Making moves on Library

Arianna Valenti

August 12, 2016 1:02 AM

Making moves by Arianna Valenti

Arianna Valenti was not a nerd, thank you very much. Not even if she had been sorted into Aladren. Not even if she studied (in the Garden, generally) for her classes, and loved practicing wandwork. Not even if she could be found deep in the library, this early morning.

No, Arianna Valenti was not a nerd. But she was on the hunt.

She had quickly learned that it was better to search in the early mornings, when there were no library monitors to run into. Not that she minded talking to Clark, Jack, John or Emmy - she looked up to them all and was involved in an activity with all of them in some way. They just didn’t need to know about this. Nobody did, not until she was certain she had found something truly interesting.

Her appearance was a testament to her lack of desire to be seen. Her dark mane of curls was in a simple top knot today, she wore a plain oversized camel-colored sweater and some leggings. Not her most polished look, but then neither were those unflattering green robes. Regardless, she would go back to her room and change before classes started. There were some perks to having your common room be connected to the library.

Making her way to the section she knew well by now, she grabbed the book she had most recently been searching. This would be so much easier if she had the internet, and wizards put their information on it. She imagined that wizards would actually like the internet if they ever got off their high brooms and tried it. It had plenty of cats.

Not wishing to be too obvious in her independent study, she wandered a bit until she found a rather abandoned looking aisle on hexes and jinxes. Perfect. Actually, some of these books looked kind of cool, perhaps she would look into them some day.

Sitting on the floor, she leaned against the bookshelf and pulled her sweater over knees. Reaching into the pocket, she unfolded a bit of notebook paper she had carefully written on over the break, reviewing her notes for possibly the hundredth time. Once satisfied, she folded it back up again and shoved it back in her sweater pocket. Picking up the book, she immediately turned to the page where she had left off.

She’d only gotten about ten good minutes of research in when she heard footsteps. Her heart started to pound against her chest, and Arianna pulled a random book from the shelf and opened it on her lap just seconds before the person started to approach down her aisle.

Mind already working on an alibi, dark eyes looked up to rest on the face of her visitor.

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Madeleine Dautin

August 12, 2016 6:23 PM

Making counter-moves. by Madeleine Dautin

Madeleine was accustomed to waking up early. She felt as though waking up early so that she could compose herself for the gruelling day ahead of her—a day of speaking mainly in English and of consorting with Americans, was very important. Picking out the right outfit to wear, even though it would be covered by her green school robes, was also of equal importance, as was brushing her hair and picking a nice bauble to put in it. Appearing well groomed was a very Dautin trait and although Madeleine sometimes wished for the more relaxed outfits of her American classmates, she still had that Dautin pride that would never allow her to appear in public with messy hair or sweatpants.

That morning when she woke up, however, Arianna was just slipping out of the dorm room. And immediately, Flora Deschamps was on alert. Flora Deschamps didn’t care about appearances as much as Madeleine did, so instead of spending a very long time on her appearance that morning and arranging a flowers into a crown of braids like Madeleine had decided to do the night before, Flora only brushed her hair and tied a large black bow in it, the perfect colour for spying. She also put the peach blouse and white pleated skirt to the side in order to don a simple black dress. She felt très parisienne and très agent secret.

Madeleine checked the clock. Perfect, ten minutes only. She opened the door to the common room and after confirming that Arianna was not there, Flora dashed down the stairs and out to the library where upon she flattened her back to the common room door and began her search. While it was not entirely probably that Arianna had left the room early to go to the library, it was a large space with many twists and turns—the perfect place to conduct an illicit meeting in plain sight.

Her sharp eyes scanned the aisles and she began to creep forward, keeping an eye out on the stacks as she did so until a movement caught her eye. The movement was not nearly as well dressed as the suspect normally was, however Flora did have to admit that the movement was wearing the same colours as the suspect had been not ten minutes earlier which therefore, logically, meant that the movement and the suspect were one and the same. Grinning to herself, Flora proceeded to tail the movement-suspect.

The movement-suspect did not seem to have a particular direction in which they were going, but Flora followed nonetheless as, who she was 100% certain, the suspect weaved around until coming to a stop and finding a place to sit. Flora had managed a safe distance, not too close so as to let on that the suspect was being followed, but not too far so as to lose sight of the suspect, until this point. She ducked into the next aisle over and quietly removed books so that there was a small slot through which she could peek.

