I'm not sure what you want from me... on Defense Against the Dark Arts

Professor Daniel Nash

June 09, 2017 12:02 PM

Intermediates: Mischief Imagined by Professor Daniel Nash

Daniel knew Sonora was working hard at finding permanent replacement teachers for their vacant positions, but Daniel had kind of been counting on most of the year in Advanced Charms and DADA. He'd even agreed to help out the Dueling club as their instructor, advisor, and referee.

So when he was called to see the Headmaster after only a few weeks, he wasn't really expecting to be relieved of one of his classes, and he definitely hadn't been expecting to see Grayson Wright there, too. But that's what happened. Gray was taking over Charms, leaving Daniel with just one class that had fewer than ten students in it.

Of course, nobody with eyes could miss that Isis Carter had way more than that on her plate.

So after Daniel had finished turning over the Advanced Charms class's progress notes to Gray, and Neal had done the same for the Beginner and Intermediate classes, Daniel waited around until Neal and Gray had left and asked the Headmaster, "So, to avoid a needing to make any changes to my payroll after this, do you want me to take on Intermediate DADA in place of Advanced Charms?"

It was agreed and so here he was.

He looked out over the classroom and realized he should have asked for a raise. With three years' worth of students and it still being a mandatory class, was a much larger group than either of his Advanced classes had been.

"Hello, there," he greeted them, "Some of you may know me from Dueling Club, but for the rest of you, I am Professor Nash. I'll be taking over this class from Professor Carter for the rest of the year, or until a permanent DADA teacher can be found." He was kind of hoping doing so would take at least into the summer, because a substitute gig that lasted only a month or two was not going to impress anybody who looked at his resumé, and he really wasn't feeling up to reviving his job search again so soon.

"Anyway, I understand you started working on a Spirit Creatures unit at the beginning of January, so we will carry on with that. Last time, according to Professor Carter's notes, you finished the section on Banshees. Are there any more questions about that creature before I move on to poltergeists?"

When there were no more questions forthcoming, he began his lesson with a question. "Can anyone tell me a difference between a poltergeist and a ghost?"

"Yes," he confirmed when he got a right answer, "poltergeists can interact with the physical world while ghosts are entirely incorporeal. Anything else?"

"Right," he confirmed the next correct answer, "Ghosts are the spirits of the deceased; poltergeists were never alive. They are spirits of chaos."

"Poltergeist", he said as he wrote it on the board,. "The name comes from German, meaning loud ghost or spirit, as they enjoy slamming doors and otherwise making a racket and disturbing people. Poltergeists can fly, and move through walls as ghosts do, but they can also move things around - manipulate chalk to write rude words, throw things, stick chewing gum in locks, open windows in the middle of winter, and pretty much anything that could cause someone trouble they can and will do. More interestingly though, many jinxes can affect them, whereas all jinxes would go right through a ghost as if it wasn't there. Some scholars believe poltergeists can feel momentary pain, but most everyone agrees they can't actually be injured in any way that lasts.

"They delight in chaos and mischief, and some people believe this is actually how they feed, growing stronger by causing embarrassment and aggravation to the living. Others think they just find it hilarious.

"Poltergeists almost always haunt a specific location - and they seem to prefer places with a lot of adolescents, like schools, though they also enjoy any place that has a lot of chaos associated with it. While it is possible to forcibly remove one from its haunt, the longer it's been there the harder it is to do so. Most places with poltergeists just learn to deal with them."

"Sonora has so far been spared getting one of its own, but it's a relatively young magic school, give it another century. As your class exercise today, though, I want you each to imagine there is a poltergeist here at Sonora. What mischief do you think it would most enjoy doing? Write a short story about some of its exploits. You can brainstorm amongst yourselves if you like. Turn it in before you leave. Your homework this week is reading the chapter on ghosts, which we'll get into next week."

