Seeking counsel (tag Alicia and Thad) on Aladren Commons

Henny B-F-R

April 27, 2014 6:18 AM

Seeking counsel (tag Alicia and Thad) by Henny B-F-R

Henny hovered uncertainly in the Common Room, twisting her brown curls between her fingers. Normally, she would be able to find Alicia and Thad easily but, given their current increase in duties, the times at which all three of them were around were a lot less frequent than usual. The worst part of that was it gave her room to doubt, time to be a chicken and just sit on what she knew... But she knew that wasn't really what her confidante wanted. He wanted her to have the answer. But, alone, she didn't. Maybe with Alicia and Thad she would have. Besides which, it was part of her responsibility as a prefect – or the rather warped version of it currently in operation – to share what she knew.

Once the three of them were gathered, she began, in a hushed tone.

“I need to discuss something with you.... You know the prankster we seem to have on our hands?” it was a rhetorical question as she was sure the two head students couldn't have failed to notice that someone was doing their level best to undermine their authority. “Someone approached me about it. They think they know who it is.” She wanted to trust her friends' judgement on the matter but she knew that they had to be pretty aggravated by what had been going on, and that that might sway them more towards the side of action. And she wanted to make sure her informant was safe. She hoped that she would have been as cautious had it been anyone else other than her own brother that had come to her. As it was, she was thankful that her position of prefect made it quite reasonable that a younger student might have approached her, and hopefully wouldn't automatically lead to Alicia and Thad guessing who it was.

“The trouble is, their worried about repercussions on them if this person is called out on their actions or punished. They don't think he can know it's them,” she explained, accidentally a little more careless with her pronouns regarding the perpetrator than the witness, “But they're not sure. And they want to know that we have enough capability to protect them. So... well, do we? What guarantee can we give anyone of...” she floundered for a way to finish that sentence which didn't sound horrible.... Of not being attacked by their classmates. Of being safe. “of... that,” she finished lamely.

13 Henny B-F-R Seeking counsel (tag Alicia and Thad) 211 Henny B-F-R 1 5

Alicia Bauer

April 27, 2014 12:43 PM

Offering an opinion. by Alicia Bauer

Alicia had always thought of sleep as more of a luxury than a true necessity, a reward she could give herself for good behavior. Inadvertent experimentation in the past days had led her to the conclusion that this was not so, at least under the current circumstances. Playing Teen Mother to a hundred people did, she had to admit, sound like it would be even harder than normal life even if she hadn't had to carry on with a semblance of normal life, too. She had started sleeping six to eight hours at a time, sometimes, inadvertently, and hadn't taken a RATS practice test all year so far.

That sort of thing made it feel more like the world was ending than anything else, when she thought about it, so she tried not to, instead focusing on the advantages, such as slight reductions in her desire to hex random people instead of smiling at them. She had been experiencing such moderated emotions for several hours when Henny brought up a particular loathsome individual and was so able to nod tersely without scowling despite her habit, even in the best of times, of being less guarded with her friends, quite as though they were not still sort of in a public place.

"Unfortunately," she said.

Her expression lightened, though, when Henny said she had a source who might know who was behind it. "That's wonderful," she said, visions of peaceful meals and class sessions, where nothing untoward happened and she wasn't constantly worried about something happening, dancing in her head. The best she had come up with on her own was that at least one perpetrator was in intermediates and that the spell complexity pointed toward a fourth or fifth year - years her own network was, unfortunately, nonexistent in. She recognized Henny's brother and Cepheus' brothers and little Julian and the prefects, but didn't know any of them well enough to feel comfortable going to them and trying to extract information, and they had no particular reasons to give any to her spontaneously.

Not a problem for Henny; everyone loved Henny. Alicia considered the fact that she - not fond of most people in general and especially not of those who might inspire more admiration than she did - and Thad - pureblood heir and all that even before their families' contrasting politics came into it - loved Henny, too, to be proof of this. Henny could probably have gathered the information on her own, if she'd thought that way, though Alicia supposed that if she did, she'd be less like Henny and more like Thad. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, of course, but Alicia liked her as she was, she was so...clean. It was intriguing and refreshing and....

...Irrelevant. She blinked, turning her attention back to witness protection. Witness protection; what were they going to do next, set up a court, Thad presiding while she argued for the state and Henny for the accused? Thaddeus the Just had a nice ring to it, but she had never cared much about becoming a lawyer. She'd rather work around things when she could, but she always wanted to have the option to outright lie if she needed to.

"If your - friend - doesn't think the person they're accusing knows it's them doing the accusing - " she did wish Henny had used a pronoun for her source which didn't double as a plural, because it slowed her speech down as she tried to work through the tangle to make it clear who she was talking about at each point - "then there shouldn't be a problem," she said. "I don't see the purpose of telling the accused - one - who your friend is while we look into it - or ever, really."

