Tuesdays were never as bad as Mondays, because at least Cedric was already back into the rhythm of the week. The week still sprawled out before his mind, and it was awful, but at least he wasn't battling the inertia of being allowed to finally rest for a moment over the weekend. It should have been the peak of productivity, probably, having finally managed momentum without having exhausted energy - but that assumed that Cedric had any energy to spare. Especially lately, he felt like he was always on the verge of running out of steam.

That was especially depressing given the fact that he only had one official lecture-style class. And yet, here Cedric was, trying to only metaphorically drag his feet as he walked into the DAWW II classroom.

"Mister Sorciere," Professor Miller said to him as he came in, and handed him a slip of paper, with only a name on it. ...Venture? Wasn't that T.S.'s last name? Amusing.

After the rest of the class filed in, Prof. Miller explained to the lot, "Your performance yesterday was evaluated, and you have been paired against the student from Pendragon Academy with whom your abilities are most evenly matched."

That was definitely an entirely fair assessment, and nothing had happened yesterday that could possibly compromise anyone's relative scoring. Cedric huffed to himself in irritation as he watched the opposing templar class file into the room, and eventually be directed to each wizard student.

The young man who sat down at the table next to Cedric was, unsurprisingly, rather frail looking, though probably still significantly healthier than Cedric himself was.

"Hi there! I'm Dean," said the brunet as he approached and offered a hand to shake, all smiles and freckles and too much positivity.

"Charmed," Cedric replied, keeping his hands firmly to himself. "Cedric. I take it you're not exactly an artist with your sword there to be directed to me." Cedric deserved better than the bottom of the barrel, but with yesterday's episode, no amount of egotism could smooth over the fact that this weakling was clearly the worst the class had to offer.

Dean shrugged and said, "Oh, I don't know, I think I'm… okay, yeah I kind of suck at this. I'm not actually even part of the Templar class, but there were a few open spots for the workshop and I was able to get in! It's really cool to be here, to see all of you guys do your magic thing." Oh Merlin, somehow it was even worse than Cedric had expected. "Hey, do you think I could transfer over here?" Dean continued, oblivious to the scowl forming itself on Cedric's face.

"You're about as close to me as you can get without physically moving my rump out of the seat," Cedric responded.

Dean laughed, but shook his head. "No, I mean, like. I want to just go to school here rather than Pendragon, you know? You're right, I'm pretty bad as a knight, and yesterday in this class I met the most gorgeous girl and she is the love of my life and I think I'd be a lot better at magic than sword stuff."

Over the course of this run-on sentence, Cedric's eyebrows rose, and rose, until they physically couldn't anymore - but they still strained, trying. "I don't… believe it works like that." Though Sofia came to the school significantly late as far as development went, and while she did have a significant advantage with the power radiated by the amulet, she actually had made a surprising amount of progress in those couple of sessions where they'd tried to have her practice magic without it, so maybe not… "How old are you, anyhow?"

"Fifteen, nearly sixteen!" Dean answered. "How about you, then?"

Cedric scoffed. "Not important." If this boy had any latent ability, it wasn't wholly impossible - he was actually younger than Sofia, though not by much. Of course, there was the issue of the school year and - and of why in Odin's name did Cedric care about this.

There was also the fact that it wasn't only upperclassmen from PA who were here to rival the most difficult class in Hexley Hall. Of course, his sister who was slightly more than a year younger than him wouldn't have been here had it only been Year Thirteen students, but it still stung.

Much more chatter was, thankfully, cut off by Professor Miller introducing the wizarding students to Pendragon Academy's teacher, Ser Alistair Theirin, and vice-versa. ...Alistair was a nice name, Cedric mused. It didn't seem to fit this blond bubbly knight in front of the class. The following half-hour was interesting, at least, though hard to focus on as the pair of teachers attempted to teach a joint lesson and ended up bickering about every third point or so. At first it was amusing, but it quickly cut into actually understanding what the central tenet of the lesson was, let alone individual nuances. It didn't help that Dean kept trying to add amusing comments, or mention that apparently he was fairly sure that Cedric had been set against Dean's brother Hank the previous day. Trying to pretend he was paying attention to lecture while the teachers were involved in disputing the finer points of what constitutes a spell or not was… trying. How exactly was he supposed to explain that all he remembered of the previous day was that it felt like it didn't exist, and Greylock managing to eventually ground him? Hades' Herbs, even most of that was fairly fuzzy.

