Connie spots him from another line and heads over (she's obtained a few mini muffins, a carton of orange juice, and a single sausage link).  "Heya.  Cool if I join you?"  She's looking a fair bit twitchier than last Friday, or even Monday's comp section.

He swallows a bite of waffle. "Absolutely! Congratulations on making it through the first week." Any other school, that would be hyperbole, but not here. "There were times I felt I wouldn't." 

"You too."  Connie checks behind her, picks a seat where she's facing the higher-traffic direction, and plops down.  "You hear so much about it but it's different, actually being here."

"That it is. On top of all the everything, I was not expecting this much maleficer activity this early in the term, it's unnerving." 

"Yeah, that's for sure."  She hunches over her tray a bit.  "There was an upperclassman in my shop section, just kinda... going around looking at everyone like he was hungry.  Didn't do anything that I saw, and Holden would probably have said something if someone else went missing, but... y'know."

"Eyeesh. I'm glad Holden made the announcement, at least. Better than being in the dark with nothing but rumor to go on." Disentangling rumor from fact has never been his strong point. No one seems to bother to tell him any rumors in the first place, for some reason. Is he insufficiently gossipy? Is that a skill one needs at the Scholomance? How does it even work? 

He takes a bite of his empotioned waffle and grimaces, sweating and slightly red-faced. 

"Yeah, he's doing a real service for everybody without older siblings... something wrong with your waffle?"  Heck, she doesn't have any antitoxin yet- and shouldn't give it away even if she did- but Alexius would be good for it probably, if she had any, which she doesn't...

"Hmm? Oh, yes, I spiced it for mana building." He rummages in his backpack side pocket and produces a small bottle filled with red liquid that looks suspiciously like Tabasco sauce. "The good news is, it works." 

"Oh, huh.  That's clever.  ...worked better than you wanted it to?"

He coughs. "Little bit, yeah. But that's sort of the point. Now that I've tried it and it doesn't outright kill me, might as well make the most of it. Delicious," cough, "mana."

And after a few months of gustatory agony, he'll magically reset his own tolerance so it'll be miserable again at low doses. Won't that be fun. 

Plan B is coming along nicely, and he didn't even have to fight a maleficer! 

"Long as it doesn't stop you getting enough calories. I still need to figure out a better way to build mana while I'm doing something else, I can do macrame but it takes a lot of yarn, and you've gotta look at it most of the time anyway."  Connie opens her orange juice and fidgets with the flaps instead of drinking it.  

"Oh, hey- not speaking of mana, but speaking of supplies, I guess- are you still looking for someone to buy shop homework off?  There was a girl in my section with a sign saying something about dueling knives, she'd maybe be interested."

Luckily, stubborn determination is something Alexius is good at. (And he's never much cared how food tastes). He sweats onward through the spicy waffle. 

"Oh that's neat, what section do you have? Or, better, do you think you could point her out if she shows to breakfast?" His head pivots, scanning the cafeteria as though expecting to see a girl under a KNIVES FOR SALE sign, before he realizes this is silly and stops. 

"Tuesday before lunch- she was wearing this cool blue scarf with stars on it, so I'm figuring she's either really confident or she wants people to be able to recognize her, or both I guess..."  She twists around as well, scanning the nearby tables.  "Didn't catch her name, she looked, uh, maybe Indian?  Like India Indian, I mean."

"Thanks, I'll keep my eyes peeled." Who even invented that expression, it always makes him imagine a particularly picky mal. Oh cool a human lemme just peel it before I eat. Those eyelids are too stringy for me. 

"Cool.  Uh, let me know if you run into anyone selling soap flakes?  Or regular soap actually. I got laundry detergent for my first lab assignment and it wants soap for an ingredient, and of course all of it was gone by Wednesday."

"I think one of the Shanghai freshmen was running a store and might sell soap? Holden hollered about it on Wednesday. And I'm sure someone is hoarding it and would trade, if we ask around." 

"Oh, that's a thought- I bet it's expensive, though, but I'll check him out if I can't find anybody who got soap for homework to swap with."  She munches thoughtfully on a mini muffin.  "You don't, like, need to go to extra trouble or anything, though."

"No harm in looking. I'll probably need some myself at some point, it's common enough in alchemy. And, uh, hygiene." Odds are good he'll want some cleaning options that don't cost mana. "I got hand sanitizer for my first assignment so soap isn't out of the question." 

"Yeaaaaah, that too.  I think soap is a pretty common one, at least?  I got a pretty cheap laundry spell that should also work as deodorant, but once I get real mana storage I won't want to be using it all the time."  Also a spell for detecting and treating breech births in goats, thank you very much Scholomance.

"Yeah, eventually we'll pass the point where we spend less time building mana for a cleaning spell than it takes to wash by hand, but not yet." 

"Yeah..."  She finishes her muffin and glances behind her again.  "Even now, though, I've been- trying to run as full as I can.  Just in case."

Alexius nods. "You got defensive options? Bella from New Orleans traded me a counterspell last week, it's finicky but better than nothing." 

"Fire spell and the force net..."  She fidgets with her orange juice some more, then leans in and lowers her voice.

"I, um.  I think I maybe ran into the freshman killer earlier."

Yikes. Extreme yikes. "...what happened?" 

"Guy with worse vibes than Garbage Dump Kid, took a cookie straight out of my hand like he knew there wasn't anything I could do about it."