Subthreads:

I'm not sure what you want from me... by Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw with Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

This is not what I was expecting by Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw with Lily Spencer, Pecari

It could be worse. (Tag Choir member) by Angelique Brockert, Crotalus

1 Professor Daniel Nash Intermediates: Mischief Imagined 130 Professor Daniel Nash 1 5

Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw

June 11, 2017 8:47 AM

I'm not sure what you want from me... by Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw

Another new teacher! Raine despaired. It wasn’t like she thought any of her old teachers had particularly glowing impressions of her, but at least they all knew where they stood with each other. Every new teacher had to go through the disappointing realisation that she wasn’t one of the brightest buttons in the box, and that she was unlikely to live up to very many of their expectations. She, in turn, had to worry about how that disappointment would manifest itself… Calling her out in class, in front of everyone, or little red pen marks on her homework? The latter were less publically humiliating but they were permanent (provided she didn’t lose the papers) and sometimes teachers wrote such soul-destroying things. The absolute worst was when they wrote ‘Please try harder,’ when she had already tried as hard as she was able.

She took a seat in the middle, not wanting to attract the troublemaker reputation of those who sat at the back. The middle felt anonymous and safe. Professor Nash seemed less… generally sad and angry than Professor Pye had been. She wasn’t sure what had been wrong with him exactly, but he hadn’t given off a warm and friendly aura, and she had found him more than a little intimidating. She did her best to take notes as Professor Nash spoke. She had been encouraged by Professor Skies at their literacy group to take more responsibility for making her own notes in class, although she hadn’t quite got the hang of sifting down the information and was just trying to scribble everything that was being said, which left her frustrated with her own ineptitude.

She almost missed the class assignment and homework, but managed to catch both, although she wasn’t sure she had heard right… Firstly, their homework was only reading - every homework that was only reading was an absolute blessing to her. She and Kyte were so busy playing catch up with their circus skills to be at the standard their mother wanted by summer, and it was hard enough even fitting in all that training around classes, let alone finding time for homework. Scraping by with responses good enough to avoid detention was stretching her to breaking point. Reading would always have been a blessing because there was the option of just not doing it, except that Ben was helping them out with that by reading to them whilst they practised. It didn’t necessarily stick, but probably no less so than if she was tiredly ploughing through the chapters herself, or just not bothering. Kyte had extended the offer of finishing off their homework altogether after practises, but she already felt she was taking up enough of Ben’s time and energy. Had she found out that this essentially involved Kyte making a bad copy of Ben’s work, she would have had even further reservations, though not enough to actually rat her brother out and risk landing both him and someone who was doing them a favour in trouble. The second thing that seemed too good to be true was that Professor Nash had just asked them to make things up. Or at least, she was pretty sure he had. He had said ‘write a story’ which Raine pretty much only associated with the fiction sense of the word. Maybe there was some academic meaning to it that she didn’t know… Her first three and a half years had been dogged by the professors telling her to stick to the facts (by which they meant a very limited set of information contained in the books they set, rather than anything her mother had taught her growing up), giving angry margin notes to any of her additional insights on chakras or crystal healing, even when they were, in her opinion, extremely relevant to the topic at hand. The staff, she had concluded, were not at all interested in what was in her head, but only in seeing regurgitated versions of the textbooks they set - an exercise which was frustrating in itself, but made even more so by the fact that she frequently struggled to find the vocabulary to put it into her own words, as they were supposed to, and then got told off for copying too heavily from the book. In short, when it came to any form of written work, she had never been able to win.

She scrutinised Professor Nash’s instructions one more time, trying to find the pitfall, and considered checking with her neighbour whether she had the task down correctly, but she worried they would think her stupid for asking. As far as she could see, the only issue for her was the requirement to write the story, rather than tell it. A lot of her family were great at telling stories - it wasn’t a gift she particularly felt she’d picked up, but she had an understanding of how to do it if she had to. She knew that writing wasn’t her strong point, and that some of her ideas were probably going to get lost in the process of putting quill to paper, and trying to remember things like which type of ‘there’ was which and what apostrophes were for.

