Headmaster Brockert
May 19, 2017 9:23 PM
Returning Feast by Headmaster Brockert
The school year had not started out on a good note. First of all, there was the fact that some students had withdrawn, which could reflect poorly on Sonora as a whole. More importantly though, it meant some badges had had to be reassigned, including Head Boy and after actually interacting with John Umland, Mortimer wasn't sure he was a good option in the least as he was an impudent little twit and how he'd gotten more votes than Tobi Reinhardt-as after Aiden O'Neil withdrew, he'd had to give the badge to the person with the next most votes-the Headmaster had no idea. It was just a testimony to the failure of the system that allowed students to vote on who recieved the honor.Not that it mattered as Mr. Reinhardt had also left school.
Then Professor Perrault had quit abruptly. This annoyed Mortimer to no end. With Professor Pye leaving and Coach Grase on what seemed to be neverending leave, they were already short staffed. In particular, Professor Carter was exceedingly overworked. Of course, she would have been less so had she not insisted on teaching Muggle Studies. Especially because, thanks to Professor Perrault's departure, the Intermediate class had overlapped with Beginner Charms. It didn't take a genius to figure out which one Mortimer thought was more important.
To top that off, the substitute Quidditch Coach had left Professor Carter to officiate the first Quidditch game!
Fortunately, they'd been able to scramble up a couple of substitute professors for the following term. Unfortunately, one of them was his nephew Cory's friend Neal whom Mortimer felt would possibly be a pain in his backside. Despite Neal being older than the other substitute, Daniel Nash, another Sonora graduate as well as some of the other staff members, Mortimer couldn't help but judge him by the company he kept and see him as an overgrown teenager. And Neal was going to be involved in shaping young minds, including Emerald, who was probably smarter and more mature than he was.
Once the students had filed in and sat down, Mortimer stood. "Welcome back everyone, I hope you have all had a good break." He still didn't really care if they did. "Before we begin the feast, I have one announcement to make. Please welcome our new professors, Professor Nash who will be covering Advanced Charms and Advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts and Professor Davison who will be covering Beginner and Intermediate Charms. I trust you will all treat them with the respect befitting their position." Blatant lie, that was. Like Mortimer trusted teenagers to be respectful . "Enjoy your meal." He sat and began his usual dinner of Returning Feast meal of steak and bourbon.
OOC-Permission granted to say Isis insisted on continuing to teach Muggle Studies.
Subthreads: Hey, I'm back again, Sonora. by Substitute Professor Daniel Nash II with Tarquin Reynolds, Aged Librarian
Bah, humbug. by John Umland with Aislinn Nicolls
Of Christmas, coconuts, and Victorian literature. by Joe Umland with Jozua Sparks
But....but(t).... by Scarlett Brockert with Lauren Song
A much needed breather by Zevalyn Ives with Georgia Kirkly
We're going on a friend hunt by Cleo James with Amelia Layne
Tagging Jemima by Owen Brockert with Jemima Wolseithcrafte
Trying something new. by Lily Spencer with Ingrid Wolseithcrafte, Lily
Still Quietly Intrigued by Jen White with Kir McLeod
Needing a favour (tag Ben) by Kyte Collindale with Ben
Returning by Tasha DuBois
Midterm Sucks by Kira Spaulding with Simon Mordue
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Headmaster Brockert
Returning Feast
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Headmaster Brockert
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Joe Umland
May 20, 2017 8:37 PM
Of Christmas, coconuts, and Victorian literature. by Joe Umland
Christmas could have been worse, Joe supposed. Certainly it had been better than he had feared it would be. Mom hadn’t said anything to him about trying to knock some sense into John back in September and had not even really reacted to his absence, though Joe had noticed she looked teary during midnight Mass at Christmas instead of smiling as she usually did – of course there had been readings from the Gospel whose name matched his delinquent brother’s, he’d thought at the time, and thought now, actually. Since she hadn’t actually said anything, though, none of them had, either, and so they had all just gone on with the holiday, trying to ignore the fact that there was an empty seat where one shouldn’t have been and the fact that Mom had actually, for whatever reason, bought John Christmas presents even after everything….When he’d realized she’d done that, Joe had, for one moment, wondered if he had been right to defend his mother’s sanity to Julian. Then he’d thought of his own behavior of a few months earlier – specifically, remembering to tell John that Mom had sent him sweaters while they were in the Headmaster’s office digging themselves an ever deeper hole to kick around in – and had shrugged and let it go. It was