The second portion of the period was spent practicing specific spells and counterspells - mostly for the benefit of the knights' class, it seemed. It wasn't that the DAWW class wasn't learning anything, but this spell wasn't exactly new, either, and they were offered no rejoinder to the templars' counter. Of course, a decent portion of the Kingsguard were templars, and the only other effective counter to a powerful mage was another powerful mage… but it still felt off, somehow.

Given the more lax nature of today's bouts, Cedric was able to give a look around at his classmates. It didn't look like T.S. ended up against that brute he'd been flirting with yesterday, though whether that was a blessing or a curse was questionable - especially given the black eye blossoming across the boy's face. Ouch. Cordelia had been paired with… oh, what was her name? Cedric couldn't remember, but he knew the girl by sight - she was large, both tall and thickly built, and her uniform always seemed ruffled and wrinkled, even when it had clearly been starched fairly recently. She seemed to resemble, in person and her calm demeanor, her Familiar which she liked to keep around and summoned - a large vulture of some variety. So Cedric tended to think of the girl as 'Vulture,' though he knew that was perhaps not the kindest epithet. Either way, he felt sorry for her as she faced against Cordelia - tiny as Cordy was, she was fast, and energetic, and indeed artful with her weapon, preferably a rapier, though she'd be willing to pick up a branch from the ground to whack someone with it.

As strange and stressful the class had been, given social interaction and all, Cedric wasn't quite out of the woods yet - after class, before he managed to slide out of the door, Cordelia caught his elbow. "Hey, bro!" she said, and pulled him into a hug before he could say anything. "We didn't really get to say much yesterday, how's things? How are you doing? Just gotta check up on my little brother, you know? Make sure you're doing okay." Little. He was taller than her, older than her, and yet she still counted him as her little brother. And yet, the dynamic seemed about accurate.

"I'm absolutely fine, thank you," Cedric said in as rude a tone as he could manage - which still ended up coming off more as sickly sweet than anything. "Thank you so much for asking, sister dear. How are you, then? Doing well? Of course you are, no need to answer that."

Cordelia laughed. "You've got that right, kid!" she said, and despite being shorter than him, managed to wrap her arm around his neck and pull his head down to her level to give him a noogie. "Glad to hear you're good. You'd tell me if someone as picking on you, right?"

"Absolutely," Cedric said. "You could definitely fix anything ill that happened to me."

Releasing her hold on Cedric, Cordelia shrugged and said, "Any problem that can't be punched in the gut, isn't really a problem."

That was most assuredly a one hundred percent factual and true statement. Cedric rolled his eyes as he barely managed to swallow a sound of disgust.

"Oh hey!" she said, suddenly and loudly, startling Cedric into jumping. "I don't know if you knew that I managed to summon my own wizard's Familiar a while ago, since I haven't really seen you since the school year started."

Cedric raised an incredulous eyebrow, but in a moment the other joined it in appreciation as Cordelia said the all-too-familiar incantation (...Greylock would appreciate that pun, Cedric said, and tried to remember it for later) - and a hummingbird poofed into existence by Cordelia's shoulder.

"Look, see?" Cordelia said, gesturing excitedly. "I, um, I don't know if I did the thing right, since I had to kind of… figure out how everything was supposed to work on my own and all, like that's obviously not a thing they teach at PA, you know? I think it's kind of broken… it doesn't seem to do anything? I don't know how to make it do anything… but I'm working on figuring it out, and I dunno, I'm still just glad that I managed at all, really."

