Take Two (Tag Jessica and Killian) on Crotalus Commons

Professor Skies

March 03, 2019 7:24 PM

Take Two (Tag Jessica and Killian) by Professor Skies

"Good afternoon," Selina addressed Jessica. It was the end of the first week and, as per their arrangement, Jessica was back in her office to talk over their respective plans.

"As we now have Mr. Row on staff, I thought it would be good to ask him to join us, seeing as a large amount of this falls under his remit," she gestured to her new colleague, who had been introduced at lunch earlier in the week, and who was now seated on her left, "Is that alright?" she checked with Jessica. She had briefed Killian on Jessica's background, on what she wanted, and on what Selina thought it was a good idea to give her at this stage.

Following the first meeting, Selina had, as promised, written down a summary of what she had suggested, plus a few additional ideas, so that Jessica had something concrete to refer back to. It had listed the fact that correspondence courses in Muggle subjects could be undertaken from third year or 'sooner if earned.' Under things they could do immediately were talking through magical further education and careers, and how that intersected with the non-magical world. She had also added the option of maintaining/improving her level of Spanish by finding Jessica a language buddy or penpal. Whilst Selina did not think that maths was going to suffer too much from neglect, she recognised that the ability to speak a foreign language might.

"How have things gone this week?" she asked. She suspected Jessica was keen to dive straight in and talk plans but Selina was just as concerned about her well-being as anything else, and wanted to check in on that. In terms of how her week had gone in class, Selina had been sure to keep an extra close eye on her, and had asked the rest of her teachers for some feedback on that matter, just in case Ms. Hayles wanted to claim that it was all going super and she could definitely cope with extra classes right away. Selina would be the judge of that.

OOC - if you could include, at least in the narrative, how Jessica had been doing in classes, that would be a big help. Thanks

13 Professor Skies Take Two (Tag Jessica and Killian) 26 Professor Skies 1 5

Jessica Hayles

March 04, 2019 7:39 PM

I'll see my name in lights before it's done. by Jessica Hayles

Daddy, Jessica thought sadly as she looked over the newcomer, was not going to be very happy with her.

Professor Skies bringing backup was no real surprise, of course, so Daddy wouldn’t be too cross about Jessica accepting that. The problem, rather, was that Jessica did so without immediately demanding her own entourage of supporters. She should, she knew, stop the whole thing until such time as they agreed to allow her to consult privately with adult counsel, and only then march in with a lawyer and her father and a few professors from the School of Education at the university and, if absolutely necessary, a psychologist.

But that would be rude, and Mommy would disapprove, would say she was acting like some damn Yankee like her father.

And she hadn’t been able to get in touch with Daddy, who gatekept her access to those resources, anyway.

“Of course,” she said politely in her soft Southern accent instead. “It’s very nice to meet you, sir. I’m Jessica.”

She sat down, not quite suppressing a twist of distaste about the mouth as the voluminous sack-uniform settled around her.

Clothes make the woman. How many times had she heard that? You could tell so much about a girl by her shoes, her lipstick, the way she wore her hair. In this thing, though, she couldn’t even see her shoes without kicking her feet out ridiculously far – it was like she had joined a convent and they just hadn’t gotten to the part where they made her change her name yet.

She pressed her lips very slightly together, feeling the gloss on them. She had that advantage – that she got to see her name printed on the bottom of the tube every time she touched up her lips. And didn’t the shade of pink in her nail polish go as well as anything was going to with this green? Unable to do her hair properly, she had started letting her hair dry on foam rollers every night before bed (she couldn’t yet discipline herself to sleep on them) and so it hung in glamorous, vaguely Old Hollywood waves, held back on the right side with a faux-tortoiseshell side comb but falling freely down the left side of her face. This way, she could turn her head and hide her expression if she needed to; she had learned that trick from watching Mommy.

“Well, thank you,” said Jessica, still blandly polite, assuming they were making small talk and determined to say everything right and keep her composure this time. She had put it all in a box, chained the box shut, and put the box on a shelf in her head, and that was where it was going to stay.

