Headmaster Brockert
July 02, 2016 1:10 PM
Returning Feast by Headmaster Brockert
Midterm had passed much as all the others before it , filled with parties where he'd had to be polite and make small talk. Mortimer loathed small talk, it was all so pointless and uninteresting. If he was going to talk to others, he would prefer it to be worth his while, an intellectual discussion. His seven year old granddaughter Topaz was more capable of it than some society adults as far as he was concerned.Now, however, it was time for school to resume and Mortimer couldn't have been happier about it, not that it showed. Of course, Sonora was full of people too, teenagers no less, but he didn't really have to interact with them too much one on one.
Besides, even if he did have to make a few remarks, there was much less to say at the Returning Feast than there was at the Opening Feast. Once the students were settled in, Mortimer cast a quick Sonorus charm on himself and stood. "Welcome back to Sonora. I hope you all had a nice break." He still didn't really care if they did or not, not anymore then he had last year or the year before or the year before that but he said it anyway. "Before we eat, I would like to introduce our new Astronomy professor, Professor Wolf-Starra." Presumably this new addition to staff was somehow connected to the Divinations teacher. "All intermediate students now will have the opportunity take Astronomy as an elective."
With that, Mortimer sat down and the meal began.
Subthreads: A question (tag: Lena) by Clark with Lena
Returning and feasting by Andrew Carey with Arthur Leithan, Andrew
Taking the plunge (Tag Savannah) by Aiden O'Neil with Savannah Brockert
Back at Sonora! by Tess Whittaker with Killian Everett
Green is not my favourite colour. by Abigail De La Garza with Joseph Umland
Back to the daily grind (tag Joella). by Lionel Layne with Joella Curtis
I came in like a wrecking ball (tag Dustin) by Emilia-Louise Scott with Dustin Newell
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Headmaster Brockert
Returning Feast
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Headmaster Brockert
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Abigail De La Garza
July 11, 2016 9:10 AM
Green is not my favourite colour. by Abigail De La Garza
Abigail always enjoyed going home for the holidays and looked forward to the time she got to spend with her parents as well as the large family festivities. She did like being at Sonora too but she was quite often disappointed by her lack of solidified friendships. Abby was in third year now and she would have expected to be part of a particular friendship group at least. That wasn’t to say she didn’t feel she hadn’t made friends at all and there were many people she liked chatting with or working with in class but that wasn’t the same as having a select few students with whom she belonged.Having such people in her school life would also make the midsummer ball a less daunting prospect. Of course, Abby wanted to be asked by one of the boys but she was confident that this would not happen so wasn’t going to worry about it. The only thing was, she didn’t want to be totally alone and therefore needed to find some fellow dateless classmates who would make the night fun. Abby had not been to a great deal of balls in her lifetime and to her this was easily the most significant of the few so she wanted to make sure it would be a happy memory.
Focusing on more current matters, Abby poked despondently at the greenery filling her plate with a fork. In all fairness it looked like a rather nice salad but after the delicious festive meals that Abuelita served up in the midterm break it really didn’t compare. The thirteen year old had always been aware of her size - young kids could be very cruel about that kind of thing - but now she was growing evermore conscious that the excess weight her mother had always assured her was just “puppy fat” was not disappearing as she grew older.
The third year understood that if she wanted to look at least half decent in her ball dress at the end of the year she was going to need to watch her diet carefully. Supposedly she had a fairly slow metabolism which meant that she didn’t burn off calories very quickly. Abby had inherited her father’s heavy frame rather than her mother’s small one which had always made it much harder for her to achieve the high level of gracefulness in her dancing that was expected of her.
“Hi,” she smiled at her neighbour, keen to find some enjoyment in the meal at least and distract herself from these negative thoughts. “Did you have a good midterm?” Abby thought most people enjoyed their breaks, or just said they had to be polite, but it was nice to see them brighten up when they spoke about it. The Teppenpaw doubted she was alone in missing her family whilst at school.
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Abigail De La Garza
Green is not my favourite colour.
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Joseph Umland
July 11, 2016 5:04 PM
Which one is? by Joseph Umland
Joe didn’t normally have much of a problem with mornings, but on his last morning at home, it had taken his mother two tries to wake him up and he had been as silent and grouchy as John when he’d finally stumbled to the kitchen table. Two cups of the builder’s-style tea his brother favored, consumed in rapid succession, had done more to make him sick to his stomach than to wake him up, but they had at least taken the grouchiness away. He’d floated amicably from Point A to Point B as last trunk checks and the border crossing and saying goodbye to his mother in Montana and had dozed off a few times on the wagon – possibly more often than he’d thought, even, as Joe distinctly remembered John directing a long, earnest, rambling lecture about crows at him, but John seemed to think he’d only really looked up from the book he’d brought for the journey long enough to offer Joe some of the vanilla sugar cookies Julian had made for them and some points in the lecture really hadn’t seemed to make a lot of sense even at the time. Joe was not a would-be ornithologist, but he was pretty sure crows did not have a lot of sub-species which were customarily purple.Once they’d returned to Sonora, he had, in the full awareness that it was not a smart thing to do, exchanged only a few now only fuzzily-remembered with other people before lying down to take a nap. After that and a little more caffeine, he felt something approaching human by the time he got to the Returning Feast, but he knew that if he wasn’t actually dying (which, weird as today had been, odds were that he wasn’t), he wasn’t going to sleep a wink tonight and was going to start the whole miserable cycle all over again tomorrow, only this time during classes. He really hoped the teachers didn’t dump any particularly complex new concepts into their laps during classes tomorrow….
