Professor Kijewski
June 17, 2011 5:32 PM
Advance Lesson 1 (6th and 7th years) by Professor Kijewski
It felt very very odd to Kiva that she was standing in the same clearing she had stood at before five years ago. Had it only been that long? It felt like a lifetime ago that she had been a professor here, teaching these students everything that she knew about magical creatures. It sort of felt like she was starting all over again… again. She had become a professor for purely selfish reasons. She had given up being a researcher because her father had been ill and the staff position was open and had been rather convenient. Then, she had left her teaching position when Emery had turned two. It had felt like the right choice. Manfred had been leaving the school and Simon, it just seemed like the right time to end that chapter of her life. And now here she stood… full circle.Kiva had been asked to step in as the Care of Magical Creatures Professor because the school’s last one had to leave suddenly and they hadn’t been able to find a proper replacement yet. Kiva agreed to the request, but it was only temporary. Or, at least, that’s what she kept telling herself. Luckily, she had worked out an agreement with Headmaster Regal that she would work until five during the week and then floo home to be with her son. Since she was not Head of House, there was no real reason she would need to live on school grounds.
Standing here, Kiva had butterflies in her stomach. Such an odd sensation. She could remember having the same feeling her very first day as a teacher. Having been a teacher for approximately seven years, Kiva was rather surprised to find herself in such a state. She didn’t think anyone would remember her. The seventh years had only been second years then, so it was unlikely that they or the sixth years would remember her at all.
That probably wasn’t a bad thing.
She waited patiently in the clearing for the Advance students to join her. Her hair was the same curly drama of brown it had always been, although she kept it as tamed as she possibly could. Her skin as sun bathed and freckled as it was when she had been in her early twenties. Aside from the small wrinkles that were starting to show around her eyes, Kiva hadn’t done much changing physically. She had, however, done quite a bit of changing emotionally and mentally. Hopefully, that showed with this job.
Smiling, Kiva greeted her students, “Hello everyone and welcome to Advance Care of Magical Creatures. You may or may not remember me, but I was your Professor for this class back when you were all just first and second years. It’s been a long time, but hopefully we can all enjoy this class this year and have fun with it.” She decided not to mention the RATS. She remembered all the eye rolls she used to get when she did. Instead of having them worry over them, it was better to let them remember there were some things that they could really love about this class. “Of course, unfortunately today might not be as fun as you would all like.” Kiva advised with an apologetic smile.
“Being advanced, you will all be able to see some of the most dangerous of creatures. Creatures I hope you never come in contact with. That being said, I have to mention the rules. I’m sure you’ve all heard them before though by this point in your education.” She leaned back on the table she always had in the clearing. She probably could have used the shack that the previous professor had created, but she liked the open air. Maybe when it started to get cold out, but for now she’d stay in the fresh air. “I ask that when I am talking that you all refrain from talking. Trust me when I say I would rather have you all enjoying the creatures that I provide to you, but each creature has a set of rules.” Kiva informed them. “That being said, I also ask that you do not talk while your fellow classmate is asking questions. It’s fair to assume if one of you has a question, you all might have a similar question. Other than those two rules, you are free to work in groups, take your robes off, etc.”
She was rather lenient with the rules, but as most of this class was observation, she couldn’t very well tell them absolutely no talking at all times. It seemed like a ridiculous request. Kiva pulled out a deck of cards that she had in her robe pocket. “Today, we will be learning all that we can from these dangerous creatures. You will select a card, take out your text books, and report back to us at the end of the lesson what you’ve learned. You can pair up and help one another as well, but each of you will be doing your own presentation. Nothing fancy, nothing long, just facts.” Kiva explained to them. Ignoring any protests that they might through her way.
“We’ll be studying these creatures individually throughout the year, so we’ll use this first lesson for the knowledge, and the rest of the lessons for experience. Okay, so everyone come up here and grab the cards.” Kiva set the cards on the table and stepped out of the way to let them grab some cards.