In reality, the week lingered in memory as a waking nightmare. Her desk drawer was a heap of crumpled scraps of poems that hadn’t formed correctly, mostly about water and the dark. She picked at her food and struggled to sleep as much as she struggled to get consistent results from waving the stick and saying the magic words in classes. The only classes where she felt fairly stable were Herbology and Potions, where things at least could be interacted with directly, the tasks felt somewhat meaningful, and she didn’t flinch every time something went right. Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts were horror shows; she was sure she had actually pulled a muscle in one shoulder from all the tensing up when there were bangs or flashes and the like from all directions.

“It’s interesting learning about the herbal properties I didn’t know about,” she continued, still smiling with her mouth to keep an artificial smile in her voice, figuring that a show of compliance might help lull the professor. “And I’ve enjoyed reading parts of the book for your class. I hope you’ve had a good week, too?”

16 Jessica Hayles I'll see my name in lights before it's done. 1442 Jessica Hayles 0 5

Professor Skies

March 06, 2019 11:28 PM

Lumos will help with that by Professor Skies

Things were not going as badly as they might have. It was true that Jessica did not yet seem relaxed or natural in using her wand, but that was often true of Muggleborn students - even some children who had grown up around magic took a while to connect with actually doing it themselves. She was at least, by all accounts, trying. And her herbology and potions professors seemed to have actively positive things to say about her.

Those were the plus points. There was still some concern on Selina's part as to what was going on beneath the surface. Jessica was not getting many results in wand-based classes. She appeared to be trying. But what was going through her mind as she did so? Was she still resisting her own magic? It was hard to know how to factor in the more positive reports. Was it because they were non-wand based subjects? They were still magical. Was it more to do with the teachers themselves than Jessica's performance - Nathan and Mary were both gentle and kind, and inclined to see the best in everyone.

"I'm glad to hear you have some good things to report," Selina smiled, wondering how genuinely Jessica felt them or whether she was just saying what she thought Selina wanted to hear. "My week has been fine, thank you.

"Thank you for taking the time to write out your goals for me," she began, placing the delicate sheet of monogrammed paper with all of its ambitions, along with the glossy catalogue, centrally on her desk. After years as head of Crotalus, a child with their own initialled stationery really didn't surprise her. "They remind me a little bit of a former student who went on do a double major in potions and business studies," she added, just gently trying to blur the lines a little. She wondered what Jessica thought currently about magical people... Did she see business sense as an exlusively non magical skill? "So, there's definitely plenty of overlap between what you want to and what we can offer," she enphasised.

"And you've seen my suggestions," she added, producing a copy of the advice she had sent Jessica, "I also remembered afterwards that we have a recently re-established school paper, if you want to develop your writing and keep up extra-curriculars that will be easily recognisable whichever world you're in.

"So, we currently have two plans. I think there's plenty of overlap between them, or different ways of achieving the same results. How shall we go about making them fit together?" she gestured at the documents, "Is there anything more you want to know from us about your future options to help?"

13 Professor Skies Lumos will help with that 26 Professor Skies 0 5

Jessica

March 07, 2019 2:36 PM

Lightbulbs require less active maintenance from me. by Jessica

So far, this was not going too badly. Of course, Jessica had briefly thought that last time, and then the professor had turned on her, got her confused and overwhelmed. Jessica thought that the other adult being here would make it harder for Skies to twist it all around and lie about what had been said only moments earlier and all that - this was probably, she thought, part of why Daddy said that bullying was not a particularly good business move - but she still didn’t trust the woman. At home, she just would have had her parents figure out how to get someone who cracked her like that fired (at least, if she could work up the courage to admit such a failure to them), but here...here she had no power whatsoever. She couldn’t even talk to her parents, and even if she could - what could they do?

Nausea threatened to strike at that thought, as it always had since she had fully realized the implications of her parents allowing these people to take her away from them. Either Mommy and Daddy actually couldn’t wield any influence here, or else they didn’t view her as worth the money and trouble. But she couldn’t think about that, just about the bare facts.

Fact, she couldn’t get rid of Skies right now.

Fact, this meant she’d have to work with her right now.

And fact, right now, things didn’t seem to be going too badly.

“That’s great,” said Jessica politely, though without any particular enthusiasm. This still didn’t account for how she was to get the instruction and feedback she’d need to get good enough to go to good universities, and that was just in English. “Extracurriculars are a useful...start. Can you tell me more about this - program this other person went into? Because I was told that - this place, and your economy, they’re totally separate from - mine.”