Shakily, she set her pen to paper, and began. It definitely wasn’t Shakespeare but, if Professor Nash could look past the surface mess, which included not spelling ‘poltergeist’ the same way twice, in spite of it being written on the board, there was a half decent story underneath…

Their once was a mean paltergeist who roomed around the halls of sonora playing tricks. He sneaked up on Raine and Kyte when they were practising their circus tricks and pushed their feet so they missed and fell down. This made them sad, and made them think they wouldnt be ok to be in there familys show in the summer, but really they were doing ok and would get the tricks right when the poltergist stopped pushing them.

She paused because that had been a lot of writing and she realised she was chewing her cuff which she did when she was trying really hard on her words, but which she was pretty sure made her look weird to other people, and made her uniform raggedy, which then got her in trouble. She glanced back at her notes, trying to work out whether she was doing this right.

And he wrote rude words and stuck gum in the locks, she added, noting the examples she’d managed to get out of the lecture, because teachers always seemed to want to hear back what they’d said to you. Maybe that was what they were meant to do? Make a story with his examples? She almost crossed out the whole bit about her and Kyte, fearing now that it was stupid and ‘off topic.’

“A-are you coming up with many of your own examples, or did you mostly use the ones he gave and make it just… a bit more story-ish?” she asked her neighbour, trying to phrase the question in a way that sounded more like she knew what she was doing than she really felt right now - another defence mechanism she’d picked up over the years. She leant over, resting her arm on the table and propping up her chin in a pose that was carefully designed to seem careful and accidental whilst providing the maximum shielding of her inferior and embarrassing classwork from people who might laugh at it. “It’s… it’s kinda different than what teachers usually ask us to do, isn’t it?” she added, annoyed at how she failed to sound entirely casual about that and how it did actually come out more like she was double-checking.

13 Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw I'm not sure what you want from me... 327 Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw 0 5

Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

June 12, 2017 1:13 PM

I'm not sure I'm really helping. by Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

When he’d heard that Professor Nash was taking over Intermediates as well as the Advanced class, Joe’s first thought had been to go ask his brother for the run-down on the guy’s teaching style and classroom policies. It was one thing to see the guy in the dueling club, which Joe had started attending since his conversation at the Feast with Jozua, but quite another to have him as a non-elective teacher, after all. He had actually been walking in the direction of the Aladren table when he’d remembered that he had no idea what kind of reception he could expect if he just walked up to John and started acting as though everything was normal.

They could not, he thought, go on like this, not least because the end of the year was beginning to loom in earnest. Reason told him that John would have to eat crow and come home then – it wasn’t, after all, as though John really had anywhere else to go. Clark might have helped a school friend down on his luck for a few weeks last summer, but there was a world of difference between that and actually agreeing to let said penniless friend who had been out of sight and therefore presumably out of mind for a year move in with him – but then, reason had said John would surely come home at Christmas. Reason had also said that John would go to church on Ash Wednesday, and he hadn’t done that, either. Joe was getting worried, but didn’t know what to do about it. Which was itself a problem, as he had thought of what he had always been taught was the correct answer – prayers and penances, relying on God to fix the problem – but just couldn’t seriously believe that this would actually work….

Not relevant, he told himself firmly as Professor Nash introduced himself to the class. He took that concern and imagined writing it on a blackboard in his head, then erasing it. The traces were still sort of there, he was aware there was a concern, but this exercise was rather helpful for pushing it far enough out of his mental line of sight to allow him to focus more on other things. Today, the other topic was poltergeists.

They were, Joe thought as Professor Nash lectured the class about them, kind of interesting now that he thought about it. What, exactly, was a spirit of chaos? Ghosts pointed vaguely in the direction of the immortality of the soul (he quickly shut down the self-writing chalk’s efforts to re-inscribe a mention of his current religious proto-doubts on his mental blackboard; somewhat relevant, maybe, but not helpful just now), but something that was never alive, yet could not be harmed and was apparently at least somewhat sentient? The ability to annoy someone was, after all, on the manipulation spectrum, and even if the poltergeist was just doing generally annoying stuff, Professor Nash had said it was possible they experienced emotion and did things purely for enjoyment. Plus, Joe was sure he’d read something when he was a kid where one could talk….