The suspect was simply sitting there, reading. How boring. Madeleine turned around and sat back down, back against the shelf she had been using to spy on Arianna. She let her eyes roam the titles of the various volumes that lined the aisle she was in and frowned. It was a rather weird section, and now that she thought about it, the suspect had been carrying a book with her, which probably meant that she was trying to find somewhere to read it. Now, the question begged why didn’t the suspect read at a table or in the common room if she didn’t want to bother her roommates?

The logical conclusion was that the suspect had something to hide. Madeleine peeked her eyes through the slot again and saw that there were not any spaces where a book might have been around the suspect. The suspect did not appear to be going anywhere, and so Flora stealthily left her aisle and retraced her steps so that she was a few shelves away. It was time to confront the suspect. It was something that she had long been wanting to do, ever since interrogating the other suspect over previous travels out of the country, but she had to time it right, as though she were accidentally happening upon said suspect.

This time, as she walked towards the aisle in which the suspect was reading, Flora made sure that her footsteps could be heard. She clunked her way along until she reached the suspect who was now reading a different book entirely. Intéressant, Flora thought to herself, as she took in her surroundings and got her story straight.

“Hello,” Madeleine said in greeting to her roommate. “Funny to see you here. Are you thinking about doing an independent project on hexes and jinxes too?”

10 Madeleine Dautin Making counter-moves. 340 Madeleine Dautin 0 5

Arianna

August 24, 2016 11:03 PM

I didn't realize this was a competition by Arianna

Well, if anyone was going to see her in a state like this, at least it was one of her roommates. Not that Arianna was particularly eager to confide in either Madeleine or Farrah, only that they were one of the select few citizens of Sonora who had seen her in pajamas or with messy hair before. Madeleine didn’t seem like her usually entirely composed self, either. It was turning out to be a very interesting morning.

Her roommate was a person who did not seem to be particularly interested in Arianna. If she had been, Arianna was sure that Madeleine would have made that known by now. She certainly had the opportunity, what with them living together for over half a school year now. Though the native New Yorker spent most of her time outside of her room - whether practicing attending clubs, going to Quidditch practice, or spellcasting in the garden - in the times she was in the dorm, she was always polite when she did interact with her roommate. All politeness, and not much more. It was nothing like the closeness she had known while sharing a bunk bed with her little sister back home. Arianna assumed that Madeleine must just be stuck up. She was just not nearly as friendly as Louis, nor did Arianna find her to be especially charming, liked Sebastien. Although, Sebastien had been acting rather oddly last she saw him in the library. What had that been about?

So she was genuinely intrigued by the sudden apparent interest Madeleine had in chatting. Madeleine seemed like one of the society girls that Arianna would have befriended back at her old school. The girls who had found Arianna to be clever and daring, with her sassy comments in class, and her seemingly kleptomaniac tendencies. It was only once she was at Sonora that Arianna had realized that the small objects that seemed to always appear in her pocket was due to accidental magic, but the girls couldn’t know about it, anyway. If only Madeleine had picked a better time.

“I didn’t know you were so interested in Defense,” Arianna observed, truly curious, “Have you ever seen a duel?” Arianna herself had become particularly interested in dueling that one time that she and Joe had worked together to fight the dummies in DADA. That had been a lot of fun. Like the rest of the Valenti family, she had a particularly potent competitive streak. And it would be fun to show up a pureblood, or two, or ten. As far as Arianna was concerned, wandwork was the best part of being a witch.

She looked down at the large book she had randomly placed in her lap, the top right corner of the page denoting that this was in fact The Dark Arts Outsmarted. Arianna liked to think of herself as particularly clever, something her Aladren placement had confirmed for her. Perhaps this was a book she ought to be reading after all.

Tucking a stray curl of hair behind her ear, Arianna decided to say something that she had sometimes thought about ever since that day fighting the would-be red caps, something she hadn’t been initially serious about but that might hopefully distract her roommate, “I’m thinking about starting a dueling club, once I know more about it.”

Talk of the Defense book would probably be a lot more interesting to Madeleine, anyway, than discussing the nineteenth century European history book that sat beneath it.

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