Sick of studying. Among other things. on Aladren Commons

Thomas Fitzgerald

December 12, 2010 12:16 AM

Sick of studying. Among other things. by Thomas Fitzgerald

Madeline wrote to say she hadn't heard from you in a while, and whether something was wrong. I told her I was sure the letter just got lost in the mail, you know how things are, and to give me another copy of it and I'd send it along with this...

"Oh, Mother," Thomas muttered, then shoved the rest of her letter - and, he assumed, Madeline's - into the cover of his Transfiguration book and moved it to the other side of the common room table he'd largely commandeered without bothering to read the rest. He could guess at it easily enough: she's really a very nice girl, of course it's none of my business, Aunt Ava's protesting something again, your father's sorry about New Year's and sends his love, etc., etc., etc. All par for the course in one of his mother's letters. He'd started to think she wrote them by route, or possibly - despite her professed distaste for magic - enchanted the pen to do so for her. The one variation from the letters she'd sent him like clockwork for the past six years was her fixation on the girl he'd made out with the weekend before Christmas.

There was nothing wrong with Madeline, especially if he were to do what his mother most wanted him to do and leave the magical world in favor of eventually becoming the governor of Missouri. She was pretty, with a good family and good manners and all that, and if she was a bit clingy, well, she'd spent her entire life at a girl's school, for God's sake. He, at least, had something to observe to get the idea that high school romances were basically pointless from; he was fairly sure she didn't, since he didn't see her as smart enough to catch on to anything going on between her classmates. Her brain was, after all, more of a problem than her being a Muggle.

There was also, of course, the slight problem of him not particularly wanting to leave the magical world and become governor of Missouri, but he considered that the most surmountable of them all. It was deeply unlikely that someone with a great number of Muggle associates would ever rise to prominence, but not impossible. What he suspected was impossible was him tolerating her company, or that of any of the Ivy Fitzgerald-approved people like her, for long periods of time. He supposed it made him a kind of romantic, but Thomas thought he'd prefer to involve himself with someone who - well - was like him, and who he could work with instead of around.

He'd have to write back to them eventually, of course, his mother and Madeline. At the moment, though, it was low on his list of priorities. Between figuring out what, if anything, to do about the Concert, preparing for the Quidditch finals, studying for his RATS, and communicating with colleges ahead of time, he thought he was very nearly booked. Not for the first time, he wondered why he'd decided it was a good idea to take multiple classes with Fawcett, of all people. The man was head of Aladren for a reason. He had felt like his mind was beginning to shut down even before his mother had irritated him out of focus.

He was flipping through his Charms book, trying to decide what to examine first, when someone sat down across from him. Thomas looked up with a smile. "You wouldn't happen to want to debate the latest high court disaster, would you?" he asked. "Play chess? Throw paper? I'd almost stoop to Gobstones at this point."

0 Thomas Fitzgerald Sick of studying. Among other things. 109 Thomas Fitzgerald 1 5

Jera Valson

December 27, 2010 2:12 PM

An Aladren sick of studying? by Jera Valson

Seventh year was definitely the most confusing place in time Jera had thus far occupied. She often wondered if she was taking too many subjects, or too few. She hadn't been giving proper attention to transfiguration and the lure of becoming an animagus hadn't helped her to focus. She wasn't sure she'd even taken the right classes - transfiguration probably wasn't all that helpful unless she wanted a career down that line, and she wasn't at all sure it was something she wanted to persue. She was, in fact, regretting having dropped Care of Magical Creatures, because she was finding many of them increasingly interesting. She had even considered taking the subject as a major at college, but there wasn't a place that would take her without the RATS, and she couldn't possibly take a whole course and pass it over the summer. She was smart but not a genius. Then college itself became a whole new confusion. She was probably, almost certainly, going to go. She had submitted applications. The only requisite she had was that she and Jessie go to the same college. This scenario was dependent on them both being offered a place by the same college, but had satisfied both sets of parents for the time being. Jera just didn't know what she wanted to do, so makign all these decisions felt impossible.