On the cards were these various creatures:
Abominable Snowman/Yeti/Bigfoot
Chimera
Griffin
Kappa
Lethifold
Manticore
Nundu
Runespoor
OOC: Feel free to pick whatever one you want to do. I know there is limited knowledge on these, so do the best you can and also feel free use other sources for information. You all know the rules. Remember the longer more detailed posts get more points. Please make sure each post is at least 200 words.
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Professor Kijewski
Advance Lesson 1 (6th and 7th years)
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Professor Kijewski
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5
Edmond Carey
June 18, 2011 7:19 PM
New classes, new beginnings by Edmond Carey
As he joined the rest of the small Advanced Care of Magical Creatures class, it occurred to Edmond that he might very well not be entirely in his right mind.He knew he was being facetious in doing so, but on some level, he almost wondered if it might be true. There was something unnatural about feeling such guilt at the idea of passing one of his professors in the hallway after dropping his or her class that he’d signed up for everything, but that was nothing compared to taking Care of Magical Creatures when he could barely even remember the lady teaching it. Not when it put him up to expecting, right now, to take nine exams. The next highest in the family in recent history was his cousin Anne, who’d done seven and been described by Morgaine as “completely brilliant, but also completely birdy.”
The highest overall, as far as anyone could tell, was Alasdair. Edmond had found that out by accident and had been assuring himself that it meant nothing ever since. He thought Morgaine was at least as smart as he was, and she was definitely close in every area they had in common and ahead of him in some others, so if Alasdair, or somebody, had given her the kind of advantages and encouragement Edmond’s parents had always given him, she would have no doubt done just as much as he was doing and still been a productive, reasonably sane member of society afterward.
When he could help it, though, he still tried not to think about it at all. This, after all, was going to be brilliant. He had been looking forward to Advanced classes for a long time even before things went wrong. Now, with an off year and a few Es behind him, they didn’t just feel like a chance to do more challenging work, but also like a clean slate. He had a complete schedule. He could start over, do things completely right, as though the past had never happened. Over the summer, he had realized, when he thought about it, that it was the first thing to make him genuinely happy since Julia had died.
Professor Kijewski’s assignment for the day did not displease him, either. He had been required to talk about things he read since he learned how to read; if he’d been at home, he would also have had Jane, their parents, and perhaps a tutor looking for any errors or flaws in his thinking, which they would have then taken apart once he was finished speaking, so that he’d do better the next time. Pure reporting was easy, though it did make him wonder if he was being lulled into a sense of false security and would find himself swamped in truly hard work any time now and sunk like an iron ship.
He went with the others to the front to draw a card, and came up with the griffin. “Not bad,” he remarked to himself, then went to find a place to sit. With his robes still on over his suit and tie, everything perfectly formal, no loose ends anywhere, he knew he looked a bit ridiculous sitting on the ground, but that was a phenomenon he’d gotten used to a long time ago. The full ensemble was the way Julia had dressed him for as long as he could remember, and he didn’t feel comfortable in any other clothes. He took out his transfiguration text to have something to bear down on, opened his Creatures text and flipped until he found what he was looking for, and started taking notes.
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Edmond Carey
New classes, new beginnings
143
Edmond Carey
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5
Dana Smythe
June 19, 2011 2:28 PM
Same old, same old. by Dana Smythe
Dana could remember that she'd liked Professor Kijewski. She couldn't remember much about the woman herself, but the feeling that she'd been comfortable in her classes was sufficient to encourage Dana that her last year of studying Care of Magical Creatures at Sonora certainly wouldn't be wrose that the previous years. Besides, she, too, had left Sonora for a few years and then returned (admittedly she hadn't been away as long as the professor) so she felt she maybe had that in common with the professor.The fresh outdoor breeze was exactly what Dana needed as she headed out to the first class of the year. Her flat, sensible black leather shoes were ideal for making her way to the clearing where the class would be held and while the Professor indicated the students were free to remove their robes, Dana was content to keep hers on to cover the slightly less sensible but status-appropriate cream-colored dress with ankle-length swing skirt. It was the fact that it was appropriate that was ikring her. She'd enjoyed her brief rebellion of pink hair at the end of last term, and in the privacy of her sixth year dormitory had even forced herself (with the help of a couple of charms) into some of her old jeans, that she'd been allowed to wear outdoors when she was too young to draw attention. Being back to conforming to expectations was restricting after that period of relative freedom, but she would adjust. She fully intended to enjoy it again one day, perhaps the very day after graduation.