He just wished he knew why he’d been so tired today. It wasn’t like him. Nothing to do about it now, though.
Brockert was brief and Joe felt sorry for the new professor – ‘Wolf-Starra’ had to be a difficult name to go through life with even if one didn’t work in a profession which involved regular study of the stars. Still, he guessed it was good the school was getting more subjects for those of them who didn’t have the discipline for independent studies, he guessed. The food didn’t look quite as appetizing as usual after his nap, but since he was hungry and thought it would taste better than it looked once he started eating it, he started serving himself from the trays without even really looking at what he was putting on his plate.
The girl beside him - Abigail, he thought he remembered from last year's classes - spoke to him and Joe smiled. “Pretty good,” he said. And it had been, though by Epiphany, he had been truly unable to understand how most people these days apparently listened to Christmas music for a solid month before Christmas itself. Listening to it for twelve days had sated his need to hear it for the next year just fine. “I’m starting to think I enjoyed it a little too much, actually,” he joked, noticing for the first time that there was food on his plate. At least he, to the mystification of half his siblings, kind of liked eggplant. “I’m not with it today. How was your break?”
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Joseph Umland
Which one is?
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Joseph Umland
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Abigail De La Garza
July 25, 2016 5:09 AM
Purple... or should I say yellow! by Abigail De La Garza
Abby chuckled gently at her housemate’s response to her question. In all honestly she wasn’t sure how much she could claim to be entirely with it herself what with all these old worries haunting her more prominently than ever following the midterm break. But she tried. If she didn’t keep up her smiley appearances and be the happy and joyful person that she’d always seemed, Abby thought it might get harder to ignore the uneasiness she was beginning to feel more frequently on the inside. Her cousin Devonne had faced more than enough issues in her teens that Abby had a good level of awareness of what could happen to her if she wasn’t careful.“My holiday was lovely too,” she smiled at Joe Umland (she was pretty good at putting names to faces and they’d shared classes last term). Now that she was back at school, it was already starting to feel as though it had been a long time since she last saw her family when really it had only been a matter of hours. “I live in Albuquerque so I spent a lot of Christmas there but I also have a lot of family in Mexico who we’re very close with. Basically my Christmas was nonstop family gatherings, which is great fun, but it’s also a bit of a relief to be back,” Abby laughed again to show that she meant nothing unkind against her family by her gladness at being back. Growing up as an only child meant there was only so much of her crazy cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. that she could take in one sitting, even if she was generally a very sociable person.
“I suppose you’re looking forward to the Quidditch match?” Abby smiled. She wasn’t all that interested in playing Quidditch herself but she took an interest in the sport as a spectator and liked to support her house. She’d picked up from conversations over the break that her father’s company ‘Varela Escobas’ were still in the process of planning a line of racing brooms and she couldn’t help wondering if, in a few years, she’d be proudly spotting a few of them flying about the pitch at Sonora. Abby was pleased that Teppenpaw finally had a team all of their own, not having to combine with Crotalus as they had done in the past, and she imagined they would all be pretty excited to be finally playing a match in their yellow robes. “How’s practice been going?”
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Abigail De La Garza
Purple... or should I say yellow!
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Joe
July 26, 2016 8:49 PM
Yellow is a wonderful color. by Joe
Albuquerque was, Joe knew, a city, not an American state. He thought it was in the southwest, somewhere near where they now were. Thus began and ended Joe’s knowledge of Albuquerque. The rest of what Abby said suggested it was closer to Mexico than not, international Apparition being illegal and Mexico definitely being a country (though New Mexico was American, one of those odd bits he'd remembered from his North American geography lessons before Sonora), but that was just conjecture. He smiled and nodded as though he understood more than he did, aware that most people would not be too keen to explain their country to the foreigner and that the rest would probably be keener than he wanted them to be.“I know what you mean,” said Joe. “We only gathered with the, you know, the immediate family this year, we didn’t see anyone else – “ his extended family was scattered across British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and New York; the Ontario ones were his mother’s family, but the rest were all his dad’s. Biological Umlands all seemed to get along fairly well but were not, it seemed, inclined to congregate – “but I’ve got three older brothers and a sister and her boyfriend and a small house. It got…kinda crowded by the end.”
He nodded when Abby asked if he was looking forward to the Quidditch match, hoping that nothing in his expression showed that he was actually nervous about the match. He had played some sports before, but never for the kinds of stakes people played for at Sonora. There were House points on the line, the House honor on the line, a chance at the Championships on the line, and, for him, possibly some of his brother’s respect for him on the line. “Oh, yeah,” he said cheerfully. “Can’t wait.”
She asked how practices were going. “Really well,” he said, finding it easier to be confident this time, because they were. They wouldn’t know for sure how good they were, of course, until they met another team on the field, but he and Gabe and Nat worked well together – the fact he and Gabe were roommates and Gabe and Nat best friends and Joe and Nat certainly with no enmity between them no doubt helped – and as far as he could tell, the others were all pretty darn good at what they did, too. Everyone got along, morale was pretty good, and…”I really think we might have a good chance,” he said. “Will you be coming to the game?”
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Joe
Yellow is a wonderful color.
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