all in all, a not so terrible morning

year_book_hero

The Scholomance really, really hates it when kids room together.

It's an incentives thing. Outcasts and other socially-disadvantaged kids already have a harder time surviving at all than popular kids, enclavers and the like. If you start letting people room together, that's yet another way in which they get fucked over: all of the kids with a choice are going to room together, in threes and fours, cramped sure but still better for their survival than being alone, they can sleep in shifts and keep any mals out and that's a straight-up improvement over regular shields. Meanwhile the kids who don't have such social capital are going to stay alone, and be disproportionately targeted by everything that goes bump in the night. Spreading targets evenly is better for survival, and the Scholomance is playing nothing but a numbers game.

There's also graduation. The entire senior hall gets shuffled as the whole school spirals its floors down one level every year, and then it's locked out of access to the rest of the school and the only way they can go is down: to the graduation hall, where they have to run past the hordes of maleficaria that await. If seniors could just go to the freshmen's rooms that night, free of consequences, and not be forced to graduate, they would. One more year in the Scholomance means one more year to learn more spells, get more well-prepared, be more likely to survive out there. But there are not enough resources for that, not enough food and supplies. Everything is budgeted tightly, and having five rather than four cohorts of students in the school at the same time is just infeasible.

So it's for these and other similar reasons that the Scholomance really, really hates it when kids room together. Each student gets one room, full stop, and they have to be in said room from curfew start to curfew end. And what happens to students who flaunt this rule and decide to try to spend a night together anyway is they become a cautionary tale. When you get in at induction and the sophomores and juniors and seniors tell you all of the horror stories, that's typically enough to scare most kids straight. Not all, though, and every year you have a few hapless souls who decide to try it anyway. Their screams echo in the night as they bang on their colleagues' doors, asking for help, any help, until they are caught and dragged away by the maleficaria that the school has specifically sent their way, killed and eaten or perhaps just eaten without being killed first, depending on which level of bad luck they have on their last day of life.

Of course, these kinds of rules don't really apply very thoroughly when Scorpius Lake is involved. Not that the school isn't sending mal after mal his way, weakening its own wards just to make sure these kids learn in the most permanent way how bad an idea it is to spend the night together. It does that, with a vengeance. Mal after mal is broken against the shield of Lake's resolve, and more pragmatically the actual magical shields he has to renew every now and then. Yvette Villeneuve sleeps, perhaps not very peacefully, but at all, needing all the energy she can get to heal from the stab wound she got from Jack Westing last night. Scorpius wouldn't let her spend the night alone, not with said recent stab wound, not when she was about to be assailed by mals all night long anyway—they can smell the blood in the water, so to speak, and she would be low-hanging fruit. If mals are coming for her anyway, Scorpius reasoned, he might as well spend the night there and keep her from dying. Mal after mal, all night long, being killed and destroyed and pulled apart, each death fueling Scorpius's next spell, systematically and thoroughly.

By the last couple of hours of curfew, most mals who would come have come, and he gets stretches of even up to half an hour to rest. Not that he can sleep, obviously, not if he wants to stay alive, but he can at least sit and wait a bit, breathe more calmly. And as soon as the first bell rings in the morning, he flops onto the ground and breathes a sigh of relief. It's... over, finally.

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"Hi!" says Magnus cheerfully once he sits next to Chloe, who's across the table from Scorpius himself. "I don't think we've met. It's Yvette, right?"

à_la_mort

Well, this enclaver isn’t the one that has been trailing after Scorpius for every meal today, blithely insulting Yvette to her face all the while. That does put Magnus in a better position than Chloe, which is not nothing. But on the other hand, he’s being cheerful at her, which is not doing him any favors.

“Hello,” she says, as neutrally as she can manage. “It is.” She already knows his name, of course, but it’s very tempting to make an enclaver squirm by pretending she doesn’t. Eh, she’d rather do that to Chloe, and she already gave that game up by addressing her by name earlier.

“Are you joining Chloe on attempted Scorpius babysitting duty, then?”

Chloe Rasmussen

Do you see what she has been having to deal with, Magnus. Do you see.

