Jane Carey
April 24, 2011 9:40 AM
There's no use crying over every mistake by Jane Carey
There were some things, Jane knew, which a proper lady never did. Not doing them was just as important as, if not more important than, doing many of the smaller things a proper lady did.That thought was the only thing that, once she’d spoken with Professor Fawcett about why she’d received the grade she had and what she could do to improve next time and escaped without screaming at him for that look of faint pity she imagined she saw, allowed her to walk calmly from the Potions classroom to the Teppenpaw common room and up past that to her dorm room, where, after closing the door quietly behind her, she threw her bag as hard as she could.
With that done, she still didn’t feel better, but was able to reduce the urge to throw something else to just needing to pace, which she did until the anger wound down to tiredness and a vague feeling of wanting to cry and she sat on the end of her bed, burying her face in her hands for a long moment before coming up for air and wiping her eyes in the same gesture. Then she glared at her bag, still resting where it had stopped beside the dorm dresser when she’d slung it away during her entrance.
“I hate you,” she said to it, then got up and gave it a kick just for good measure. “I hate you, you – you – you – you stupid thing.”
She immediately felt guilty for kicking the bag when it only had the thing she was really angry at in it because she’d put it there, but still felt a sort of bitter satisfaction at having gotten some of her feelings about her Potions essay off her chest. She was still immensely frustrated about that, but it wasn’t quite as bad now. Not quite as bad was the most she was prepared to ask of it.
A month ago, though, she would have been happy with a high E on a major paper in Fawcett’s class, and that was part of what was so frustrating. She had always known, she was sure she’d always known, she could do more, do better, but she’d been lazy and not tried for so long that now, she couldn’t try hard enough to make up the difference.
Yet. She couldn’t try hard enough yet. Jane pressed the outside of her wrist against her mouth, fighting off the nausea the thought of never being good enough had brought up, knowing it was only so bad because she’d lost control and let it bounce off her anger. She was not going to throw up again, just as she wasn’t going to keep underachieving forever. She could work her way up to it. She would work her way up to it. There could be no thinking otherwise. Not when she could still be perfect.
She was going to have to write the line again tonight, after everyone else was asleep. She wanted to do it now, but anyone, maybe even Professor Crosby, could walk into her room, and no one knew about the line because Jane liked it that way. Besides, this part of the day was for actually trying harder, not just writing that she would again.
Taking a deep breath, she looked in the mirror and half-smiled after a moment, pleased to see how little looking at herself made her flinch. She’d been making herself look at her reflection longer every day, and it was good to see it paying off. It was proof that, if she just tried hard enough, everything would be all right.
Satisfied, too, that she looked composed enough after her little fit, she picked up her bag, smoothed her hand over the place she’d kicked in apology, and then took out her Potions things, including the offending paper, before going down to the common room with them to start the next paper. Her room was quieter, but she couldn’t work there. For one thing, she got restless any time she was in the same place for too long, and for another, there was the mirror. Mirrors were getting better, but she still couldn’t concentrate around them. Downstairs, she found an empty table and sat down to work on an outline. The thoughts in that other paper hadn’t been bad, but the organization had been weak; she was sure she could have saved points just by writing a better outline ahead of time.
By the time someone sat down across from her, she was absorbed enough to smile at them. “Good day,” she said, just as she would have before.
There was, after all, no reason for her not to. Something very tragic had happened, but it was just a freak of nature. It wasn’t as though something horrible had happened, because nothing really horrible could have happened. Everyone knew that.
0
Jane Carey
There's no use crying over every mistake
160
Jane Carey
1
5
Andrew Duell
April 26, 2011 8:25 PM
You just keep on trying until you run out of cake by Andrew Duell
He had definitely had better days. For example, that one day when his parents had taken him on the trip to Disney, that was a pretty good day. There was also that one day when he went to the dentist and had spent what seemed like hours writhing in agony as the dentist did horrible and unnatural things to his mouth. Relatively speaking, that had been a pretty good day as well. His bag weighed him down as he plodded up to the Teppenpaw entrance. He prayed that someone else would be entering or leaving as he arrived. No such luck. Crap. As if this day hadn't been miserable enough, he was going to have to open the door himself. Most days he didn't mind, heck some of those days he almost enjoyed it. Not today. Glancing back down the hallway, he toyed with the idea of just sitting outside the door and waiting for someone else to come along, or for someone to come out. That would just look poor though, wouldn't it? A fifth year, sulking about outside the door waiting for someone to open the door for him just because he didn't feel like doing a little jig. Suck it up.Andrew sighed, stood in the right spot and did the little dance. The door didn't budge. For crying out loud! He practically screamed, wishing this day was over. He took another deep breath and tried the dance again, this time making sure he hit all the steps. The door swung open, and he rushed inside just in case it thought it would be funny to close on him. Now he was inside, he felt a little better already, he was that much closer to his room and crashing in his bed, not to be seen again until tomorrow. He trudged through the common room without really noticing anything about it and made his way for the dorms. Once in his room, he finally relieved himself of his burdensome bag and flopped down on his bed. There, he had succeeded, he was in bed, the day was over. Nothing more could go wrong. Right?
He believed that right up until he looked up. He had known that would be a mistake, but it had to be done. It was just a quick check on his experiments, just to see how they were doing, just a quick glance and then right back to beautiful nothingness. They were on fire. Well, one of them was, the others had already burned out. A quick charm put out the fire after springing out of bed. How could this have happened? Where were his notes? Right, in his bag. He shuffled around the contents of his bag, but before he could find his notes, he found something else. His Charms paper that was due tomorrow, that he had completely forgot about and hadn't started. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!
Downstairs, he would have to work on this downstairs. There was to much temptation here to distract him, so he gathered up his bag once more and bid his very comfy bed a sad farewell. Dragging himself back down to the common room, he looked around. Most of the tables were taken already, Jane was alone at one though, and she seemed pretty focused on what she was doing. That would work, hopefully he didn't bother her to much. He took the seat across from her and tried to be as quiet as possible. Yet another thing to add to the list of 'Things that did not go right today.'