The devil was, after all, in the details. Jessica found the Potions and Herbology courses more bearable than some, but they hadn’t done much to convince her that she was not in fact trapped among the seriously un-advanced. Plants were - irregular in how effective a given sprout was. You couldn’t guarantee consistent results with them - Arvale had done press about that to counter attacks from the all-natural crowd, along with running a television ad campaign last year about how the same research which went into their skincare lines had led to some medical breakthroughs in the past. Plus, well - Jessica barely even knew how much she didn’t know about economics, but she knew that an economy which ran on coins was woefully out of date and could only grow so far. Gold was a non-renewable resource, hard to transport, easy to steal, and Jessica was pretty sure it would be really hard to do economic adjustments with it. It had the advantage that the coins were intrinsically valuable in most situations short of the zombie apocalypse, but if Jessica hadn’t been forced to rule out escape as an option (she had no idea how deep in the desert they were, and even if she could walk to the nearest habitation, Mommy and Daddy had always been insistent she must never go out alone or wander in public, that she might get kidnapped or worse, and she couldn’t imagine she’d be safer alone in some remote village in the middle of a Native American reservation than she was in the suburbs of Atlanta with a phone and people who loved her and could help her within the same city), one of the first things she would have done was visit a pawn shop so she could exchange her wizard money for paper money she could use to pay for bus tickets and food until she got back to Georgia. Jessica thought it was possible she could help these people and their society someday - if they didn’t cripple her - but she really wasn’t seeing yet how they could possibly help her.

OOC: Just to be clear, the idea that Selina is a gaslighting bully is Jessica’s subjective interpretation, and Jessica...views reality through a filter, so to speak.

16 Jessica Lightbulbs require less active maintenance from me. 1442 Jessica 0 5

Mr. Killian Row

March 14, 2019 12:30 AM

Students require the most maintenance. by Mr. Killian Row

Killian was more than a little nervous for his first serious meeting with Deputy Headmasters Skies and a student in need. His previous job had certainly given him experience in this area, but that didn't make it much less intimidating. Every student he met had a whole future ahead of them; what if he couldn't deliver? Luckily, he was pretty okay at his job, and the confidence of a man who cared always made it a bit easier. As he considered the interactions between Jessica and Selina, though, he wondered whether anyone had ever cared as much as these two women.

Though young, Jessica was adamant, passionate, and fierce. She was very much like the woman across the desk from her, although he suspected neither of them would agree about that. Selina was self-assured (and usually right), powerful, and determined. They also had one other thing in common: they both cared about Jessica.

When it was Killian's turn to speak, he chose his words with some care, preferring to match Selina's more reserved tone as much as possible. He was a generally happy-go-lucky person and reserved wasn't his strong suit, but the last thing he wanted was to give Jessica - the very image of reservation herself - any reason to dislike her deputy headmistress any more than the position she was in already made her do. Also, he didn't want her to blow anything up.

"There are options," Killian assured them both (and maybe himself a little, too). His mind was whirring with the possibilities but he hesitated to trot too many out at once. "I've worked with several students on obtaining internships in banks, businesses, and other fields. I like Professor Skies' comment about the option of double majoring as well. It makes any job candidate particularly competitive, and gives students the opportunity to pick up a complementary minor in something like Muggle Studies or Comparative Cultures and then graduate with a double degree instead of a double major."

He wondered precisely what Jessica hated so much about the magic world. It was hard to imagine someone so keen on power as this girl was stopping shy of obtaining it. Suddenly, it clicked: this was never about power, but about expectations. He wondered whether Professor Skies would mind his prying as he pressed Jessica on the matter.

"Professor Skies has told me a little, but I wondered whether you and your family have talked about your future at all? It sounds like you're interested in business ventures, which makes me think that your magical education is particularly important." He nodded to Jessica, wondering how much she'd thought this through.

"One of the most important skills business programs seek to instill in their students is a level head and strong instinct. When your particular instincts include magic, learning to control and utilize that power will be a huge asset. Besides, the wizarding community is a huge market. It's an untapped gold mine for a business-minded witch or wizard."