the only practical option, particularly when he’d kind of, after a little more reflection, understood, or thought he did. Between Julian having nothing on her mind anymore but her upcoming wedding and John pulling a Heathcliff (…well, except for the part where it was over wanting to marry his adoptive sister. Joe was pretty sure John did not actually want to do that. He also sincerely hoped John wasn’t going to show up again in three years and decide it would be fun to psychologically torture the entire neighborhood into madness and be a major contributing factor to the deaths of half of it), he had been forced to realize, really realize, for the first time that his family was really never going to be the same again. Even if John came home without any particularly psychotic desire to make everyone pay for Julian impulsively doing something John didn’t happen to like, even if John and Julian patched it up one more time…everything that had happened had still happened, and Julian was still leaving them. Logically, Joe knew that wasn’t the right way to put it – Steve and Paul had both moved out, and while Joe had missed them at first, he’d kind of gotten to like having more room and he still saw them all the time and he had never been under the impression they were abandoning him – but emotionally…moving out was one thing, marriage was another. Julian wouldn’t use their family name anymore. There would probably be times she went to William’s family events instead of theirs. It was different, and it made Mom’s behavior, frankly, a lot more understandable to him, even if he couldn’t explain it to Julian. How was Mom supposed to take this abrupt abandonment by two of her children at once?
So Christmas had been less than ideal. It had been their last chance to have a semi-normal one and John had ruined it back in July. It could, however, have been worse. He thought about that very firmly as he entered the Cascade Hall. He had no desire to have another cozy chat with Headmaster Brockert while John admired the man’s collection of torture devices.
He looked over the new temporary Charms teacher with some mild interest, wondering again what on Earth had been in the water last year which had made so many people apparently decide that Arizona wasn’t the place to be all at once, but was quickly distracted from the man by the appearance of the food. He really wanted to skip the meal altogether and just go straight to desserts – he was for some reason craving coconut, really craving it, and there was a decent chance that some kind of ice cream or coconut cream pie or winter cake (coconut, he had discovered, was often a winter flavor in America, or at least the southern half of it; it apparently soured too quickly to be a practical ingredient to work with in many dishes in their miserably hot summertimes) would present him with the chance to address this – but he knew that wasn’t how it worked, so he looked around for something to tide him over.
“Is that fruit salad over there?” he asked a neighbor, indicating one dish. Something fruity might be good to start with, might even hit the same spot which wanted coconuts on the off chance that he could not obtain any real coconut-based products during dessert.
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Joe Umland
Of Christmas, coconuts, and Victorian literature.
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Joe Umland
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Jozua Sparks
May 23, 2017 12:10 PM
Of Christmas, Dueling, and, um, more Dueling by Jozua Sparks
Jozua was normally a pretty decent student. He'd grown up in the town called Aladren after all, and his mom had been from the Sonora House Aladren, so some things just rubbed off. The last two or three weeks before midterm, though? Not so much. He had been super excited about the new year, when he could not only go to a Professional Dueling Tournament (which he got to do every summer for his birthday) but this time he could invite Lily and Finn to watch it with him.Even Christmas had been barely a blip on his radar, though he'd gotten a new chess set, a bunch of cool books, and a pair of new beater gloves (which he'd asked for as a practical request not because he wanted to be Beater any longer than absolutely required).
As the Duel had been just the day before the wagons brought them back to Sonora, his friends caught the wagon back with him and he got to spend the whole ride with them. As such, his social meter was already at full when he arrived at the feast, so he said goodbye to Lily to let her catch up with her Pecari friends and adios to Finn so he could catch up with his other friends, which left Jozua a bit at loose ends about who he should sit with.
He spotted Joe sitting already when he arrived and decided his intermediate classmate and Quidditch teammate was as good an option as any other and took the seat across from him. "Hey," he said, but his arrival was timed such that there wasn't much chance for conversation before the Headmaster began what - for the Headmaster - was a decent sized speech. It was, like, four whole sentences.