Andrew managed a weak smile in return to her greeting, she must be having a better day than me. "Hi, I hope I'm not disturbing you to much." He settled his materials, and realized he had lost his writing implement somewhere along the way. He folded his arms on the table, collapsed his head down on them and in a muffled voice asked, "Have you ever just had one of those days?"
2
Andrew Duell
You just keep on trying until you run out of cake
145
Andrew Duell
0
5
Jane
April 26, 2011 10:06 PM
Then the science gets done by Jane
Her greeting was polite, pleasant, close to what she thought she was supposed to offer in a semiformal occasion with someone whose name she knew, but behind it, Jane felt wary when she recognized her companion as the fifth year prefect. Yes, he had things with him that suggested intent to work, but she was wary of all the prefects right now. They were the people, after only maybe Miss Kerrigan, Edmond spent the most time with, and since she was still not speaking with Edmond, he might have asked one of them to check on her.“Not at all,” she said when he said he hoped he didn’t disturb her. The common room was crowded, and she was alone. He could just very well need a place to work. Clearly, she wasn’t the only person having trouble doing that in her room.
And besides, Edmond was more of a mess than she was, and she refused to believe that he could have become stupid enough in the one awful month since they had left school to go home for Christmas to not see that. Edmond was smart. It was enough of a defining characteristic for him that he had gone into Aladren. There was something even more wrong than she’d realized with things if he didn’t see that, if anyone needed to speak to someone about someone else in their relationship, it was Jane who needed to speak to Miss Kerrigan or Mr. Nash or maybe even Professor Fawcett about checking up on him.
She had just looked back at her outline when Andrew dropped his head to the table and asked if she’d ever had one of ‘those days.’ Context let her infer it wasn’t one of those days when she wanted to go skipping because everything was going her way. “It’s likely,” she said. “Is your work not going well?” What self-respecting fifth year would take help from a third year, even if she did usually take those assignments when she was given the choice and cared to offer him help, Jane didn’t know, but he seemed to want to vent, and she’d been raised to think that it was best to state one’s emotions instead of letting them boil up and eventually over. Now, she wasn’t allowed to talk about them at all, but always before.
0
Jane
Then the science gets done
0
Jane
0
5
Andrew
April 27, 2011 7:32 PM
And you make a neat gun by Andrew
Andrew raised his head and smiled a weary smile at the girl. "Work, life, you name it. I don't know if you really want to hear it all, plus you'll never get any work done. Let's just say that today it seems as though Murphy has been my very special friend and constant companion." One of these days he was going to have to hunt down this Murphy character and beat the living daylights out of him for coming up with his stupid law. He must have been a very powerful wizard to do what he had done, maybe if he could figure out the spell that Murphy had used, he could make a counter-charm for it. He paused for a moment and looked down at his Charms paper then gave a very slight, amused chuckle. "Jane, you must be a lucky charm or something, I think I've got an idea for this paper now. Finally something has gone right."Then he remembered his previous predicament, maybe he had just overlooked it before, so he started digging around in his bag once more. Absentmindedly, he asked, "How's your day been going? How did that Potions essay go for you? You can imagine how mine went." It had not gone well. Things were falling out of his bag left and right; papers, books, other strange things. Finally his bag was completely empty, and with some embarrassment he asked her, "I don't suppose you have a spare writing implement, do you? Mine seems to have wandered off."
2
Andrew
And you make a neat gun
145
Andrew
0
5
Jane
April 27, 2011 9:57 PM
For the people who are still alive by Jane
Somehow, Jane just found it hard to care that she had been slightly snubbed, or really what was going on in Andrew’s life. She hoped it worked itself out for him, but his problems were not her problems, and unless he specifically asked for her help, there was no reason to invest any energy in worrying about it.She didn’t, though, like to not understand what someone said to her. “I’m pleased,” she said, sounding genuinely so, when Andrew said she’d somehow inspired him to find a topic for his difficult Charms paper. Charms was one of the classes the fifth years were taking with the sixth years instead of with the Intermediate group this semester, so she imagined they were having to work very hard. The professors couldn’t afford to let the sixth years slip, not when they were prepping for RATS, and if the fifth years needed to be as good as possible for the CATS. “But who is Murphy? Is he a charms master?”
Asking embarrassed her. He’d said it like it was something anyone intelligent should have known, and she hadn’t known. Was that a family she was supposed to have learned in genealogy lessons? She’d never paid enough attention in those. A mythological figure associated with poor luck? She would, she thought, have remembered that; it was more interesting, more like something she’d read on her own. A, as she’d suggested, very important charms master anyone who’d done more than basic work in the subject should have read about at some point? Part of her entire problem was that she didn’t put enough effort into really learning all of the aspects of her academic subjects, just getting far enough through the things that didn’t interest her to make the E her parents would grudgingly accept…
“My day is going reasonably well, thank you,” she lied, then continued on to his next question without pausing, as he’d asked them. “But that paper wasn’t my best work,” she said honestly about her Potions paper. “That’s why I’m working on these outlines. So the next one will be better.”
“I do,” she said when he asked for a writing implement, taking out an extra quill and offering it to him. Mother said to always have a backup of everything, insofar as was reasonably possible. Good preparation was a deterrent against all sorts of embarrassing missteps. “There you are.”
0
Jane
For the people who are still alive
0
Jane
0
5
Andrew
April 29, 2011 6:11 PM
I'm not even angry by Andrew
Caught off guard a moment at her question, he paused before he remembered. Jane was a pure blood. He smiled at her, "I'm sorry, Murphy is something of a Muggle..." he dug around in his head for the right word, "legend, I suppose. Murphy's law states simply that 'anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.' That pretty much sums up my entire day. Now people will usually start quoting his law if they get a small string of bad luck, I was at that point before breakfast. Things did not improved as the day progressed, I mean stuff went wrong that I didn't think were possible. For example, my broom just stopped flying midair and I woke up in the hospital wing with blue hair and..." he paused again, this time flushing with a bit of embarrassment that he quickly tried to hide and continue on, "Anyway, Rocamboli said it would only be temporary. Not temporary enough." He sighed again."Back to Murphy though," He continued, "It just occurred to me while we were talking that there may be more to him than the Muggles give him credit. They know him only for his law, that's it. They aren't even generally curious as to it's origin or anything. Now, to me that sounds like something having to do with the magical world hiding itself from them. So, what sort of Charms would it take to pull off an effect like that? How strong would someone have to be? This may just be a fun paper yet." He finished with a grin.