Cedric sighed. "Well, Familiars aren't necessarily supposed to do anything. It's more of a…" Cedric hummed a note to himself as he pondered what he was trying to say. "It's a mark of personal growth, a rite of passage, partially. And finding out what one's associated animal is, understanding how it relates to oneself, though it's not always entirely clear."

Cedric momentarily remembered summers of his youth, watching the hummingbirds battle fiercely over the brightly colored nectar his mother had put in an old jar with holes to allow for feeding. There were plenty of places for the birds to sit and drink, and still, they fought. It wasn't exactly difficult to imagine why Cordelia found herself with a spectral one by her side.

"And they can be companions, somewhat more intelligent than your average pet but significantly less conversational than human cohorts. Sometimes they may do things, as per a connection to their caster's emotional state, but making them do anything is… difficult at best."

A soft clapping drew Cedric's gaze back to Cordelia - he wasn't exactly sure when during his ramble his gaze had wandered, but that wasn't exactly odd, he supposed - but either way, he was looking at her now, and she as grinning and clapping her hands softly and bouncing a bit. "Oh, that's so interesting! See, this is why you're the next royal sorcerer. I'm sitting here muddling through these books, casting things wrong and giving people permanent bad hairdos, and then you can just - you know so much, you can just talk about it without a moment's notice."

There were… so many things wrong with that whole thing, Cedric didn't even know where to begin.

"Anyway, kid, I've got to go - training in the dazzleball field starts in about five minutes ago I think," Cordelia said, pre-empting and dismissing any answer Cedric might have had. "Do you guys ever even use it? Everything's so dilapidated it's… pretty sad, really. But yeah, later!" Cordelia pulled Cedric's shoulders into a hug, then dashed off before he could react.

The door to the tower study room creaked open, and Sofia stood up quickly to greet Cedric as he entered. "Oh, hey," Sofia said, "I'm glad to see you're better. Assuming you are better, are you?"

Cedric shrugged his bag off his shoulders, though Sofia wasn't sure if that was just him being tired or meant as a response. "I'm not having another episode, at least," he said.

"That's a good way to look at it, I think," Sofia said, sitting down again. "Silver linings, or at least brighter sides of things relative to other things… positivity can be infectious, even if it's not much, you know?"

Another shrug from Cedric, then he said, "Given I missed tutoring yesterday, and you're here today, I thought I'd make up for that now. Is there anything you've been having trouble with?"

Sofia sighed softly to herself, disappointed but afraid to push. "A bit, I guess. Professor Pi is actually focusing on pi, and trigonometry and stuff… and it's just… I don't know, I'm not really understanding why I'm not understanding it?"

Cedric put a hand to his chin as he considered. "Maths really aren't my strong suit, either, but I can certainly attempt. Give it here, your homework, and let me look over what you've got to do. The text, too."

So they discussed what set trigonometry apart from your average algebra, largely. "I don't know if it confused you the way it did me," Cedric said at one point, "but something that helped me understand radians, which you do seem to be having trouble with - well, they're the outside of the circle, yes? Or angles, but the circle is the- either way, they're measured mostly in multiples of pi. If you recall, the formula for the circumference of a circle, given radius 'r'..."

"...Is two-pi-r," finished Sofia, and breathed a stunned sigh. "Wow, yeah, that actually makes a lot of things make sense."

Looking rather proud of himself, perhaps a bit smug?, Cedric said, "It does, doesn't it? I don't know why teachers don't point that out to students themselves." He was even grinning at her. "I don't know how much I'll be able to help you beyond that realization, but I'm glad I could help as much as that, at least." He nodded firmly, looked to the side and seemed to consider something, and then continued in a softer tone of voice. "It's nice to do something right today, at least. My DAWW class is doing a… joint workshop with Pendragon Academy, which would be bad enough, but to add insult to injury-" Cedric coughed and mumbled, more to itself than to Sofia it seemed, "a little too literally for my taste…" and then he looked at least in Sofia's general direction again as he finished, "my sister is part of that program."