OOC - Information about double majoring/degreeing based on my experience with university. I have 0 idea whether it's universalizable, but it seemed like a safe starting point for the start of a discussion on US educations.

22 Mr. Killian Row Students require the most maintenance. 1450 Mr. Killian Row 0 5

Jessica

March 15, 2019 1:50 PM

I can maintain myself fine. I have a whole skincare line. by Jessica

Jessica wondered if the magic stuff damaged people’s brains. She had explained her full objection to the course of study they wanted her to take during her first meeting with Skies. She had written out exactly what she was supposed to do for about the next twenty years in the letter to the professor. Why did they keep acting as though she were speaking Greek?

Unfortunately, however, she couldn’t ask. She was eleven. It didn’t matter, in light of that, if she was right or not. All that mattered was that if she said something they disliked, they could punish her. She was already lonely and teetering near-constantly on the brink of panic, but adding punishments might make her life here go from unpleasant to absolutely unbearable. So she had to play the game.

“We talk about my future all the time,” she said in response to the question. “We have a lot of plans. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but – I don’t need help getting an internship when I’m old enough. Daddy will just give me one at Arvale.” She flushed, knowing it was a bit impolitic and improper to admit out loud that she didn’t have to worry much about sheer dumb bad luck interfering with her plans – or hadn’t, anyway, before that awful little man had showed up at her door. Her parents took pains to make sure she knew she should be grateful for this, and also that she knew it was not nice to talk about it.

“It’s not that. It’s that there's a lot of things I'll need to know to even do well in that internship,” she said, very slowly and precisely. “Daddy would think anyone who sent in an application for one without any background in social studies or math or science was totally insane. He said things about – this place maybe making us some money, someday, when we understand anything about it, but – did that awful little man lie to us?” she asked with a flicker of hope. “He said we can’t admit to anyone that this place exists, that I can’t put it or anything I do here on my resume, and we don't have much use for anything that can’t go on my resume. They have half of Atlanta thinking I’m in a hospital somewhere, but they can’t say where, or do any fundraisers or use it for any campaigns, so what good am – is that story to anyone?” she asked bitterly, editing at the last moment to make it a question about what good the story was to anyway instead of what good she now was to anyone. “So if he lied, he’ll be living under a bridge a while before legal is even done with him,” she added fiercely, one tiny hand curling into a fist without her noticing it as she imagined it at the unfortunate liaison’s throat.

16 Jessica I can maintain myself fine. I have a whole skincare line. 1442 Jessica 0 5

DH Skies

March 19, 2019 8:49 AM

And yet the cracks are showing by DH Skies

"I would recommend neither strangling anyone nor setting a pack of lawyers on them. Especially as that would involve trying to convince your lawyers that wizards are real,” Selina stated, the angle of her eyebrows and the look she gave Jessica’s hand both suggestive of the idea that she strongly disapproved of that gesture. It was easy to see a rather spoilt and irritating brat, especially when she did things like that. However, between the idea that anything that could not go on her resume was useless, and this ridiculous story about her being hospitalised (and the near Freudian slip about her usefulness that Selina had most definitely noticed), she was strongly getting the impression of someone with far too much pressure on their shoulders. It would have been easy to simply dislike Jessica for being spoilt and entitled. But those weren’t the sum total of the problem…

“There is a strong line of separation between the worlds," Selina acknowledged, "And between their economies. Should you choose to re-enter the non-magical world, you would not be permitted to use magic or magical knowledge in order to get ahead in business. It is likely that you would come under a high degree of scrutiny from the government - our government, to ensure that you weren't doing so."

She suspected those weren't things Jessica wanted to hear, and that they were not going to increase her impression of the usefulness of her magical education. She seemed fixated on rejoning her old world, and anything that didn't fit that seemed to be of little interest to her. Still, there was no point giving her a false impression of what was and was not possible.

"The course I mentioned took place at a magical university. Magical people run businesses. They also have business knowledge,” Selina stated bluntly. “There are also universities which exist in parallel with or work in co-operation with their non-magical counterparts.