When she wasn't worrying about exams or college (which didn't happen very often) she was worrying about her Ma, or the Midsummer oncert. She had offered to help out Daniel, and Gray with his writing, and she hadn't really contributed a great deal, which was due to her being buried under her other commitments but she had offerred after all and not following through on her offer was just making her all the more stressed out by it.

When she reached a point when she felt like she might just explode, Jera turned to her best friend. This was easier to do when she wasn't at school, but Jessie was at least reachable by owl, so Jera decided to send her a letter. Gathering writing materials from her dormitory, Jera headed down to the house commons to compose her communications. However, as she joined Thomas at the table, her friend seemed in a similar state of approaching explosion, and Jera could hardly call herself a friend if she didn't help out. "You'd have to tell me about the high court disaster for me to debate it with you," she replied, "but I'm up for chess. Or a conversation centered on bad-mouthing the faculty," she offered, having taken in the variety of textbooks with which Thomas had surrounded himself. "If I have to read another textbook today I will go crazy," she declared.

0 Jera Valson An Aladren sick of studying? 112 Jera Valson 0 5

Thomas

January 08, 2011 8:53 PM

Shhh, it's my dreadful secret. by Thomas

Badmouthing the faculty appealed to Thomas on the personal level, but all the parts of his brain he’d carefully groomed, over the course of seven years, into automatically being on the lookout for their opinions screamed at him that it was a bad idea. At once. Jera’s comment about textbooks, though, was too good not to answer, especially since Fawcett was nowhere in the area and Thomas doubted there was anyone paranoid enough to assume that Fawcett, of all people, was somehow a small bug animagus listening in on their every word.

“I’m forced to concur,” he said, as though acknowledging a point in some kind of debate. “I’ve seriously considered throwing all mine out the window and shouting ‘it’s my life’ after them a few times, but….” He shrugged. “It’s all for a good cause, isn’t it? These textbooks are our portals to the future.” The timbre of his voice had changed slightly, more as it was when he was giving a speech. He’d also begun gesturing grandly. “Once we have committed their contents to our memories, and mastered the skills they purport to teach, we will be on our way to greater things than we have ever known within the walls of this school. We will be on our way to changing the world.”

He paused, considering what he’d just said, and then spoke again in a flat tone. “Dear God, I’m turning into my Aunt Ava. Or possibly the illegitimate love-child of Ava and Gray.” Thomas was convinced his roommate, having been denied permission to blow things up during his play, had decided to go into a satirist phase just to irritate him and corrupt his language with over-the-top phrases. “So, how about that faculty-bashing?”

Not that he didn’t plan to change the world, at least to the extent of having his name in the history books where someone else’s would have gone otherwise. He just never, ever, as long as he lived, planned to talk about it in such pretentious language when not trying, as he had been this time, to be vaguely funny, even if he was giving a speech at a school. If he sounded like a deluded moron to himself, how did he sound to other people? Besides, bad speakers were dime a dozen, and very few of them ever did anything notable enough for them, as opposed to their organizations, to be remembered for it.

0 Thomas Shhh, it's my dreadful secret. 0 Thomas 0 5

Jera

January 12, 2011 2:07 PM

We each have one of those by Jera

It had been announced on more than one occasion that Aladrens had a tendency to be somewhat unusual. Jera didn't think it was more true of their House than any other, per se, but perhaps Aladrens were less reluctant to show their oddities and querks - either that, or they simply didn't notice themselves behaving in a manner that others might consider to be unusual. For example, when Thomas started to praise the inherent greatness of the textbook, Jera felt her eyes begin to glaze over as they sometimes did in Fawcett's class, and a small part of her brain registered that Thomas could sometimes be rather unusual. he seemed to have realised this, too, as his speech concluded and he postulated himself as a rather unlikely love-child, the thought of which made Jera laugh.