The assignment, however, had nothing to do with these questions and Joe doubted it would be a good idea to theorize too much about them in his short story. Including things he couldn’t say for sure were facts might not lose him points, but he had no way of knowing (without asking, anyway, and that was the kind of thing which ended with one’s classmates becoming irritated and making a point of tripping one up on the stairs) that it wouldn’t for sure. Better to focus on doing something vaguely interesting with the facts as he knew them.

There was, he began, then crossed that out, remembering why he preferred artistic projects that let him make something over those which asked him to write something that wasn’t a report. Joe liked to read as much as the next member of his family, but he had never felt that fiction was his strong point in writing. He’d rather write up text for an oral presentation, really. It was five o’clock, he tried again, then decided he didn’t like where that sentence felt like it was going in his head, either. Hopefully he’d have time to make a clean second draft on another sheet of paper.

Five minutes earlier, the Cascade Hall had been clean. It wasn’t a total wreck yet, but Jim thought it was only a matter of time. He had ducked under the table when the poltergeist had started flying across the room throwing an armload of sausage rolls at people at different tables, but some people were probably going to start throwing things back soon.

He was giving this paragraph a critical look-over and absently trying to figure out how to make a plot out of it when Raine asked him about examples. “Pretty different, yeah,” he agreed. “I’ve got a poltergeist trying to start a food fight so far – I know some people might like it, but it would annoy the teachers and plenty of other people, so I figured it would work. I guess I could stick in the part about gum in the locks somehow, though – maybe that slowed the people trying to run out down so they could get hit with something in the back.” That would cause chaos among the Crotalus girls for sure, he imagined, and not an inconsiderable number of the others. “I’m…hoping, anyway, he’s grading on how much chaos we stick in and not the literary quality of these things, because I don’t really know how to make a plot out of it when it can’t really have a conclusion – unless it’s a mystery where the poltergeist frames somebody and they have to prove it wasn’t them? I don’t know if that would be focused enough on the poltergeist, though. What do you think?”

16 Joe Umland, Teppenpaw I'm not sure I'm really helping. 329 Joe Umland, Teppenpaw 0 5

Raine

June 15, 2017 9:59 AM

It's the thought that counts by Raine

“Yours sounds really good,” Raine smiled, as Joe explained his story, praise that was backed up by the amused little smile that had appeared on her face as he described the scene. “I-I used the gum thing too,” she added, “Plus some other stuff that I made up.” She didn’t make any move to elaborate, but this wasn’t particularly unusual for Raine, who tended to venture only short remarks in most conversations. She pondered whether she needed to make more of the gum thing, like Joe seemed to be, but she couldn’t think how without directly copying him, which wouldn’t be good.

“Hmm,” she responded, when Joe asked her about plot, because she’d learnt that it was important to say something to show she was thinking, otherwise people just tended to repeat their questions louder, as if she was zoning out, or more slowly, as if she was stupid. She knew that stories were supposed to go somewhere, and not just be a list of examples… But she wasn’t really sure where the dividing line was. People sometimes just mentioned a random thing that had happened in their day, and people would say things like ‘That’s a funny story,’ so she thought that a poltergeist doing some random things might count as a story, but she wasn’t confident enough of this opinion to venture it to Joe. She realised she was chewing her sleeve again, on the non-paper-shielding arm, and tried to drop her hand back casually by her side.

“That sounds like a good story, but hopefully he’ll be happy if we just give some silly examples,” she ventured, not wanting to put down Joe’s idea, which she found genuinely impressive, but not wanting to make the task seem worryingly complicated for either of them. “I mean, could you even get that done in the time?” she asked. Joe’s story had sounded quite long and complicated.

13 Raine It's the thought that counts 327 Raine 0 5

Joe

June 15, 2017 6:54 PM

Even if I end up making things worse? by Joe

Joe was curious about what the ‘other stuff’ Raine had made up was – she was rather quiet, and so he wondered sometimes what was going on in her head – but didn’t ask. If she’d wanted to say, he assumed she would have, or else would have dropped a broader hint about wanting someone to ask her to elaborate, and so asking might be seen as prying. If she asked him many questions about his, he’d take that as an invitation to discuss content more thoroughly.