He nodded as she said her day was going well. That was good, at least somebody's was. Ahh, she was working on Potions. Ugh. He should really work harder at that one. Another day perhaps, not this one. He had his Charms to work on, potions could wait. He accepted the quill from her with a "Thank-you. I promise to try and stop distracting you so we can get some work done. Potions is not my strong suit, but if you want to bounce what you have off of me when you're done, feel free." He gave her one last smile then began scribbling away on his paper. Moments later the quill tip broke.
2
Andrew
I'm not even angry
145
Andrew
0
5
Jane
April 30, 2011 12:23 PM
I'm being so sincere right now by Jane
Jane listened, wide-eyed, to Andrew’s description of his day as a demonstration of the truth of the law of the legend Mr. Murphy. “Oh, my,” she said when he said he’d woken up in the hospital with blue hair. How could that even happen? Was it a contagious condition, causing fainting and body modification? Jane glanced at her own hair, still looking just a little off to her from where she’d had it trimmed back toward her shoulders and thinned so it looked how Mother liked it best before she came back, but it was still resolutely nearly black.“That does sound like an unpleasant morning,” she said, feeling momentarily relieved. They weren’t even Aladrens. Blue hair seemed like the sort of Quidditch game day prank that Pecaris might go in for if they were Aladrens. “I’m sorry it’s been going so poorly for you.”
She smiled back when he explained how Mr. Murphy was relevant to his Charms paper. “Some theorists say Muggles are willfully ignorant of our existence,” she said, remembering some of the books Edmond had read…was it last summer, or last Christmas? If they’d been at home, she could have simply checked his lists where they were in the notebook right beside hers on Mother’s desk, but that would have meant going back in the library, where she hadn’t been since the day she was kidnapped out of it. She supposed someone had put away her French composition things by now….
She blinked, pushing aside that thought. She didn’t want to think about French. “So that might work out,” she went on, as though she hadn’t thought that. “But to do that – make a universal rule – that would mean being very strong,” she said, already silently berating herself for slipping into the academic. She was supposed to be a perfect lady. A lady could be well-educated, but not flaunt it like this. Mother would be upset with her. “It’s almost a little terrifying,” she added, with another smile. “I hope it is fun to write about.”
Her topic wasn’t dull. She was dealing with the properties of moonstone in potion-making, and going further than required, getting into interactions with other substances and the resultant changes to roles. “You’re welcome,” she said when he thanked her for the quill. “And thank you,” she added with a smile when he offered to let her bounce ideas once she was done. She doubted she’d take him up on it, but it was nice to have the option, especially now that her main study partner, Autumn, was someone in her own year. Having Edmond as a close brother had been a major advantage, and one that she missed.
She was distracted from her thoughts again by the snapping sound as the end of the quill broke. This really wasn’t his day. “I’m sorry,” she said, blushing and feeling mortified to have given him a substandard piece of equipment. “Really. I have a sharpener, but would you like another quill instead?”
0
Jane
I'm being so sincere right now
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Jane
0
5
Andrew
April 30, 2011 4:36 PM
Even though you broke my heart by Andrew
Andrew just stared down at the broken quill in his hands. He could feel something boiling up inside him. Was this it? Was he going berserk or something? Was this the final straw that broke the camel's back? That was an odd phrase now that he thought about it. Where had it come from? How much would you have to put on a camel's back before it took a straw to break it? It didn't matter now he was... nope. Whatever had been there a moment ago was gone now. He looked down and just saw a broken quill. He sighed and slumped down in his chair farther. Jane was saying something, he looked up at her, she was blushing. Now he felt really bad."No, it's alright. It's not your fault. I shouldn't be dragging you or your belongings into my curse for the day." He hoped it was only for the day. "I'm sorry for breaking your quill. I should fix it for you." He placed the quill on the table lining up the broken tip as well as he was able. Then he pulled out his wand and gave her a bit of a grin. "Luckily, I'm semi-good at fixing things." He knew he was above average at transfigurations, if he was looking at someone else objectively he'd probably say 'really good' at transfigurations. But he wasn't, he was looking at himself so he was just 'okay' at them. He wasn't allowed, couldn't be 'really good' at anything. 'Semi-good' was about as far as he could stretch himself to admitting. He focused on the quill, waved his wand and uttered a few syllables. The quill mended itself, good as new.
Andrew tucked his wand away again and smiled once more, while picking up the implement. "There we go, fixed and sharpened, it should even be a little tougher than before. It won't break again. Anyway," He waved the quill around in a gesture meant to symbolically clear the previous unpleasantness out of the air, "Rocamboli said that the whole blue hair thing was some sort of after effect of whatever she used mixing with some lingering potions thing in my system. As for this paper, yeah this should be fun." He looked down at his paper, clutched the repaired quill and began writing again. Or tried to. The quill easily shredded it's way through his paper, and even left a mark in the table. Before he could even properly process what had gone wrong, an owl landed on his head with a message tied to it's leg.