The class today was easy enough, and with the majority of professors no doubt itching to make the seventh years aware of their upcoming exams at every turn, Dana was grateful for the gentle breaking-in she assumed they were being granted. With the rest of the class, she withdrew one of the cards from the deck, and frowned as it speficied 'manticore.' Having been worked into terrfified frenzies in her youth, at Cynthia's assurance that she'd been a bad little girl and so the manticores were coming to devour her, Dana had little love for the creatures. Still, at least she didn't have one to deal with in the flesh (and perhaps the fact that manticores were sometimes used as a threat to get small children to behave would even feature as an anecdote in her presentation).
Settling herself on the ground - proving that keeping her robes on was beneficial - Dana opened her textbook and began to take notes on the appearance of the manticore first. She managed just fine with that, but as the textbook began to explain the exact method by which the creature lured its prey toards it, Dana lost track of what the words meant. She wished just every once in a while that their textbooks could be written in plain English; the apparent aim of this particular passage was to obfuscate its readers, not to educate them. Looking up from her textbook in search of alternative inspiration, Dana realized that she'd taken a seat fairly close to Edmond Carey. She didn't know him personally very well at all, but had heard that he was intelligent (his being in Aladren didn't do anything to damage this perception). If he didn't know what the passage meant then Dana knew it was being purposefully vindictive.
"Excuse me, Mr Carey," she said across the gap between them. "Sorry to interrupt, but I'm having trouble making out a paragraph," she pointed at the offending page in her textbook. "Would you be able to help?"
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Dana Smythe
Same old, same old.
142
Dana Smythe
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5
Edmond
July 03, 2011 12:07 AM
The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same by Edmond
Edmond was jotting down notes about the earliest recorded appearance of a griffin and the speculation that they were magically produced, another part of his mind trying to figure out how to fit that into the presentation in a logical and at least somewhat graceful fashion instead of just as part of a disconnected battery of facts, when he realized someone was speaking to him. Blinking his way out of his book, he found himself looking at Dana Smythe.He knew little about her. She had been out of school for a while, but that wasn’t so much something he’d noticed himself as heard later. She was not the seventh year Pecari prefect, but was instead roommate to Miss Sinclair, who was. She was related to Jethro Smythe, which made her a member of a respectable family; he vaguely remembered Julia suggesting he marry her if her…relation didn’t marry Janey, since the way the Smythes hadn’t had a disownment or major scandal in four generations had impressed his mother deeply. Last year, for some reason, she had possessed pink hair. A disconnected battery of facts. He wasn’t sure they had spoken before, at least more than in passing.
“It’s quite all right,” he said mildly when she apologized for interrupting. “I’ll see if I can make anything out of it….”
He looked the paragraph over. It was a little dense, with an excess of technical terminology. He didn’t like that in a text. It was better when things were presented simply at first, in their basics, and then elaborated on, though he was told he had an excessive idea of what constituted ‘basics.’ He couldn’t understand things without as much detail as he put into them, not without being fundamentally wrong about something, so he’d never really understood what other people meant by that.