After he asked about his general ideas for a plot, Raine fell silent and began chewing on her sleeve. Based on these behaviors, he hypothesized that the other Teppenpaw either was thinking very deeply about what he’d said or else thought it was a bad idea from the top and was thinking very deeply about how to phrase her objections. Instead, though, her comments turned out to be something in the middle of those two extremes, which he thought was, overall, probably for the best.

“Probably not,” he said, looking at his paper again and noting how long it had taken him to scribble an introduction he still wasn’t entirely happy with. Mom had drilled him thoroughly enough on what the skeleton of a story looked like that he could write something acceptable, but he had never really liked creative writing very much because he could never do it well enough to satisfy himself. “Especially since I don’t even know how to frame anyone for anything, and I think I’m probably a lot more…organized…than a spirit of chaos,” he grinned, willing to laugh at himself a little. “Huh. What am I going to do with this…Professor Nash said some people think they can feel pain for a minute, right?” he asked. “Some students work together to hex the poltergeist until it leaves. That’s a resolution to the conflict in the story, right?”

Of course, the story so far was Jim hiding under a table. An intermediate dude hiding under a table was not likely to be super-effective at resolving the conflict in the story. This was probably going to require supporting characters, which meant…”And if I do that, I can stuff the dialogue with…stuff to move it along fast,” he added. Characters telling stuff would be quicker than one character thinking and then doing. It wouldn’t be good literature, of course – one was supposed to show, not tell, Mom insisted on that too even though she was the woman who considered books full of nothing but dead people talking and thinking about philosophy to be good literature and had on occasion mentioned having a degree of affection for both Tolstoy and Tolkien – but if Professor Nash really expected the intermediates to produce deathless prose on the fly in class about poltergeists, he was presumably either drunk or had never been around non-adults before, probably even including the time in the Dark Ages when he himself had presumably been a non-adult.

16 Joe Even if I end up making things worse? 329 Joe 0 5

Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw

June 15, 2017 10:00 PM

This is not what I was expecting by Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw

Jozua was surprised to walk into DADA and see Professor Nash at the front of the room instead of Professor Carter. Maybe she's sick today, he reasoned with himself, not allowing himself to read anything into it. He took his seat and looked attentive, hoping to impress the substitute who was also his club's Dueling Advisor. Nash obviously wasn't a dueler - Jozua had needed to explain far too many finer details to him for that to be the case - but he was willing to help with the club and he clearly had a good repertoire of hexes, jinxes, and blocks, so while he was no Pye, he was worthy of respect, and Jozua wanted to earn the same in return.

When he said he was taking over the Intermediate class, Jozua felt an equal mixture of elation and terror. Elation, obviously, because he felt he had a leg up on the new teacher over most of his classmates, seeing as how he was the president of the Dueling Club that Professor Nash was instructing, and even mentioned in front of everybody. Jozua sat up a little straighter in case anybody looked at him in association with it being talked about.

Terror because it meant the guy was going to have to read his essays and while Jozua wasn't a bad student, he just didn't shine in academic writing the way he did in Dueling. It just got a lot harder to secure the man's respect. Especially if he blew anything up, and he had a reputation to maintain now. This was going to get tricky.

He wasn't sure why he was surprised when the lesson was about poltergeists. That was the next chapter in the Spirit unit they'd been working through, and curriculum consistency was important especially among changing teachers, but somehow he'd expected Professor Nash to launch into a lecture on some new hex.

It was disappointing.

He perked up though when he asked a question Jozua knew the answer to, and his hand shot into the air, eager to show off. "Poltergeists can interact with the material plane," he answered. "Ghosts can't." He was a little put out when Professor Nash accepted his answer but then asked for another answer, too.

He took notes on the rest of the lesson dutifully, not wanting to appear like he wasn't an exemplary student, but feeling a bit resentful about it. He'd done the same for Pye, as Jozua had hoped to impress him, too, but he'd gotten a bit lazy with Professor Carter, and Pye had known him since he was a dumb first year and so the bar hadn't been set as high. Professor Nash only knew him from doing the thing he loved most, so his skills there were far above par.