Jozua was dismayed to discover Pye was gone. Who was supposed to teach at Dueling Club now? He eyed the Advanced DADA teacher speculatively. It might work, even if the guy was part Charms professor too. Of course, Perrault had been his second choice if Pye had declined, so the new substitute would probably work from either of his subjects' perspectives. But that would require approaching a person who wasn't even one of Jozua's teachers. Maybe a second opinion was in order. Joe was right there, so Jozua asked him, "D'you think that guy would agree to be the Dueling Adviser? The one teaching Advanced classes? Or would Carter be a better one to ask? Substitute you know and all that." Presumably Carter would be taking on their DADA lessons since no Beginner/Intermediate DADA substitute had been specifically mentioned.
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Jozua Sparks
Of Christmas, Dueling, and, um, more Dueling
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Jozua Sparks
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Joe
May 24, 2017 11:53 PM
...Y'know, I get the impression you like dueling. by Joe
Joe had realized there were going to be a lot of headaches until the teachers got themselves sorted out and replaced and whatnot, but the logistics of extracurricular activities were not things he had considered before. After Jozua’s question, he looked between Pye’s replacement and Professor Carter, looking for something that might help him compare their relative virtues and weaknesses for the role Jozua needed one of them to play.Their appearances proved unhelpful, leaving him with only regular reasoning. “Well, this Nash guy...he’s a substitute, too,” said Joe reasonably. “And he probably has more - well, there’s a good chance he knows more about it, if he’s teaching the Advanced classes.” Of course, Professor Carter taught Advanced classes sometimes at need, Joe was pretty sure. Hopefully Jozua was not Aladrenish enough to point this out to Joe now that Joe had noticed it himself. “Plus it might make him feel welcome,” he added.
Joe finished that sentence in his head with so he doesn’t bail as soon as he meets the Advanced classes, deeming this the kind of thought one did not express in Teppenpaw. He had also had to edit the words ‘trait’ and ‘specialization’ from his reasoning for approaching Nash over Professor Carter for the job, at least temporarily. What Julian had said when he first came home - that Joe, besides whatever it was with Joanie, was starting to talk like John, dressing himself in borrowed robes now that John himself wasn’t around for Joe to contrast himself to - had struck a nerve, and struck it hard.
“It can’t hurt to ask anyway,” he concluded. “If he says no, then ask Professor Carter.” It wasn’t as though Professor Carter, anyway, seemed inclined to leave. She had been here for years, taking on something different all the time. She seemed unlikely to be too offended that Jozua offered another job to someone else first. “How was your midterm?” he asked.
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Joe
...Y'know, I get the impression you like dueling.
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Joe
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Jozua Sparks
May 25, 2017 10:21 PM
You picked up on that, did you? by Jozua Sparks
Jozua nodded in agreement that teaching solely Advanced classes suggested a higher base knowledge in the subject, which would probably be a good thing in a person trying to keep a bunch of 11-18 year old students from killing or maiming one another in an extracurricular dueling club. And Joe's second point was worth considering as well, though Jozua felt fairly confident that 'it might make him feel welcome' was not something that would have come up in a discussion with anybody from any other House but Teppenpaw."Good idea, it's always good to have a backup plan," Jozua agreed. He'd kind of been leaning that direction anyway, so having Joe come up with it independently made him feel more confident in that course of action. "Nash first, then Carter."
That settled, the conversation naturally fell to the obvious question for the Returning Feast. Fortunately, he had a more interesting answer this year than 'fine' and he'd actually been hoping, for once, that someone would ask, since his two main friends had been there for the highlight and so had no need to ask him about his break. And he was nigh on near to bursting in his desire to tell someone.
By asking this fairly innocent-seeming question, Joe was unknowingly opening the floodgates. As a rule, Jozua didn't talk much. He was generally a polite person, and he wasn't shy precisely, but he just had a fairly taciturn nature. One of the reasons he and Lily worked so well together was that Lily could carry 5/6-ths of a conversation all by herself.
This was not the case when the topic of dueling arose.
"It was great!" Jozua enthused, his entire person basically glowing as he dropped his club worries and picked up his recent glorious memories. "For Christmas, Dad bought me tickets for myself, and Lily, and Finn to go the New Year Dueling Championships in Aladren! It was so good -" and here he began to speak Duel-ese, which was very similar to how some fervent sports fans talked about Quidditch, with name dropping and stats and signature moves and so forth.
