Threatened, bribed, and pleaded with on Crotalus Commons

Captain Charlotte Abbott

June 10, 2011 9:08 PM

Quidditch sign-ups! by Captain Charlotte Abbott

At times Charlie had commented that she'd quite like to replace the whole team, but that wasn't strictly true. Marissa was excellent - that she hadn't caught the Snitch in the championship match against Aladren last year was hardly her own fault, and Charlie knew she was probably the best Seeker in the school. Besides, she was the Assistant Captain and would take over the team next year when Charlie herself had graduated, so she was an essential part of the team and could certainly not be replaced. The Chasers, too, were excellent. Renée already had a reputation as being fearless, and had even come back into the last game even after she'd been smacked unconscious for a short while. Sam might be regretting his decision to be on the team with every game they played that earned him a hit from a Bludger, but Charlie was hopeful he'd return; the Crotalus Chasing team was still considered a force to be reckoned with.

As for the rest... Tohper had plenty of scope to improve. he was new, had been getting steadily better, and his aim was far better than most. he'd even taken a chance to stand up to Edmond, which showed serious guts. He still needed work, but he would no doubt be in great shape in no time. The other Beating position and the position of Keeper were, as far as Charlie was concerned, wide open. This was as much for Nic's safety from the rest of the House who may very well hunt him down if he ever let that many goals in during one game again, as for the fact that Charlie was keen to not have her team ridiculed. Of course if nobody signed up then Nic was actually better than nothing (as the end of the championship game had made clear).

Hoping for a strong, enthusiastic sign up, Charlie wrote out the sheet before she'd even returned to school, and pinned it on the noticeboard in the commons at her first opportunity. It read:

CROTALUS QUIDDITCH TEAM
Sign up with your name, year, and preferred position on the sheet below. New and returning players are welcome. Try-outs will be held next week - details posted soon. Watch this space. Any questions, see Captain Charlotte Abbott or Assistant Captain Marissa Stephenson.

Then, in the space underneath, she signed her own name and details:
Charlotte Abbott, seventh year, Chaser.

Subthreads:

Playing with fuzzy time by Paul Bennett

Signing up again by Topher Calhoun

Ready to try this again (WotW). by Marissa Stephenson

Here again. by Sam Bauer

Threatened, bribed, and pleaded with by Nic Sawyer

0 Captain Charlotte Abbott Quidditch sign-ups! 0 Captain Charlotte Abbott 1 5

Paul Bennett

June 11, 2011 1:49 AM

Playing with fuzzy time by Paul Bennett

It didn’t take Paul’s resolution to remain invisible in the sights of one Amelia Pierce very long to throw a problem in front of him. It didn’t take very long at all.

Joining the Quidditch team was a sensible move. It showed willingness to work with others, gave him a chance to get to know people, proved a level of manliness for those who cared about that kind of thing, and seemed like the best step he could take to ensure that he came out of Sonora with some badge. Quidditch Captain definitely didn’t outrank Head Boy, might not even be quite equal with prefect, but it was better than nothing, and the other two were, as far as he could tell, out of his hands. But it would mean identifying himself to She Who Is Far Too Good At Transfiguration To Be A Mere Quidditch Coach, and with the sole exception of Mother, and not always with Mother, Paul usually assumed adults were smarter than Eliza gave them credit for. She probably knew that his sister did not exactly see eye to eye with the one non-proper Crotalus in her year.

On the other hand, though, she had encouraged them all to try out during the same speech which had been giving him unsettling thoughts at random times about toads. So perhaps joining up would win her favor, or at least her apathy. So long as his bone structure remained unfortunately like his mother’s, and his sister kept walking upright, too, and neither of them was too harshly penalized, Paul was happy to settle for that.

After a few days, during which some other people signed up, though, the thing that settled it was realizing that at least some of his reservations were about That Female being a Quidditch player and how she might react to someone with the name Bennett, and how that might go for him if she did that before he figured out which one she actually was. He was not going to be scared out of something he wanted to and that could help him out down the line because he was afraid of a girl. Besides, if she did anything to him, any pushing off brooms or anything like that, he was pretty sure Lize would actually kill her, and then they could both do whatever they wanted once they figured out how to make it all go away, so he didn’t really, beyond some superficial pain, have anything to worry about.

Still, he was signing up for Beater. Weapons would be good when he was on the Pitch under present conditions, at least until he established whether or not the coach and his maybe-teammate held grudges, and if so if they were personal or family ones. Most people, he thought, wouldn’t expect a pureblood eleven-year-old to fight back with a club.

He forgot about it for another day after deciding it, then found a quill after dinner and wrote Paul Bennett, 1st, Beater.

0 Paul Bennett Playing with fuzzy time 201 Paul Bennett 0 5

Topher Calhoun

June 11, 2011 12:07 PM

Signing up again by Topher Calhoun

The first time Topher had played Quidditch at Sonora, it had gone well. He hadn't disabled the opposing Seeker, but he had hit him, and Crotalus had won the match. Good times.

The second time Topher had played Quidditch at Sonora, it hadn't gone so well. He'd hit the opposing Seeker twice, but hadn't been able to keep his Seeker from taking a hit to the stomach, and Arnold had remained conscious just long enough to catch the Snitch for Aladren anyway, the showoff, so Crotalus had lost the match. Not such good times.

