Joe Umland
January 16, 2017 1:43 PM
The game begins (tag Madeleine). by Joe Umland
In the end, the most difficult part of the undertaking had been deciding how to get the initial invitation to play to Madeleine Dautin without letting her know it was from one of the Umland boys. Joe had agreed that school owls were probably too easy to trace, they had no access to a post office, and while John was reasonably sure he could figure out how to get ‘round the charms that were supposed to make it impossible to enter the girls’ side of the House, he was far less sure he could successfully do so undetected and even less certain he could come up with a plausible explanation for his presence if he was caught. Leaving a note in the Cascade Hall made some sense, but what if someone else found it first? Few people had permanent seats at the tables and it could cause all kinds of trouble if the wrong person got hold of it.Finally, John had come up with a plan, one which had involved Joe doing simultaneously dull and risky work. When Joe had commented on this, John had grinned and welcomed Joe to the game. This was how Joe found himself sitting in the Cascade Hall, pretending to study and to enjoy his third cup of tea while waiting for the target and hoping she would be alone when she arrived so he wouldn’t have to go through all this nonsense again another morning.
This had looked so much more fun when John had been sloppier and Joe had been on the outside looking in. It could have been worse - John's original plan, before Joe had stripped it down to something workable for him, had involved Joe standing in a corner near one of the waterfalls under a Disillusionment Charm; Joe admitted this would have gotten the note to Madeleine effectively, but getting Joe out unobserved might have been a different story - but this was still not exactly how Joe would have chosen to spend a Saturday morning.
Luckily for him, Madeleine arrived at breakfast by herself this particular morning. Knowing he might not have long at all before someone else joined her, Joe had to force himself not to hurry as he carefully took out both the envelope in his pocket and his wand and tapped the former with the latter. Once it was airborne, he quickly flicked his wand toward the floors and doors, skimming the note away from his position under the table and as close to the floor as possible to minimize the chances of anyone who noticed it realizing it had come from Joe’s exact position, before skimming it along the floor toward Madeleine and then levitating it up to land in front of the Aladren girl.
Dear Miss Dautin, it read in Joanie’s handwriting, the hand among their little merry band of idiots that there was no chance anyone at Sonora had ever seen. She wrote to John, but even if she didn’t type her letters, which Joe imagined she did, Joe had discovered painfully that John was in the habit of hexing all his closable possessions to attack anyone else who tried to access them, so Jax had most likely not rifled through them.
Greetings from the Committee for the Elucidation of Intelligence Resources in Arizona. There had been a long spate of bickering over that; Joe had objected that Madeleine might not even know what ‘elucidation’ meant, and John had pointed out that Joanie had gotten the idea from opening a biography and pointing to the name of one subject’s terrier, but Joanie had prevailed on that one, though Joe still didn’t know what the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night were or why they were important. We have observed the presence of your network in our jurisdiction and congratulate you on remaining hidden from us as long as you did. Nevertheless, we are aware of you now and would like to determine if you and yours might be brought into our organization.
If you are interested in our offer, please describe a feature of the foyer in detail and use a cipher where 11 = A and 10 = Z to encode your description. Joe had thought this sounded frankly bizarre until John explained it was to see how observant, and how dedicated to the boring work of coding, Madeleine and her friends were. Place this in an unmarked envelope and attach it to the underside of one of the stands closest to the eastern Quidditch goalposts by the end of the week. If you accept, you will find further materials and instructions there on Monday.
Regards,
Control.
What to name the spymaster who was a composite of the three of them had been the subject of yet more debate, and they had finally settled on ‘Control’ as something as bland and generic as possible, with no associations to any specific work which John could have ever mentioned liking to anyone. It was at about this point that it had begun to occur to Joe that John and Joanie were possibly even weirder than Joe had realized. He had known they were pretty into their game as kids, but not that they were this into it. They both seemed to find it completely natural to think through everything, even Joanie, who was not used to hiding knowledge of the magical world, or, as far as Joe knew, any other massive secrets, from everyone around her. Joe thought of it again as he took another sip of stone-cold tea, peered at his charms book as he put his wand away, and prepared to lie low for at least ten more minutes before he tried to creep out of the Hall undetected so he could get on with his Saturday morning.
OOC: The biography Joe mentions is Robert K. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra, which mentions the Empress’ disagreeable terrier Eira. The Elucidated Brethren of Ebon Night are a secret society in the Discworld novel Guards! Guards!. This besides ‘Eira’ and ‘Brethren’ both being Chatzy jokes ;). The code goes 11=A, 12=B, 13=C…26=P, 9=Y, 10=Z (not, for those at home, a particularly secure code). To do even worse things to the timeline than I already have, this is before John visits Professor Pye to ask if his roommate is a teenage werewolf.
16
Joe Umland
The game begins (tag Madeleine).
329
Joe Umland
1
5
Madeleine Dautin
February 09, 2017 3:17 PM
This all seems very...suspicious... by Madeleine Dautin
Madeleine was waiting in Cascade Hall for Bastien when a levitating letter landed in front of her. She looked around the room rather suspiciously, curious as to who could have been sending her something like this but she saw no one so instead she cautiously opened it up. It wasn’t a Howler and if it contained poison or something else equally as deadly then it was best to be in public where a professor or older student could rescue her than in the privacy of her dorm room since she didn’t really have privacy there and besides she wasn’t too sure that the Evil Arianna wouldn’t just leave her to suffocate.Dear Miss Dautin,
Greetings from the Committee for the Elucidation of Intelligence Resources in Arizona. We have observed the presence of your network in our jurisdiction and congratulate you on remaining hidden from us as long as you did. Nevertheless, we are aware of you now and would like to determine if you and yours might be brought into our organization.
If you are interested in our offer, please describe a feature of the foyer in detail and use a cipher where 11 = A and 10 = Z to encode your description. Place this in an unmarked envelope and attach it to the underside of one of the stands closest to the eastern Quidditch goalposts by the end of the week. If you accept, you will find further materials and instructions there on Monday.
Regards,
Control.
The contents of the letter, as it seemed, were just as troublesome as poison. Madeleine had never heard of the Committee for the Elucidation of Intelligence Resources in Arizona. Further more why an intelligence agency would want to hire a twelve year old to work with them and then use a boarding school sports stand as the drop off for an acceptance into joining an elite society she didn’t know. She looked around again and stuffed the letter and envelope into her blazer pocket, flouncing out of Cascade Hall with purpose. Bastien could wait, she had research (and a lot of thinking) to do.
10
Madeleine Dautin
This all seems very...suspicious...
340
Madeleine Dautin
0
5