2
Andrew
Even though you broke my heart
145
Andrew
0
5
Jane
May 03, 2011 2:34 PM
And killed me by Jane
“Thank you,” Jane said when Andrew said he was going to fix her quill. It wasn’t a serious matter, she supposed, but Father and Mother had tried to teach her and Edmond about money and why it and anything bought with it should be taken care of. Another reaction to his genetic family, but not one of the ones Jane was more inclined to complain about. She didn’t enjoy her economics work very much, but expected it would be useful when she was an adult and expected to help establish a household.Had things been a little different, that might not have been such a problem; with Mother dead and her as her parents’ only child, it would have made sense for her husband to simply come live with her and Father, so Father could be looked after, Jane and her husband would have help getting established, and it would be easier for her husband to be quietly anchored to the family. As it was, though, Edmond was almost certainly going to get everything that would have otherwise been Jane’s, and she didn’t even mind. She never had, because she had always thought of him as the eldest son and, but now it was much more simple than that. She wanted nothing to do with either the house or the family ever again, and marrying far away from it as soon as possible seemed like the best way to go about achieving that objective.
That should have made her feel terrible, because of Mother, but she didn’t. Mother had always wanted her to be a good Carey, taught the family mystery and history as much as she did any of the more practical subjects, but Jane actually thought Mother would have understood her reasoning on this point. The family hadn’t killed Mother’s mother.
Her eyebrows lifted slightly at the mention of potions still in Andrew’s blood, hoping he wasn’t ill, when Mr. Murphy struck again. First the newly-strengthened quill broke the parchment, and then a bird landed on his head.
Jane eyed it warily. She hadn’t been expecting a letter, which meant any letters that came to her would almost certainly be bad news. Father hadn’t been completely well yet when they’d come back; could something have happened? She buried one hand between the side of her chair and the folds of her long skirt so she could clench her fist and let her fingernails dig into the heel of her hand to steady her. “I think you have a message,” she said, dearly hoping he wouldn’t take down the letter and then find it was hers. She’d had enough of bad news to, she thought, last her whole life.
0
Jane
And killed me
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Jane
0
5
Andrew
May 03, 2011 8:22 PM
And tore me to pieces by Andrew
He knew that bird, he knew that bird anywhere. That was Lance, his mother's bird. He had yet to figure out why the bird thought that his head was the perfect perch. It probably had something to do with when he was younger, his mother thought it was incredibly cute and encouraged the owl to hunt him down. Andrew put down the new super quill of ultimate destruction and sighed. "Yeah, it's for me. Jane, I'd like you to meet Lance, my mother's owl." He raised his arm and encouraged Lance to hop over onto it so that he could retrieve his message. He was expecting something from his Dad, he was hoping that this was it. Being a muggle, his dad didn't really have any good way of getting things to him directly while he was at school, so he had to send them to Mom and she'd send them along with Lance.The owl eventually decided to move onto Andrew's arm, and he brought it down and glared at the bird for a moment. Once he was mostly convinced that he had gotten his silent 'don't sit on my head' message through to the bird again he untied the envelope. Lance flew off again almost immediately. Andrew opened the envelope and inside was what he had been hoping for, Dad had come through. He pulled out a small silvery pouch with a mile-wide smile. "Awesome! Dad found them! Do you know how hard it is to find transistors with the right...." His voice trailed off as he looked at the pure blooded witch girl across the table from him, "No, you probably don't. Heh." He shrugged and gave her a little embarrassed grin. He put the silver pouch in his bag, and pulled a letter out of the envelope as well.
That was from Mom. It started off mushy and stuff, and went downhill from there. He extracted and decoded some basic questions from it; How were classes going? Have you found a girl yet? How was Quidditch going? Have you found a girl yet? Were they still feeding you alright? Have you found a girl yet? If nothing else, Mom was persistent. He wondered if other the other student's parents were like this. He thought about asking Jane, but had now idea how to phrase that sort of a question without it getting to personal. Oh well.
He read the last section of her letter with a little more interest. "Huh, I don't know if that's good news or bad." He talked aloud, "I'm hoping that the whole of today hasn't just been an ongoing omen for this news."
2
Andrew
And tore me to pieces
145
Andrew
0
5
Jane
May 03, 2011 9:36 PM
And threw every piece into a fire by Jane
Jane felt a moment of relief when Andrew confirmed that the owl was his, or at least his mother’s. She felt almost bad about that after a second, because the way his day had been going didn’t suggest that he was likely to have much better news than she did, but it was hard not to feel relieved that nothing else was happening to her.“Good day, Lance,” she said to the owl, since it had been introduced to her. “I’m Jane.”
She bit her tongue short of using her full name and family branch. There had to be limits. The rules were a little different here in Teppenpaw. It was why she felt safe enough to throw things in privacy in her room, where she wouldn’t have done that on her own in any other room in the school. It was, within very narrow limits, a little different here.
At least Andrew’s sudden change of expression suggested that nothing too horrible, at least for him, had happened. “I suppose I don’t,” she agreed when he was done, smiling. “The family usually sends us everything we’re – “ allowed, but she wasn’t going to say that – “in need of.” Which, more or less, had, she thought, meant everything Mother wrote and told Thomas they needed. Certainly they didn’t shop in stores. They almost never left the house. Did Father know how to do it?
His vocalized thoughts as he read his letter, though, were more worrisome. “Oh, dear,” she said to his thought that the whole day he had described had led up to this. “I hope it’s an improvement if it is.” She didn’t know how to say any more without seeming to pry.
0
Jane
And threw every piece into a fire
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Jane
0
5
Andrew
May 03, 2011 10:58 PM
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you! by Andrew
"I'm not really sure." He read over the letter again. "Mom says that my cousin, Jhonice, just got her acceptance letter. She'll be coming to Sonora next term." Andrew really wasn't sure how it would work having Jhon around. Uncle Arthur and Aunt Mary lived in Aladren, in Oregon. It was pretty far away, so they didn't visit very often, but they did get together for the holidays. It seemed most all of the family trees involved were fairly sparse. Dad was an only child, Mom and Uncle Arthur were the only two from that family and the rest of Aunt Mary's family lived in Europe. So, when special occasions came up, they got together because there really wasn't anyone else to get together with.Last time he had seen her, Jhon had been something of a spirited girl. That wasn't long ago though, she probably hasn't changed much. She had a way of getting herself into the strangest of predicaments. He wondered briefly how she got out of them when he wasn't around. He could just imagine what she could get her self into around here. That would be another thing that Mom and Aunt Mary would be constantly sending him messages about. 'Keep an eye on your little cousin. Keep her out of trouble.' He sighed, and half-hoped that she'd get placed into one of the other houses. If she wound up in Teppenpaw.... He could say good-bye to his studies, experiments, and any type of 'social interaction' that his mother had been pressing for. On the positive side, she was a good kid and would be fun to have around more, as long as it wasn't to much. Time would tell.
