DH Skies
October 31, 2017 6:01 PM
Snow time! by DH Skies
Not many students or staff stayed at Sonora over Midterm, which meant that the full spectacle of the weather charms was somewhat lost. In spite of the school’s location in the Painted Desert, it had the climate of its founders’ native Ireland, and a penchant for showcasing the most dramatic elements of this. There was always snow for Christmas. The Labyrinth Gardens were iced to perfection, each leaf glittering and deep drifts settled across the paths.Just so as they didn’t miss all the fun, the weather charms had held the spell until the first day of term, and thus the students stepping off the wagons from their Christmas breaks were met with a winter wonderland. It was no longer pristine, as the tracks of the prairie elves wound up and down across the paths from their business keeping the school running and in good order, along with any marks made by those who had stayed for the break or already made their way into the gardens.
Still, there were a couple of hours until the returning feast, and there was plenty of good quality snow for sculpting, making snow angels in, or perhaps turning into ammunition for a snowball fight….
OOC - Although Midterm is set to run until Friday, we wanted to offer a platform for posting until the returning feast, to get our Nanoing off to a good start, so here’s a little pre-feast, start of term bonus. Go nuts!
Subthreads: California dreaming on such a winter’s day! by Jasmine with Tatiana Vorontsova
Incoming! [Tag Ben (and any of their friends)] by Tess Whittaker with Ben Pierce
In the gardens we can build a snowman (Tag Jemima) by Owen Brockert with Jemima Wolseithcrafte
My first snowball. by Amelia Layne with Kir McLeod
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DH Skies
Snow time!
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DH Skies
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Jasmine
November 01, 2017 12:54 PM
California dreaming on such a winter’s day! by Jasmine
Jasmine had lived in the southern half of California for as far back as she could remember. Her parents’ ranch had seen snow before, but she could count on one hand the number of times she had seen it get deep enough to cover the grass. Stepping off the wagon at Sonora in early January was almost more magical than it had been in September.Leaving her luggage for the elves to deliver up to her room in Crotalus, she walked out into the Winter Wonderland formerly known as the Labyrinth Gardens. Despite the unfortunate fact that it wasn’t currently snowing, she held her hands up toward the sky and twirled, laughing. (Television told her this was the proper way to appreciate snow and as this was magic school snow, she didn’t want it to feel slighted just in case it was marginally sentient.)
She was poorly dressed for the weather - she was wearing a coat and gloves and a hat and even boots, but they were fashionable rather than warm as her home area had been above freezing when she left it and she hadn’t anticipated the Arizona dessert to be any colder when she arrived - but right now she didn’t particularly care. There was so much snow!
Smiling at the nearest student not beelining for the school after getting off their wagon she asked excitedly, “Do you think there are sleds out here somewhere?”
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Jasmine
California dreaming on such a winter’s day!
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Tatiana Vorontsova
November 01, 2017 2:52 PM
With daylight, too! by Tatiana Vorontsova
Tatiana had experienced mixed emotions on leaving home for reasons other than hating to leave her family before her name’s day was even past, and these had mostly to do with the weather. On the one hand, in Arizona, the sun would shine for more than four hours a day even now, in the depths of winter. On the other hand, in Arizona, would it really be winter at all? Having more light in winter was pleasant, but having temperatures high enough that frostbite was no concern had seemed bizarre even before she’d gone home and become accustomed to normal weather again.As the wagon drew closer to the school, though, she couldn’t swear to it, but she thought the Gardens looked distinctly…white! She held her breath as they landed, then darted out as quickly as she could without tripping over anyone (trampling anyone was an impossibility; it was Katya that Papa teased by saying she was small and light enough to float away like the Snow Maiden when that illustrious parsonage traveled with her Grandfather Frost, but Tatiana was not much bigger) and smiled in delight to find snow on the ground. Natural weather – but not so bad she need worry about freezing so long as she stayed reasonably active and wore gloves – and sunlight. This was great!
It seemed she was not the only one who thought so, either. She would have had no clue what Jasmine said to her – well, beyond do you think and around - before the holidays, but Anton Petrovich had taken advantage of his pupils’ impatience to go play when it was light enough to do so to give them a lesson on English winter-words over the holiday. Therefore, she knew that Jasmine was – probably – talking about sani.
“Must, if they have winter,” said Tatiana, only a little less excitedly than Jasmine had. “Where’s Xavier? He will know.” Tatiana kicked a lump of snow experimentally. “Maybe he will help make – big!” She held a hand above her own head to hopefully indicate what she meant for the moment before the word she wanted came to her. “Snow mountain!”
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Tatiana Vorontsova
With daylight, too!
