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The only thing that sucks more than the Scholomance is not going to the Scholomance
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"What happened," Alexei asks Sofia, in English because they're in public.

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"It does not matter. You should drop her, though. She's, she is pulling you down."

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"...Sofia."

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"She is! You're in a, a," and she huffs out an annoyed sigh. "Whatever. Do whatever you want to do. It is no my problem."

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"...Sofia..."

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"We have homework."

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Elsewhere, someone agrees, not that either party is aware. Yep. So much homework. Some of it's even her own! It will be finished with great prejudice. If she happens to sniffle sometimes, well, no one can hear her, so it doesn't matter, and if any tears are shed, they will not fall on either the desk, or the books, or any of the essays she's writing, so they won't matter either. Just the firm and comforting solidity of jobs well done.

Honestly though, being furious is kind of great for knocking out papers. Even with her morning delay, she's quickly getting ahead of schedule.

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There's a noise.

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Oh man, if there's something that needs killing, she is more than ready, c'mon you little fucker let's go.

Which is to say that she is out of her chair and ready to turn whatever it is into ashes or paste or possibly gibblets.

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...no, nothing. Must've been her imagination.

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Bullshit it was. Who or what is out there, and does it have any fucking idea who it's messing with, because she will be more than happy to make that perfectly clear.

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There's that noise again. It's soft, but it's soft because it's... distant?

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...

Fine. She'll go hunting. But she'll reshelve books on her way, because they don't deserve to be kept hanging like this. And go towards the strange noises at a measured and wary pace.

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Again. That's... a scream? That's a scream.

That is multiple screams, actually. Based on the distance and direction, that'd be from the reading room? And now there's a faint flash of purple somewhere up ahead.

(And the floating lights above her want to get slightly dimmer...)

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The fuck?? Is something attacking the reading room? With all of the goddamned enclavers in it?? What could even manage to pull that off?? It'd have to be a swarm of somethings, or several different types of mal, or possibly an all out inter-enclave battle for some blighted reason. Or, more likely, something is trying to play tricks on her. Something psychic or air based, maybe? Sound or something? Hm...

She stops to reshelf her final book, then continues forward warily, willing the lights above her to knock their shit off. But her eyes are elsewhere, watching for... something.

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The sounds become louder as she walks on, and when she gets to the Sanskrit aisle she can definitely make them out: those are many screams, "everyone in the reading room" amounts of screaming. And the aisle might be... slightly longer than it ought to be?

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It's more than slightly longer than it ought to be, she knows the typical length of this section of the library. It varies a bit, based on its mood and hers, but this is getting absurd. The Sanskrit section does not ever go on for this long. Sanskrit is not this popular as a chanting language. It becomes so alarming that she begins trying to combat the effect, keeping track of the labelled numbers on the nearby books, but the numbers just keep being higher. She'd rarely ever seen a label with more than four numbers, and half of these have six.

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And that book over there, she knows that book specifically, she wrote about it in her notebook. There used to be a different book by the same author right next to it but now there's an entire bookcase between them.

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The way the books and the aisle are behaving is honestly freaking her out more than the prospect of a bunch of mals attacking the reading room. What the everliving fuck is going on! Possibly she should take a goddamned hint and return to her desk and take shelter in obscurity, but she can't. There are people she likes in the reading room. It's paramount that she makes sure they're okay, even if it's at risk to herself. She made a damn graduation alliance with Alexei, she's not going to hide in the stacks just because the school itself is telling her to stop. If nothing else, she needs to make sure he specifically is okay. And also Scorpius, and Liu, and Nkoyo has also been pretty great lately.

On she goes, keeping very careful track of the books as she walks. She's pretty sure that the minute she gives any ground on the 'where I could possibly be' front, she will end up somewhere else.

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She can see flashes of red and violet light at the distant end of the aisle, a sort of rhythmic set of spell bursts one-two one-two that Yvette might be able to recognize as typical of Scorpius's castings. A lot of them, clearly a huge fight of some kind, as evidenced by that even moreso than the screams.

Reams of unfamiliar books and manuscripts start appearing on the shelves, books Yvette has never caught glimpse of before, old spells and recipes wrapped in ancient leather that haven't seen light in perhaps hundreds of years. With what she's doing the aisle is mostly not getting any longer but it's almost certainly not getting any shorter either, and the school definitely does not want her to keep going.

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Yeah, school, she got that, but brevity is the spice of wit, so you can stop belaboring your point already!!