"It was soo good," Jozua breathed out in conclusion two full minutes later. "Best midterm ever. How was yours?" Which wasn't a fair question at all, because, really, who could have done anything that could have remotely compare favorably to his? But he thought it was Joe's turn to talk now and he didn't know what else to ask to shift the conversation back that way.
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Jozua Sparks
You picked up on that, did you?
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Jozua Sparks
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Joe Umland
May 26, 2017 3:46 PM
I am a master of observation. by Joe Umland
Joe nodded his agreement about back-up plans, glad they were thinking similar thoughts. “You know it,” he said.The question about breaks was, by definition, a boring question. Everyone asked it and everyone usually gave the same answers. Goodness knew Joe was planning to give his standard answer when Jozua inevitably passed the conversation-starter back to him - maybe with a few selected details, amusing things, added in to prevent Awkward Silence from falling upon them, but not the truth under any circumstances. He was surprised, then, when Jozua - who he’d never noticed was all that talkative in general - far from giving him a boring answer, launched into a passionate ramble about dueling.
Joe sat back in his chair as he listened, genuinely impressed. He’d known Jozua was running a dueling club even before the other Teppenpaw had asked him about his thoughts on a new advisor, but he had not known the other boy was this into it. This sounded like John talking about rare crows or Mom rare copies of Margery Kempe, with the main difference being that the bits Joe could understand were actually interesting. Joe found this heartening, as it indicated that maybe the Sorting Potion hadn’t been quite broken the year he had consumed some of it.
“Probably not the best midterm ever,” he said when the question was passed back to him, amused. “Not the worst, of course - “ this was what Joe believed the vernacular would classify as a lie; Joe himself just thought of it as a carefully qualified statement, as things could always be worse. This year, it had only felt like the whole family had been hit by a train; since no actual trains and death and such had been involved, he had to acknowledge that Christmas could have been worse - “but it was...pretty normal. My sister won’t shut up about her wedding and my mom wanted to go to church even more often than usual, but we had a good time.” Okay, that was an outright lie. He’d deal with it when he went home for Easter. “You said this tournament was in Aladren? I have to ask what that town’s like.”
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Joe Umland
I am a master of observation.
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Joe Umland
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Jozua
May 26, 2017 9:37 PM
It is an excellent trait to possess by Jozua
Jozua nodded in sympathy when Joe predictably admitted his midterm had lacked the glory and wonder of Jozua's. Not everyone could have The Best Midterm Ever, and Jozua had surely claimed it this year, so that left Joe stuck with his sister's wedding plans and stuff."Congratulations to your sister," he put in politely, as was expected when weddings were mentioned, then he shrugged in response to the question about Aladren. "I grew up there," he explained, "so I don't really know what to compare it to. It's a town where everyone's magical, so we're pretty free with magic, I guess. I mean, almost everybody gets around by broom or Apparition, so everywhere you look, there's someone flying or appearing out of nowhere. And like," he gestured around them toward the waterfalls flowing down the walls of the Hall, "magical folks tend to enjoy flashy but pointless magic to show off how magical a place they have, so there's a fair amount of that going on, too. It's a decent place though, I guess, even if everybody is always in everybody else's business and the old folks call you by your grandfather's name and hold his childhood pranks against you." Jozua reconsidered that last line, and amended, "Though, I guess you wouldn't have that problem if you visited."
"What about you?" he asked, feeling it only fair to turn the question around. "Are you from a small town? And are there muggles about? I was always kind of curious about how that works. I mean . . . they don't have magic. How do they even get to the second stories of shopping plazas without brooms?"
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Jozua
It is an excellent trait to possess
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Jozua
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Joe Umland
May 28, 2017 12:47 PM
Thank you, I quite agree. by Joe Umland
“Hm, probably not,” agreed Joe when Jozua got really specific about a drawback of life in Aladren. “Unless you’ve got immigrants of a certain age from Saskatchewan. My granddad might know them. I doubt it, though. He’s kind of a hermit.”Plus, Joe looked nothing like him, so being called by the same name was unlikely. He supposed he had biological grandparents somewhere in the world who might have pranked people in high school severely enough for a grudge to be carried several generations later, but he had not the slightest idea if any of them had been wizards. That, however, was all sorts of complicated and not something he thought really advisable to have a deep discussion of at the dinner table. For all he knew, it could lead to places neither of them really wanted to go, like realizing they were long-lost cousins and this causing major rifts in both their families. It was unlikely, but at this point, Joe was sort of over assuming that things that were statistically unlikely in general were also unlikely for him. His sister was the Snow White of northwest Calgary and one of the seven dwarfs was dabbling in anti-royalist activities. Joe’s life was weird just by association with those two.
