If that were the only problem, she might have just gotten used to it, used the extra exercise to gain mana. But of course, it's not. Books, especially magical books, are finicky and proud things. There are no due dates for library books here, but you'd have trouble keeping them for any extended period of time anyway. If they feel they're being neglected, or ignored? If they've been too far from their shelf home for too long? If another student also needs a book on this subject while the first one is hoarding it? It'll just leave. Good luck ever finding it again, even if you made note of where it had originally been shelved. It'll avoid you out of spite, if nothing else. Books used in the first year of school, baby's first magical tome and the like, tend to be more forgiving. They understand that they're dealing with children, newly ripped from their homes and dropped into a void suspended school filled with monsters that are sometimes maleficaria and sometimes human. As magical books go, they're very patient and gracious.

As the students grow in power, and need tomes of corresponding strength, it starts becoming very necessary to see that books are treated very politely indeed. Yvette has taken to keeping careful track of where the books she needs come from, in a tidy little notebook she keeps on her. Title, catalog number on its label, which aisle it's in, how many bookshelves from the end, which shelf from the floor, how many books on either side of the shelf, and the names of its immediate neighbors. The aisles are, in her notebook, color coded. When she is done with her books, which should be promptly, they are to be reshelved right where she found them. 'Promptly', in this case, means 'when you are not using them,' and 'when you are not using them' means 'directly making use of them right that second to learn or work on something.' No taking them away for later reading, no keeping books for after dinner study, and especially no holding books overnight. They have a purpose, and they have a place, and she will respect them or she will not have access to them, and none of them will broach or tolerate any argument to the contrary. Yvette thinks this is very fair. Also rather charming; she's occasionally been tempted by the idea of becoming a librarian.

This sort of careful and dutiful treatment of the contents of the library is not very conducive to long periods of time to work with the books when one is taking books to places besides the conveniently placed reading rooms that she will likely never set foot in. Studying in the stacks themselves works fine with singular books, safely kept in her lap and off of the floor, but this strategy falls through when she's juggling several to compare their contents. The best she could do with that situation after her second year was grab an empty classroom to study in, instead of trekking all the way to her room, and that comes with its own dangers. Mostly mal related dangers. Not to mention, the conventional way one navigates the library is by staying in the main aisles, where the classification of the contents of each row is tidily written on the end. If a student doesn't keep track of where they are in the library at all times, they could very well get lost, and, well. Getting lost doesn't tend to go well. The oldest and least used works are further in, too, and late last year she'd had a project involving the comparison of several old languages. Which meant a lot of walking in, grabbing her book, walking back to the main aisle, then walking back in again. All of this with no cheating by doing her reading on the floor, because by then she'd had it good and impressed upon her that books are precious and to be respected. Eventually, she'd gotten frustrated with the inefficiency, and decided to risk going around the back to save time.

Her gamble had gotten her a viable shortcut that saved quite a lot of time, a forced crash course in Sanskrit (from paying a bit too much attention to the titles of that particular section of the library to keep from getting lost), and a true library treasure. A studying desk, tucked away in a little nook that could only be seen from the back, tucked away in darkness beneath one of the mezzanine walkways and between scrolls and tablets so old the language has been forgotten. After it showed up in the same place several times in a row, she did the only sensible thing and traded for a mostly empty bottle of wood oil (courtesy of Alexei) and lovingly got it cleaned up. From then on, it became her desk. Nobody else knew where it was, and it liked her at least well enough to stay where she thought it would be.

She's known for disappearing mysteriously into the stacks and not coming out until the bell demands it of her, and this little bastion of hers is usually where she ends up. In fact, it's where she's heading off to right now, to work on Liu's history homework.

Someone intercepts her before she can do that, though.

Since the bizarre conversation he had with Scorpius a few days ago on Thursday things have been... odd. Odd is a way to put it. Scorpius and Yvette have gone mal hunting a couple more times, and he's been sitting at the same table as her more often than not. The same table as Alexei more often than not, what with how he's also been spending a lot more time with Yvette. Sofia and Natalya are both kind of unhappy about this—Sofia most of all—but they're getting used to it, and that extends to other people, too, with various other indies who previously barely-tolerated Yvette now actively seeking her out.

All because of Lake. Everyone's noticed by now that he seems to have taken a shine to Yvette (and Alexei notes with some anxiety that they may notice that Scorpius's taken a shine to him too, the one time he didn't sit with Yvette this weekend he sat with him), and while New York and London seem to have given up on her (and Alfie seems to be chumming up with him), there are other enclaves making overtures. Paris didn't even try, but Manchester, Munich, and Lisbon are all variously trying to get in Yvette's good graces, and even Shanghai has been making some noises.

Yvette is wrong, that she wouldn't be welcome in the reading rooms. If she didn't escape into her stacks more quickly than anyone could catch her Alexei is virtually certain that she'd start getting invitations, especially if she wanted to bring a friend with her.

But Alexei has been kind of on the lookout for her most of today because while all of that's been happening he's been sort of ruminating on something and it's driving his anxiety levels up the roof and, and he needs to talk to her, so unlike the enclavers he succeeds at intercepting her before she's gone.

And then he... doesn't know what to say. Because of course that's exactly what would happen, isn't it, so he's just standing there, awkwardly, looking at her expectant face.

For others, she’d politely say a greeting, and then nonetheless resume her escape without so much as a backwards glance. For him, she stops, and he gets a smile that looks as warm as sunlight, and an, "Alexei! Hello."

oh

He lost track of what he'd been thinking. It must be the anxiety. What was he anxious about again...? Oh, right.

"Uh, I meant to ask," he starts, and then stops again, because help.

She tilts her head a little. Ah... huh. Whatever this is, it's making him nervous. So probably they shouldn't have this conversation here, whatever it's about. Since they're still visible (and audible) to some of the general public, this close to the stairs.

"Well, all right. Can you ask while I get books for homework?" she asks, tilting her head towards the privacy of the stacks. "I'm a little behind." This is a lie, she's fine. Knocking out her shop project has put her tidily ahead of schedule, and she's already sorted out her maintenance shift for this week.

He blinks slowly, looks at the stacks, then back at her, and nods.

Right! Off they go.

"How private do you want?" she wonders mildly. No one's following them (and nothing's currently trying to ambush them), she'd have noticed, but, well, she's aware Alexei is a little bit shy. If he wants to be really and truly hidden from all the world, she can provide that service. Besides, it'd be kind of nice, to have someone else at her desk.

He looks around then nods. "Privacy would be good."

She returns the nod, begins to walk, then stops and hums thoughtfully. "... You don't speak any Old English or Sanskrit, do you. Then you should not look at any of the books."

Instead, she holds out her hand. To lead him, without catching too much of a language that he doesn't want from looking at foreign book titles.

He looks down at her hand. Then up at her. Then down again. Then up at her.

aa?

"... We can not, if you'd rather, just, um." Oh no, is he worried that she's going to try to kill him, because that'd be ludicrously stupid for so many reasons! Including but not limited to 'He's really great and she likes him'!! "I caught Sanskrit by accident last year, I cannot imagine it'd be any more fun as an artificer so close to the end of term."

So he is carefully led through the stacks, down a very, very long aisle, and to the back of the library. There, nestled in a dark nook between a bunch of stone tablets and scrolls, there is an ancient and sturdy looking desk, scarred and worn, but recently taken care of. Its wood is shiny and smooth, and it has not one, but two chairs.

"You can look, now. The scrolls and tablets are hard to get an accidental glance of." she says, still in Russian, but she's beaming at the second chair.

He finally looks up—he had been getting a bit nervous, there—and blinks at the desk.

Then he smiles. "I should have known," he says (except as soon as he says it he feels like maybe he shouldn't have said it??? aah).

She giggles, even as she carefully checks for mals, just in case. "Yes, it's very obvious when you consider how often I disappear here, isn't it?"

Nothing untoward found, she takes one of the available seats, smiling at him. "If you wondered what I did with the wood oil from your midterm sophomore project?" She pats the desk.

He walks over to inspect the desk, lightly trailing his fingers across its surface, his anxieties momentarily forgotten, and he breathes out a sigh of contentment. He knows by now that Yvette takes better care of her artifice—whether it be artifice she made or found or traded—than half the artifice-track kids, and it's only because the other half has a lot more materials and time to dedicate to the exclusive maintenance of their creations, but it's still always refreshing to see in person.

Alexei is very cute when he's caring for mostly inanimate objects. It's very charming.

But of course she immediately needs to justify things not being perfect, because she's herself: "I haven't had the material for fixing the scratches yet, and," okay she does not have the Russian to manage this sentence, so she switches to French, "I'm not sure how different types of wood would integrate together with make and mend, and I'm not entirely sure which kind of tree it came from..."

He turns to look at her and he is taken over by an absurd, overwhelming desire to kiss her. Since that sounds insane and terrifying it's actually suddenly quite easy for him to say the thing he'd been meaning to say instead, all at once, its prior ability to induce anxiety in him suddenly dwarfed in magnitude: "Areweinanalliance?"

"Oh! Ah." She sits up, then begins industriously fidgeting. She continues in French, because that was the language she was last speaking and her brain is now stuck. Besides, it's so much better to babble in. "Well, I, I mean I figured you'd want time to think about it, it's kind of a big decision and, I mean, you, um. Probably have better prospects? And if I'm the first person you get in your alliance I might scare others away, with my, me-ness, so I don't particularly mind being secretive about it or just being generally helpful or, um. Something? I just don't want you to die."

He continues to want to kiss her and he is absolutely not going to so he carries on: "I want to. And I wasn't sure. But I want to."

And it occurs to him with a start that actually that's more than a kiss, that's deeper and more important in this place, because you can kiss anyone you like and that doesn't mean anything but being allies means everything. It means more than friendship, more than love, it means life. It means having someone who will try to save you as much as you do, and whom you will try to save as much as they do; it means saying that you're together until one of you dies or you reach the end of the world (this world).

So now he's blushing. There's that.

... Well. Well. She. Is also blushing. And absolutely failing to watch for mals at all, shame on her, she should do that right this instant because that is how she continues to live.

".... I also want to," she agrees, softly. "Though you should probably know, ah. My affinity is, sort of. Sadism? Inflicting death, destruction, pain, and sorrow? That. Sort of. Thing. So."

"Huh. That... makes sense." Pause. "...mine is automation. Things that make decisions on their own. That have a mind of their own. Things with opinions."

And while that's not as bad as literally sadism, most things that wizards make are already trying to become smart and from there it's a short trip through bad circumstances to becoming maleficaria. If the stuff he makes is by design meant to be smart, then that trip is even shorter. It's a very, very dangerous affinity which demands very, very good and precise workmanship to use.