Sofia wasn't sure how she should react. Clearly this wasn't a good thing, but she also had already had a vague idea of- well, assuming this sister was the same one who Cedric had written of in the journal she shouldn't have kept and read. "I'm sorry to hear that," she settled on after a moment that she hoped hadn't drawn on too long.

Cedric sighed. "It's not your fault, certainly, no need to apologize." Sofia had to hold back a chuckle at the misinterpretation of language there, but thankfully Cedric didn't seem to notice and continued unabated. "She's… I can understand why she and Greylock have gotten along on the few occasions that they've had to be around one another. Cordelia is crass and rude and abrasive, but somehow through all of that she's usually also nice." Cedric huffed and momentarily pouted in irritation. "Now that I've had the time away from her, I can understand why folks like her, but that doesn't make her any less awful for my own wellbeing. She- she, she, she," He closed his eyes and scowled, rapping on the table repeatedly with his fingertips. "She puts me on this pedestal, I suppose. I'm the 'good' sibling, the one who's going to carry on the family name, the important one, the smart one - and yet, here I am, struggling with what few commitments I even have, the worst participant in the DAWW class such that I was paired against a knight student who isn't even part of the Templar class series, who had only been brought to fill out the numbers and give every wizard student a partner. She actually showed me today that she managed to perform the initial Familiar summoning on her own - no class, no teachers, just from reading during her spare time from physical training. And yet, somehow, I'm supposed to not just measure up to her, but surpass that. I wonder if that's even possible, honestly."

It took a moment for Sofia to be sure that Cedric was done speaking, but then said, "Oh, wow. I'm sor-" and then caught herself, afraid to get into a habit of that. "I mean," she continued, "I.. see. Yeah, that's definitely not great." She put her hand out across the table to reach for Cedric, lightly touching his fingers with her own.

He seemed to jump just a bit from the contact, but then moved to grasp her hand firmly, the fabric of his fingerless gloves feeling rough against her knuckles. "Quite," he said, "though I wonder if you'd change your tune once you met her, yourself…"

Sofia hesitated. "I… try to make friends with most everyone, and understand their viewpoint," she said, "but that doesn't mean I'm going to not believe she's hurting you? I'm not exactly a stranger to emotional nuance. You might remember me telling you about my loving, kind dad who might have also been a pirate?" Sofia laughed softly, hoping Cedric would find that at least as vaguely amusing as she had. "He was still great, to me, and loved me a lot - but if he was a pirate, he probably did a lot of awful things to other people… and yet, even knowing that, even feeling kind of- betrayed, I guess, I can't help but still remember him fondly, to love his memory and appreciate him."

Cedric smiled a bit, and rather lopsided, but it was at least somewhat positive as a reaction. "That…" he said, taking a moment, then continued, "sounds like exactly the opposite kind of problem."

...It rather was, wasn't it. Sofia chuckled again, and said, "You're not wrong, really, but the point wasn't the specifics of the situation, so much as I get that family can be a lot different to each other than they are to the world at large, I guess. It's weird, and even mine is painful - and my dad was only a maybe, it's not like I've heard of a Dread Pirate Birk Balthazar or anything. I can only imagine what it's like to be told… you're wrong, what you're experiencing isn't real, or whatever? I can imagine that pretty easily, because if anyone else knew my dad was a pirate, well… No one mourns the wicked, you know. But even that's still just imagination." Sofia shrugged, and finished, "Whatever happens, I won't just… turn my back on you like that, I guess is what I'm trying to say."

At this, Cedric took his hand back - had he really been holding Sofia's this whole time? She was touched he'd even felt like it for that long - and said, "I appreciate the sentiment, at least." The way he said it made Sofia doubt he believed her, but… it was progress. More than she'd made during the few weeks they were probably dating - and Sofia had thought their relationship was hard to label then, hah. But whatever they were now, post Tea Incident and the aftermath, she was finally managing to start understanding Cedric, to helping him, to help him through these issues - or at least be able to vent pressure from them to her.