“They have...machines,” he said of Muggles. “It’s all metal and wheels - I don’t know much about it. My brother could tell you more. But that’s how Muggles do things, and yes, there are lots of them where I live. Which is Calgary.” It occurred to him that this might not mean anything to Jozua. “It’s a city in Canada. We don’t live in, you know, apartment buildings or anything - we’re sort of near the edge, and our neighborhood, I think it’s kind of like a town. My mom can kind of drive - that’s, uh, what they call using the machines that take you places - but most of the stuff we use is close enough to walk to, and we know everyone around us. Mom volunteers for a lot of stuff, and we all grew up in a homeschool support group with Muggles.”
Joe took a drink of the milk he’d decided to have with supper tonight. “On one hand, I don’t have to worry about anyone holding stuff Grandpa did against me, but on the other, sometimes you find yourself sneaking books out of the kitchen under your shirt and hiding them in the laundry hamper because the neighbor had an emergency and begged your mom to watch her kid, and then you’re kind of like - what am I even doing? Who thinks it’s normal to sneak books out of the kitchen and hide them in the laundry hamper, you know?.” Joe grinned, amused by it even though it was a genuine complaint of his. “I’m lucky I’ve got three brothers and the sister, because none of us could ever really have friends until school.” He’d once thought John was the exception to this, but...it turned out he wasn’t. “I mean, Mom kept us in as many programs as we could afford so we could learn stuff and get socialized, and she liked having her students ‘round for tea, but everyone knew - Mrs. Umland’s a little bit weird and doesn’t like a lot of company, and that automatically made all five of us weird kids you couldn’t really be friends with, too. So the five of us, we pretty much hang out with each other at home.”
As soon as he said that, he became acutely aware that he was probably still the owner of a tiny bit of fame for being that Teppenpaw who had referred to his brother as the offspring of the formal term for a female dog and tried to hit said brother on the first day of school. Hopefully Jouza would not do what Joe or John would have done, which was at least think a sarcastic remark about how well that seemed to have worked out for Joe’s family. “Do you have brothers or sisters?” he asked, partially out of curiosity, partially to distract from the fact that he really had said more than he thought, in retrospect, he had really wanted to.
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Joe Umland
Thank you, I quite agree.
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Joe Umland
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Jozua Sparks
May 31, 2017 3:27 PM
Continuing to overshare by Jozua Sparks
Jozua twisted his expression into uncertainty and wiggled his hand out in front of him. "We've got immigrants," he admitted. "I know of one from the Netherlands in the form of my mother, but," he shook his head, "you may be out of luck in the Saskatchewan hermit-knowers category."Joe's explanation about wheeled machines did not really make much sense to Jozua, but that may have just been a misunderstanding of Jozua's question. Little involving muggles made much sense to him anyway so he just dismissed the whole idea and stuck with his personal theory that muggles simply didn't have plazas with more than one level of shops. Wheeled machines wouldn't get anybody up to the second level of anything so Joe maybe could not comprehend a shopping plaza with more than one floor and so just told him how they got to the plaza as a whole.
"Ah," Jozua said when Joe stated his origins. Jozua was from Oregon and his family traveled a lot so he knew perfectly well what country Calgary was in, but he supposed not everyone had as good an education in geography as he did so he tried not to hold it against Joe for thinking Jozua needed the clarification.
This was forgotten a moment later when Joe continued talking about the the drawbacks of his own hometown and Jozua's eyebrows beetles together in baffled confusion, "You - uh. Why would you hide a book in a hamper just because you're suddenly babysitting?"
He was missing something, he knew he was missing something important in there, but he could not figure out what it could possibly be.
"Oh-" he said suddenly, getting it. "It was a muggle kid and a magic book." Wow. Yeah. The idea that a muggle- not even a muggleborn, an actual muggle - might knock on his parent's door was entirely anathema to him. The person would have to be obliviated just for stepping on the property nevermind anything they might see inside.