"Oh. No wonder you're so careful about not... involving yourself directly in projects, or making too many things for people. Why you sell materials instead of what you could make out of them. But then you trusted me to not drive them to...? ... I suppose I did find a desk in the library and near immediately get it wood oil, didn't I. And told my old knife that I would happily keep it for the rest of my life if it wanted to stay even after I went and rudely made another, but that I wished it well if it would rather, when, um, I'm babbling, I'm sorry." She lets out a little self conscious laugh. "Anyway, yes. Um. I'm still. We can put our names on the wall together if you'd still like?"

She did what to her knife.

That's adorable.

WHY is he thinking about people with that adjective. It must be Scorpius Lake's fault somehow.

Also he's blushing harder now. "...yeah. I'd like."

She grins at him.

"Okay. Um. ... it's probably inefficient for us to run off to the dorms to write our names on the wall literally right now but. Yeah."

"It is?"

"I mostly mean that it's a long way to walk, and you might have come to the library for reasons besides speaking to me? ... I'm overthinking things and have perhaps optimized myself a bit too much for efficiency, haven't I. Nevermind, I'm being silly, we can go now."

"I was doing some homework but um."

He totally did come to the library mainly to speak to her actually.

"Right! Yes, okay." Up she gets, then offers him her hand to lead him back to familiar territory.

They can go back to familiar territory.

Some people maybe catch sight of them leaving the stacks, together, holding hands.

This will certainly not have any consequences whatsoever. At least not any that Alexei is currently thinking about, because he is mostly just focusing on how hard his heart is beating right now and how much he wishes it weren't so.

She will release him once they're back in the main aisle that he can navigate without her, which makes it highly unlikely that anyone's going to actually see them, with how big and dark the library is. But, yes, someone could have! They'll likely find out at the next meal.

From there they can head down to the junior dorms and go write their names on the wall between the boys' and the girls' bathrooms.

And Alexei writes their names in Cyrillic next to where Yvette did. They're not the first alliance to write their names there, but they are the second.

They are!! It's very early for it, and graduation alliances are serious business that are not to be trifled with, but she's absolutely serious and will in fact protect Alexei to the very end, now.

Yvette adds her own name in Chinese characters beside the Cyrillic, but she doesn't think Alexei has figured out how to render his own name in Chinese characters, so. That part will stay blank unless he wants to sit down with her and figure that out. One it's done she beams happily at the wall.

He smiles at her for a bit then looks away, blushing again, because she is so pretty and how did he never notice that before and why can't he just go back to not noticing it.

"I am sorry to have interrupted your homework for this, but... I am also glad I did."

"Yes. Me too," she agrees, turning to point the smile at him instead. "Okay, um. Do you need help with any projects, are there... Oh I should get you a crystal, you should have access to my mana stores."

"—oh. Are you certain?"

"Um. Not my entire mana stores, but. ... I do want you to have an emergency fund available. In case something happens, and you need it."

He nods. "Then... I accept."

"Okay," she agrees, and then off they go, to her room. She retrieves three completely filled crystals, glowing faintly blood red with power, which she connects to each other with a crooning incantation. Then, somewhat shyly, she hands him all three.

When his hand touches hers as he's accepting the crystals he draws it back like he's been shocked and looks away, trying to push his blush down. Then he decides that he should just go back to his room to put two of the crystals away before he does something he'll regret he's got more self-control than that but he'd rather not risk it anyway.

Awww. He's shy!!! It's very cute.

It's probably an inefficient use of time to head back to the library, though, isn't it. Hm. She considers her carefully laid plans and how they could be adjusted, then says, "I think I'm going to build mana until lunch, then. Do... um. We can build mana together if you've got nothing else to do?"

Nevermind, now she's also shy. This is terrible.

"No, sorry, I have stuff to do," like not spending a lot of time alone with Yvette especially if anything they do to build mana is exercising—which to Alexei it is, that's his main mana-building activity, and it, uh, kind of, a little bit, gets the blood flowing, and he does not want any more bloodflow in him right now the blushing is enough thank you.

"It's absolutely fine," she assures, sincerely.

Then she'll head back to her own room and get to building mana. It'll be exercise for her, for right now, anyway. She also exercises fairly often, though she tends to jump between different activities as she gets bored or too irritated with them. Crochet or inventing Sudoku puzzles and then seeing if she can solve them are also regular mainstays. Along with the meager Scholomance gardening, but that's not a 'do anytime, anywhere' kind of deal, and it's definitely not for doing before lunch.

At lunch Scorpius gets to her and Alexei's table—and even though Nkoyo, Cora, Jowani, Sofia, Liu, Alfie, a Manchester enclaver called John, and a Lisbon enclaver called Marta are already there they give him enough space to sit next to Yvette—and he plonks his tray there grouchily, seeming to be annoyed enough that he doesn't even try to demur in the direction of people not moving for him no really it's fine etc etc. Then he hunches over his tray and starts eating mechanically without saying so much as a "hello" to everyone else, which is extremely uncharacteristic of him.

... Okay??

She nibbles at her own food and then decides, yes all right, if he's grumpy in public he can be asked about it in public.

"Did something happen?" she asks, mildly.

"What do you think," he snaps, then he stops himself and rubs his face with his hand. "Sorry. Magnus Tebow and Jermaine Thomas happened, with some side action from Chloe Rasmussen and Todd Quayle."

The other enclavers side-eye him. Bringing up enclave business in public like this is just not done. Then again, it's not like the usual rules apply to Scorpius Lake.

.... It's probably to do with her, actually. Considering the timing, and how her name is now on the wall with Alexei Yahontov's. That might earn him a talking to from his enclave, for, what, mooning after a girl who then traipsed off with someone else. That sounds plausible, if awkward. None of their damn business, but also incredibly awkward.

The only thing she can really think is that they're complete idiots for being so hostile to their infinite mana ticket. What, do they think they literally own him??

"Well. My condolences for the trouble," she says, because she is not broaching that topic at a public table. "Whatever it is."

"Yeah, thanks," he sighs. "If you ever find someone with an affinity that could help with pulling someone's head out of their ass let me know, all my efforts have been in vain so far. Can we pretend I'm being as personable as usual today? I just can't find it in me."

"I'll remember keep an eye out. Why, with such charming topics of conversation, who wouldn't find you personable?"

"Really, with the way the hashbrowns were, I've a mind to be less than personable than usual. Did you see how many little mal larva were in there? Awful."

Scorpius cracks up, as does most everyone else. "Nicely done, Alfie."

But that's enough of an ice breaker that the table can return to its previous background levels of chat, which nowadays even try to include Yvette—passively, at least.

She's still not entirely used to it yet, and her wit is a bit... sharp... but she genuinely does have a way with words and a wry (if black) sense of humor. But she's (quietly, subtly) delighted to be included, even though she keeps doing things like... 'also gently including Liu' that don't mesh well with the typical social ecosystem of the place.

Pretty much everyone is going to the library after lunch, since it's a Sunday, so if she wants to go back there she'll have a nice and plump group to go with. Even Scorpius is coming this time!

Yeah, she does absolutely still need to go to the library. Work waits for no one, etc. The nice and plump group to go with is an excellent bonus.

When they get to the library stairs Sofia taps Yvette on the shoulder and says, "Can we talk?" in English.

Alexei slows down as the mass of others starts going up the stairs, shooting Yvette and Sofia concerned glances.

Yvette gives him a reassuring smile and motions for him to go on without her.

“Sure,” she says to Sofia, absolutely certain this is going to be something horrible, or mean, or something horribly mean. It probably won’t be another murder attempt, with how Sofia presumably doesn’t want to have Alexei out to kill her if she succeeds. So that's, you know. Nice.

Once they're the only ones at the landing she folds her arms and looks—upset, hurt, kind of angry but the scared kind of angry. "What do you think are you doing?"

“…. About to ascend the stairs to the library?” she says, mildly, entirely unruffled.

"Oh, okay, I'm going to have to do that, then," she says, the anger getting more of a twinge of annoyance. "Drag it out. No be productive. What are you doing with Alexei."

“You can yell at me in Russian, if you’d rather,” sighs Yvette. “And… try my best to get him through graduation alive?”

She switches to Russian. "You and Scorpius Lake cavort with maleficaria, and now you are leading Alexei on even though you are still with Lake. I will not let you hurt Alexei!"

"Lake and I kill maleficaria. And we are not together. What I would like to do is take the spoils of killing maleficaria to Alexei, to use them to make things, or find someone that can use it." She raises her eyebrows. "Are you satisfied with the truth, or are you going to continue to search for reasons to hate me?"

"The truth is that you did not answer my question. ...implied question. Are you at all serious about Alexei?" There's the hurt, again, and no small amount of anxiety, creeping into her voice.

She blinks, confused, then puts the pieces together. She needs to reply in English, from a mix of genuine puzzlement and her language courses not really favoring talking about relationships: "What, romantically?"

She blinks at Yvette like she's grown a second head, or more like she cannot believe Yvette could possibly have misunderstood her except on purpose. "Yes!"

"... Are you seriously more concerned about relationship entanglements and the status of idiotic teenage love dodecahedrons than the risk to his literal life? That is what you wanted to talk to me about. That. Yes I am serious about Alexei! But if you haven't noticed you shallow self obsessed trollop," yeah her antiquated vocabulary from her reading choices sure is showing itself here, isn't it, "we are in a murder death school and could die at any time! We are weeks away from becoming seniors and being first in line to the mal chopping block!!" Huff. "I want him to live. I am deadly serious about that. Now begone, I've lost patience with your trivialities."

And on that note, fuck it, she's leaving. To the library, she has work to do.

She reaches forward to try to hold onto Yvette's clothing to hold her back. "Wait!"

Nope. One of them has been honing their reflexes from hunting mals a couple times a week, and one of them hasn't, and frankly Sofia is lucky that her attempt to forcibly grab an angry witch gets her only a glare instead of a curse.

Up the stairs, into the library, fuck Sofia's goddamned stupidity, why is every goddamned teenager so obsessed with sex!!!!!

Sofia follows after her and stomps over to where Alexei, Natalya, and the South Africans are studying together, fuming.

Yvette has absolutely fucked off into the stacks without so much as a parting word to anyone, because she cannot be around people right now. She knows dozens of spells that could be used to do such horrible things as 'flay people alive' and 'rip the blood out of their veins' and 'burn their lungs from the inside out' and she hates that they are the spells at her fingertips. She is not safe to be around people when she's like this, and she has some fucking homework to do, anyway, so she's just. Going to go to her little desk all by itself in the darkness and get it done.