The lesson though. . . Jozua was totally unprepared for the lesson. Creative writing? In DADA?

He wasn't against creative writing. He loved reading stories, and some of his favorites did feature DADA material creatures in them. He just didn't feel it was an appropriate use of DADA lesson time.

With a heavy sigh of resignation, he pulled out a sheet of parchment and picked up his quill. And drew a complete blank.

He turned to his neighbor and asked, "What's a good poltergeist name?"

1 Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw This is not what I was expecting 348 Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw 0 5

Lily Spencer, Pecari

June 24, 2017 10:05 PM

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? by Lily Spencer, Pecari

They had a new DADA professor today, and though Lily had liked Carter, she didn’t have any strong feelings either here or there. All of the professors were the same to her, and if one was replaced it made little difference to her. The biggest blow in her book was the lack of Quidditch. Right after becoming Pecari’s Seeker, the staff decided to go with unofficial matches, which took all the fun out of the sport. Still, it was nice changing positions here and there as she felt. She just wished she could’ve done a bit more to make Pecari proud that first match knowing that they wouldn’t be playing a second as a team.

Lily took a seat next to Jozua as usual and almost expected him to answer Nash’s question. And he did. Lily smirked at him, giving him the bemused you know-it-all look, knowing full well that this was his area of interest. Lily had yet to find hers, if such a class even existed, but at least she was making decent marks. That’s really all that mattered.

Their classwork was very unexpected, and she looked over at Joz as if to confirm that they were indeed writing in Defense class. If there was anything Lily hated more than Brussels sprouts, piano lessons and the ridiculous pure-blood notions of women’s rights, it was writing. She didn’t mind reading so much. After finding a pamphlet from some group called D.I.S.C.U.S.S., Lily had been fascinated by articles and books about women’s roles in modern day particularly from the points of view of other pure-blood witches. It was some advanced reading, but somehow she managed.

“Zelda. Or Tangina. A wizard might be Gwydion. Ooh, Sir Gwydion. Makes him sound more posh.” This was what she was good at, coming up with names and being creative, not the writing bit. Lily took out her quill and some parchment, but pouted at it with her brows furrowed, acting like the little sister she was. “I loathe writing. Please can we work together? I promise I’ll help loads with the creative story-making bit.”

She didn’t know if Professor Nash would be pleased with their combined composition, but really she didn’t care. If Jozua didn’t agree, however – though she hoped her puppy eyes would work on him – she’d sigh into her chair and return to staring blankly at her parchment, ideas running amuck behind her eyes with no motivation to put them into ink.

40 Lily Spencer, Pecari Is that a good thing or a bad thing? 299 Lily Spencer, Pecari 0 5

Angelique Brockert, Crotalus

June 26, 2017 7:45 PM

It could be worse. (Tag Choir member) by Angelique Brockert, Crotalus

Defense Against the Dark Arts had never been a favorite of Angelique's. It was overall too...athletic and masculine and right now, the best thing she could say about it was that Professor Nash was quite handsome, even though he was doubly inappropriate for her to find attractive. Her parents were rather big on gender roles and so she'd always been taught what girls and women do and what boys and men were supposed to do. It made her glad every day to be a girl because if she was a boy, she'd probably have to play Quidditch!

The thought made her kind of ill. Angelique despised sports, more so now than as a child since they were what was making her an outcast. Which was why she needed the choir. She was so happy that some people had joined and now they were going to perform at the school concert that was coming up. The Crotalus couldn't have been more thrilled about it, they were going to show off that music was important too. Not just sports. Especially given Quidditch had been changed to just pick up games for the remainder of the year due to difficulty getting full teams.

Angelique would have been spitefully glad about it, except that it meant apparently sports were just so important that they couldn't bear to cancel it completely, unless there were the Challenges or some catostrophic event. The Crotalus had to wonder who on the staff was so militant about it, since it certainly wasn't Uncle Mortimer and the real coach had been gone for some time. Professor Carter had done the official match before midterm, despite the fact that Angelique had thought they'd hired a sub specifically for that purpose and Merlin knew that she didn't need more to do.