He shook his head, still a bit shocked by the idea of unexpected muggle encounters happening at Joe's home, and said, "No, I'm an only child. And aside from some Dutch parties with my mom's family, where I could beg language barrier excuses, my folks never much worried too much about getting me socialized. The Sparks have a long history of eccentricities and, um, disasters, that date back to the town founding, and nobody has forgiven us for the Angry Sinkhole of 1791 or the Blue Fire of 1816 or the Explosion of 1866 or the Dancing Fires of 1923 or the Laughing Fire of 1982 - that was my aforementioned granddad that people hold against me - so we mostly keep to ourselves whenever possible and try to be invisible." Jozua was quiet a moment, letting that sink in then added, "'Sparks' was an earned surname."
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Jozua Sparks
Continuing to overshare
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Jozua Sparks
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Joe Umland
May 31, 2017 5:03 PM
Continuing to ask questions. by Joe Umland
Jozua’s mother was from the Netherlands*? Well, that was not something he thought one heard every day. Joe knew this was probably not interesting if one was used to it, but he still considered this more interesting than being from Canada, or even being a Canadian whose grandmother was American. The distances involved were considerably smaller in his family, after all. Marrying across a border was a lot more common, he thought, than marrying across an ocean.“I’ll keep that in mind when I pick a place to settle down,” he said. He was not sure if settling in the States was something he would want to do even if it proved possible, but all things were possible, he supposed. A magical town where no-one knew his family did have a certain amount of appeal, at least as an idea, right now, at this point in his life when his family was…really something that was causing him more headaches than happiness. He loved them, of course, would never want to just cut them off and become an American hermit altogether, but…right now, he was kind of glad to have some distance, honestly, even as he was angry with his brother for having a greater degree of the same thing.
Joe had thought he was fairly clear about why the neighbors were sometimes inconvenient to have as well, so he had to stop for a moment to think how to explain it further without saying something which either implied his teammate was stupid or that Joe himself was politically incorrect. Before he had to explain himself further, though, Jozua caught on.
“Yeah, that was our problem. Mrs. Baraheni…might have been kind of freaked out if she’d seen a potions book. Muggles…I mean, it’s not totally different, they have these laboratories that blend things together for them to use for medicines or cleaning product or whatever, then you can buy them in the shops, plus you have some of them who want to use herbs for everything, so that’s even closer to what we do, but…I don’t think they’d see if that way if they just saw one of our books,” concluded Joe. “At least not fast enough to not start yelling a lot and attracting even more attention from the neighbors on the other side and all.”
Joe knew it was rude of him, but he couldn’t help but stare a little as Jozua began listing all the disasters his family was apparently responsible for in the history of Aladren, Oregon. “I am not surprised,” he said when Jozua added that ‘Sparks’ was an earned surname. “What is a laughing fire?” Blue fire he could guess at, dancing fire just sounded like one that moved aggressively (or only attacked dancers, he guessed), but what was a laughing fire? The bit of Joe which felt at home with Aladren the House needed to know what this thing which had apparently been unleashed on Aladren the town had been.
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Joe Umland
Continuing to ask questions.
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Joe Umland
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Jozua
June 01, 2017 11:07 AM
Continuing to answer by Jozua
Jozua nodded in understanding as Joe explained the dangers of hysterical people who didn't slow down to think about things before jumping to wrong conclusions. He might not know any muggle mothers who may randomly drop her muggle child off at his house, but sudden onsets of stupidity and false conclusions were not limited to the muggle parent demographic. "Right," he agreed with sympathy.He was reasonably sure Joe wasn't going to fall victim to the same following Jozua's recitation of his family's, erm, more catastrophic mistakes, but by the look on the older boy's face Jozua wondered if maybe he should have kept those historical footnotes to himself. But Joe just asked for clarification about his grandfather's contribution to the family legacy.
"Um, grandad could tell you more about the exact specifics - this was all before I was born, you know - but as I understood it, he was trying to create a heliopath. I mean, obviously not an actual heliopath creature like in legends, but enchant an bit fire to act like one. It . . . kind of worked a bit too well. So he made this weird little fire fiend sprite thing - not actually sentient, but the next nearest thing - and it ran all over town laughing madly, evading capture, and setting things on fire. They eventually managed to disenchant the thing, but not before it caused a lot of damage. Granddad spent a little time in prison for reckless endangerment, but Inventor's Insurance kept him from going bankrupt paying for all the repairs. His and dad's premiums are both through the roof now, though, which Dad is very bitter about, because he was only an apprentice at the time."