"What happened," Alexei asks Sofia, in English because they're in public.

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

"...Sofia."

"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."

"...Sofia..."

"We have homework."

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.

There's a noise.

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.

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

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.

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

...

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.

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...)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are precious few vents in the library to let in air, placed on the floor at regular intervals as there is no ceiling for them to be attached to instead. But she can't see the one that should be behind her. She can't see the edges of tarnished brass which should be reflecting even the dimmest lights from the main aisle, and she can't hear the grate of the old grimy fans that are only there to pretend that the airflow in this school run on physics rather than magic. She can't even hear the rustle and scrape of pages shifting, of magical tomes winking into and out of existence in the background, as if even the books are holding their breaths.

It's too dark for her to see much of anything, but if she strains her hearing, holds her breath, focuses away from the fighting noises in the main room, she can hear... breathing. Multiple people, breathing softly and darkly and heavily.

It's too dark for her to see much of anything, because the lights overhead are out completely, but Scorpius's next spell-burst comes, another flash of light brighter than any the library usually has, and then she can see it, half a dozen human eyes watching her, more mouths than that gasping for air and moving in silent pleading, pieces of people scattered over the translucent, glossy slime that's pulling itself through the vent slowly, ponderously. Inexorably.

It can see her, too.

Oh. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no. No wonder the mals ran. No wonder they're falling all over themselves to get into a reading room filled with wizards. There are some mals where learning about them increases your chances of survival. Where it's useful to know if the thing chasing you is resistant to fire, or will regrow bits if you chop them off, or how it'll try to come at you so you know how to dodge.

This is not one of those.

Yvette takes a step backwards, away from the horror that is known to the wizarding world as a maw-mouth. The horrible thing that eats all other horrible things, wizards and mals alike. When it arrives, enclaves don't fight it, or drive it off, or do anything particularly clever. There is usually not enough available power to have much chance at any of that. They close the doors and they hunker down and they pray, they pray that it goes somewhere else and eats something else, anything else. Because, realistically, that's all they can do. They can hope it goes for someone else. The practical advice for students is similar, but even less hopeful. If you have a choice between something awful and a maw-mouth, you pick the something else. It doesn't matter what it is or how horribly it'll kill you, if it'll use your still living body as a nest for its eggs or if you'll be slowly eaten alive or if you'll be torn apart. Whatever horrible fate awaits you from the something awful? It's better.

Because you really, really don't want to be the thing a maw-mouth grabs. You don't want to be the thing that it eats. All of those eyes? All of those mouths? They are from its victims. And, as far as the greatest magical minds with the most resources of the biggest enclaves can figure out? Each and every one of those victims is still alive. Still suffering. Their flesh and body were painfully unspooled like the threads in cloth until they're the same slime as makes up the rest of the maw-mouth. Until they've just made the damn thing bigger, more powerful with their pain and body and extended suffering. As written in the Journal of Maleficaria Studies, it was discovered that even long-digested victims of a maw-mouth can respond to a communications spell. All the response offered was screaming. Those mouths would probably still be screaming now, if they hadn't been exhausted into silence from the unending torment.

She continues backing up, terrified. If something ambushes her, she really wouldn't mind. But nothing would ambush her, not here. Not when this horror of horrors that gives the other horrors nightmares at night is so close. She really was the biggest goddamned dumbass in all the world, to not just listen to the fucking library.

The light from Scorpius's spell behind her goes out, and it's dark again. Then there's another spell, a long firecracker burst of bright greens and blues, and the maw-mouth is still there. It blinks at her with many of its eyes in disconcerting asynchronicity, browns and blues and green, most of them glazed and unfocused, a couple staring directly at her with horror and pain and revulsion, but only for a little bit, as the eyes and mouths slowly glide just under the surface of the creature, away from each other and disappearing back into it, new ones emerging to replace the ones that disappear. It doesn't do anything to her, though, other than stare, as it keeps flowing up and out of the vent. The lines of the grating aren't wide enough for these body parts to pull through, but the slime doesn't need to make sense according to physics.

Yeah, it seems like it’s having itself a time, cramming its way through a tiny, tiny air vent. There’s never been a maw-mouth loose in the school itself. Graduation hall, sure, but the school itself? Never. She would have read about it, people would have talked about it. It would have been well known, if it ever happened. Maw-mouths aren’t exactly ambush predators. All of the screaming and the thrashing as the victims are slowly taken apart is extremely noticeable. It just doesn’t matter, because there isn’t any realistic way to stop them. Slow them down is more reasonable, buy time for others to get away.

She is succeeding at putting distance between herself and it. Probably she should start screaming or something, but she just can’t seem to remember how. What’s her plan, run to the reading room to hole up with the others, hope that it’ll find eating a pack of well armed and entrenched baby wizards too unpalatable? Compared to what, what else is present for it to go after—

—except it could have grabbed her already, couldn’t it. She basically walked right over it. If it wanted a meal, it would have had one. All it’d have to do is reach up a tendril and touch her skin and that would have been it.

And it didn’t do that. Why would that be? Because then she’d scream, and presumably give the game away, and it’d lose out on a delicious feast in favor of some crummy sandwich.

So what does it want instead?

When maw-mouths have a choice, they don't eat a single person at a time. Their one weakness, if you can call it that, is that they need to sit still to digest their meals. Now, a single person can be digested reasonably quickly, as such things go; the only reason it'd pass her up is if it thought—to the extent these creatures can "think" as opposed to merely chase after any sources of mana they can perceive—that the time it'd need to spend digesting her wouldn't be worth it, because it could use that time to get something that it wouldn't be able to get otherwise.

The maw-mouth sighs, or some of its mouths do, and pulls the last bits of itself out through the vent. It spends a couple of seconds perfectly still (other than the passive internal movements of its eyes and mouths), and then it starts moving—away from her. And once it does move, it does so with shocking speed, at least for its bulk. This one isn't as huge as the two maw-mouths who have made the graduation hall their home—the only mals to have ever been given individual names, Patience and Fortitude—but even so, you would not have expected it to be able to roll over itself with such haste as it goes down the aisle. Down the aisle towards the stairway that goes down from the library to the freshman dorm, where all the youngest kids would be holed up in their rooms.

Well, not all of them. Just the loners, the losers, the ones who don't have an enclave or enough friends to be able to claim anywhere decent in the reading rooms of the library proper, the ones who have to do homework and build mana on their own. The ones who are now just like Yvette was, once upon a time, before she found her desk.

And to think, when she was a freshman, she was happy about the short trip.

She feels sick. There’s nothing she can do, right? No reasonable thing. All her bravado about being strong and powerful are just words in air and with just as much substance. The best, the best, she could do, is slow it down to give others time to run. By throwing herself into it, and accepting that eternal future of suffering. So that maybe, just maybe, the freshmen could try to get away. So that maybe the calculus of who lives and who dies (or wishes desperately to die) comes out in favor of more people living. Triage, cold and simple.

But that’s still just a maybe. Not a guarantee. The smart thing, the reasonable thing, is to just run. Save herself, warn her allies, maybe attempt to, to, what. Wait until the maw-mouth is good and settled and then try to rip that section of the dorm from the school? Barring that unlikely plan, wait until four years pass, and the maw-mouth is shuffled down to graduation hall?

That would be dooming children to an eternity of suffering, of course. Little babies who were just ripped from their lives and their homes and dumped into this mock-Darwinian nightmare. And she’s older, and more experienced, and more powerful, and she’s not an adult yet but damn it, she agrees with the logic that puts the senior dorms on the bottom. She agrees that it’s the duty of those with power to protect those without.

This is the stupidest thing she’ll ever do, and she’ll regret it for the rest of her very long, very unpleasant life.

She gulps a breath, and then she runs after it.

When the maw-mouth moves, it doesn't leave a trail. Some slimes do, but not this one. It doesn't even leave dust behind, wiping the floor clean on its way towards and down the stairwell. The dim light coming from there briefly reflects off its glossy surface, creating an iridescent effect that would be almost pretty if it weren't for the human body parts gliding right underneath it, giving it the impression of a very macabre work of art.

It pours itself through the opening and quickly vanishes down the stairs and into the freshman hall landing, where it will park itself and then slowly extend tentacles down towards the doors of the rooms, stretching through the cracks under the doors, and by then it'll be too late. No matter how much the rooms' occupants scream and beg and plead, no one will come to rescue them, no one will even try, because by now everyone knows that you don't leave the safety of your room to investigate screaming and even if anyone did everyone knows better. The maw-mouth will be able to take its sweet, sweet time, and it won't even need to open the doors, digesting the students right where they are and then pulling its limbs back in once it's done and ready for the next entry on the corridor-shaped menu. At least its future victims will have advance warning, so that they can choose to die some other way instead—by trying to room with another student, perhaps, if anyone is foolish enough to try to shelter them, or just by giving up and using some other way to escape, like a knife or some alchemical concoction that'll kill them quickly and painlessly.

It's a horrible choice to give them, an awful impossible one that no one should ever have to make. Still, it's better than not having the choice at all.

Is this a worthy altar to sacrifice her entire self on? All her hopes and dreams, her ambitions? The people she's connected with? Her mother, who sacrificed pieces of her soul to keep her only daughter alive? Nkoyo, noble soul wrapped in a cloak of pragmatism, risking her life by refusing to abandon her friends, and who was actually just beginning to like her? Liu, the maleficer whose careful and logical and measured use of malia, never ever on humans, still giving up pieces from herself all the same, who reminds her so much of her mother? Scorpius, hero of all and friend of none, traumatized into never making connections, terrified to lose someone again? Does she really want to do that to him again, for him to know that the second person he tried to befriend threw herself into a damned maw-mouth, and will be suffering forevermore? Alexei, the stupid and brilliant artificer who should really just have agreed when she'd tried to warn him that she's a shitty person to be in an alliance with? Even when really, he should pick someone else, anyone else? Should accept the lifeline London is offering him and sail off into the sunset to build wonder and beauty into this wretched world? How can she do that to him, agree to fight for his life and her own to get out of this shitty place, with you until the end, and then just. Throw it all away?

For some freshmen she doesn't even know?

Well. Maybe, maybe not. All anyone really gets to do in here is take gambles, anyway. She'll likely never find out.

But she does know that she doesn't want a world where people only protect themselves, their in-group, fall to the ever persistent tribalism that's plagued humanity since they were climbing in trees. She wants them to be better, which means she wants to be better, which means...

Putting her mana where her mouth is. Or she's just a damned hypocrite like all the rest of them.