She disagreed with his textbook theory anyway, because doing something for real was obviously far better for learning than just reading about it, although admittedly subjects like history made this tricky to accomplish. She would much rather spend her time learning by doing, and exploring, and taking things apart ot see how they work, than to read about it. She loved reading, too. This belief was one of the many things that was causing the seventh year to consider the option of going to college as just that: an option. Though she'd already spent far too much time thinking about that today, and Thomas was up for some study relief in the form of bemoaning the faculty.

"What is it about Professor Crosby that makes me want to kill her, do you think?" Jera started gently. "She's competent, friendly, fair - but I spend half the class restraining myself from hexing her and the other half restraining others from doing the same." She exagerated, but the joke held some truth. "Maybe the position really is cursed and we just have to hate her out of it," she suggested.

0 Jera We each have one of those 0 Jera 0 5

Gray

January 15, 2011 6:50 PM

I think I'm running short on them for now. by Gray

It was times like the end of the year when Gray began to wonder, quite seriously, how he had ever gotten into Aladren.

He had gone through the motions when Anne was around, because she was Anne and to be feared, but the truth was that he had never gotten very worked up about exams, and mostly just found it irritating when the professors began to teeter on the edge of panic about them and pile the work on. Whatever he knew by that point was as much as he expected to be able to know for the exams, making all the extra work just something to get out of the way before he went back to his life’s work of accumulating useless but interesting bits of information from books he actually wanted to read. RATS, by all means, should have been different – these were the big ones, these were his future, these were everything his entire family couldn’t stop writing about for pages at a time – and maybe they’d feel different when he sat them, but for now, he was just not feeling it.

Because of that, he always felt vaguely wrong walking through the Aladren commons or several segments of the library, where actual scholars were, he assumed, busily refreshing themselves on old bits of knowledge in preparation for CATS, RATS, and regular old end-of-the-year tests, which were quite terrifying enough on their own when one actually cared. The result had been an uncharacteristic amount of outside time in the past few weeks. He still didn’t really like sunlight, but after years of Care of Magical Creatures and Quidditch and avoiding his usual haunts during the study season, he had made a kind of peace with it. Maybe enough to include a few windows when he eventually got his own place. Once he figured out what it was he planned to do with the next sixty or so years and got certified to do it.

For now, though, he was indoors because he couldn’t remember exactly how his favorite passage in Blue October went and was convinced he wouldn’t be able to work until he found the book in the depths of his dorm and reread that passage. His personal library wasn’t as much of a snarl to navigate through at Sonora as it was at home due to being considerably smaller, but his side of his and Thomas’ room was still usually cluttered with lots of things in stacks, which might stay in one place for months before he thought of something, dug through them all to find it, and then organized everything for about a week before the stacks started up again.

To his surprise, the phenomenon didn’t repeat in his search for this particular book; it was only two into the stack between his bed and the wall. That did remind him that he’d have to clean under the bed at the end of the year just to be sure there was nothing lost under there from first year, since he wouldn’t be coming back again, but he dismissed that as a problem for another day.

As he reentered the common room from the stairs, holding the primary book and a few others he’d picked up because he felt he wanted them around, he wasn’t too surprised to see Thomas and Jera sitting together. He’d gotten along with Jera since they met in Sutekh Transfig, but she and Thomas had become Quidditch-friends, too, and he’d been operating under the vague assumption that Jera fancied Thomas since she’d jumped a year. If they had been friends with Lucie, too, then he would have been able to claim an organized group of friends as large as that of the Ladies of the Year Court, but as it was, he was okay with having his Aladren Trio and his Luce as separate but nearly equally important entities. Getting within hearing range, he smiled at the topic, pleased to hear that he wasn’t the only person fed up with exams.