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Jozua
Continuing to answer
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Jozua
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Joe
June 01, 2017 7:04 PM
Contemplating the future. by Joe
“I see your dad’s point,” said Joe, amused, as Jozua continued into his family’s insurance woes. “I’d be mad if my bills went up because John set something on fire.” Not quite the same thing, of course, but going to prison for creating a cackling fire sprite from Hell was pretty much exactly the sort of thing he had expected to happen to John someday even before he had learned about John’s actual, expressed tendency toward social non-compliance.“Still, though,” he added. “That sounds like some impressive magic on your granddad’s part, so there’s that.” Magic going too well could be as bad as magic gone horribly wrong, or even worse in some cases, but Joe still had to have some respect for someone who could make it go that much too well. “Are you planning to stick to the family business?” he asked, partially out of genuine curiosity and partially to tell if he ought to start trying to find spells to fireproof his worldly possessions in case Jozua accidentally incinerated the entire Teppenpaw boys’ wing one of these days.
The future was still a long way off, but Joe had to admit that he had started to think about his own sometimes. He had probably blown any chance he’d ever had of Prefect when he’d lost his composure back in September, but Head Boy and Quidditch captain were still real possibilities, and…well, he wanted to crawl under a rock just imagining the looks on Mom and John’s faces if they could read his mind when he thought of it, but it was possible Julian might be able to nudge a door or two here or there open, too. All of this together meant he’d probably have options when he left here, and next year his CATS would determine some of them, but if (as he assumed he would) he passed all of them, he had no idea what he wanted to do when he grew up. If he didn’t figure it out in the next year, he was going to have problems, because he was not stupid enough to try to take all the RATS.
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Joe
Contemplating the future.
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Joe
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Jozua
June 02, 2017 9:37 AM
Uh-oh, Cleo and Amelia are catching up by Jozua
Jozua laughed, "Well if you're learning your trade from him and he just set the whole town on fire because the spell he was inventing did exactly what it was supposed to do, they might be justified in raising your rates, too. Dad's a bit more sensible, though, so he's mostly upset that they seem to think he'd burn down a town by mistake, too. And, you know, it's expensive, but mom's family is rich so we don't really want for anything. He doesn't like depending on her money though. It's a pride thing.""It was impressive magic," Jozua agreed with conviction. "Granddad's a really powerful wizard and very smart, if lacking in some basic common sense and contingency planning. And he has invented some pretty interesting enchantments. He's best known for an improvement in the floo system that made it easier to hook in new fireplaces to the network."
When asked if he would be an inventor, too, Jozua shrugged. "Well, I was born to the wrong time to be a knight, so my alternate plans failing the invention of a time portal are professional duelist, auror, or maybe jungle explorer, but I'm keeping my options open." He grinned a bit impishly, "It's not for nothing that I am annually the winner of Most Likely to Cause An Explosion for my class in the yearbook. Grandad is very proud." This was said without irony. Grandad was proud. Mom sighed, and Dad shook his head in exasperation, but Granddad was proud of him, and this pleased Jozua.
"What about you?" Jozua asked curiously, "Do you have any vague and glorious ideas for what you're going to do when you graduate?"
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Uh-oh, Cleo and Amelia are catching up
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Joe
June 02, 2017 3:10 PM
Can't allow that to happen. by Joe
Joe was not as touchy about money and politics as some of his siblings were, but he still wasn’t quite sure what he thought of Jozua’s blunt statement that his mother was rich and that high insurance rates were therefore Not Actually A Problem. On one hand, he supposed, it was good that Jozua was honest – fake-modest rich people really were annoying – but on the other…Mom was dreadfully old-fashioned, and intellectually Joe knew this, but he had still been raised to consider it distasteful to actually talk about money when it wasn’t absolutely necessary.He decided to focus on the bit where Jozua was honest, and where his father had some pride. That made him like Julian; his sister had come by a windfall, but she hadn’t stopped trying to support herself as a result. It still, though, had to be nice, just having loads of money to fall back on….
“Cool,” said Joe, ignoring all this in favor of the fact that Jozua’s grandfather was apparently actually the appropriate level of good at some neat-sounding stuff.