And so if she is doing this, this incredibly stupid thing to give this monster of monsters brief indigestion, then, well. At the very least she is going to be the most absolute indigestible bitch that this fucking thing has ever seen.

She takes off her satchel, and she sets it carefully against the nearby wall. It's still got Liu's homework in it, after all. And the book that... she'll probably never get the chance to read. Sorry, book. At least she got you out of the library, and didn't take you into a maw-mouth.

The crystal around her neck is already connected to her stash, all carefully gathered and budgeted with the relentless efficiency of someone whose life depends on it. She has over a dozen spells to kill a room full of people, but they'll all hit harder if she makes it inside the thing. Just standing out here and flinging death spells until her mana was empty wouldn't slow it down much at all. She puts up a shield. It won't be enough, it won't last forever or let her escape from its grasp, but it'll buy her time before it can manage to start unspooling her. Time enough to get very, very far into this thing, so that each and every single one of the horrible murderous spells this fucking school gives her will hurt as much as possible. Buy as much time for someone else as possible.

Before she has time for any further thought, before she has time to hesitate and flinch and flee, she steps into its waiting grasp.

It looks almost confused, as it sees her dashing towards it. One of its mouths lets out a non-word, a "nyeg" just before she collides with it, but given that she wants to be eaten so badly it's definitely going to help her. A millisecond before she's made contact it makes contact with her first, two tentacles emerging from its mass with startling speed again, wrapping themselves around her and pulling.

And then she's in.

The feeling is horrible: something big and sweaty and slimy, something grabbing her too tight and hugging her, clinging to her like some stalking admirer that finally got their hands on her, breathing loudly and heavily into her ears, gasping and whimpering and whispering more non-words. But it's worse than a hug, it's worse than clinging, because once she's inside she's inside; this creature that wants to just open her up like a clam and get to the tasty gooey innards, lick her clean and make her come undone, is all around her, in every direction, looking and feeling like it stretches on for miles and miles as far as she can see. And it's not just physical, it's a magic creature, and even more than the feeling against her skin—disgusting and revolting and horrifying even through her shields—she can feel its intent, its insatiable hunger for her. It wants her, it wants her to be a part of it, it's almost ecstatic in its desire to possess her, to use her, to consume her.

Inside, it's not just eyes and mouths. It's intestines, it's pieces of lungs and brains and skin, it's everything that makes up a person in eternal suspension and flux inside this monstrosity. She can feel something like those dead algae that occasionally cling to your ankles in the ocean by the beach the day after a storm, except it's veins, capilaries, a web lightly trailing against her skin before it vanishes in the endless mass. She can see a finger, a single finger floating just one foot in front of her, its nail painted red and chipped. There's a clump of hair, over there, still attached to a piece of skull, lying on the floor just to her left.

And throughout all of that, a torrent of mana filters through her crystal and into her shields. It must, to hold this horror of horrors off, to protect her from immediately and painfully dissolving without ever, ever dying. It's a maleficarium, and like every other mal what it wants most is mana, and unlike every other mal there is nothing it can't break, nothing it can't eat. Her shields are buying her time and nothing more.

The books were right. Anything else is better than this, much less being like this forever. It's just touching the wrapped plastic around the delicious treat inside, and it's already the worst thing she could possibly imagine. It'll be so, so much worse when her shield comes down. It's normal to scream when a maw-mouth grabs you, and she understands why. She wants to. She just... doesn't. Can't. The only response she can muster is a gasp of horror, as she's drawn within, and then a whimper, from what feels like the depths of her soul.

It's not like anyone can help her now, though, is it. And there is a response inside her at this, this thing, wanting to possess her, wanting to take her apart, wanting to reduce her to her component parts and use the convenient bits of her while all the rest of her screams and screams and screams. She is an instrument of destruction and death, of inflicting pain and fear. Since she was a child, she has been suppressing the urge to indulge. Sure, sometimes when she's attacked by maleficaria, she can indulge a little, but it has always been carefully controlled. Don't use too much mana, don't break anything that shouldn't be broken, play support to the great big hero that gains mana from the monsters. Always, always, always. Carefully measured, carefully proportional, carefully managed. Safe, safe, safe.

At this moment in time? She doesn't care if she's being safe. She doesn't care if she breaks the whole world. Fuck the world, if it has this thing in it. It can all be destroyed and be ashes and everyone can be dead and that'll be better because they won't be suffering like this.

The very first major killing spell that she ever learned is the simplest she knows. It's also the most deadly. But, careful little Yvette of the past, naive little child, she who did not know what it was like to be inside this thing, never used it. Never wanted to use it, wanted to burn it out of her head so she'd never even have the option, but never could. Even if she thought that it was very elegant, it was too dangerous, it was too easy. Three little words, a careless flick of the wrist, and those before you died. 'À la mort,' it goes. 'To the death' it means. Like a duel, or a marriage. See? Very elegant. But of course, there is a lot of trouble in flicking a wrist carelessly, in desiring to end something and saying you'll die to end it and meaning it. In being careless with it. The best spells are often paradoxes. How can you be careless with your own life? How can you want something dead so much that you will use the La Main de la Mort, and cast it carelessly, and not particularly mind which outcome you'll get?

She has her answer. The words are sweet on her tongue, and there's no concern about which outcome is 'better' or 'worse.' There is just the joy of knowing whichever side of the coin comes up, she wins. Of finally, finally getting to let loose, and just do her level best to end everything.

If you get the mental state wrong, that spell kills you. If you get the wrist flick wrong, that spell kills you. But is she even flicking her wrist, barely able to move through this thing's space-distorting molasses? It doesn't matter, at least not when it's Yvette, because it's all in the intent. The flick of the wrist is just a crutch, really, a reminder of how little you care. How little she cares. And in her paradox, in her indifference between dying and killing, she kills.

But that makes it worse. The horrible masses around her, barely-alive in the first place, lose what little hold on life they still have on their pretense at life. It putrefies, the remains of the person closest to her, years-maybe-decades of decay catching up with it in the matter of seconds. One of the eyes right in front of her, staring at her, blinks in relief before it dissolves.

That was one person. How many people is this thing made out of? How many times can Yvette cast that spell?

She doesn't know how many times she can cast it. She doesn't even know how many times she does cast it. It just happens, over and over, as fast as she can say the words and flick her wrist. It's as easily as breathing, and with near as much relief. The joy of killing, of causing this thing to die, is the only nice thing in this hell that she's thrown herself. Yes, good, end it. End it all. Tear this wretched thing down and apart until there's nothing left. Until all this monstrosity that lies before her is dead and gone. As much death as she can manage before she, too, is gone.

The only way to kill a maw-mouth is by killing its core, and it's only been successfully done three times in history. Each time it was done it took an entire circle of wizards, every single time, with most of them outside feeding shedloads of mana into the shields of the ones inside so they can reach that core. And maw-mouths are, in fact, a lot bigger on the inside; you walk and walk and walk and you've moved five inches sidereal, all the while suffering through the worst hell possible to visit on a human being—other than actually being eaten and then digested forever. You get an entire circle of wizards, most of whom stay outside the maw-mouth feeding mana into the ones going in, and then the ones going in spend hours, maybe even days, walking and walking and walking, until they reach the core. And then it's not like the core itself is vulnerable, either; killing it is as difficult as killing any of the individual pieces that make this mal up, if not more.

La Main de la Mort doesn't work on literally everything. Psychic-class mals, for instance, which mostly don't exist in the first place, are immune. But a maw-mouth isn't a psychic-class mal, and everything other than those will just die. Another wizard might be able to protect themself, maybe, if they have enough advance warning and can prepare contingencies against the most powerful of killing spells. But the individual pieces of a monster made out of people who all want to die, who are all begging to be released from their eternal torment?

They die. They die and die and die, they die in droves, La Main de la Mort doesn't cost that much mana (relatively speaking) but there are so, so, so many people. They're probably grateful, to the extent they can feel anything other than pain.

And then suddenly, between one moment and the next, the entire thing breaks apart over her head and slithers down all around her into an enormous puddle of rapidly putrefying gore.

The disorientation of having nothing more to kill causes her to stop her mantra of death. She stares in utter confusion as it... falls to pieces in chunks and rivulets around her shield. It's dead? How, how can it be dead?? How can she possibly have killed it? How is this a thing that could have happened??

After a long pause of bewilderment, she flicks her wrist. It's the same sort of motion of the spell she'd been casting, but it's got a different meaning, and a different word, "Partez!" This flings away her shield, and all of the gore covering it, in a great burst, all apart and all at once. That wasn't a proper spell, or if it was it was one she'd just made, but it felt like a thing she should be able to do with the shield of her own creation. One last act of destruction, that leaves her entirely clean from the mess she's made.

Then she's left in a little... clean spot on the floor. Surrounded on all sides by the remains of all that she's undone. Her hair's come undone, too, from where she'd tied it up, somewhere in the running and the being eaten and the killing. She notes, pointlessly, that she has absolutely no idea where the associated hairtie went. Damn, those things are hard to come by.

When she's sufficiently reoriented herself, she finds that she's barely two steps past where the maw-mouth had originally grabbed her. There's a thing left on the floor a few feet ahead, something that looks like the human version of a deboned chicken, in fetal position. It only stays like that for a few seconds before it bursts and dissolves into sludge. Nearly the whole hallway is drenched in blood and rotting viscera, far too much of it to properly go down the periodically-placed drains along the length of the floor.

Until, that is, the sprayers in the ceiling automatically kick in, loudly. The water must have some alchemical concoction in it, as it manages to drain away the remaining bits that had been choking the drains up, and in a few more seconds Yvette finds herself drenched and alone in the empty hallway, with no evidence whatsoever of what just happened.

As if it all just. Never happened. But for the way she’s drenched, and how she feels like she’ll never, ever be clean again.

She considers her available options, then very deliberately loses her lunch in the direction of the nearest drain. This important task complete, she then proceeds to collapse into a heap on the floor.

"Yvette?" calls Scorpius's voice from upstairs, his footsteps loud in the sudden peace and quiet. "Please tell me you went downstairs, please tell me you're okay—oh thank God," he says once he's climbed down enough to spot her there. "I'd seen you go into the stacks and there were—"

But then he notices the state she's in and stops himself short. "...what happened?" he says, skipping down the remaining steps two at a time and crossing the distance to her in two seconds. He doesn't—quite—touch her, but he's hovering a bit and looking around for, for whatever must've...

The only reply she manages is a manic laugh that doesn’t… sound okay. At all.

She buries her face in her hands, and lets out a choked sob that sounds like another attempt at a laugh.