They couldn't just take the first source they got at face value, after all. Someone could be trying to throw a rival off his broomstick, or start more trouble, maybe between groups, or even be the prankster themselves and trying to throw suspicion, though she thought it was a poor way to do it....

They might not have a courtroom, but she did think they had jobs. Being lovable was Henny's job, being logical was Thad's, and being cynical was Alicia's. She didn't know how they were going to manage without each other Outside, someday, but for now, she thought they made a good team that way. The trick was just presenting her work product in a way that didn't shock Henny too much, if Hen felt the need to ask. Alicia hoped she understood all this and it could pass without comment this time.

16 Alicia Bauer Offering an opinion. 210 Alicia Bauer 0 5

Henny B-F-R

May 02, 2014 2:39 AM

Adding complications by Henny B-F-R

“I suppose...” Henny began hesitantly. Charlie didn't think that Leo knew he knew. But it was possible. Even though it was only a slim chance, she'd never been much of a gambler, and certainly not when it came to her brother and him potentially being targeted by another student.

“It's a bit more complicated though,” she admitted, a little reluctantly. She knew they all had a lot on their plates right now, Thad and Alicia especially – even if her friend hadn't been Head Girl, she had a tendency to stretch herself, so Henny could only imagine what the effect of combining that with a position of authority and a crisis was having on her.

“There's a way he... Ok, so the accused is Leo Princeton,” she stated, deciding to dispense with at least one pronoun and make the whole thing easier to follow. “And our informant saw him pointing his wand at Anthony Carey shortly before the exploding pumpkin head incident. And Leo will know that someone knows because... well, the informant turned the tables on him,” she admitted, with a little blush. She knew Charlie's actions were a little morally questionable. “Leo was himself the victim of a Butterfingers jinx. The informant admits that that may have been wrong and that they may have to face punishment too. They just wanted to stop Leo causing any more damage though and, in the absence of any authority figure – other than the prefects, who clearly weren't being respected – felt that was the only available course of action to curtail him. So, Leo knows someone hexed him, quite possibly as a result of being onto him. And if Leo and another student are punished, it won't take a genius to figure out the link. I mean, if we're even doing punishments?” she queried. It was normally so simple. Do a bad thing, get a detention. But she wasn't really sure that they had the authority to hand them out or would be listened to if they tried.

“I mean, let's say we do find out it was him... What would you actually want to do about it?” she asked.

13 Henny B-F-R Adding complications 211 Henny B-F-R 0 5

Alicia

May 05, 2014 3:35 PM

Complications successfully added. by Alicia

Alicia flinched, just a little, when Henny finally gave up on the tangle of pronouns and announced the possible identity of their problem child, seeing in an instant most of her good options go up in smoke. Her own fault, she had to admit. She had dismissed her friends from her list of suspects before she even formed it, but she hadn’t considered the possibility that the culprit could be someone close to one of them.

She looked at once for the good side, but the only one she could find was that Cepheus had never seemed as fond of his brothers as the others were of their families. Since even she had looked for Isaac and Lionel that first morning, when she thought the prairie elves might be losing their minds and thus constitute a threat to any small, weak things nearby, she did not think that was really much of an advantage. She had wanted, at least a little, to protect specific small, weak things for no better reason than shared blood – behavior she dismissed as the operation of some primitive tribal instinct predating the point where a particular nomadic group of breeding animals developed reason, an instinct she was sure she could suppress at real need, but which had happened. Cepheus was more conventional than she was, she thought. He might take it badly if she, his best friend, suggested anything too harsh for one of his small, weak things.

In theory, she wasn’t supposed to care – was supposed to help administer justice, or whatever passed for it in the teenage wasteland, without fear or favor, or however it went. But in practice….

She glanced at her friends, trying to find a solution and failing. “I don’t even know,” she admitted wearily.

It wasn’t, after all, even just Cepheus she had to think about. It was one thing to imagine what she’d like to do to anyone, but a real culprit meant considering the real facts of the situation. She and Thad were both legally adults and the faces of the pseudo-administration they had set up. On the bright side, that meant they would have a fantastic PR opportunity if they ever did get to interact with the outside world again – in her more optimistic moments, she could all but see them bludgeoning their way into the news as the saviors of the small, weak things, then using that to accelerate their careers, particularly hers. She suspected people would have fewer snotty things to say about the people who kept their useless brats from ripping each other to shreds, or at least who presented themselves well enough as such. The truth didn’t matter as much as the fact that she and Thad had spoken first when this began, or as much as whether they did so again when it ended – which was also the downside. If someone decided a line had been crossed at any point, out there, then they would be held responsible, and she couldn’t see a good way out of that one. Take the blame and she was a scheming tramp who’d manipulated a nice boy into trouble, a prime example of why girls shouldn't have nice things. Deny it, and she was a weak, sniveling female who’d been manipulated and would never be seen as anything else ever again. Stick together and try to defend an action which passed the limits of normal school operations, and they’d both be looked at sideways afterward, marked out as rebellious, a little dangerous, presumptuous, which would…be inconvenient, though still better than the other two options.