Jozua’s future plans made Joe smile more than the comment about being Most Likely To Cause An Explosion. He shrugged when asked about his own glorious future plans. “My mom’s a royalist by politics and a medievalist by training, so I didn’t actually realize until I was about ten that John and I probably weren’t really going to have an opportunity to be knights or two of the Great Explorers,” he said. “We had plans, though. Did you ever hear about that charms facility incident that happened here a few years ago, before our time? My sister was here then, and John honestly believed we were going to find enchanted swords just lying around a motel in Arizona and go rescue her, like in a book.” Joe took a swallow of his milk. “Of course, I believed it, too, but I was…several years younger than he was.” Obviously. Joe was, now that he thought about it, a little embarrassed that he hadn’t been more skeptical a month after his eighth birthday, so he chose not to divulge that he had passed that milestone before gaining an iota of brains. “I haven’t really come up with a good replacement plan, honestly. I need to work on that. I think I'd still like something that lets me travel, though. Might as well use all that atlas-reading I did back then for something, right?”
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Can't allow that to happen.
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Jozua
June 09, 2017 2:00 PM
I think we won by Jozua
Joe had already been moving up out of the 'acquaintance' circle and into solid 'friend' territory, but learning he had also been disappointed to learn Great Explorer and Knight were no longer viable career paths in this day and age sealed it. "We're friends now," he told Joe, to make it official.Of course, then he went and mentioned the Charms Facility Mishap and for a moment he started getting defensive before he realized Joe was talking about a different charms facility and a different mishap and he slumped a bit in relief. "My family had nothing to do with that," he denied with perhaps just a bit too much pleased conviction, like being able to deny involvement was something he didn't get to do nearly often enough when this sort of thing came up, before listening to what Joe was actually trying to tell him.
"Well, enchanted swords aren't exactly common, but they do exist and one might have helped depending on its properties -" he began then realized Joe was trying to suggest believing such things was ridiculous. "I mean, not that a hotel is really a good place to look for one."
"But traveling is good. I want to travel, too. Just the travel, or start with some advanced schooling? I'm still undecided whether I want to set out as an amateur or get formal training in something professional first."
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I think we won
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Joe
June 12, 2017 11:43 AM
Looks like it. Go us! by Joe
Joe was not sure he’d ever had anyone ever announce they were friends before, but he could see the advantages of the approach. He nodded. “Very good,” he said. “We failed knights of the world have to stick together, y’know.”It was, he thought, interesting, talking to someone whose life was entirely conducted on the Other Side. Of course, he did so often enough, but usually about lessons, or with Tasha about places foreign to both of them on both sides of the Line. Looked at from Jozua’s perspective, he supposed John didn’t sound quite as out of touch with reality as Joe thought his brother had been by that point. “Not that one, anyway,” he said. “Sorry – I forgot, it was a Muggle place. Mom’s Muggleborn, so she’s more comfortable there anyway, plus the exchange rate – galleons to dollars – we buy a lot of stuff from the Muggles, we can get more for the same amount of Dad’s money.” Of course, Mom was paid in small amounts Muggle money for the work she did outside their house, but she was in charge of finances for the whole house and so could convert Dad’s galleons to dollars whenever her income wouldn’t cover something or she otherwise saw fit. “Anyway, a magic sword definitely would have been useful on a rescue mission – if, uh, either of us could have figured out how to use it – but someone would have been in deep legal trouble if someone had found a magic sword there.”
John hadn’t thought of that. Probably because, from the timeline Joe had managed to piece together over the past year, by that point he had already started treating the Statute of Secrecy as more of a helpful guideline for people who weren’t John Umland, who could do whatever the heck he liked. On some level, Joe knew this wasn’t fair – eleven-year-olds were not known for their brilliant ability to spot every conceivable flaw in a plan, and any kid raised with a foot in each world and stable footing in neither could have missed the same problem – but he had just remembered that he was still mad at John and therefore not currently inclined to fairness.
“I’ll probably start with more school,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be the only kid in the family without some, and plus – if there are still any adventures out there, I’d rather have them after I learn as much about how to survive them as I can. I don’t think I’ll go all the way through all the degrees, though – I think at that point, it’s more theory and research than anything, plus specializing that much in one field wouldn't be very helpful for the goal.”
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Looks like it. Go us!
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