"Spoken like a true writer-person," he said, stopping near Thomas' chair upon hearing Jera's theory about how to get rid of Professor Crosby. Gray hadn't had as much of a problem with getting worked up over her grating personality as most people did, but that was because he'd written her off as a condescending donkey's rear about thirty seconds into their acquaintance and decided to educate himself from the helpful translation Anne had provided of her old notes instead, just turning up in the room to watch everyone else's reactions and make sure they didn't ban him from the exam. He'd hit a few glitches where his cousin fell into a different school of thought than his professor, but overall, the strategy had worked pretty well. "And not a bad theory. Do either of you have brothers or cousin-people or something to keep us updated about whether or not it works?" He had already taken it as a given that the three of them would remain in touch, as would he and Luce.

16 Gray I think I'm running short on them for now. 113 Gray 0 5

Thomas

January 15, 2011 7:17 PM

I'm with Jera, everybody's got something by Thomas

Thomas winced involuntarily at the mention of Professor Crosby. He had stuck with Transfiguration because it was both extremely practical and because having a decent RATS score in it would make him look smart, but dealing with her had not been one of the perks of his year. His major regret of the year was that she hadn’t quite driven a class into open rebellion, because that was a scene he would have given a pretty to see. With any other professor, he would have felt a certain obligation, as Head Boy, to try to break it up, but since he was an incompetent child with the mentality of a none-too-bright Teppenpaw first year to her anyway…

That would have been fun. He would have felt awful later, but he supposed he was just vindictive enough that the moment would have been a wonderful thing to be in.

He was about to begin with the fact that she was far too young to convincingly pull off that air of superiority and experience she seemed to want to project but too old to get away with acting like a five-year-old on Pixie Stix while projecting that air, but Gray chipped in his opinion of Jera’s curse theory before he found an acceptable wizarding analogy, off the top of his head, for Pixie Stix, making him jump a little. Dude who had as much trouble as Gray did with navigating his environment without breaking his neck had no right to slip up on someone, ever.

“I…might,” he said, trying to remember how old Lucy was. And his father’s brother, Uncle Mickey, was a wizard, though the last Thomas had heard of him, he was dedicating his energies to trying to start a flying motorcycle club somewhere in the northwest instead of trying to start a family. Of course, Dad and Uncle Mickey hadn’t gotten along ever, so for all Thomas knew, Mickey had more kids than the rest of the family put together and they were arch-sorcerers to a man. “The only cousin I’ve got close to our age is a Muggle, I can never remember exactly how old the others are. Guess I’ll figure it out if they ask me to give a What Sonora’s Like speech. But to answer your question, I think it’s the age inappropriate behavior, Jera. No way she’s old enough to be that full of herself, or to have forgotten that most of us are capable of talking and tying our shoes.”

0 Thomas I'm with Jera, everybody's got something 0 Thomas 0 5

Jera

January 17, 2011 5:40 AM

We could test this theory by Jera

Jera acknowledged Gray with a smile and a "Hey" in greeting as he joined in their discussion about Professor Crosby. He seemed to think he theory about the position curse was sound, and asked if they had anyone still at the school they could ask to find out. Jera's immediate thought was 'no', because she and her Ma were both leaving, and along with her Pa that was pretty much their family. but then Thomas mentioned a possibility of his cousins. While Jera's cousins were either too old or too young to attend Sonora, she did sort of know other people. "I guess I could ask Cooper," she said. "I sort of see him sometimes in the holidays." As usual, Jera was more than happy to down-play the fact that she saw not only the Headmistress, but also the charms professor fairly frequently out of school. She couldn't help it that her best friend's father happened to teach at her school, any more than Cooper could help the fact that he was being fostered by the same man.

"But to answer your question, I think it’s the age inappropriate behavior, Jera. No way she’s old enough to be that full of herself, or to have forgotten that most of us are capable of talking and tying our shoes," Thomas said, amuseing Jera sufficiently that a short laugh accompanied her smile. As much as she was keen for the year to be over with, so exams and studying would be a thing of the past, with a glorious summer laid out before her, Jera knew she would miss these conversations with Gray and Thomas. She might even miss Quidditch practises with them, too. If she was going to make effort to stay in contact with anyone from Sonora, these two would be at the top of her list.

