"Pot and kettle, Alethia dear. You look absolutely delightful, the jeans flatter you marvelously, and I'm clearly on a date with the most dashing girl for countless miles in any direction."

She gets the door and holds it for her date. "Shall we?"

The silliness of Sable's exaggerated compliments helps her get over her nerves.

She wonders if that was on purpose.

"Thank you. And- yes, let's."

And through the door she goes.

Sable finds an out of the way table with a nice view out any windows there happen to be, and pulls out Alethia's chair for her. "What would you like?"

"Hmm. I think a hot chocolate and a cinnamon bun."

That will leave her with a hankering for Actual Food in a few hours, but that's fine.

"I'll be right back, then."

Sable steps swiftly away to buy those, along with a black coffee strong enough to wake the dead — metaphorically, at least. This dead girl is forever awake. It'll be strong enough to have a meaningful taste through her vampiric taste buds, though.

And Alethia will maaaaybe check her out a bit as she walks away.

Maybe.

Who could say?

A vampire who can catch hints of movement in a reflection on a pitcher, maybe? But Sable shows no visible sign of noticing being checked out.

She just squees internally, instead.

Soon enough she's setting mugs and a plate down on the table. "Here you go!"

"Thank you, Sable!"

A pretty girl is buying her tasty food and pulled out her chair for her and held open the door for her. And now she has tasty hot chocolate and delicious pastry!

Life is good.

Is this a sappy look at seeing Alethia so pleased? Yes. Yes, it is.

"Gladly, Alethia. So how'd the test go? Kicked ass, I expect?"

"I think so, yeah! I finished twenty or so minutes before the exam ended and I could have left early but instead I just went over my answers to double check them. And it's a good thing i did, I'd somehow made a mistake on step one of one of the questions, would have gotten it completely wrong if I hadn't noticed."

Oh, wait! Sable doesn't have any food!

"Are you sure you don't want a pastry of some kind? They're quite good."

Unfortunately the pastry would taste of sadness and lies to their vampiric palate, and they'd have to dispose of it sometime later after eating it. That especially would be unpleasant, and the taste would make Ruby sad. It says something about matebonds that Ruby would rather eat the misery pastry than make Alethia sad, but they should be able to dodge this problem easily enough.

"I actually had breakfast already. No room for pastries, much though I wish otherwise. Thank you, though. The coffee is certainly good, and I'm quite enjoying how much you're enjoying yours."

"Okay then, I suppose I won't insist. Even if the cinnamon buns are very good."

"I'll have to live vicariously through your joy," she replies with a playful grin.

She's posing in a way that vaguely suggests she's just said something lewd. She didn't, but this is empirically not helping her incipient blush.

Quick, Alethia, have thoughts that are not about this before you develop an embarrassing blush.

Hmm. The delicious cinnamon bun is right there.

Nom.

Yes, this has distracted her successfully.

Oh, there's that sappy expression again. Had Alethia missed it while it was away?

"So, are they giving you a break before term continues, or just throwing you right into it?"

"Oh, no break at all. We do have a one-week break before midterms start up though, to study in. The profs all have the brilliant idea to add an assignment due right after it ends, though. They're bizarrely incapable of extrapolating their collective choices to results, for people with math degrees. My measure theory prof assigned twenty hours of graded homework a week, for the first month or so, before I went to office hours and said I had half the class behind me in agreement that this was too much. He was very firm that four hours of class a week and twenty of work outside it wasn't an unreasonable workload until I explained to him that his students have other courses, and so he should multiply the hours of work he assigns per week by five before he decides whether it makes sense as a workload. Still barely persuaded him, he didn't seem to get it. How he manages to teach measure theory while not getting that I'm not quite sure. To his credit he did listen, eventually, and cut the workload down to about a third of what it had been."

She is still a bit annoyed by how it took her half an hour to explain that to the man. She doesn't even usually go to office hours, she's too shy about asking questions. But she and her classmates were being run ragged- that twenty instead of six hours a week was pushing her from fifty to sixty-four hours of work a week, on average and that's not including studying time. Her classmates weren't, for the most part, double majoring like she was, so it wasn't quite as bad for them, but that first month sucked.

They are... appalled. None of them managed to expect a professor to be that absurd, even Hailey, and Sable shakes her head in response.

"Wow. Just... wow. That has managed to skate beneath even my already low expectations of university professors. Good on you for getting it fixed, and shame on him for making your actions necessary."

"Yeah, you would really think "multiply by five to check if this decision process leads to a total acceptable workload" would be- pretty trivial for the kind of person making novel mathematical contributions to the collective knowledge of all humanity, but apparently not. But he did reduce the total amount of work, and he wasn't too much of a jerk during the meeting. I, uh, think it helped that I'd managed a perfect score in his class, at that time. Not sure he'd have listened if it seemed plausible I was just being lazy, or just couldn't hack it. But he did listen, in the end, and that counts for a lot. Plenty of people would just have completely failed to consider- actually listening to the undergrad telling them they were making a mistake."

"Despite how common I know failing to listen to undergrads is, I can't see myself ever failing to listen to you. You're just so obviously clever and careful. You might ever make a mistake, but I get the impression you'd take time to fix it the second it was pointed out."

"That's certainly the kind of person I try to be. Nobody can be right about everything, but you can try to- systematically move in the correct direction."

She is not completely sure how to respond to the compliments, The Scripts do not have an immediate response ready, so she is just going to Not. Hopefully this is socially acceptable.

"You can. Not enough people do, but it's certainly possible."

If Alethia is under the impression that she is capable of doing something that will inspire these vampiric headmates' affection for her to fail or run out, she is sorely mistaken. As far as they're concerned, she's responded in an absolutely adorable way to the compliments. They could probably adjust to be able to tell her what other people would think about something she did, but they are not remotely bothering with that at the moment.

Not loving Alethia is simply incorrect.

She likes Sable. She thinks she likes Sable a lot. But she's going to try not to get too enthusiastic too quickly. Just in case.

Doesn't mean she can't smile at Sable for saying that, though.

"Hmm. So. First date topics- Politics! Do you or do you not support Reform Anti-Moonism, which proposes that we destroy the moon, but not with a giant moon laser?"