Okay um um um. "I'm going to try to help you back to your room. Okay? Stop me if you'd rather I not do that." And if she doesn't object he'll try to carry her, bridal-style.

"Mnnh," she objects, shrinking away from him. Look, it's, it's. She doesn't want to be touched right now, okay. There had been so much touching. It was all bad touching. She wants there to be no touching for the foreseeable future. She wants, wants to claw her own skin off and burn the memories out of her skull or cast the La Main de la Mort and see if that somehow makes the world better again. Probably not, but hey, it worked once, right?

He doesn't touch her, then, but he looks miserable. "Please tell me how I can help." Because he is not leaving her alone here in this state, she would be a banquet. "Would, would a floating spell help?" He still hasn't deposited most of the mana he got from fighting the library mals (so if Yvette pays attention she might notice that there's a tiny amount of eldritch light shining through his eyes and his clothes may be swaying a bit in nonexistent wind) because he wasn't sure there wouldn't be more mals to fight, he can definitely splurge a bit for this.

Oh great now she has to manage his feelings along with hers how is that any fucking fair..!

He just wants to help.

"....... I'll. Shower," she says, a little haltingly. With this mission in mind, she does manage to stumble, clumsily, to her feet.

"Do you want me to find Nkoyo or Liu to keep watch for you? Or I could, but."

"I don't..." she really doesn't care. His concerns about seeing her without clothes on are absurd and ridiculous and she wants him to go away and he just wants to help.

"... Liu," she manages, after a pause where she tells herself to calm down and not attempt to destroy the whole school in a murder-suicide. "I, still have her homework."

This is such an absurd thing to be concerned about, right after killing a maw-mouth, and yet here she is. Hairties and homework.

"Okay, I, give me, shit, I." He can't leave her here, whatever happened she's, she's really not okay and he does not trust her to go looking for some mals to kill on her own or something and she looks like she's going to be the easiest meal in this school for any mals. "Do you have a piece of paper in your bag I could write on?"

"Mnn," she hums, but this does persuade her to (awkwardly, clumsily) get up and go for her satchel.

... She freezes when her hand touches the first thing that's inside, and she stares.

"Excusez-moi, mon chéri," she murmurs to the treasure she'd tucked away inside it, fingers brushing the gilding, "Désolé pour le dérangement, j'ai besoin de temps."

And then she gets Lake his piece of paper, shuts her satchel, and instead of putting it back on she just hugs it, eyes closed.

...okay?

He's not going to ask.

Piece of paper, he can get a message written on it and cast a spell that turns it into a paper airplane and sends it after Liu. Typically for this spell you'd need something of the target's, a lock of hair being typical, but that's just because targetting people by mind impression tends to not be sufficiently precise and that is not a problem Scorpius has. Off goes the paper airplane.

She opens an eye to watch it go, then shuts it again. She continues cuddling her satchel, like it's the most precious thing in the world. Leaning against the wall and looking very small and drenched and ragged.

Liu fled down to her room just like every other student in the library than Scorpius but since that wasn't possible while the mals were there the paper airplane managed to catch her before she got there, so it only takes her a few minutes to emerge out the staircase, looking anxious.

Accompanied by someone else who is also looking anxious. He takes one look at the scene and blanches. "What happened?"

"I don't know," Scorpius says, trying and mostly failing to keep his voice level. Clearly Yvette wants to be alone and Scorpius would love to leave her alone except for how he is worried she might die if he does.

Liu gets a little tiny tentative attempt at a smile, but Alexei...

"... I'm sorry," she says, in a very small voice, looking like she's about to start crying. Again.

"...what... for?"

Nope, no explanations. Only a little whine, and scrunching inward towards the satchel that she's still clutching.

He looks at Scorpius, starting to feel kind of really terrified.

Yeah he's with you here buddy.

To Liu: "She said she needed a shower and she wanted you to stand guard for her."

"Oh." Scorpius's message was very short and unclear but now it makes sense that he was asking for her specifically. She looks at Yvette, then. "I'll come with you," she says quietly. "We can use the freshmen's bathroom."

Nod nod.

Then: "... I finished your homework," she says, because. That is clearly the most salient information here, right? Right.

"Thank you. I'm almost done with yours?"

“S’fine,” she shrugs, with just a hint of that little manic laugh of hers.

She looks at the boys, who look just as lost as she feels, then she takes a couple of steps towards Yvette and... offers her her hand.

She stares at the offered hand for a couple heartbeats, then. That wouldn’t be too bad, right? It’s not touching her anywhere else, it’s just her hand. And it’d keep that hand from flinching into a certain careless flick. Probably safer. For everyone else.

Tentatively, she takes Liu’s hand.

Liu notices the hesitation and almost pulls back but... call it instinct. She felt like this would work.

She doesn't squeeze or pull too hard but she does start walking.

Yeah, okay. Yvette trails along behind Liu, more like a lost and confused puppy than the headstrong and proud teenager they’re all used to. She does really, really need that shower.

Scorpius and Alexei also look like lost and confused puppies, trailing after them. Scorpius most of all; all of his social intuitions are screaming that something is horribly wrong, that something unutterably indescribably awful happened, and it's making him miserable. But... it happened to her so he doesn't want to dump his feelings all over her. He just wants her to be okay.

Yeah... yeah.

So Liu can gently lead Yvette into the bathroom so she can have her shower, and she's happy to stand watch.

...which is weird. Very weird. She shouldn't... let herself care about people. But she supposes that ship sailed when Yvette demonstrated that she cared, too.

Once the two girls are inside: "What happened?"

"I have no idea. I just, after you told me she was in the stacks I went looking and the freshman landing was right there and I figured she could've run from the mals there, except she was just on the floor there looking awful and the entire hallway was wet and there was vomit near the drain and I offered to carry her or float her to her room and she said she just wanted a shower and I said I could grab Liu or Nkoyo to stand watch or I could stand watch and she gave me a look like I was insane for caring about seeing her naked like that could ever matter and."

"She was probably attacked by something."

"No duh." He shakes his head and looks away. "Sorry. I'm freaking out, she looks like she's freaking out worse, but she doesn't look hurt. Something psychic? Spiritual? I don't know, Yahontov."

Alexei closes the distance between them and... places a hand on Scorpius's shoulder.

He doesn't startle because at this point in the Scholomance you just gotta have good enough reflexes that you don't get startled by that kind of thing but he is surprised.

"She is tough. If something got her we will fix it. And she'll be fine. Trust her."

"Yeah. She will. I just..."

"You wish you could've helped, or stopped whatever it was. You take on too much."

"Not you, too," he grumbles.

He lowers his hand. "We'll wait. She'll be fine."

And if he's trying to reassure himself, too, well, no one needs to know.

Buddy you are talking to the wrong person if you wanted no one else to know.

"Yeah. She will."

The shower... helps. Granted, she spends the time sort of literally scratching at herself, scrubbing as much as she can to get the (probably psychosomatic) feeling of ick off, until her skin is red and raw. But the hot water is nice. And eventually she acknowledges that she will not get any cleaner, and ends the shower. Her clothes also get washed, separately, and they're still not completely dry by the time she's done, but at least they don't smell faintly of alchemy chemicals.

"Thanks," she says to Liu, when she emerges, looking... some fraction more like herself, if still a bit shaky. And slightly scrubbed raw. "Um. Do you also need anything while we're here? I can stand watch for you, too."

She shakes her head. "I showered this morning. But thank you." Pause. "How... Are you feeling better?"

"A... a little. It's. Further behind me, now." She can't help but shudder, though. "I. Did kill it, though. The." Then she shakes her head, from a mix of not wanting to think about it ever again and the knowledge that what she did is kind of unbelievable. "... The mal."

She nods. "Good," she says, inanely, but she means it: if whatever it was did whatever it did to Yvette, who's nearly a senior and who has quite a lot of practice killing mals, it would probably have caused rather a lot of trouble for the freshmen.

Yeah, no kidding.

They emerge from the bathroom, and she offers the waiting boys a tiny little smile.

"Hi," she says, awkwardly. Right, uh. Same reassurances. "Um. ... I did kill it. The." She waves vaguely, then shakes her head. "It's gone."

Alexei smiles. Yeah. Of course she did. She's Yvette.

"Do you need anything?" No hovering, Scorpius, that's not cool. He will stay a polite distance and not hover at all. There's no reason for him to be worried even if the little alarms in his head are saying that everything is NOT fine.

"Um. ... Mana, probably. I. Don't know how much I used." She gets her crystal out to see how much is left, and. ... It's cracked and broken. Entirely black. Probably ending the shield spell improperly, but she really doesn't know. She winces, then puts it back away. "... But don't piss off your enclave for it."

There, that almost sounded like herself.

Scorpius snorts. "There were six huge things in the library just now. There's enough for everyone." His eyes are still faintly glowing if you pay attention.

Alexei looks... sad... about the cracked crystal.

She gives a little snort, but doesn't comment further on that subject.

Alexei can have the cracked crystal, if he'd like. Maybe he can figure out how to fix it. ... He should probably get the ones Scorpius broke too, actually.

"He actually broke more," she says, pointing at Scorpius, in an attempt to try and be more like herself. Play a character that is shaped more like herself.

"Then he should pay to fix them."

No one's buying it but they can play along.

"Are they even fixable? Didn't one of them literally break in two?"

Alexei physically winces.

"Mm. We'll see. But I'm pretty sure my door hates you, now."

Now it is Scorpius's turn to wince. "It was a kvenlik," he complains. But yes, they should get going, then.

"Ahuh."

Yeah. She's pretty sure she's being forcibly escorted to her room, and she will accept these circumstances.

Well, everyone is going back to their room what with how the library is now uninhabitable so it makes sense for them to all go together and yeah no one's convinced are they.

They are accompanying her to her room, then.

Ahuh. They're really, really not fooling anyone. But this is.. this is very sweet.

Also they might notice that she is absolutely still clutching her satchel instead of just. Wearing it. Like a normal person. The whole way there. Is this safe? Eh. Does she care? She cares about her satchel and potential new grimoire!!

"Thanks," she says, very softly, when they have reached the junior dormitories.

"Don't mention it," Scorpius chirps.

Alexei blinks at him.

Liu is getting the impression that he's just Like That, yeah.

"I'll have your homework done by dinner," says Liu, and then she goes to her room.

Scorpius looks at Alexei with... some kind of facial expression.

...what. What does he want.

Oh.

He looks at Yvette. "May I see the crystals?"

"Yeah, of course," she agrees, a little amused at Scorpius prompting this arrangement.

"See you at dinner," she says, to Scorpius and Liu, but yep. Alexei gets to come into her room, and help her assess the horrific damage.