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Jasmine
November 01, 2017 4:43 PM
Tracks in the snow by Jasmine
Jasmine had been a bit taken aback the first few times she had heard Tatiana’s accented and somewhat uncertain English, but as the days of their acquaintance had turns to weeks and then months, she stopped noticing it as much. It was just one of the things that made Tatiana stand out a little but more than some of their peers, rather like her pearls and other fine jewelry. It almost made Jasmine wish she had a French accent like Dad’s, if only to make her sound a bit more exotic.Ideally, she’d still have perfect English, too, though. She felt a stab of sympathy for Tatiana as the Russian girl struggled for the word she wanted.
When she found it, Jasmine nodded eagerly, “Yes! That would be great!” Logically it made sense to need a big snow mountain to go sledding, and she was glad Tatiana had thought of it before Jasmine looked like an idiot trying to do cross country sledding.
She looked about trying to find Professor Xavier, but he didn’t seem to be immediately available here at the wagon deportation point like had been before Orientation. What she did see were large bootprints that had to have been made by an adult man (or possibly one of the larger seventh years, but this did not mesh with her current goal so it did not occur to her) and she pointed the prints out to her companion, “Do you think those of his and we can follow the tracks to Professor Xavier?”
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Jasmine
Tracks in the snow
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Tatiana
November 02, 2017 2:06 PM
These boots are made for walking. by Tatiana
Trak. That meant, evidently, what a shoe made in snow. Tatiana noted this; absorbing vocabulary from any source she felt reasonably sure of was such a habit now that she didn’t even think about it consciously as she did it. She nodded.“Yes, maybe,” she said. “Poidem - we go!” she amended.
Delachene sounded to her like a French surname, but Tatiana had learned to tell English-speakers enough apart to tell that Jasmine’s accent was nothing like Dorian’s, and flipping through her Russian-English dictionary at random one day had revealed that it was not a coincidence that ‘Jasmine’ sounded like zhasmin, a sweet-smelling little white flower. Tatiana’s best guess was that Jasmine’s family had been French long ago, but now thought of themselves as English. She felt surer of her second assumption about Jasmine, which was that the other girl was well-to-do. The things she wore to flying class were bizarre, and her jewelry was quieter than Tatiana’s own, but said jewelry looked real enough and all her clothes were clearly well-made. Even at the moment, when they were clearly too light for the weather, they were flattering to her.
“Your boots is pretty,” said Tatiana as they followed the tracks. Her own were, she knew, not so much; they were not ugly, but they were definitely plain, somewhat thick brown ones, thick-soled and more functional than anything. However, she had on her nice new gloves that Babushka had sent her and a fetching hat, so she did not feel she was at a serious disadvantage in the sartorial games.
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Tatiana
These boots are made for walking.
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Jasmine
November 03, 2017 11:05 AM
These boots . . . are not by Jasmine
"Poidem!" Jasmine declared cheerfully, repeating the word she could only assume meant "let's go" in Russian. She had no expectation she'd remember it even five minutes from now, but for now, she enjoyed knowing one Russian word.As they followed the tracks that may or may not belong to Professor Xavier, Jasmine rubbed her hands together to keep her finger from getting too cold. She beamed with pleased pride as Tatiana noticed her boots and complimented them. Her budding mental complaints that they were pinching her toes and not nearly insulated enough for walking around in the snow with them evaporated under the praise.
"Oh, thank you. I got them for Christmas," she told Tatiana. "Uncle Daniel - er, Professor Nash, er, Uncle Daniel," she stumbled, not entirely sure which name to use for her uncle, since he'd given her the boots in the role of her uncle, but Tatiana knew him only as the DADA professor, so Jasmine wasn't sure whether to refer to him by his familial name or professional one. She decided to split the difference and just use his full name. "Daniel Nash the Second gave them to me." Then she figured it would probably be helpful to explain why Daniel Nash the Second was giving her Christmas gifts, just in case her verbal waffling hadn't made it obvious. "He's my uncle."
A thought occurred to her and she asked curiously, "Do you celebrate Christmas, too?"
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Jasmine
These boots . . . are not
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Tatiana
November 03, 2017 1:48 PM
That is unfortunate. by Tatiana
Tatiana was dreadfully confused at first by Jasmine’s attempt to explain where she had obtained her pretty (if not very weather-appropriate-looking) boots. Had she gotten them from Professor Nash or ‘Uncle Daniel’? Before she could come up with any really interesting theories for why Jasmine could not settle on a story, though, the situation was made marginally clearer to her – Daniel Nash the Second was Uncle Daniel and, presumably, also Professor Nash.“I see,” said Tatiana, hoping she followed it all correctly. She supposed the professors must have first names and families, but it rarely occurred to her – they used their titles and surnames to speak to her and that was how she thought of them. Now that she thought of it, she wasn’t sure she remembered what Anton Petrovich’s family name was at home, either – he was simply Anton Petrovich to her.