"You would not be able to show a resume listing a magical education to a non-magical person, no. But you plan to work for your father, who knows full well where you are. I appreciate that you might need certain skills to do well. We are not stopping you acquiring additional skills alongside magic. We just need to identify what skills you actually need in order to make your workload feasible- you mention maths a lot. I’ve looked at maths curricula. They’re very odd. Maths is different to business skills or financial skills, and large swathes of it are utterly irrelevant to daily life, whilst vital knowledge is often left out. I believe, for example, most non-magical people have no idea how to do their taxes, and that you have entire professions of people who have learnt how to do it for them. I can only conclude that a high school mathematics course is full of filler material, and that you certainly will be none the worse off in the business world if you don’t know how to solve a quadratic equation."

Selina was starting to suspect that the real problem was not the quality of the education Jessica would be receiving and more the fact that her parents were no longer able to show off about her. Ah, Crotalus. Where the problem was never just the problem itself but also what other people were going to think about it. She very much wanted to go and shout at Jessia’s parents for rather a long period of time about the kind of expectations and pressure they were putting on their daughter and how very visible the cracks were already becoming.

“So… You want to work in a non-magical business. Being in a magical school and not being able to account for your education would be an issue. Conveniently, the business is run by someone who is already aware of this. You, us, and your father if he wants to be involved, can cherry pick the relevant bits from a non-magical education and dispense with anything useless.”

13 DH Skies And yet the cracks are showing 26 DH Skies 0 5

Jessica

March 20, 2019 6:53 PM

There's nothing enough money can't fix. by Jessica

Jessica saw the look, then saw it was directed at her hand. She flushed and instinctively hid the hand behind her, though it was too late to undo the damage.

There went another point. You keep losing every time you go against her. Daddy’s lucky to be rid of you -

She shut it out, trying to focus on anger. Anger was good; anger could push her though the worst spell of nerves, could shut down so many of the voices in her head, at least temporarily. Of course, there was always a price to pay for these intervals – later, she would spend ages obsessing over how she had made this mistake or that one, how she shouldn’t have said this or that, how this or that could absolutely derail everything beyond any hope of recovery; the spiral could even re-activate in her head, on and off, for the next few days – but it was better than dissolving again, or thinking about dissolving, or remembering how she’d dissolved last time….

However, anger kept slipping away, batted out of panic’s way by the ongoing barrage of life-ruining information coming out of the professor’s mouth. It was nothing to her that the woman apparently didn’t know math herself, or that she didn’t understand what a core curriculum was, or that she probably didn’t quite understand how corporations worked, if she thought it was even remotely a profitable idea for Jessica’s family to even attempt to do its own taxes. Skies and Row could live like peasants from the Renaissance forever without it making much difference to Jessica. But it was obvious that the woman’s mind was so very limited by her own lack of education and exposure to the world – there were many things that Jessica didn’t know, but knew about just from listening to her family talk, and these things, the things of the adult world, were the very things Skies was dismissing so casually – that there was no reasoning with her. It would be like trying to explain chemistry to – well – a peasant from the Renaissance. And the lawyers were helpless. And Daddy had either been unable to stop them from taking her away or hadn’t bothered to try –

If I can get him here, if he sees this, he’ll find a way. Or maybe they really are so backward that she’ll just jump the moment a man says ‘hop.’ But even if she doesn’t listen to Daddy, Daddy will get me out of here – he can get me out of the country, maybe. I don’t want to do that, either, but at least I can get some kind of education abroad. I could be Jessica Groves in school, or Rose Groves – no, you can’t call yourself Rose Groves, it sounds stupid – Jessica Groves in school – don’t people do that sometimes, if their parents want to protect them, but their records will still let them go to school?

Having a plan, however tenuous, calmed her a bit. Not entirely, since she didn’t actually have Daddy on board yet and was also terrified of the idea of yet another deviation from the plan which had kept her calm almost all her life, but enough.

“Of course – we – will have to talk to Daddy,” she said, only slightly choking on ‘we’ and trying to keep any enthusiasm out of her voice. If they realized how very much she wanted to speak to her father, they’d never let her, and it would be much easier for Daddy to get her out if she could just get into the same room as him without anyone getting in the way. “He knows about the business side of the plan more than I do.” Jessica just knew what she had to do; Daddy knew all the whys. Jessica hardly concerned herself with those, as it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to know why, just to follow the plan, so everyone would be happy with her and she could therefore relax a little.

16 Jessica There's nothing enough money can't fix. 1442 Jessica 0 5