"You have family here, how does that generally work out for you?"
2
Andrew
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
145
Andrew
0
5
Jane
May 04, 2011 11:13 PM
Now these points of data make a beautiful line by Jane
Jhonice. That was certainly an interesting name. Jane didn’t think she had ever heard it before. She wasn’t sure she liked it personally, though she supposed it was no worse than Jane. She had never liked her own name specifically because it was so very plain. She didn’t even have a middle name to enliven it a little. She was simply Jane Carey, because Father had a fondness for the name ‘Jane’ and Mother hadn’t been able to think of anything that she felt went well enough with it to make a middle name of – not even her very plain middle name, Ann.Someone would, she supposed, end up with it eventually, if she or Edmond ever had a daughter now that their mother was no longer alive. The momentary image of them fighting over which one got to name a girl Julia Ann almost amused her for a moment. They couldn’t have first cousins with the same name….
Except, of course, that Edmond’s children wouldn’t really be her nieces and nephews, and right now, she couldn’t see a situation where they were still speaking when they weren’t living in the same household anymore. After all, they were living in the same building right now and not exchanging a word with each other even when they happened to be in the same room. She had no reason to assume that things were going to get better.
Her smile flickered when, for a moment, it seemed that Andrew had read her mind, but then she remembered. His cousin. “My brother and I have always been very close,” she said, thinking that she wasn’t lying. She was told the first few months had been…strange, since Edmond had been very strange and neither of them had really ever been around other children, but from the time he started reading to the day their mother died, they’d been more or less inseparable.
“We’ve always taken our lessons together, so we just kept studying together here. At first it was only the lessons Mother sent us from home, our languages and mathematics and literature and etiquette and – well, you see, but this year we’ve been in the same formal courses, so we’ve worked together in that, too.” Except when he was ditching her for his not-dates with Miss Kerrigan. She smiled fondly at the thought, until she remembered that was most likely over, too. She had a lot of feelings about him, but one of them was still worry, because she could see that Edmond wasn’t right anymore. “The other Careys here aren’t really my family,” she added. “They’re from the South Carolina branch, and I’m from the Virginia one. We've only been on speaking terms for a few years.” She laughed. “Biologically, Edmond’s a closer relative of theirs than he is of mine. They’re all descended from Anthony II – Edmond from his eldest son, Arnold and Arthur from his second one – and I’m just the great-great-great…” she bit her lip. “Maybe another great-granddaughter of one of his first cousins.”
0
Jane
Now these points of data make a beautiful line
0
Jane
0
5
Andrew
May 05, 2011 10:13 PM
And we're out of beta by Andrew
Andrew still marveled a bit at some of these wizarding families. Some of them were so big and spread out, they were sectioned off by location and seemed to be at odds with themselves. There always seemed to be drama, intrigue and a certain mystique about them. They seemed so large, but so cut off at the same time, they almost operated as their own independent nation or something. It was a mindset that they had that Andrew just couldn't quite grasp. He could see it some of the students at the school that came from such families, they just had their own culture. That made it a bit tricky to interact with them. He could see it in Jane's face and hear it in her words. He wondered about the things she was saying about her family, and what she wasn't. It really wasn't his place to pry into these affairs, but it made him curious. He imagined he was something of an 'outsider' to them, so his curiosity would probably never be sated.He was used to that though. Ever since he asked his dad why the sky was blue when he was very young. His dad began explaining atmospheric absorption theory to him, and at that young age he began to realize how much was out there that he just didn't know about. Unfortunately he discovered later that the more information you gather and the more you know, the more questions you get and the more you realize you really don't know anything at all.
He smiled as she talked, "It must be nice to have someone that close. I don't have any siblings, Jhon is the closest thing I have I guess. By close, I mean 'lives a few states away and we get to see each other on occasions.' I guess it will be interesting to have her here." He debated briefly trying to explain further, but realized he just couldn't find words to describe the relationship adequately.
Instead, he looked down at his torn paper, the deadly quill and scratched desk. "Hmm... I don't seem to have made much progress so far. How goes your work?"
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And we're out of beta
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Jane
May 06, 2011 12:26 AM
We're releasing on time by Jane
Jane thought, despite the clearly huge difference between their families, that she understood something of what Andrew was getting at, though his case sounded somewhat closer than hers. Her father had an older brother, which was why he’d been allowed to go for so very long without marrying at all and then to settle with a woman who brought only limited advantages to the family just because he liked her and thought she would fit in well, who had grown children, who had children of their own, but because of the way her parents had been secluded for Edmond’s safety, it had been possible to go quite a long time without seeing any of them. And then there was the family as an entity, expanding through five states – really four, now, but there were three small children and, counting their Georgian acting matriarch, four grown women who were still technically considered the North Carolina branch – and as many as five generations in places, and which only came together once every five years. She had cousins she wrote to occasionally and fondly, but might not recognize at the Reunion this summer, because she hadn’t laid eyes on them since she was nine.It was a little different, though. ‘Occasions’ implied physical proximity occurred more than just once every five years, and when most people said ‘cousin,’ they didn’t mean it the way Careys did. If she happened to be talking about him to someone at the Reunion about him, Jane would call Edmond her honored cousin from Georgia – ‘honored’ because he was an heir; she would, if the position was reversed, just his cousin Jane from Virginia, perhaps his dear cousin because of their relationship, but the only ‘honored’ women were Morgaine and sometimes Belinda – and their nearest common ancestor was a great-great-great-great-great grandfather. So when Andrew changed the subject away from families and back to work, she left it alone.