“Yes,” said Tatiana when asked about her family’s holidays, reminding herself of the word celebrate - she wasn’t sure she could have pulled it out of her memory at need, or recognized it completely out of context, which meant she needed a refresher there. “We do.” She pointed to her ear. “Mama and Papa give me this,” she said, indicating a hoop earring of gold filigree. “Babushka – the mama of my mama - give me glov-es.” She caught herself before she scrambled her English and Russian pluralization and felt inordinately proud of herself.
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Tatiana
That is unfortunate.
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Jasmine
November 05, 2017 4:07 PM
I know; why can't they be fashionable and functional? by Jasmine
Jasmine nodded and smiled, pleased to know that Tatiana celebrated Christmas, too. She loved Christmas and she always felt a little sad when she found out somebody didn't get the joy of getting a lot of presents in the middle of winter. It seemed like a waste of a relatively miserable part of the year to not have anything special happen then."Oh, I do like those earrings," she complimented the gift from Tatiana's parents with enthusiasm. As a rule, Jasmine loved all jewelry, and Tatiana's in particular always seemed especially tasteful and lovely.
She rubbed her hands together again, then tucked her fingers under her armpits. "I'm wishing I got some nice warm gloves right about now," she admitted. "These ones, I think, were made with Southern California in mind. Though, honestly, I don't understand why Arizona is so much colder than home." She jumped a bit in place to get her blood moving before moving along the path of footprints they were following. "This is supposed to be a desert," she complained.
Of course, if it wasn't cold, the snow would just melt away and then the Gardens would have the same problem the ranch did. So she just started rubbing her arms and wished she was old enough to know how to cast a warming charm. That would solve the problem, too. Maybe when they found Professor Xavier, he could cast one on her. "Is it very cold where you live?" she asked, guessing from how much more functional Tatiana's boots looked than her own that she must be from a more frigid climate.
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Jasmine
I know; why can't they be fashionable and functional?
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Tatiana
November 06, 2017 2:34 PM
It's a crying shame. by Tatiana
Tatiana smiled in pleasure when Jasmine said she did like Tatiana’s earrings. “Thank you,” she said politely. Earrings - that was the English plural, which was logical, as earrings came in pairs, or at least hers did. Tatiana had never lost an earring that she could remember, and she was proud of that.One of the problems with speaking with English-speakers who spoke in long sentences was that English sentences were often – backward, sort of, organizing the sentences differently. Luckily, there were some words she knew well in Jasmine’s speech and she got the general gist just from the other girl’s gestures and context. She was clearly not speaking, for instance, about them being in a dessert, a sweet dish served after food; that would be silly. Context was a beautiful thing.
“Cold at home, yes,” said Tatiana. “Home is Alaska – Volshebnaya Derevnya. Do you know it?” Tatiana had been surprised when her village was occasionally something other people had heard of, so it couldn’t hurt to ask. “At home, it’s already dark now,” she added. “I like this – we see snow, but it is light more often.” She thought about geography. “California – that is beside the ocean, too, yes? But south. It dark in the winter days there too?”
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Tatiana
It's a crying shame.
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Jasmine
November 07, 2017 11:11 AM
I have tears by Jasmine
Oh, Alaska. Jasmine pictured a land that consisted of nothing but snow and ice, and maybe a few igloos. Definitely colder than here. She shook her head apologetically when she didn’t recognize the name of Tatiana’s town. “Sorry, geography isn’t my strongest subject. I know where Alaska is.” It was, in fact, North. Waaaaaaay North.“Yeah, California is along the coast, but my parents have a flying horse ranch pretty close to the Arizona border, so we’re basically in mountainous desert country, too. We’re actually not terribly far from Sonora, honestly, which is why I thought the weather would be about the same; I’m only on the wagon for an hour or so. We get the same amount of sunlight here as there, too. My grandparents live in LA, though, so they’re closer to the ocean. Grandmère Kathleen even has a beach house; it’s gorgeous. Same sunlight there, but a little more rain.”
Following the bootprints around another turn in the labyrinth, Jasmine stopped short and stared. “I think Professor X might be a mind reader after all,” she breathed in awe as she saw the slopes of snow and the sleds laying in wait at the bottom. While she wasn’t really into marvel comics much, she had enough cultural exposure to Hollywood that she was at least aware of the Herbology professor’s cinematic alter ego of the same name. She grinned at Tatiana in excitement, “Shall we?” she invited with a bow and a grand gesture toward the available sleds.