Now, he had to decide whether he wanted to join the team again despite not being sure if the slightly scary captain and slightly less scary, but she'd do in a pinch assistant captain both wanted his blood for the way the Final had ended last year. Not to mention making the call about whether he was even good enough to play here. This was not a decision he took lightly. He liked Quidditch and all, he had even gotten used to playing Beater, but he knew he wasn't in the same league as a lot of the other people playing, not by a long shot. It was a hobby to him, but unless they were on something or just scary talented and crazy when they went out, it seemed like a life to them.

Last year, though, Crotalus had been the only team without an alternate. They'd gotten a full team, but that was it. He figured Charlie would kill him much faster, if none of the first years were interested, for not showing up and leaving the spot blank than she would for being all they could get. In the second instance, he might even be able to convince her it was the rest of the House she should kill for not wanting to help out instead of him.

Plus, if he quit Quidditch, he'd have way too much time on his hands for homework or things that would get him expelled, which meant he'd end up doing a lot of homework. A guy had to have some standards of presentation, and there was only so much studying that was healthy.

Topher Calhoun, Yr. 2, Beater

0 Topher Calhoun Signing up again 192 Topher Calhoun 0 5

Marissa Stephenson

June 11, 2011 3:04 PM

Ready to try this again (WotW). by Marissa Stephenson

So last season had, in the end, been a bust. That happened. It was even more likely to happen, too, when the Seeker was in an exam year and so was the school’s one big Beater and his mom had just died. That combination meant that everyone involved was stressed out, and Marissa ended up focusing much more on the struggle to breathe than on the struggle to beat a particularly common sense-impaired first year to the Snitch.

She didn’t hold that Bludger against Edmond, really, or even Topher. Marissa was much closer to Edmond’s size than the Crotalus Beater who’d tried to defend her, and she doubted she could have done much more than he had to sort things out in Crotalus’ favor if their positions had been reversed. The only reason she had made it as long as she had in the Final had been because Ed had been out for blood that day and there had just happened to be much more of it down among the Chasers than there was in her. It had seemed like she’d been put off until Edmond got bored with the game, which was honestly a little more insulting than being taken out at the very end, or even being beaten by Crazy Arnold.

It was all water under the bridge now, though, and this was a new season. She knew she was going to be have to be extra ‘with it’, too, because it was Charlie’s turn to suffer through an exam year. She thought she was up to it, though. Let the Chasers continue to prove that Aladren wasn’t the only house that drew the mad and the Beaters keep their nerve and they would all be fine.

She just hoped they didn’t play Aladren again first. It seemed very unlikely, but luck didn’t always like her, and Crotalus could really do with a solid, or better yet completely crushing, victory under their belts before they went into the rematch. As she signed up, she kept her fingers crossed for that very thing, knowing it was a silly, childish superstition but thinking that any little bit might help out just now.

Assistant Captain Marissa Stephenson, Sixth, Seeker

16 Marissa Stephenson Ready to try this again (WotW). 147 Marissa Stephenson 0 5

Sam Bauer

June 11, 2011 5:04 PM

Here again. by Sam Bauer

Sam knew that the previous year of Quidditch had been brutal. It didn’t really matter that he thought he’d gotten injured in both games, because there were very few people who’d played last year who could say they hadn’t been. The thing was, he didn’t know why it didn’t bother him.

He was a Crotalus. He had been routinely picked on for being weird when he was in Muggle school. He still had to keep a weather eye out for a few guys who persistently forgot, between September and June every year, that yes, something weird and unpleasant was basically always going to happen when they messed with Bauer. All of these things translated into a nice, healthy survival instinct, which made him avoid trouble more avidly than he avoided illness – and, it seemed, personal injury. He still found himself malevolently hoping that he’d somehow accidentally cursed some of the schoolyard bullies from his early childhood to something life-long and unpleasant, but getting hit by Bludgers didn’t really faze him.

He didn’t get that. It did not make sense. That should have bothered him, too, since Sam liked for things to make sense, but it hadn’t, really. He was just cool with it all, and wasn’t cool with being cool, which also didn’t make any sense.

In spite of all, though, he was still sticking with the Quidditch team. Quitting had honestly never even occurred to him. He came to school, he took classes, he played Quidditch. The three things were intimately linked in his mind now. The first time he noticed the sheet, he didn’t have a quill, but the second time, he signed up.

Sam Bauer, 4th, Chaser

16 Sam Bauer Here again. 163 Sam Bauer 0 5

Nic Sawyer

June 17, 2011 1:11 PM

Threatened, bribed, and pleaded with by Nic Sawyer

He hadn't planned to join again. His talents in the Quidditch arena were clearly substandard and he didn't really want to re-hash that same lesson again and risk further injury through either bludgers or his own team's vengeance for failure. Plus, he just starting another growth spurt and he got even more clumsy than usual during those. Not knowing exactly where your hands and feet were relative to the rest of you was not conducive to successful Keeping.

But a week passed and the sign-up sheet was still down two players. Nic kept to his resolution. No Quidditch this year. There was a whole extra year's worth of kids in the school this year. Charlie could find somebody else.

Charlie found him.

After a few minutes of pleading and threatening, a bag of pretzels changed hands, and Nic found himself with a quill in hand and facing the Sign-Up Sheet for the second year in a row. With a heavy sigh and a feeling that he was going to regret this, Nic scrawled out his name at the bottom of the list.

Nic Sawyer, Fourth, Keeper

But he'd gotten pretzels out of the deal. He'd been hungry.

1 Nic Sawyer Threatened, bribed, and pleaded with 165 Nic Sawyer 0 5