"Yeah? Which one of them was complaining?" Said with a bit of a smirk. He knows his students, for the most part, want to be there; he also knows they're not above complaining about particularly tough sessions. He doesn't know how to respond to the compliment, so he just blinks and- doesn't. It's not a good habit, but it's his fallback sometimes.

The nudge is definitely affirmation enough. Good. They'll talk for real later. For now, he smirks a bit. "Would you believe they don't have starfruit? Evidently that's slang for some kind of drugs that're laced with cosmic dust and fatal to humans. The mess staff thought I was crazy when I asked for some."