He'd gotten to see how her mana stores had been before the incident. She'd had almost thirty crystals in total, filled to the brim and brilliantly red with power. All but six are empty. The crystals used to channel to and from her stores, the one around her neck and the one in the box, are cracked. Add that to the three others that Lake broke himself, one set which is in fact in half, and, well. All in all? It's bad. It's very bad.

"I'm sorry," she repeats, to both her crystals and her alliance mate, looking horrified.

He stares. And he doesn't say anything because Yvette is clearly already aware of the magnitude of this but... what the fuck. "...Scorpius can help you recover some mana?"

"... Yeah," she agrees, still staring. She huffs a laugh through her teeth; the same slightly pained, manic one from earlier. "Fuck. I'm sorry. Sofia was right, I'm a terrible ally. I, I could have, just run like a sensible person but it was." And then she sniffles a little. "... It was going for the freshmen."

He looks at Yvette, now, blinking.

"I do not know what Sofia told you," he says, quietly. "But I did not decide to become your ally in ignorance of... who you are."

"I know, I just, I." She motions vaguely to the destruction that is her mana stores. "I might've killed us. Or at least myself, you're." She cracks a watery smile. "If you want out we can say it was my fault, it wouldn't even be hard."

"...no."

This earns a laugh, a real one this time.

"Ah, yes. I know that no. That's the 'I will not tolerate argument' no." Sniffle. "Thanks." Huff.

And then back to the business of staying alive:

"At the very least you can get the full recipe for making them, no secrets or anything. My, my dad invented them. We can probably sell them to make up for..." And she motions to the depleted stores. "At least a little."

He nods, slowly. She never told him where she got the recipe for the crystals, but he guessed it had something to do with her parents. He doesn't really know the full story, it was Western Europe drama that didn't really reach Russia in detail. But he's pretty sure her father's not in the picture, anymore, and he suspects he's dead.

"I... may have reverse-engineered them already," he admits.

"Of course you did," she snorts. "Do you want his notes, though."

He nods again. "Yes."

"Thought so." She carefully retrieves a brown, unmarked book from her shelves; an exceptionally light number with very thin, delicate pages. Technically speaking, this is a copy of her dad's notes, refined and rewritten for getting them through the weight requirement of a freshman’s induction into Scholomance, but. Still.

Little bitty brown book that she has carefully kept both secret and safe for three years: to Alexei.

"He had extra manuscripts and notes that are referenced within, but I've always had trouble getting the school to fork them over." Probably because she wouldn't be able to do much with them, not being an artificer. "But maybe you'll have more luck."

He accepts the book, and gives her a small smile. "Thank you."

She smiles back.

"You're welcome. Allies, you know. I actually maybe should have handed this over before the mana crystals, but, well. I can't say I regret being concerned about your immediate safety?"

Alexei shakes his head. "It is appreciated."

"Yeah." Then she looks at her satchel. "And... there might be... something else, in our corner. If the poor beauty hasn't gotten irritated with my lack of attention and ditched me for my hubris."

She very, very carefully looks, and just as carefully removes it. Now that she's got time to look at it, wow is it beautiful. Pristine dark-green leather, lovingly stamped with intricate patterns in gold. It is, without a doubt, the prettiest goddamned book she has ever seen, and she's seen many books.

"...what is it?"

"Ignore him, darling, he's far too used to the workshop and doesn't know a proper lost grimoire when he sees one," she says, and it's to the book itself. She pets it, then sits carefully down on her bed with it and opens it to the first page.

The first page, the title page, was copied Sanskrit, annotated heavily in Arabic. Well, the Arabic's a surprise, but she'd been expecting the Sanskrit, and if she has it right, it translates to: Behold the Masterwork of the Wise One of Gandhara.

She sucks in a breath, then clutches it to her chest.

"this is the most precious creation I've ever laid hands on," she whispers, eyes wide.

Alexei... does not have Sanskrit. So he just blinks owlishly at her.

"I, um. Do you know of the Golden Stone sutras?"

He sucks in a breath through his teeth so quickly he chokes on his spit and has to start coughing violently, because he does, he does know about the Golden Stone sutras: they are the first known enclave-builder spells, from thousands of years ago.

Before they were invented, enclaves only happened naturally, accidentally. Have a group of wizards live in a single place, doing magic in it and just existing in it for enough generations, and it'd start to slip a little bit into the void. Then you help it along, push it a bit further, start using only a single entrance in and out, and it would go all the way, and that door would be the only place in the enclave that was connected to the world.

And the reason people want that, want to build an enclave with their little space-outside-of-space, is twofold:

One is that if you're not in reality it can't fight you, or at least nowhere near as much as it does outside. When you do magic you're looking at the fundamental laws that reality is built out of and saying: not you, not here; my will be done. It resists you, it complains, it needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into shape. Artificers like Alexei know this best of all, because reality resists you even further when you try to shape it permanently, to create an object that works in ways it shouldn't and that keeps doing that even when you're not actively making it with your power and your will and most importantly your mana. It is especially difficult to do any magic around mundanes, around people who don't have any magic of their own, because they don't believe in magic—not the way wizards do, not the way they believe in air or in cars, in real things right in front of them—and then it's not just reality that fights you, it's also their will. Fail to do magic in front of a mundane and your next spell will be that much harder to cast; do that enough times and you lose the ability to do that in its entirety, your own body deciding that you never had it after all. In an enclave, in the Scholomance, out in the void, it is much easier to do magic.

The other is the same reason the Scholomance itself exists: safety. There are endless numbers of creatures out there trying to eat wizards, having to consume mana because they need that mana to survive (unlike humans do) but they can't generate their own (like wizards can). What enclaves do is create a chokepoint, a highly-defensible small hole out of reality that makes the smell of magic filter out much more slowly. You can do magic in an enclave without worrying that you're about to have a pack of hungry chayenas descend upon you with murderous intent.

If this book has anything to do with the Golden Stone sutras, then, then...

His mother told him about them. They were created by a man named Purochana who, five thousand years ago, worked for the prince of Gandhara—where Pakistan and Northern India are in contemporary times. He is often referred to in medieval sources as the wise one of Gandhara, and in mundane works he's described as a villain, for some reason. But wizards who know of him know that he is one of the most important figures in history, the one who first figured out how to give people safety and power, at will, without needing to spend three hundred years in a single place and hoping it happens to you.

It was the only time she ever actually talked about enclaves, after her group disbanded and the project of creating a Russian enclave fell through, after she and her colleagues all refused to complete their dream of decades, the dream she'd taken over and whipped into shape just so that she wouldn't lose more children. All enclave-building spells are an incredibly closely-guarded secret, and Alexei suspects that that secret may be magically-enforced, with a geas being part of the price to get them at all, what with the way his mother completely stopped talking about them and could never explain why she never used them.

And while the sutras are no longer the state-of-the-art in enclave building—modern spells allow people to build skyscrapers connected to each other by monorails, hanging gardens that change shape at a wizard's whim, anything you might want with all the technological amenities you might dream of—but some of its pieces are still used to this day. Even after five thousand years of refinements and improvements and new inventions, some of these building-blocks are still incredibly useful, especially the ones that manipulate matter at a fundamental level, which have never been surpassed.

This may, in fact, be the most precious creation either of them will ever lay their hands on.

"Oh, good," she says, at his reaction. Well, not the coughing, the coughing is kind of alarming. "... Are you okay? I have water if you need some?"

He shakes his head and lifts a quelling hand. No reason wasting precious water on this, he'll be fine in a moment, and he indeed is.

"What," he croaks, "is the book?"

"I am going to need to do so much work on my Sanskrit, and probably pick up Arabic besides, but I'm pretty sure the translation of the title page is, 'Behold the Masterwork of the Wise One of Gandhara.' So, ah." She looks at the book, still held against her like it's the most precious thing in the world. "I'll need to make a special book chest. It's such a good thing I've finished shop for this term, I was going to spend the time doing something else, but this beauty needs a home of its very own and I need to make sure it'll be perfect."

He blinks loooong and slow. "It's. It's them? All of them? The sutras? Not just—it's actually them?" Alexei is typically a boy of very few words but holy shit.

"I, I think so. I should look in more depth, I just. I'm sorry lovely, you're so exciting I've just lost all my sense of manners, haven't I. I should let you properly introduce yourself, shouldn't I..."

She is absolutely crooning to the book. She even continues while carefully leafing through the pages, soft little reassurances of adoration and promises of cherishing it forever and ever and ever.

Yeah he's staring, now. "I do not have Sanskrit or Arabic, but I will help you with the case." They're allied, now, so of course he would, but he doesn't know what else to say, he's kind of in shock.

She nods, looking up from her precious, precious book to smile at him, briefly. "Thanks. I'll - I think it's proper if I do most of the work myself? But not at the cost of quality, just."

Which is to say: she'll totally do all of the annoying scut work, and request his help for the tricky bits that she's likely to mess up herself. This is a much more efficient use of their time.

He nods again.

And then it clicks. It clicks that you can't get anything for free in this school. Anywhere. The principle of balance, or something, there's a cost, there's always a cost, and sometimes it's just mana, just the effort and suffering you send out to the world, but for something like this... for the Golden Stone sutras...

He can't keep the horror from his face, at least not immediately. He doesn't know what attacked her in the library, but the way she looked, and acted, it must've been something terrible. And he can't help but have the next thought, that it may not have been enough. He doesn't know, doesn't know what it was, but for something like the sutras, what kind of price would she have to pay?

Yvette doesn't notice his concern or horror, instead focusing on reading her fantastic and incredibly valuable new friend.

It does not take particularly long for her to have her grimoire's value cemented.

An important thing to understand about magic is that lot of it is about efficiency. A student's magical education at the Scholomance is often less about how to do something, and more about how to do it well. You can get the same thing in multiple ways, but some of those ways are more wasteful than others. If you want to change one phase of matter to another, like ice to water or water to steam, the most obvious way to get there is by changing the temperature of the matter to match what phase you want it to be, and begin the typical process that matter changes phases. But 'obvious' is not 'efficient.' A lot of the mana is being fed into what's essentially waste heat, instead of just directly aiming for the end result that the wizard wants. There are obvious ways to make this more efficient; just heat up the matter itself, and nothing around it, apply or remove an amount of air pressure to make the process go faster, and so on. But if you are the Wise One of Gandhara, Purochana himself, you can figure out how to cut out the middle man, and just tell the matter that you want it to be liquid directly. No heating, no pressure, just the end result. Very efficient. His phase-control spell is old, yes, but it's really hard to improve upon that level of efficiency.