“They – I believe it’s saying they wait for groups, then drive them – until there’s no way out, and they are where the manticore can kill them quickly and have a large meal.” Memories flickered unpleasantly, but, thankfully, dissipated. It would be the family problem he owed more than he could really repay. “Very unpleasant. They’re alleged to croon as they eat as well, that may be to draw in more prey… I suppose there would be prey scarcity, since dangerous creatures are typically confined to reservations these days, and even what other animals were there naturally would be driven off by their presence, they’d thin out the populations quickly, and humans are scarce, and I’m sure they’ve found precautions…earmuffs, possibly armor that’s effective against the tail spines…Though I don’t know that for sure. I’ve never thought about dangerous creature keepers very often before.”
He realized he had just reeled through an entire line of speculation that really didn’t pertain directly to the question he had been asked. It was related, and helped with understanding the full issue if he was right, but it wasn’t directly pertinent. Perhaps that was what people meant when they said he was too detail-oriented. He would have to think further on that. “Ah – I’m sorry, most of that wasn’t from your book,” he apologized. “Just…speculation. I really am sorry about that.”
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Edmond
The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same
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Edmond
0
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Dana
July 04, 2011 6:17 AM
It's a paradox by Dana
"That's okay, don't worry about it," Dana said at Edmond's apologies. She didn't mind if he wanted to speculate about her alloted creature - she was fairly sure Professor Kijewski said they could discuss the work together, anyway. "Thank you for helping me out," she said, taking her textbook back. "I get confused with these textbooks sometimes," she didn't mind admitting. "It feels to me like they take twenty words to say what could be said in three and," no, mustn't spend anymore time compaining about school textbooks, "well, thanks, anyway." She hadn't finished with much finesse but at least she hadn't gone into a full-blown complaint."What did you get?" Dana gestured towards Edmond's card before she wrote down some of the things he'd said about manticores. She hadn't initially been sure, when listening to him talk, where the book information had stopped and the speculation had started, but now she knew what the paragraph was aiming to convey she thought she might be able to read it with better understanding; she generally found it was easier to read something when she already knew what it was trying to say. Edmond apparently didn't have the same trouble she did with hard core reading comprehension, but then he was rumoured to be smart, and that's why she'd asked him. Come to that, he was also rumoured to be a little crazy, and Dana wasn't sure what to make of that. She'd seen him slaughter a couple of Quidditch teams last year, and had been incredibly thankful that Pecari hadn't been matched with Aladren, because then she probably would have had to actually play, instead of sit on the sub bench, but that didn't necessarily make him crazy. He was also a Carey, and Dana didn't tend to put much stock in gossip, but the family in general wasn't considered especially stable, particularly Edmond's immediate relatives. She always made a point, however, not to judge people based on the family - if anyone judged her based on Cecily and Amelia's example she wouldn't be impressed, so it was only fair she extended others the same courtesy.
Having organized her own notes a little further, Dana reflected, "I think you must be right about the crooning to lure in further prey. It doesn't make much sense for them to draw attention to themselves otherwise," especially considering they were a rare species these days. Then again, maybe the crooning while they ate was evolutionarily maladaptive, and had been a contributing factor in pushing them closer to extinction. Putting a question mark by this point in her notes, she left it alone for the time being, and instead moved on to the section about herding and parenting habits, where she read something that caused her to make a noise of distaste. "They've been known to eat their young if they are particularly hungry or if the offspring are born underweight or with deficiencies," she explained her earlier utterance. "No wonder you're struggling to exist," she muttered to no-one in particular.