“My biggest problem is organization,” she said. “And not putting in too much detail. I’m just trying to be thorough, but it comes across as tangential, and rambling.” She reached up to twist a piece of her hair around her finger, but it wasn’t in the right place. She had always hated having it this way, but Mother liked it best. “It’s so frustrating, isn’t it? How one never can seem to figure out how to do anything right. Or right enough, anyway. It’s almost never perfect.”
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Jane
We're releasing on time
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Andrew
May 08, 2011 6:32 PM
So I'm GLaD. I got burned by Andrew
"I've heard that perfection is something to strive for, but impossible to achieve." Andrew had no idea where he had heard of any such saying, but it floated through his mind so easily, so he must have heard it somewhere. He picked up the quill and drew out his wand again. He cast a quick spell over it again, and tested it. This time it seemed to work properly. He did one more pass with his wand and the tear in the paper was repaired as well. "Okay, now that is fixed. I am by no means an expert on papers and knowing what the professors want, but I try to follow a simple formula. Figure out exactly what you are writing about, and make sure that everything else that you put on the paper somehow relates back to that one idea. There is no harm in explaining how it relates back to the original idea either.Andrew usually used that technique to pad out the shorter sections in his writings. You can really take up some space if you need to explain how some random fact actually does relate to whatever point you are trying to prove. "Once you get that down, it's all down to organization, just like you're doing. If you find yourself putting unrelated stuff, you can always go back and change around your initial statement to include that stuff as well. I've actually most of this kind of thing is self-regulating. The prof will give you something to do, and you define how you're going to do it. Usually I get points off when I don't follow my own outline."
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So I'm GLaD. I got burned
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Jane
May 08, 2011 9:50 PM
Think of all the things we learned by Jane
Jane frowned at the idea that perfection was impossible. Truly it was, but who cared about the truth? Gwenhwyfar was walking and talking and moving around and breathing and everything, yet the law said she was dead, just as it said Jane’s mother had died January third instead of December thirty-first despite Morgaine finding her not walking, talking, moving around, breathing, or anything else on that date. As long as everything everyone could see was perfect, she would, for all intents and purposes, be perfect. It would be better if she could work herself into perfect habits so completely that her imperfect inclinations just went away, but perceived perfection would do to start.There was another problem with the statement, too. “That’s illogical, though,” she said. “If something can’t be obtained, then the opportunity cost of pursuing it is too high.” Of course, that argument also said that it wasn’t worth it to do anything perfectly – it was spelled out in one of her economics lessons – and she had deemed it wrong in her personal life, but that was because being perfect was her only way to both honor her mother and get out of the family. The only other escape plan she had been able to come up with, going to college and then walking away from the Careys, would have crushed Mother to pieces if she had known it had ever even crossed Jane’s mind.
Then, of course, she realized how borderline rude that statement had been. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “That wasn’t polite of me.” Jane laughed awkwardly. “My parents have been saying I spent too much time on logic and not enough on deportment ever since I started school.”
She had always found that horribly annoying, wondering why it was all right for Edmond to be the way they both were while she was supposed to seem unintelligent in company, but she was trying to suppress that most of all now. It still didn’t make sense to her that a gentleman could be well-read and the most knowledgeable person in the room but a lady couldn’t, or why it didn’t bother other girls, but it was how it was. Mother had accepted it, and Mother had been the most educated woman Jane had ever known. Who was Jane, then, to argue?
She wasn’t quite sure she understood Andrew’s formula, but nodded anyway. The last section made sense. “My brother usually says he has no idea what a paper’s about until he’s already written it,” she said lightly. “He writes his conclusions before he writes his introductions. Mother always scolded him for it when she knew, but he scores well.” She smiled wryly. “I got in trouble for fitting research around my ideas and making it fit instead. It was a shortcut, and Mother never liked it when we took shortcuts.”
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Think of all the things we learned
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Andrew
May 10, 2011 10:01 PM
for the people who are still alive by Andrew
Andrew smiled at Jane's apology. "Polite? What does politeness have to do with anything? I've never found an excess of politeness to be logical, and I'd rather talk to someone who can have an intelligent conversation than someone obsessed with decorum." He hoped that made some sort of sense to her. "Anyway, as for your argument, you are correct. The price of perfection is unthinkable, simply because it itself is unobtainable. The counter-argument falls back on the idea of diminishing returns. The closer you work towards perfection the harder it becomes and the more expensive it becomes. Thus, you work towards it to whatever level you can afford." At this point he was mainly just talking in circles, trying to hash out his argument as he went. It was how he did most of his thinking, and probably how his paper would read.He'd heard arguments on both sides for rationalizing doing research both ways as she described. "I try to do a mix of those two methods. I start where I'm supposed to, and do the research to support it. But depending on what the research digs up, I may be forced to change my starting ideas. The research and facts define everything when you do something like this. If you start out wrong and you only find out after research, you have to change it. The problem is where you do your research. You need to dig up the actual facts, and not find the information that you want."
"Hmm..." He looked down at the very basic outline that he had scratched out on his paper. "Speaking of research, I'm probably going to have to hit the library for this." The thought of hiking the whole way down to the library did not appeal to him. "The magical world really needs a version of the Internet."
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for the people who are still alive
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Jane
May 15, 2011 11:35 PM
Go ahead and leave me by Jane
Jane smiled at Andrew’s assertion that politeness wasn’t logical, and that intelligent discourse was better than decorous conversation. She had heard as much before, but she thought now that people didn’t tell the truth when they said it. If it were so, why did the system continue to operate as it did?“I’d like to think that both are possible,” she said lightly. “To have an intelligent conversation I don’t start out so…bluntly.”
Because she couldn’t just give the books and the numbers up. She had been here long enough to know it was ridiculous, but Mother had allowed almost nothing else when she and Edmond were small. They’d been given leisure time, but even it was structured, enough that, when she’d first come to Sonora, she’d been confused by weekends. They’d always had less work on them at home, to spend time with Mother and Father, but half of Saturdays had still been spent on light lessons, and they were expected to read aloud during family time and have a short etiquette lesson on Sunday evenings. The lack of structure to evenings at Sonora had been overwhelming; two whole days of it, almost terrifying.