"This is the Purochana's phase-control spell," she whispers.

He's managed to school his expression again by then—he does not want to remind Yvette of whatever horrors she may have witnessed and may be yet to witness, he'll broach the subject later—so he looks up and he's... maybe a bit too expressionless but that's not unusual for him. "So it is them," he whispers back.

"Yeah. Yeah." She looks back down at the spell. "Um. We can probably... trade or auction the phase-control spell or something? You can do that, right, that's a thing you can arrange? I can probably have several copies in a week."

She is speaking like she's already learned the spell and knows how to cast it. This is because she has. Look, it just. ... It makes sense, okay? She studied some chemistry and other sciences before she was inducted into the Scholomance, so once the path has been shown, even in damned Sanskrit, then. It just sort of clicks. Granted, she wouldn't know how to translate it from Sanskrit, at least not without a lot of invested time and probably some trial and error, but. The solution is already worked out, in front of her.

He nods. "I can put the word out," he says, slowly, working the details out in his head. "...Scorpius could probably help reach more people. He speaks Mandarin. We can have an auction, the five top bidders get the spell..."

"I can make five copies," she agrees, nodding. "And we can get Scorpius to help with arrangement. That's a good idea." She speaks Mandarin too (though for the record her accent is terrible, she has so much trouble getting the phonemes right) but obviously she is a much less charming candidate.

He disagrees he's not sure he does exactly but he does still find Yvette very charming. He smiles at her, again. This may be a record number of smiles he has smiled within a single day or something.

She smiles back! It's perfectly reasonable for him to smile a bunch this day (even if it was a bit of a shit day, for her in particular), because they are in an alliance! She's very pleased about this, and he seems to be, too.

But for now she's going to go back to cooing over her pretty pretty grimoire, and cleaning it of dust, and murmuring something about making a sling for it so she can literally carry it around forever instead of just in her satchel, and introducing it to her knife and musing about if they seem like they'd accept being aesthetically coordinated, and so forth.

He wants to kiss her it is now time for him to go.

"I should probably go. Will you... be okay?"

Yvette looks up from her crooning. Why wouldn't she...? Oh. Right. Everything is horrible and maw-mouths exist. And she killed one. Yes. She'd, uh, forgotten. It had probably been good for her.

"Yeah. I think so." She makes a face. "As long as I'm... doing something, anyway?"

He nods. "Do you have any concrete plans for the book? So I can procure materials."

"Um. I'm going to need gold for decorations and gilding regardless, for both my athame and my grimoire." She is not going to let her precious dagger get jealous of how lovely and decorated her new grimoire is, no sir. "And... some sort of hardwood, probably, for the sake of protection?"

He has some suggestions for what kinds of wood she can use, and ideas are already sprouting in his mind but he'll wait for Yvette to come up with a design she likes and start figuring out what they'll need in more precise quantities. But for now, though, he'll get going. Except... he stops at the door and turns around to look at her and say, "If you need anything you know where my room is." Right next to hers, and he is now blushing again what is wrong with him.

This earns another brilliant smile, pointed right at him. "I do! Thank you, Alexei."

"You're welcome, Yvette." Aaand she's smiling at him which means he will now go back into his room thanks muchly goodbye.

So there's still some more school work that she's got to get done, but all of it is hers, and none of it is due by Monday, and, well. It's really very important that she persuade this grimoire to stay. So she very carefully cleans it of all dust and sets it on her lap while she begins sketching plans for the book chest. She's going to need to see if the void can cough up anything about common decorating preferences from Purochana's time, it seems appropriate to nod to her book's history when creating something to house it, and it'll really highlight how it's just for it. Hmm, it'll probably need to hook onto her belt, too, considering how much she's going to be carrying it around everywhere she goes. Which of course means that she probably should make sure the aesthetics of her dagger and its sheath match at least the book's holder, and she'd had some plans for that already and...

She will keep herself quite occupied until dinner.

"Oh, goodness," says Nkoyo when Yvette shows her the book. Most of the juniors—most of the students—went back to their rooms after the attack in the library, although some got together in groups rather than be alone, the enclavers and the people who have something resembling friendships (does Yvette have friendships now? she might, actually). So when the dinner bell rings, pretty much everyone leaves to go eat together. Well, not together together because being in a huge group is almost as dangerous as being alone—there's a sweet spot in group numbers when there's enough people to be able to deal with most mals but not so many that they start attracting the really big ones—but in larger clumps than usual.

The loose little loser-group that Yvette's been sort of subsumed into—Nkoyo, Cora, Jowani, Alexei, Sofia, Natalya, Ibrahim, Yaakov, and Nadia—all go together. Sofia is now resolutely pretending Yvette does not exist, and Natalya is sort of anxiously trying to stay between them and looks ready to break up any potential budding fights.

Don't worry, Yvette will be ignoring Sofia right back. Instead she will be downright bubbly about her new book and the really excellent spell she's learned from it, and if she is perhaps forcing this cheer a bit, who would know. ... Besides Alexei. Alexei would know, obviously. This bit of theater is ultimately for her own benefit, not so much convincing others.

"Are you doing trades? I know a couple of Somali girls doing Sanskrit."

"We will be doing an auction."

"'We'?"

"Oh I saw your names by the bathroom, you're allied now?"

There's a round of congratulations at that news, with one notable absence.

No there isn't, because Sofia doesn't exist!

"We are! Thank you," she says, brightness a bit less forced this time. She's really tempted to hook her arm through Alexei's and make a very obvious statement of Mine, but that would be silly and unproductive and not accomplish anything more than petty spite.

"Well, I can find some people who'd be interested in this auction, if you're auctioning. My Somali friends probably know some people from their Sanskrit spell trading group..."

"Thank you! That'd be appreciated." Nkoyo: is excellent, honestly. She'd known this already, but it's nice to have it pointed directly at her.

She doesn't sit with them at dinner, this time, because instead she goes to spread the news/gossip to others, and they have people coming over to admire the book very quickly.

Alexei is being point person for the organisation, since he already has an established trading network and also everyone instinctively dislikes being around Yvette or interacting with her in any way. They can schedule a demonstration of the phase-change spell for when Yvette has it down, to prove that the spell does in fact do what it says it does, and lots of people are interested.

Scorpius arrives two minutes before the junior queue closes—unlike the other students, he didn't go to his room after the library attack, and instead decided to go patrolling for any more enormous mals that might have been around—and makes a beeline to their table with his half-empty tray.

"Do you have an intact crystal on you?" he asks Yvette. He is still glowing a little bit. He might be glowing more than he'd been earlier, actually.

... Scorpius why are you doing this here in the cafeteria. In front of everyone. Like your enclave. Like them.

"Yyyyyyyyes? But I'd rather you didn't break another one?" There, look everyone, he is doing this for logical reasons! He broke one of her crystals. "Scorpius I am not the sole person that is capable of dealing with you overloading with mana."

"So long as I don't get distracted I am sure I won't break any more crystals. And everyone else looks at me like I'm crazy and like I must have some ulterior motive if I try to offer them free mana. Not even my reputation can save me, here."

Nkoyo blinks at him, slowly. "Are you...?"

"No, we are not, I am just paying off a debt. ...I also do have more mana than I know what to do with, separately."

Scorpius you are so bad at this!!!!!!!

"He broke three. Of my crystals. One's in two pieces." She sighs. "You know, you could set up a mana trust fund, or something. Fill something, leave it lying around for someone to find. I suppose that would attract mals and scream 'trap,' wouldn't it..."

"It would, yeah. I keep trying to tell people that I am not particularly looking to have mercantile relationships with everyone and they keep not believing me..."

"...I believe you."

Okay Scorpius is not often surprised but now he is. Delightfully so. "Really?"

Aaand now he's uncomfortable. But he carries on. "You do not make sense otherwise."

He doesn't really make sense anyway.

He does, but goddamn he's annoying about it.

"You could start a lottery. Or say you'll pay mana for pro-social things. Maybe building a planter in the cafeteria for more food."

"I suppose I could make some ill-advised mana-backed oaths that I really do just want the pro-social things..." He hums. "...that was a joke, to be clear, but separately, you do work with plants, don't you, Yvette?"

"... I do, yes. Though it's not actually my affinity, I just inherited my mother's notes."

"There's some food for thought, then. Let me know when I can drop the mana off, though, my power-sharer doesn't actually have a setting to let me keep this much mana on me," he says, fishing the fancy-looking (for the Scholomance, at least) watchlike wristband from his pocket.

"...what?"

"Don't worry about it."

She rolls her eyes, then holds up the crystal around her neck. "Fine. Here. Maybe you should work out a personal mana storage system, hm?"

"Maybe I should." Bap. He is now no longer glowing.

Good for him. "Sort yourself out, Lake, you're a damned mess," she sniffs, and then it's back to her food.

Scorpius has to finish eating quickly, given how long he took to arrive, but also since arriving so late meant there wasn't that much food for him anyway he manages. Not even enclavers get extra nutrients, here. And on most days, people would go back to the library after dinner, but today they are all going directly back to their rooms instead, and this time Scorpius goes along with the masses. He considers pulling Yvette aside when they're downstairs to say something, but one glance at her is enough to convince him he shouldn't. He'll talk to her later.

Yeah, trying to walk up and just give her mana in the middle of the goddamned cafeteria was a bit much! To say the least!!

She kind of wants to go murder mals about it but she needs to make up for her massive fucking mana deficiency and also legitimately has a lot of work to do, so. So. She'll just. Head back to her room and do her work. Grumble. Grumble grumble.

A few other juniors (including Nkoyo's friends) and seniors are interested in Yvette's spell and show up by her door in the morning to talk about that.

...or, well, maybe Alexei's door instead, but they're right next to each other. When the Russians all open their doors in unison at fuck-you AM there's already people there.

Yvette does manage to get up at fuck-you AM! It's mostly because she had trouble sleeping, even with her new book as a soothing comfort object to keep under her pillow and half cuddle. Whenever she started to doze off, the sensation of being inside a maw-mouth kept coming to mind. On the other hand, she finished all of the homework she had the references for. The void will occasionally oblige and give her a very specific book that she asks for, if she has the title of it already. That doesn't help for finding appropriate books, that's what the library is for, but. It's something. Most importantly, her pretty grimoire is still there in the morning! Hooray.

She's a little overwhelmed by there apparently already being a crowd, but, um. She'll do her best. At the very least her grimoire deserves the attention.

No, Alexei is going to (quietly but firmly) put his foot down, there. People can have a glance and sign up for the demonstration but he is not going to have them just hovering around forever wanting to see the book. The seniors need to get going if they want to have their breakfast and the juniors have time to go to the bathroom before their own breakfast queue opens.