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Dana
It's a paradox
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Dana
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Edmond
July 04, 2011 2:17 PM
It's okay as long as it doesn't get into the architecture by Edmond
Edmond smiled politely when he was thanked. "You're welcome," he said. "Some textbook authors are much better than others. My sister and I hated one of ours so much it ended up being replaced...." He trailed off, realizing his childhood in Virginia was of little interest to anyone but himself and perhaps some significantly closer acquaintances, but grimacing anyway at the memory of that awful thing. He supposed it could teach the virtue of patience to some, but Julia had never quite managed to root out what she'd called an 'excessive tendency toward emotion in the Careys' out of either of them, and though she'd overcome much, at least on the surface, of that habit she'd had when they were small of sometimes being mardy and uncooperative when bored, Janey hadn't been having it. Since Julia had been a fair being, and more interested in them learning than in how they learned no matter what the subject, the world's dullest manual on social graces had gone quickly in favor of something better written and more entertaining."I drew, er, griffins," he said, looking down for a moment at his card and notes. "Terrible enough, sometimes, but at least they don't have human heads like yours." He frowned thoughtfully at his work."I'm not sure if I should include their popularity in family seals in Montreal or not, though."
It was inconvenient at moments like this, but he was reminded of what it was he loved about being a student. Data, facts, information stretched in every direction, in every format imaginable, just waiting to be found as he followed a trail from something else he'd learned. Everything was connected by those trails, which in his occasional poetic moods he thought of as dazzling. And while the decision to follow one path and not another could be difficult, he had the comfort of knowing that it was not a permanent loss; he made notes of it all in the journals and notebooks he kept, so that if he chose, he could come back at any time and begin to follow the line he'd passed up before, perhaps with a slightly different perspective, but basically without consequence. It was, he thought, a much better system than real life, where decisions closed off other opportunities permanently.
"I really can't think of any," he admitted when Dana asked if there might be another reason for manticores to croon besides prey-drawing. Aside from it being, well, a manticore and not really needing a reason to do things, but he doubted that was a valid point to bring up in research. "But would it be a hypnotic effect, or just other creatures coming to investigate the noise? I'd suspect the former, but...." He shrugged. "If that were so, it seems you would hear of more savagings."
He looked up again at Dana'ss sound of disgust, which she explained. "Yes," he said distantly to her aside about their near-extinction. "Apparently most things eliminate deficient offspring - " sometimes, he thought cynically, even wizards, supposedly civilized, gave it a good try, but then, Dana's subjects did have human-like heads - "but I think eating them isn't common. Especially the healthy ones." He rubbed his eyes. "The academic monotone helps with disgust," he added helpfully. "The idea really is revolting."
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Edmond
It's okay as long as it doesn't get into the architecture
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Edmond
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Alison Sinclair
July 07, 2011 4:07 PM
Yeah, that could be bad. by Alison Sinclair
It took about fifteen seconds into the new teacher’s speech for Alison to begin to feel awkward, but she thought it was probably more her fault than the professor’s. Couldn’t really blame Kijewski for the fact that she hadn’t been at Sonora when the rest of the class was in first and second year, and she thought more of her issue was just not knowing why she was here, or at least not liking why she was here.‘Because Dana’s taking it’ and ‘because I’ve got nothing else to do in that time block’ were not good reasons to take a class. ‘Could be interesting,’ another one, was all right, she could deal with that, but the other two…Yeah. She could not be so dull that ‘take a class’ was her idea of what to do with spare time, and as for the other….
She was starting to realize, especially after her run-in with Tessa over the summer, that she’d always had a tendency to follow along with her friends and just not admit that was what she was doing, but after the way it had turned out to backfire on Amy, she could see good reasons to do something about that. She hadn’t been directly involved in the accident, hadn’t even been there at the time and hadn’t known anything about it until Amy told her, but maybe, if she’d ever told Tessa some of the stuff they’d gotten into was stupid…Well, maybe nothing would have changed, it was Tessa, and situation A was not exactly situation B since Dana wasn’t Tessa, but she couldn’t help but think about it. How things might have gone differently, might go one way or another even now. It wasn’t fun.
Happily, therefore, she was distracted by a contradiction in what the professor said. She hoped they were never exposed to creatures she was going to expose them to. Alison knew she meant in the wild, but it still amused her.