She had learned, though, to appreciate that to some degree. Having some choices about how she spent her time, and sometimes choosing to do something unintellectual. The best example she could think of, offhandedly, was painting in the new place. To just have things be peaceful for a while, to not think so much…that was nice. She enjoyed it very much.
“Though it does bring up the question of what’s best – to come very close to true perfection in one thing, or maintain a satisfactory level across life, so it looks better than it is.”
She felt troubled when he spoke about research, but thought it was mostly because he sounded quite a bit like Mother. It made her wonder how long being upset whenever something made her think of Mother was going to last. Mother had always said that everything ended eventually, and Jane thought it must be true of this as well or no one would ever survive the loss of a parent by very long, but somehow, not only was it still bothering her, but it was far easier to be reminded of Mother than she thought it usually was. An example of things getting worse before they got better? Mother hadn’t believed that one was an absolute rule, but that sometimes it was true.
At the end, though, he used a word she didn’t know. Nets were used for fishing, or for holding hair, or as a metaphor for something complicated and entangling; she thought there were a few legends, too, about charmed ones of both the physical kinds. Why would entering one of those help with research more than the library? “Enter-net?” she asked. That wasn’t quite how he’d pronounced it, but she thought that was most likely a regional difference. “I don’t understand you.”
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Jane
Go ahead and leave me
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Andrew
May 17, 2011 8:38 PM
I think I prefer to stay inside. by Andrew
"True," Andrew responded to her statement on conversation, "As far as I know, they aren't mutually exclusive, however I don't much see the point in abandoning the intelligence of the discussion simply to conform to a set decorum. The discussion revolves around ideas, and words are just the method that we must use to convey those ideas." He got the sense that he was just rambling at this point, but the string of words coming out of his mouth was amusing him, so he thought he'd see where they led. "Politeness is a filter of sorts that those words must pass through, and the moment that it begins limiting the words so as to not convey the idea, it becomes a hindrance." The stream of words seemed to come to some sort of conclusion there, so he decided to stop.He thought about her other statement, "You know, it sounds horribly overused, but I guess that depends on the person. I, for one, don't really think to much about perfection. I'm well aware that I will never achieve it, in anything. Plus, perfection itself is subjective. That's why it's not really obtainable. What one person sees as 'perfect' is not the same as the next." He grinned and gestured towards her outline. "I think you've got a pretty good example of that right in front of you."
Oh boy. How does one explain something like the Internet to someone who has never heard of a computer? "It's a research tool that Muggles use. It allows them to get information from anywhere on the planet without leaving their chair. It's really nice, my Dad let's me use it all the time when I'm with him."
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I think I prefer to stay inside.
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Jane
May 20, 2011 9:25 PM
Maybe you'll find someone else to help you. by Jane
Words, flowing into ideas. Mother had taught them that such a thing was very powerful, the kind of thing that made things happen and change. Mother had been as great a believer in rhetoric as she had been in propriety. She had always said they, combined, were of far more use than violence.Jane was tempted to disagree with her and think that words meant absolutely nothing if the other fellow had a wand pointed at your chest and a larger supply of general weapons and people to use them. To think that ideas only mattered while dealing with people who had the restraint not to use force. And maybe that restraint only existed where there was weakness – crippling fear, or a lack of magical and physical strength combined with a lack of enough charisma to get those who had what the bad guy lacked. Good people were just people who were hopelessly afraid or lacked resources.
At the same time, though, another part of her mind rebelled at the thought of that dark and simple world. It couldn’t really be no more than that. Maybe it couldn’t be her mother’s calm, detached, completely civilized world of thought, either, but it couldn’t be that/.
“I suppose we have to hope for balance,” she said with a smile. “Since no one I ever met was willing to listen to anyone who was too rude, either.” She remembered, though, that he had more or less said he hadn’t found her rude when she’d done something she would have been reprimanded for doing at home. “Though here at school, the rules of what’s polite seem to be different than they are at home. I guess they’re different outside, too.”
That was something she hadn’t really thought of before, not explicitly, like that, anyway. She had accepted that school wasn’t like being at home within a few weeks, but she hadn’t thought about the rest of the world. She didn’t expect to ever interact with such a variety of people on the outside as she did at school, but still – what if it was different, dealing with society up north, or out west, or in another state anywhere, even right next door? Merlin knew that, if Edmond’s sisters were anything to go by, Georgia was a very different place from Virginia. How would she manage? She, unlike her brother and possibly his sisters, at least had enough interest in her surroundings to try to adjust, but it still took time. Who knew what she could do wrong during that time?
She looked at her outline, not sure if he was saying her outline was perfect, her use of outlines was ridiculous to him, or something about Professor Fawcett. “It’s more or less what Edmond did his summer research on,” she said uncertainly. “How we define best. If I made full marks – “ a rare thing, especially on essays, for any student of Professor Fawcett’s – “would that mean I’d done the best that could be done, or even the best I could do, or just enough that Professor Fawcett felt his requirements were met? And what happens if different people believe different ones?”
Jane was amazed at the concept of the Muggle tool Andrew described to her. “Is it a charmed book?” she asked, curious. She liked understanding how things worked. What the principles of things were. “How does it access the information in other books? How do you tell it what you want?” Another thought occurred to her. “Or just something like a summoning charm, to bring the right books to your desk?” You couldn’t use that at the library, because you might hit someone in the head, but her parents had both used it at home before, and it was technically a way to sit and look up things without leaving the chair.
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Maybe you'll find someone else to help you.