Yes, he does.

"Are you feeling any better? I heard you got stabbed."

Alfie

But before she can answer that, two other kids sit at the table next to them: another two enclavers, Alfie and Sarah, from London.

"Hullo!" says Alfie, his cheer a lot more genuine than Magnus's. "—sorry, were these seats taken? We should have asked first."

year_book_hero

...Scorpius leans forward, resting his forehead on his hands. This is shaping up to be a lovely meal.

à_la_mort

Ohhhh no. Or possibly yes, if she considers this dinner and a show. It’ll be more entertainment than she’s had in weeks. Then again, none of these enclavers are paying her for holding and protecting the table with the standard offerings of food, are they. So just the show. She’d rather just the dinner. And she’s not really in the mood to watch everyone have enclave politics around her.

“It’s… fine,” she demurs, but she will delicately take a bite of one of the spring rolls Scorpius has forked over, a little pointedly. “Hello.” She should probably answer Magnus, shouldn’t she. “A bit better, yes, thank you for your concern.”

Sofia Artyomova

Natalya and Sofia exit the queue at the same time, give that table a glance, decide that it's more tro—

Alexei Yahontov

dead_reckoning

No. Please. Please come rescue him.

Sofia Artyomova

They look at each other, a bit worriedly, but they do kind of owe Alexei for many reasons, so sure, they'll go sit next to him and away from the enclavers.

Alfie

"Oh, hello to you, too, please sit, there's enough space for everyone," Alfie says to them, once again with unforced cheer. "I don't think we've met?"

Natalya Levitskaya

"...I'm Natalya, she's Sofia. We're from Russia."

"Say, Scorpius, what did you spend all afternoon doing today?"

à_la_mort

God, all of the different things people want is starting to make her head hurt. It’d be entertaining if she didn’t expect people to keep poking her to see what she does. Also, the London enclavers seem to be treating this like it’s their table, now, which is incredibly irritating. She burned a bit of incense to keep stray mals away, but clearly she should have just waited for sickening scent of enclaver entitlement to show up.

“Did London have something set up here before I got here? Because it didn’t work to ward off the shrinking crawler that shriveled up from the incense I burned, so whatever you were doing..."

Alfie

Alfie blinks, and has the novel realization that he's being told he's been rude. Oh. Huh. He... has been, hasn't he. He'd just been following his usual script, where this would be absurdly welcoming and nice of him, actually. Huh.

"Oh, no, we hadn't," he says, smiling with self recrimination, "I just didn't want to scare off any of your friends. I got a bit ahead of myself, there. Apologies, of course."

And because he does, actually, know some basic Scholomance table manners, he will be the very first enclaver to actually give Yvette food for her table protection services. Well, offer. "An apple's fine, right? I guess you might be sick of them if Lake keeps saving them for you..."

à_la_mort

...... Okay, that's a bit better. Still rude, but he's acknowledging that and even actually apologized. Quick, someone graduate early and check outside for flying pigs, the Londoner enclaver is apologizing. To someone who's French!

"It's all the same nutrient slurry underneath the magic anyway," she replies with a shrug, but she is mollified by his offering and will accept it.

year_book_hero

Scorpius kind of got distracted from Magnus's question by that exchange but since Magnus is still looking at him expectantly he sighs, shrugs, and says, "Shop assignment."

"Oh, but hadn't you finished yours already?"

year_book_hero

Another shrug, this time not accompanied by an actual answer.

Yi Liu

mouse_leficer

(Liu emerges from the food queue, scans the tables for somewhere to sit, and pauses when she spots the... table Yvette is sitting at... which now apparently contains suitors from two of the largest enclaves in the world?)

à_la_mort

(Yvette spots Liu in turn and gives a slightly pained smile. You can have a seat here if you really need/want one, but if you have the chance, save yourself, Liu. She does not have control of this nonsense, the enclavers are descending, etc.)

Yi Liu

mouse_leficer

(...yeah, sorry, Yvette. It's not even her purview, if there are enclavers she'll suck up to that'll be the Asian ones, not New York and London. So she will go sit with some Asian losers instead.)