When they were told to come draw cards, she went up with the rest and ended up with the chimera. She wondered if the way some books stuck in an extra ‘a’ would count as a fact, but decided it probably did not. There were some tricks that worked in some classes but would just get you a Not Amused look in others, and that, in Care of Magical Creatures, was, she was fairly certain, one that would get her a look that fully reflected the extent to which Professor Kijewski wasn’t entertained if it was presented as anything other than a throwaway opening joke to get the audience’s attention.
She copied down facts from the book for a little while – Greek, ate Dai Llewellyn, national day of mourning in Wales, she thought she could get away with that, Muggle reports of what was up with the heads, habitat creation issues, only one successful slaying ever by some ancient Greek dude who’d promptly died – and then looked up and around. Dana was talking to Edmond Carey. She decided to go over and see what they were talking about.
“I’ll remember that,” she said, catching the last bit of their conversation about manticores as she sat down again. “The academic monotone part.” She didn’t giggle at just saying the words ‘academic monotone,’ but it was close. “I got chimeras, so I’ll probably end up having to use it, too.” She made a face. “Between mine and yours, Dana, I don’t think I’m ever gonna go vacation in Greece.”
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Alison Sinclair
Yeah, that could be bad.
140
Alison Sinclair
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5
Dana
July 16, 2011 9:32 AM
I'm fuzzy on the whole Good/Bad concept. by Dana
There was something about the way that Edmond spoke, something in his tone, maybe, when he said, "Apparently most things eliminate deficient offspring," that put Dana in mind of a different sort of elimination. Perhaps she hadn't jumped to that thought all by herself - maybe Edmond had already been thinking it. He was a Carey, after all, and eliminating deficient offspring would definitely be on their family agenda. Dana's own family tended to grant a little more leeway for potential future development (which was perhaps lucky for Jethro). Nonetheless, if word about her miniature rebellion got too widely circulated she knew there'd be hell to pay. She wouldn't be elimintaed just for coloring her hair, but the notion itself was enough to cause her to suffer an involuntary shudder.Luckily, before she could sink too heavily into her morbid musings, Alison pulled her from the quagmire by joining the conversation with a light-hearted comment about academic monotone. Forcing herself to leave her earlier thoughts behind and focus on what Alison was saying about Chimeras was only successful in that Dana's thoughts were soon occupied elsewhere, but not on chimeras. She was instead feeling peculiarly out-of-depths in holding a conversation with Edmond and Alison at the same time. Edmond was someone with whom she would communicate for two very specific reasons: either academic (as had been the case today) or because they happened to be at some social event together and pass nearby, and it be rude for them to not speak. It wasn't that she had anything against him, she just didn't know him all that well. Alison, on the other hand, had shared a room with Dana for a couple of years, had cut and died her hair, and been there when Dana'd had occasional frustrated outbursts (about school, life, whatever the problem was that day) that were - she liked to believe - invisible to everyone else. Trying to talk to both of them at the same time was pulling on two different parts of her person, and it was unnerving.
"I believe Greece is overrated as a vacation destination," she quipped lightly, not matching Alison's ease at conversation, but pleased with what she had managed.
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Dana
I'm fuzzy on the whole Good/Bad concept.
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Dana
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Edmond
July 20, 2011 12:24 AM
*Offers ethics books* by Edmond
Edmond blinked in surprise at the sight of Alison Sinclair dropping out of nowhere, but smiled uncertainly nevertheless. If he was to be honest, she intimidated him a little, but they had no quarrel with each other that he knew of.“There are…” he began when Greece was discouraged as a tourist destination, then realized they were most likely not interested in the academic merits of the place, and were likely joking as well. “…Disadvantages when it comes to the local wildlife,” he finished instead, not mentioning the positives of the place, or the additional negative of how difficult the language was. He had learned a little academic Greek, as was expected, but thought it was crude and inferior by any standards. Dropped into modern-day Greece, he expected he would find himself in trouble very quickly.