"Maybe she was dropped in some shriking solution or something, causing her body to reduce in age but she's actually a very sweet old lady," she postulated. She didn't really believe this theory, but wished she'd thought of it sooner because it would have made transfiguration classes easier to deal with during the past year, not to mention provided that extra entertainment value that some classes sorely lacked.

0 Jera We could test this theory 0 Jera 0 5

Gray

January 18, 2011 11:53 PM

For Science! by Gray

Gray couldn’t help but laugh at Thomas’s comment about not being sure how old his cousins were. “I’m gonna start calling you Family Values Man,” he said, then waved his own comment away before Thomas could react to it. “Messing with you, messing with you! I live with Anne, and I wrote a poem for her birthday last year that hinged on it being her twenty-third.”

Though she’d seemed more amused than offended, she had still smacked him upside the head when he came home for Easter break a few weeks later, and his parents would. Not. Let. The joke. Go. Like it was his fault she had managed to pick up a working knowledge of so many things that a quick examination of her Bookshelf of School Notebooks would make anyone think she was old. Er.

Gray had no idea who Cooper was, but decided to assume he was a student here and leave it at that. It wasn’t like now was really a time when there was any point to learning the names of all the random people as short as he used to be running around this place, even if ‘this place’ was limited to the Aladren Commons.

A moment later, though, he was distracted completely by Thomas’s step into the role of Logic Man. “Dude,” he said. “That’s it. That’s what’s wrong. You rock.” He listened to Jera’s alternate theory. “Just not as much as her,” he added. He gave her a look that bordered on proud. “I’ve corrupted you. That’s a great idea. I’m gonna, gonna have to pay you, uh, royalties for that one. You’re good at this. Isn’t she good at this?” This was more or less directed at Thomas, though possibly also a little to the Muses.

16 Gray For Science! 113 Gray 0 5

Thomas

January 19, 2011 12:08 AM

Bill Nye should just go ahead and move over by Thomas

“That is pretty bad,” Thomas agreed dryly when Gray told the story of how he’d botched up Anne’s birthday despite living with her outside of school. It never failed to amaze him a little that the most infamous Quidditch captain ever known was still living with her untraditional family, teasing her little cousin about the passionate love affair everyone except Gray himself knew he was having with Lucie Dupree. He would have said Anne Wright should, at the very least, have been working for the government, which incited her to hate and then assassinate Quidditch players who were expressing politically undesirable views in other countries, but that was too much of a Gray thought for him to entertain without serious concern for his sanity. “If she’s twenty-three, we’ve already graduated, but we all still seem to be here.”

Cooper…Yeah, that was that kid who always seemed ticked off about something, wasn’t it? How was Jera connected to him? Thomas decided it would be better not to ask. He would really rather people not know exactly how he was related to Mickey Fitzgerald the biker or Ava Proctor the activist who didn’t think it was a year if she didn’t get arrested twice for disturbing the peace. Jera might have no problem with everyone knowing how she was associated with Cooper, but it might be one of Those Issues. So, instead, he said, “Very good. Let me get in touch with Mother’s family, and we’ll see what we can set up for Crosbywatch.”

Which led them to what it was that was so strange about her, which led to Jera being proclaimed more awesome than him. “She’s good at this,” Thomas agreed when Gray claimed to have corrupted their friend. “You two should go into business together. Wright and Valson, great authors of surrealist comic scripts.” It was the closest thing he could come up with to describe the kind of thing Gray came up with and Jera was apparently coming up with, though he expected there was an even more perfect niche somewhere out there in the land of fiction. It wasn’t a world Thomas knew all that well. “I’ll be sure to invest a knut or two with you guys once I have a knut and you have stock.”

0 Thomas Bill Nye should just go ahead and move over 0 Thomas 0 5