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Andrew
May 22, 2011 7:14 PM
Maybe Black Mesa by Andrew
Andrew smiled, "It's all about relativity and perception," He commented. "There aren't any absolutes, everything you do has to be defined by those around you. Whether or not that's how you address them, or the information you convey. Before any of that, you need to understand the mindset of whoever you are interacting with. What do they want? How do they want to be treated? The problem is you can't learn that information until you interact with them." How many problems of the world came about because of this? Misunderstandings, violence, civil unrest... he sighed.Anyway, back to the conversation at hand. "For example, this conversations has changed as it progressed. We've learned more about how each other interacts and expects to be interacted with. There is a 'perfect' way for me to interact with you, and it is vastly different the the 'perfect' way of interacting with someone else. Thus, if you want to define the perfect way of doing something. That something must be very, very clearly defined. Your outline there needs to be 'perfect' not only for the subject matter, but the audience, and the audience's perception of the author." He stopped for a moment. He was rambling again. "This gets really complicated, and that's generally why I don't worry to much about 'perfection'." He ended with a grin.
"As for the Internet," he thought about her ideas, "A charmed book would be a good way of thinking about it. Imagine that all of the books everywhere were charmed and linked together. You could tell your book what subject you wanted, and it would list all of the information on that subject that was in every other book."
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Maybe Black Mesa
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Jane
May 30, 2011 12:28 AM
That was a joke by Jane
The audience’s perception of the author. That was a question she had never really considered before. She had always thought of things in terms of meeting the requirements, which logically led to a high grade, but it made sense, now that she thought of it, that the professors’ opinions of her would influence how they graded her. There was, for instance, the assumption that Aladrens were smarter than everyone else in general, but had a special edge against Teppenpaws, even though she tested out higher than Edmond did in most areas; why shouldn’t it extend to the professors? They were older, but they were people, too, and some had been students here, once, growing up with that same set of assumptions….Though really, Andrew’s definition in general was more complex than Mother’s. Mother, Jane was sure, had considered perfection to consist of always being completely proper while still making top grades with no visible effort or public knowledge of her accomplishment. There wasn’t any need for much individual knowledge of the people she spoke to, because they were all, in Mother’s world, society people, with whom she would have a common language of saying nothing much at all. Mother didn’t account for the greater variety of people here at Sonora, because to Julia, most of them wouldn’t have been classified as people.
She shook that thought off firmly as soon as she had it, guilt swelling in her chest again.
“Really complicated indeed,” she said with a smile.
The analogy he used to describe the Enter-net made her eyes widen in surprise and fascination. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. Research would be so much easier. The amount of time she and everyone else had to spend on homework would be reduced. It was possible that people’s work would get better, too, if they didn’t have to work so hard and get so frustrated with it all; she knew there were times when she had simply given up on something and made do with what she had known was only moderately good information just because she couldn’t stand to dig through musty old books no one had looked at in ten years anymore. “I wonder if that would be possible? To develop a charm like that, I mean.” It sounded like it would involve something similar to dictation charms, something that could interact with the user…The key, though, would be how the books were linked. She bit her lip, now frustrated with the feeling that she almost knew what she was talking about, but didn’t have quite enough information.
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Jane
That was a joke
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Andrew
June 01, 2011 7:34 PM
HaHa. Fat Chance by Andrew
Andrew smiled back at Jane. "Yeah, life in general seems to be more complicated than people realize. Heck, people are more complicated than they realize, it's best not to try and simplify them. It would be easier if you could generalize in such a way, but then in the end you'll just be wrong." He thought back to some of the independent physics work he'd been doing last summer, and even in the books he'd smuggled into the school. They would always 'simplify' the problems by removing factors such as friction or air resistance. They call it 'negligible', but once the problem was solved, they noted it was an approximation because of the missing factors. That just seems like simple way to get the wrong answer. All of those factors were necessary to determine the actual result. Now he was beginning to see that people worked in a similar manner."It would be great, except for one thing. It would run into the same problem that the muggle's Internet has." He paused trying to work out the analogy for this one. "Let's say that linking up these books would become common. Then people started linking books other than text books, such as journals or newspapers or sketchbooks. There would, and is in fact, lots and lots of rather 'useless' information on the Internet that you need to dig through to find out what you actually started looking for. Muggles, at least those involved with the Internet, seem to thrive on the idea of freedom of information. They don't want anyone regulating what can be put there or what can't." He paused again solely for dramatic effect, "It makes for some interesting, and some downright frightening things to be found."
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HaHa. Fat Chance
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June 04, 2011 8:14 PM
Anyway, this cake is great! by Jane
“Mm,” Jane agreed when generalizations were summarized as wrong. “That’s why I hated it when that one tutor – the one with that awful musta – “ she realized she was not reminiscing with someone who’d actually known any of the tutors she and Edmond had gone through over the years since he became her brother – “never mind,” she quickly amended. “Why I hated it when I had to learn estimation. I just couldn’t see the point.”She still couldn’t, really, and was counting on Mother’s old way of saying that there were many things she didn’t understand because she was thirteen, or whatever age she’d been at the time, and would grasp later in life, when she knew more about other things and was simply more grown up. Maybe someday, it would be quicker for her to make a guess at something than to just take the time to do the figures in her head, or on a bit of paper, and get the right answer. She could see that the real world was not as neat as pure numbers, which was one reason why she preferred the pure numbers a lot of the time, but she’d always been taught that precision was still important.
Dramatic effect was something that sometimes went a little over Jane’s head, though she could see here that Andrew meant for the last statement to have an impact. It reminded her of some of her history tutors. Freedom of information, though, was another concept she’d never given much thought to. The family was generally against it, on the principle, to put it in Mother’s words again, that there were things some people simply didn’t need to know.
“I suppose…” she said slowly. “Well, if they made that mistake, letting it become bogged down with useless information, then we could learn from that. There could be specialized loops, or if you don’t know what you’re looking for at all, perhaps some that people do watch over to make sure they only have good things in, and some that other people can link in what they want…” It wasn’t, after all, as if it was easy to keep anyone who could learn it from using a spell, so links would come up everywhere eventually. Her economics lessons had mentioned in passing that sometimes, tradespeople killed other people to keep certain spells out of circulation, and there were some that had been lost forever that way or had somehow managed not to be leaked long enough for damage to be done for long periods of time, but sooner or later, it seemed likely that anything would get out.
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Anyway, this cake is great!
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