Or they were pandering to the athletes, because apparently they were more important to-almost- everyone than other students were. Nobody had done the same for the artists and musicians-who'd had to form their own student led groups that didn't have any sort of faculty involved other than Dueling Club- or even the super intelligent or magically talented. Still, an overall lack of interest in the sport was a good thing in Angelique's opinion, so she still felt slightly smug and justified in said feelings. Even if it unfortunately was too great in her own year group and she still didn't fit in.

So from her perspective, that this year's Concert was going to be a club showcase was a definite positive because it gave other activities the respect they deserved. Well, okay, there was one club Angelique would never respect, but when she'd signed up, the only other club that had was Dueling. She rather hoped some other acts did sign up because otherwise the Concert might end up changed and the only way that could be positive was if the choir got to sing more. And even with that, the Crotalus didn't want it to be too long as students might get bored and she never wanted her singing to bore anyone! When you engaged in creative pursuits, you wanted others to love what the product as much as you loved creating it. Not to mention that Angelique was the sort that loved getting attention and didn't want to ever be considered boring in any other way.

Anyway, speaking of creative endeavors, apparently Professor Nash was going to have them write stories. An incredulous look found it's way to her face. She was a singer not a writer! Owen was the writer.

And she couldn't even ask her cousin for help, because it was a lesson that had to be completed in class. Angelique didn't even know if she could complete a short story in that time. Owen put a lot into his creative process. Writing wasn't necessarily something one could do completely on the fly, though she'd seen her cousin be apparently struck with inspiration and spend hours writing. And Owen was good at creative writing! Angelique didn't really think she was. Truth be told, she hadn't tried, beyond a few assignments her childhood tutors had given her. The Crotalus had received good marks on those....because Owen did most of them. Not because she'd asked him to do more than help, but because he got really into them.

Her cousin couldn't save her now though, but maybe someone else could albeit not to the same degree since Angelique didn't think her classmates would do her homework for her. Why should she expect anything of them ?

Still, the fourth year had to look on the bright side. At least she didn't have to do anything athletic and get potentially gross and sweaty and mess up her hair. Angelique turned to her neighbor, one of the people who she knew from choir and therefore had a fairly positive opinion of, and asked "Do you want to work on this together?"

OOC-Assumed based on Chatzy comments and general probabilty that someone from the Intermediate class joined the choir.

11 Angelique Brockert, Crotalus It could be worse. (Tag Choir member) 332 Angelique Brockert, Crotalus 0 5

Raine

July 05, 2017 9:43 AM

I generally trust your intentions by Raine

Raine was pretty sure that most of what Joe said was thinking out loud rather than actually seeking input or opinion from her. Having grown up with Kyte, who struggled to keep any of his many rambling thoughts internal, Raine was well practised at being a mirror for other people's thinking. She smiled when Joe did, in agreement with his own assessment that he was more organised than a spirit of chaos but still incapable of framing anyone. She understood his ideas, and agreed that they'd be a good story, though rather too complicated, but didn't have a lot to contribute in terms of ideas or improvements. And, as Joe continued to work through it himself, she was confident in her assessment that he needed little more from her than nods, smiles and the occasional noise to show that she was listening, all of which she happily provided.

"Sounds good," she nodded, when he seemed to reach a conclusion in his thoughts.

She returned her attention to her own story, rubbing the fabric of her robes between her thumb, on the inside, and the fingers of her hand on the outside. It was staring to get a little thinner from where she'd chewed it and there was the possibility she'd end up with a thumb hole there if she kept fiddling. She knew that technically that was viewed as a bad thing but she liked thumb holes. They were comfortable and comforting.