Life was designed, though, to be as hard as possible for people who wanted to change it, and she was getting close to the point where she either had to take a real chance or else leave the table and go seriously propose to Cepheus. No one but their descendants would remember her then, but they’d have a lot of fun in the meantime and it would solve a lot of his problems, so there really were worse resolutions to some of her own, she thought. Right now, though, she needed to solve Henny’s.

"If we bribed him, he might shut up, but he might just tell everybody. If I hex him purple, then he might tell everyone anyway and then they might decide to throw us all out." The only way Alicia could see to effectively rule over people who knew her resources and a good bit of her abilities - as a person, not as a representative of something - was for those abilities to be overwhelming, which hers were not, not yet, and she doubted Thad was secretly that much beyond her, if at all. "I don't know which is worse. I'm sorry." She hated apologizing, but she was supposed to always have a solution, and right now, she didn't.

16 Alicia Complications successfully added. 210 Alicia 0 5

Thad Pierce

May 19, 2014 10:36 AM

You are overcomplicating matters by Thad Pierce

Henny's hushed tone as she opened her discussion left Thaddeus with a vague sense of apprehension, but that soon dispelled when she quickly got to the purpose of the meeting - the prankster. His apprehension then turned swiftly to a feeling similar to but not quite exasperation. The prankster was a thorn in their sides, mostly because he was undermining their authority, but hadn't yet physically harmed anyone. The culprit had thrown out a couple of hexes, though, so the person in question could not be entirely dismissed as harmless so something did need to be done.

What, precisely, Thad didn't know yet. Owls to parents were not exactly an option, House Points were a joke right now, and who had time to host a detention anymore?

The current plan as he understood had only two, not very well detailed, steps to it. First, identify the perpetrator. Second, make the pranks stop. It sounded like Henny had found a source able to accomplish the first part.

A source who wanted to remain anonymous, possibly even from them, if Henny's reluctance to even use pronouns was any indication.

Thad nodded in agreement as Alicia noted that if the accused didn't know the witness knew who he was, there shouldn't be anything that they had to do about it. "We are going to need more than just one person's word that the prankster is who your friend," he used the terminology Alicia had to make it clear he was talking about the same person, "says he is, so once we have enough proof to move on the information, the original source doesn't much matter anymore. The evidence will speak for itself."

As Henny further explained the situation, Thad couldn't help but sag a little in relief as at least one name made an appearance in the discussion - both because it reduced the number of confusing pronouns being tossed around and because it was someone he knew how to deal with. He was, in truth, a little surprised when Alicia seemed completely baffled by how to proceed.

"Actually, this makes it easier," he told them. Perhaps not what to do with the person Henny was protecting - a butterfingers jinx was against the rules, too - and, as she said, punishing two people for throwing jinxes around the DADA classroom was not going to make it hard for Leo to figure out, if nothing else, who hexed him, but dealing with Leo - if indeed he was the guilty party - was quite simple. "If it was Leo, I just need to have my father talk to his father, and he'll receive more than adequate punishment. Throwing hexes at Careys - especially an Anthony - isn't exactly proper behavior his family would approve of."

It occurred to him that maybe they didn't quite understand the magnitude of this transgression. "That might be even worse than," he tried to think of something easier for someone outside of the pureblood community to grasp as not-good pureblood behavior, "than me asking Henny to marry me." After a moment, he added, "Um, no offense meant. My family just doesn't care for yours, you know?" It wasn't a topic they often spoke of, carefully keeping the peace by not broaching sensitive topics, but there was no secret there. "But Anthony is an heir. Assaulting an heir is not a done thing."

It dawned on him that they really had a quite excellent way to stop the pranks in their tracks, if it was Leo. "If it is Cepheus's brother doing this," and he was oddly hopeful that it was because then they could do something to stop it, "I can talk to him privately and lay out his options for either having me tell his family what he's done or stopping these pranks and agreeing to provide some kind of 'volunteer' school service in reparation. We can address the Butterfingers hex issue equally quietly. Then Leo won't know someone else got punished as well but the pranks and hexing should stop, and the rest of the school will probably realize the issue was dealt with cleanly and efficiently."

"First, though, how do we confirm it was Leo, if it was?"

1 Thad Pierce You are overcomplicating matters 213 Thad Pierce 0 5