void, for a little while." Maybe a few years.
"In theory, yes, I never hurt anyone with a recipe before. But then, neither had the memory potions."
"Angie, Alexei, Zed...for what it's worth, I'm sorry. And" more to the point, in the Scholomance, "I owe you."
"Short durations, small doses, and pay people to be test subjects. Or find people who can do diagnostic spells and have healing affinity, work with them. But yeah, be cautious even if you get those."
They want to say a lot of things. But- instead they say nothing at all. Memories of the past few hours still stuck in their memory, painful.
"I'd planned to test things on myself first, but apparently that's worse than useless...we should get out of your way." He shoots what he hopes is a meaningful look at Bella. "There'll be others needing that counterspell."
Alexius leads the way back to the cafeteria. En route, he acquires a puzzled expression. "...Agglo terrarium?"
"I want to figure out a way to poison or possibly sterilize the mal food chain. Agglos are harmless, and they remain harmless in picking up all kinds of random things, so if I can give them something that makes them drop dead..."
Shrug. "It probably won't work very well, but if it did wouldn't that be cool?"
"...yes. Yes it would. Even if you spent a decade trying and got nowhere, that's a decade of research for the next attempt." Damn, why didn't he think of that.
Alexius frowns. "I've...recently learned a valuable lesson about experimental rigor. It might take more than agglos, and past them there's not really such a thing as a safe mal. Be careful, okay? And let me know if you want a spotter."
"Yeah, I will absolutely want more help with the project before I try to step up to kidnapping baby quattria to iterate on it - I found some on a supply run the other day, they were weirdly cute actually but I did not want to take them home with me."
"...yeah, that's fair." He falls silent the rest of the journey back, but there's a bit of spring in his step that wasn't there before.
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