... Yvette will bow to Alexei's expertise! And also beam at him, because he's great, and she's allied with him. She can helpfully relay his judgement in any language that he lacks.

Of course, the juniors that are around did wake up at fuck-you AM just so that they'd catch the Russians at this and now they have a bunch of time before breakfast which they can use to go shower. It is not often that this many people are together and can keep watch.

Theeeeeey are going to attract a bunch of mals if they clump uuuuuup how have they survived this looooooooong it is very plausible that Scorpius's existence is how they've survived this long.

"Good morning," he says to the loser group that is increasingly becoming the Scorpius-and-his-loser-friends-???-I-guess group.

"Morning!" Ibrahim replies, cheerfully. He isn't exactly part of said no-longer-loser-question-mark group, what with how most people in this group find him kind of grating, but he is very happy to be around Scorpius anyway. "Did you sleep well?"

"As well as I ever do. How about yourself?"

"I did! I guess everyone coming back to the dorms together earlier than usual helped me get some good few hours of sleep."

"Good morning," she says, instead of the snide 'well good for you,' that comes to mind at Ibrahim having a good night's sleep. She does not, actually wish him a bad night's sleep, just. She really did not have one herself.

Instead... Yeah she'll have another shower. Since there are this many people and she's not a pariah anymore. Don't mind her, everyone, she is going to aggressively scrub herself until she can maybe pretend she's clean again!

A few mals do take pot shots at the group like he fucking told them they would and Scorpius deals with them without at any point complaining and so the juniors do in fact leave the bathroom in smaller groups, afterwards, causing his stress to gently and quietly go back to background levels.

Yvette has a sort of tired acceptance of people being fucking idiots. Noticing that people are being fucking idiots does actually persuade her to stop scrubbing herself raw in the shower, though, so. That's nice? And once she's done she goes to guard Alexei her own, smaller group of people that are less dumb.

If this were a normal day, Yvette might be expected to have more people showing up at her table at breakfast, curious about the book. Today is not a normal day, and there is a bigger source of gossip, noticeable as soon as they arrive at the cafeteria: a senior is sitting alone at the middle of a prime table, hunched over his tray.

Completely alone. Not even loser freshmen and sophomores are trying to sit at the same table as him, and the surrounding tables are all only occupied by said freshmen and sophs; every single senior is avoiding being anywhere near him.

Chloe and Magnus arrive at the cafeteria shortly after Yvette's group, apparently having sped up a bit to catch up, but as soon as they notice the lone senior they freeze in shock.

"Todd? Todd Quayle? Why would he... what's he doing sitting by himself??"

... Is it bad that Yvette thinks this works out well for her. That's probably bad. Eh, she's thought to be a bitch anyway. At least this way she gets less attention. Can she grab a table and get food while all of this... whatever... is going down?

There's another junior trying to slip right past them but Scorpius stops him. "What happened?"

The kid looks somewhere between star-struck and terrified. "Poached," he mumbles.

Scorpius drops his arm to the side and stares.

... That would do it, yep.

If there's one taboo that's worse than being a maleficer, it's what is colloquially known as 'room poaching,' or just poaching. The rule is one student per room after curfew, and if the student assigned to the room dies, that room loses the protections student rooms get. The door doesn't have any kind of natural warding, doesn't lock properly, the drain and vent aren't cooperative about keeping mals out, that sort of thing. The same sort of thing happens if students try to swap rooms, to a less but still noticeable degree. When the dorms lower a level, the walls get shuffled around to put use to the space; Yvette had the dubious benefit of having the empty room above her added to hers to have an incredibly high ceiling.

A loophole comes in if, technically speaking, the student assigned to that room doesn't die, but also isn't in that room. The most straightforward way to do that is to shove the student out into the void, but Yvette supposes no one's tested to see if students technically still alive by other means also count. (Like being eaten by a maw-m, no, stop it, Yvette, stop thinking about that.) But the void responds to will, and most people do not want to be lost forever to the void, actually. So a person attempting to shove another out into nonexistence has to really work at it. It's not, as she understands it, a particularly fast process, and requires magic and mana to achieve. All while the person struggles and tries, desperately, to keep some hold of themselves on reality. Until, eventually, the person is so far out they just... disappear into the darkness. They don't come back, or at least not that Yvette's ever heard, but they're also technically not dead. And they'll never be in their room, ever again.

But then the question is: why the hell would a senior so close to graduation do that? He's about to lose his room anyway. Did he poach a younger student's room to try and stay longer at the Scholomance, for some godforsaken reason...?

Someone else doesn't believe it either, and she's going to be much more loud about it.

"No way. No fucking way. This is a mistake!! There's no way he poached. He doesn't need to! He's going with Annabel and River and Jessamy, and they've got the valedictorian on board!! Why would he?"

"What the f- Lake what are you doing," Magnus hisses.

What he's doing is marching directly towards the table. "Quayle," Scorpius says, in a tone of voice probably no one has ever heard him use.

Or at least, no one alive.

But for all of that he doesn't then flinch. He just keeps eating, mechanically, not looking up, while the entire cafeteria falls rapidly into a hush. Some kids up in the mezzanine are even specifically leaning over the railing to watch.

Yvette is not getting involved in any of this. She's going to the food line. Let New York sort its own damn self out. The gossip network will tell her the important bits later, but it is not so kind when it comes to granting calories.

Chloe is totally going after Scorpius, though.

"It's a mistake! Scorpius, please calm down, there's no way it's true..!"

"If it's not fucking true then Todd fucking Quayle can say so himself."

One forkful after another, still not looking up.

"Who? Why?"

"... You're graduating!! Todd you have one of the best graduation alliances this year, there's no reason to!" She doesn't quite go so far as to say 'you'll be fine,' because that's just not done in Scholomance, not even enclavers are that assured of their safety, but it's heard perfectly well anyway.

Food, in face.

"Mika," Jermaine leans over to say from the New York table over there, in a near whisper that is heard by everyone anyway. The silence is overwhelming enough that you could hear a single strand of hair hitting the floor. "He poached Mika's room."

Scorpius... gets even angrier, if that's at all possible. Because he's sure almost no one knew Mika, most of the seniors had no idea who he was. He was one of the last stragglers, one of the people without a graduation alliance, which this late in the year meant he was most likely going to die anyway. That made him a very logical target, really, and that makes Scorpius's blood boil.

"You had everything, Quayle. Everything. And you had to, what, have a better room, too? Two weeks before graduation?"

And still he eats, quietly. He reaches for his glass of juice, and his shaking hand accidentally bumps and and spills it over, so he tries to right it—

"Answer me you fucking coward—" he says, reaching for Todd's hand.

And Todd stands up abruptly, heaving his tray up at Scorpius and painting him with the remaining food then giving him a good shove, which when Todd is a six foot tall senior and Scorpius isn't sends him nearly sprawling back. "Shut up!" he yells, his voice cracking in hysteria. "Shut the fuck up, Lake, you have no fucking idea—"

Now it's Chloe's time to yell.

"—He fights mals daily, I think he fucking would! Two weeks, and then your room wouldn't matter anymore!"

"Oh yes he's such a hero," replies Todd, aiming for a sneer and landing mostly in panicked wailing. "Saving us all from being eaten, the biggest man on campus, am I right?" he says, spreading his arms out to look at everyone else, theatrically.

...what the fuck.

"Well guess the fuck what," he continues, turning around to look at Scorpius again. "You've done shit. You haven't made a dent in the real crowd downstairs, and they're getting hungry. I'd know, my fucking room was right next to the stairs and I could hear them. Every. Fucking. Night." He presses his fists to his temples and his face just crumples, eyes scrunching up and tears starting to leak freely. "I can't sleep," he says, voice cracking again. "And they're coming through, and you know what went by my room yesterday?" He lets out a hysterical laugh and looks up again. "A fucking maw-mouth! Now go deal with that, hero."

And if anything could break that silence it would be that, with murmurs and freaked out gasps emanating from that spot in expanding circles as everyone confirms that they did hear him right and he did just claim a maw-mouth was roaming the halls.

".... What! No, that can't be. We would have noticed by now! They're not subtle, Quayle! If it were in the school we would know!"

Everyone is so busy looking at the New York theater club, that it's very easy to miss one person in particular stiffening. Her face is a mask of cool indifference, but the angle of her spine is that of someone who is desperately trying to forget about something horrible. Damn it, did someone have to bring up the existence of those fucking things, she wanted to have breakfast, not lose it.

Scorpius doesn't protest like Chloe, though, and barely reacts. His face has gone pale under the dripping egg and porridge hanging from his skin and clothes, and the closest thing to an emotion he's shown was the barest of flicks of his eyes in Yvette's direction.

But Yvette wasn't the only one who decided not to participate in the drama and to go grab food instead, and Alexei is a lot less good than Scorpius at disguising the way he also looks at her for a moment.

"Would we, Rasmussen? Would we really? On a Sunday, when everyone is away from the best places to hide in the school? Careful everyone!" And he turns around to address the room again. "Make sure to keep an eye out at the supply room! The workshop!" Back to Scorpius. "The library. Say, didn't I hear," another hysterical giggle, "that a bunch of incredibly powerful mals uncharacteristically attacked the library reading room with every student in it? I wonder what they could've been running from? But sure, Scorpius, thank you so much for protecting us. What would we do without you."

Yvette is not here, she does not exist, she is only an automaton that is fetching food and making sure that nothing nasty is going to poison her with it. Perfectly ordinary student that is not at all having any kind of meltdown remembering being trapped inside that fucking thing for the chance of maybe saving the freshman. And what did this asshole do? He shoved someone he knew for four years into the void. For a better room. So it would get someone else first.

Nevermind, maybe she does exist, actually. Just very quietly.

"Not shove a guy into the void," mutters Yvette, darkly, focusing on the anger to have any kind of hope of not having a meltdown in the middle of the cafeteria. It's not that people would think 'Ah, yes, she killed it and she's traumatized about it,' it's that they'd think she'd break at the first sign of one of the damn things. Which would screw up Alexei's prospects, since he's attached to her now, and that is not allowed, thank you.

Scorpius is fueling a lot of New York's mana habits, including the seniors. Calling him out for the results of his heroism now is what is known as... a dick move.

So it is with this context, where Scorpius's efforts have also directly and tangibly helped Todd himself, that Chloe Rasmussen slaps him. In the face.

"You're a disgrace, to New York and especially your father," she hisses, and then she flounces off to the lunch line.

He just stares at her, dumbfounded, as if he can't quite believe she just did this.