But again, he did not think that would exactly work as a topic of conversation. “Are either of you planning to travel somewhere, once you graduate?” he asked curiously. It had been standard only a hundred years ago for all young men to take a year to travel after finishing school, and while the tradition had waned somewhat, some young men and some young women still did it. Gwenhwyfar had been traveling when she seemed to die, and he knew Robert and his brother both had. Jasper, in fact, had liked it so well that he’d been traveling almost constantly ever since. Maybe they were planning to go on a world tour together, being roommates and all, though he was sure enough Alison, despite her surname, was Muggleborn to think the Smythes might object to that.
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Edmond
*Offers ethics books*
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Edmond
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5
Alison
July 20, 2011 1:50 PM
*Considers fleeing the portable library* by Alison
For a second, Alison was fairly sure Edmond was about to start going on an Aladren discourse about something, but then he rejoined the Land of Normal People and didn’t, much to her relief. Half that House seemed to be living on another planet sometimes, but Edmond struck her as slightly out of it even more often than a lot of his fellows.“I’ve been planning to go on an epic road trip since I was – what – ten?” she said when Edmond asked about travel plans after graduation. Strange to think that was in less than a year. This time next year, she probably wouldn’t be in a school, she’d be…doing something else. Training under someone, or working to pay for a cheap apartment Merlin alone knew where, or maybe even on that trip, though that was less likely if she couldn’t corral someone into going with her. Maybe it was just watching too many police procedurals during the part of summer she was with her parents combined with growing up DoMLE with Uncle Arnold and Aunt Lauren, but the thought of going cross-country as a single woman was…Well, it wasn’t like she wouldn’t do it, if she really felt like it, but company would be good. Not least because boredom on long, blank stretches of highway was almost as unappealing as serial killers.
“I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I’d like to see stuff, though, before I get chained to a desk somewhere. What about you, D?” she asked, looking over at the other girl. She was pretty sure Dana’s family was the type to try pushing someone into housewife-hood as quickly as possible after school, but maybe she’d gotten lucky and had other plans for the next year or few years before all that happened. Alison wasn’t sure if she hoped so for her roommate’s sake or not. On one hand, the thought of being Miss Pretty Housewife was enough to make her feel almost ill, but on the other hand, having to wait knowing it was going to happen eventually did not sound like a good kind of suspense.
Assuming, of course, that Dana didn’t want to get married at seventeen and have a passel of brats by twenty-five. Always possible, though it just hadn’t occurred to her really before. She’d heard often enough that she was a little slow on the uptake sometimes when it came to considering points of view that were really far removed from hers.
16
Alison
*Considers fleeing the portable library*
140
Alison
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5
Dana
July 26, 2011 11:14 AM
*Considers coming with you* by Dana
How they'd progressed from manticores and chimeras to travel plans was not something Dana would be able to explain later if someone were to ask her, and yet the conversation seemed to be flowing seamlessly even with such dramatic topic changes, and certainly far more smoothly than she'd initially anticipated. She was pleased enough by this that she didn't send Edmond an incredulous look when he asked if she'd be traveling. She had dyed her hair pink, after all, it wasn't beyond imagination that she might take off and go traveling after she graduated from Sonora.Unable to avoid the topic since Alison directed the question to her specifically after asserting that she herself intended on seeing a little more of the world, Dana offered the smallest of shrugs. "I suppose I'd have time if I wanted to," she side-stepped the question with unexpected finesse. Money certainly wasn't an issue, and with one wedding occuring at midterm already Dana wouldn't be expected to get married until the following summer at the earliest, which gave her a year to play with, theoretically. She supposed that if she traveled with Lucas or went to stay with one of Ivy's relatives it would all be more acceptable, but she highly doubted she'd be permitted to wander off round the globe on her own, or even with Alison (which might actually be considered to be worse). She wasn't sure she even wanted to. True, different cultures did interest her, but so did a soft bed, hot, running water, and clean clothes. She didn't think that traveling round the worlds' luxury magic hotels was quite the same scenario as whatever Alison was imagining.