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Jasmine
I have tears
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Tatiana
November 07, 2017 10:09 PM
I have...very little shame, anyway. by Tatiana
“Not mine also,” said Tatiana when Jasmine, with what sounded like regret, admitted that geography was not her best subject. “Me – I…mostly know where is California.”She also knew where Arizona was, more or less; at least, she knew she was currently inside it. This gave her a better frame of reference for where California was as Jasmine described her home. Once again, she didn’t understand every word - ellay, gore-joss; the first part of the second one sounded like the Russian word for mountain, but since Tatiana knew the English word for mountain and it sounded nothing like the Russian word for mountain, she assumed that gore-joss meant nothing to do with mountains, particularly since it was associated with beach, which was the coast.
Tatiana also stopped short and stared when they found exactly what they had been planning to ask for sitting there waiting for them. She didn’t really properly understand what Jasmine said about it, but nodded anyway, catching the general tone, before smiling at the invitation, which she did understand.
“Yes,” she said firmly, sweeping an awkward (gloves and boots not being best suited to delicate gestures) little curtsy in response to the bow.
The sleds looked pretty much like the ones they had at home: basic wooden platforms, maybe big enough for two people if they didn’t mind squeezing, with a rope running across the edge of the curved front. This would allow rough steering and help with dragging it from place to place, too. Tatiana, as the possessor of sturdier gloves that were less likely to allow rope burns, grabbed a rope. “Both one, or we race?” she asked Jasmine.
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Tatiana
I have...very little shame, anyway.
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Jasmine
November 08, 2017 10:28 AM
No need for tears now. It’s time to sled! by Jasmine
Jasmine smiled back, feeling an odd kinship with the Russian-speaking girl (being from Alaska, Jasmine guessed Tatiana wasn’t technically Russian) as she admitted she was also lousy at geography. It was strangely reassuring to know they came from totally different cultures and climates, but they could still find commonalities. Even if that commonality was an absence of knowledge about pretty much anything regarding the other’s home state, other than its existence and rough location on a map.Well, that and sledding. Though, to be entirely honest, Jasmine was more into the idea of sledding than in possession of any kind of practical experience doing so. “Um, let’s go together,” she decided, thinking maybe a joint run might work better for her maiden voyage down a snow slope than trying to figure it out while racing. “We don’t get much snow at home so I haven’t done this before.”
She let Tatiana take the lead and followed her up to the top on the snowy mound. Her toes were definitely started to freeze by the time they reached the top. “Hang on a minute,” she requested, then studied Tatiana’s boots and compared them to her own. She drew her wand and hoped the same rain boot transfiguration spell they learned in class would work to make snow boots. She tried it and, if nothing else, her boots now looked like Tatiana’s. Her toes were still cold, but she wasn’t expecting instant heat. It was a transfiguration not a charm. “Mine looked nice, but they weren’t very warm,” she explained. “Yours look warm.”
Then she looked at the sled, and started to grin again in eager excitement. “Where should I sit?”
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Jasmine
No need for tears now. It’s time to sled!
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Tatiana
November 22, 2017 10:51 PM
Poidem (Let's go)! by Tatiana
Tatiana’s eyebrows lifted slightly in surprise when she heard that Jasmine had never gone sledding before. This seemed very sad to her, though she wasn’t sure she should say so to Jasmine – perhaps she liked where she lived very much, just as Tatiana did, and so wouldn’t appreciate an outsider criticizing it even mildly.“Ok, together then,” she said instead, as this suited her too. It was fun sledding with another as well as alone, maybe more fun, and besides – if Jasmine had really never sledded before, she would probably be poorly suited to putting up a real challenge in a race.
Hang she didn’t know, but she gathered the point from context and was just a bit flattered when she realized that Jasmine was clearly basing her Transfiguration of her shoes into something more sensible on Tatiana’s own. Of course, it was entirely possible that they were simply the first at least reasonably practical shoes Jasmine had seen, coming as she did from a warm climate, but Tatiana preferred to be flattered.
“Warm-er, anyhow,” she agreed when Jasmine explained this.
Keeping the rope in her grip, Tatiana took the front half of the sled. “You behind me,” she instructed in answer to Jasmine’s question. “Feet go toward front – I will make it go.” It would normally be the person in the back (which, often as not, would be Tatiana) who kicked off, she thought, but she had taken the front with Katya before and was the one who knew more about what she was doing. She only slightly awkwardly maneuvered her feet so her heels were in contact with the surface of the snow, hearing in her head Papa’s injunctions against digging in her toes or digging even her heels too far into the snow, how this could hurt her. “Now I kick – hold on – “ she warned Jasmine, and then did so, launching them down the sledding hill.
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Tatiana
Poidem (Let's go)!
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