... Or maybe continue, actually, because there is a gleam of gilded gold on a shelf ahead, and no label at all. The school labels the books as it claims them. If it's on a shelf in the library for an extended period of time, or if it's picked up and read by a student within the library itself, a label will very mysteriously be on the spine when the reader next looks. Being without a label means that it has just gotten here. Its place nestled among aged manuscripts implies that it's... likely a consolidation of older spells, a pick of the good ones of that time. The book was then gilded and spoiled to try to keep it from disappearing. And then it considered itself valuable enough that it went and disappeared anyway, despite its author's best efforts. Where it hid for who knows how long, not even deigning to show up on the shelves of the greatest school for wizards in the world for what could be several hundred years. Until at last the school ran out of books to extend this fucking aisle with, and it decided, oh, fine, and showed up where it would have fit. In an effort to keep her in this aisle.

Obviously she grabs the book the minute it's within reach, snatching it off of the shelves and scooping it into her satchel in a swift motion without so much as inspecting what the book is about. The library is her most beloved bastion of safety in the entire school and she loves it dearly, but clearly this beauty does not want to be a library book. There is no way it's going to tolerate a label. She's quite sure that if she aided the school in putting one on it, not only would she absolutely never see it again, but it'd probably stay sulkily off of the shelves for several centuries just out of petty spite. And... she really wants to know what's in it. The fact that it's unclaimed means that there's a chance the book could just be hers, she could have her very own actual grimoire. It's even bound in leather of her favorite color; green. So she will not be looking at it until she is out of the library, where it is not in danger of being labelled and claimed by a school built by the most brilliant artificers of the world, trying their hardest to protect and teach their children. By similar logic, she's fairly certain that it'll stay in her satchel until they're alone. In her experience powerful books are also some degree of vain. Appearing and disappearing without giving the stupid holder so much as a vague idea of what tantalizing spells they're missing out on? Yeah, no.

... Wait, she totally got distracted from her quest of getting down the aisle by a pretty book. Look, in her defense, it's a really gorgeous book. But, uh, yeah, no more distractions, time to venture forth and be heroic or something. If the school will fucking let her.

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She can almost feel the school's reluctance to give her this prize, a heaving pained sigh from the bookshelves all around her like they're trying to say no please don't go, to keep hold of the book for a while longer. But with this prize in hand...

...the aisle starts getting shorter again. No more pulling hundreds of tomes out of the deepest recesses of the place to pad it out, no more absurd manuscripts no one's seen in centuries, and most certainly no more space for anything nearly as valuable as what Yvette probably just got. The school is jealous of what it gives out, and clearly Yvette's got far too much already for the price.

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That's certainly possible.

Or...

... or, it could be that the school isn't trying to keep her out of the reading room at all.

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The school has pushed her past the Sanskrit section into the section with more modern languages by now, between her shiny new acquisition distracting her enough to dim the lights even further and her desire to keep going. But she's close enough to the main aisle leading out into the reading room that that doesn't matter much, anymore, because unlike the aisle she's coming from the lights there are brightly lit all the way out of the stacks, an open invitation for her to just keep going.

She can make more noises out, now, beyond just the screaming: a pitched shrilling, vaguely birdlike; a lower snarling sound; a whistling like wind through dry leaves; Scorpius's voice calling out a "Tebow! Put down a slickshield!" So that's presumably at least four mals in the reading room, bad enough ones that New York hasn't managed to escape, that the students there are cornered and needing to actually fight rather than run.

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Something has been bothering her, during her excessively long walk. It involves the psychology of mals. Many of them are stupid, but the older and more powerful ones definitely aren't. The library is an absolute catch to manage to hide in; students go into the aisles by themselves, all alone and vulnerable. They get distracted doing homework and know the place is safe and get lost wandering the non-Euclidean stacks. It's perfect for ambushes; she would know, she's been ambushed a couple of times in here. Safer does not mean safe, after all, and she's been here rather a lot.

So why, why, with such a delightful hunting ground, would a bunch of maleficaria storm the crowded and well fortified reading room, all together? Why not stay here, and wait for your prey to come to you, like all the mals of the graduation hall?

What if instead of going on a stupid and suicidal hunt, they were running from something else. Mals eat each other, after all, more than they manage to eat even baby wizards. The smart ones run when something bigger and scarier shows up. Something that the school might have been extending the aisles to keep her away from, and is now... shortening the aisles as much as possible. What if the danger isn't in front of her, not anymore.

Very carefully, and very deliberately, she turns to inspect her surroundings. Is there, perhaps, something worse that she should be aware of.

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