"I might stay with extended family in Europe," she elaborated, "but I don't actually have any plans." She'd gently toyed with the idea of going to college, but for the stress it would cause it probably wasn't worth it, and she wasn't academically minded enough for it to make a real difference to her personally. "Do you travel much?" she asked Edmond. She didn't think it appropriate to ask if he had plans to travel after his own graduation, considering he was an eldest son and might not have a choice in the matter, but she didn't want to exclude him entirely.
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Dana
*Considers coming with you*
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Dana
0
5
Edmond
July 26, 2011 9:07 PM
*Sighs and puts books away* Better? by Edmond
Alison was planning something, but didn’t know if it would happen, and Dana might go to Europe. Both sounded entertaining enough, though not options he expected to have. Going off on his own wasn’t too likely, and while he supposed he most likely did have extended relatives somewhere in Britain, they weren’t really family. The twins, a generation below him despite being only a few years younger chronologically because Alasdair had left off having children until his fifties, were the ninth generation of Careys in this country, and what he knew of the family histories indicated that they hadn’t come here on good terms with those they left behind.“Not at all, really,” he said with a self-deprecating smile when Dana asked if he traveled often. “My pa – the people who raised me,” he finished instead, since it was not exactly a secret in pureblood circles that he had not been raised by his biological parents for a number of very good reasons, foremost among which was that Alasdair could have provided all the case studies for a number of psychiatry handbooks, but pureblood circles also didn’t often think well of even formal adoptions, never mind him calling Robert and Julia his parents, “thought I’d get more out of studying.”
Not entirely true, but if Dana Smythe didn’t know that he’d been kept almost entirely isolated from the world outside his family because of the threat Alasdair presented from the time he was six until the time he came to Sonora, he wasn’t going to tell her. “I’ve always hoped to see a bit more of the world after school, though. Perhaps not all at once - just the occasional vacation." Since he was expected to finish his studies as quickly as possible after Sonora and then take the family from his sister, so she could write her slim history and then get on with her life as a Healer, hopefully - Thomas hoped, anyway - becoming obscure instead of causing further scandal.
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*Sighs and puts books away* Better?
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Alison
July 28, 2011 2:03 PM
...Slightly. by Alison
Alison’s left eyebrow twitched upward before she caught it when Edmond caught himself halfway through saying something about his parents and changed it to the people who raised him, but she didn’t say anything about it. She had always thought that kind of thing would be really rare among purebloods, with their preoccupation not only with pure blood but also with their individual family lines, but Merlin knew she was no one to say anything about anyone else having a slightly unconventional family structure.She doubted she was the only person in all of history to have her relationship with her parents actually improve because she ran away from home, since history was a long time and she was pretty much convinced at this point that nothing was really original anymore, but she was the only person like that she’d ever met. Her mother and father hadn’t seemed so much angry at her as hurt, which was what they now claimed they’d been feeling all along in the uncomfortable series of summers and Christmases since she came home. She was a little skeptical about that, really, since some of the fights they’d had had been pretty bad and a lot of the time had been spent simply ignoring the elephant in the living room, but she was willing to accept it in favor of peace.
“The world,” she repeated instead. “That’s one I haven’t thought about tackling yet. I’m still thinking the United States is big.” Which was compared to everything except maybe Russia and China, but compared to the world, it was still pretty smallish. And how did world travel really work, anyway, if a person didn’t speak the language of every country he or she visited? Though, she thought again, that might not be entirely out of the question for Edmond. “Whatever I do is probably going to be a delaying tactic, though,” she admitted with a laugh. “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do with the next hundred and fifty years.” That was, she thought, maybe the one major downside of the extended lifespan magic granted, provided she didn’t get herself killed prematurely somehow. A person either had to be really good at what they did and happy with it, able to master multiple crafts, or be okay with being kind of miserable for a long while. And she had never been great at staying entertained.
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Alison
...Slightly.
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Alison
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