'Ben was in the libry,' she wrote, deciding that she didn't dare risk writing how he'd been helping them in case Professor Nash disapproved. She didn't want to get Ben in trouble when he was being a good friend. 'The poltergist turned his pages when he wasnt lookin so that it didnt make sence. Then he followd Nevaeh,' Raine paused, wondering what tricks the poltergeist could play here. She was running out of mischievous ideas (contrary to what teachers and policemen and all kinds of other people probably thought about her, she wasn't a trouble maker). To play a trick on Nevaeh too it would have to be something physical or auditory. If the poltergeist pulled faces at her or wrote rude words she just wouldn't know. Which gave her an idea... She glanced at Joe, waiting until he looked like he'd paused in his work before venturing a tentative call for his attention.

"Hey, Joe?" she asked, hoping he wasn't trying to gather his thoughts. "Um... What do you think would happen if people ignored the poltergeist? It likes the attention, right?" Her mom always said that if people were bothering her she should just ignore them, and they'd get bored and go away, although she didn't share this rationale with Joe because it involved explaining that people often teased her, or at least implying they did, and she didn't want Joe to know that. "Do you think if everyone ignored it, it would get bored and leave, and that that could be a.. an ending?" She knew Joe had used a different word than that, a fancier one, but she couldn't remember it.He just hoped he didn't think she, or her idea, we're too stupid. She got the impression that Joe came from the kind of family where being stupid was frowned upon but he'd been nice enough to her during the Peru project that she wasn't as self conscious around him as she might have been otherwise.

13 Raine I generally trust your intentions 327 Raine 0 5

Joe

July 05, 2017 12:02 PM

Only generally? by Joe

Raine seemed to agree that the ideas Joe had were at least not terrible, so he decided to go with them. Girls, he’d always heard, were supposed to be better at telling stories, so if she thought it sounded like something that could be vaguely made to resemble a story, it probably was.

He reread his introduction and bit his lip, trying to figure out how to shoehorn in other characters. Looking up and down his would-be bomb shelter, Jim saw his sister Susan, who was also in ~~their~~ his House, had had the same idea. She looked really silly scrambling around on the floor crawling toward Jim, once she noticed him there after he called her name, with her hair curled and wearing a dress, but desperate times called for desperate measures and great minds thought alike and all that. The second part of that thought ~~got more support~~ ~~became truer~~ was proven when one of the seats at their table suddenly blew aside from someone casting a charm on it and then their brother Tom who was in a different House joined them.

Susan gave Tom a mom-like look. “Thanks for blowing a hole in our fortress wall,” said Susan.

“We need an observation point,” argued Tom. Tom argued with everything.

“Why? All we’re going to see is sausage rolls.”

“See? You’re already behind the times, Su,” said Tom. “Now it’s written something that wouldn’t look nice in print with a squeeze-bottle of ketchup.”

“Does it look any better in ketchup?” asked Susan.

“Aren’t the teachers doing anything?” asked Jim, jumping in before Tom and Susan could really start bickering. Susan thought Tom should listen to her because she was older than him and Tom thought Susan should listen to him because Tom was ~~an Aladren~~ really smart and said he didn’t get emotional even though he really did all the time like an idiot, so Tom and Susan could get really off-topic sometimes arguing.

Joe knew where he wanted to go from there. Tom, having been out in the chaos more recently than Jim and Susan, would report on the school-wide food fight which had just erupted, then Susan would tell Tom he was the genius and so to do something genius-like, whereupon Tom would rattle off a list of facts about poltergeists and then admit that there was nothing one could do about them. Then, just as Susan got really alarmed wondering if they were just going to have to wait it out, Jim would have the bright idea for the three of them to try driving the poltergeist off. Establishing that Susan and Tom bickered a lot even tied in nicely with making the story have a point, as they'd have to work together to solve the problem even though they'd rather trade snarky remarks. The problem was, none of it was going to work.

Problem One: Sure, drive the poltergeist off. That didn’t address the problem of the other students taking advantage of the chaos to work out petty rivalries or whatever with fistfuls of the nearest foodstuffs.

Problem Two: Joe wasn’t entirely sure he was really sticking to the prompt anymore.

Joe looked up, fidgeting with his quill and trying to figure out if he could save the situation, and was glad when Raine distracted him from it with questions. That they were interesting questions helped, but he would have frankly been grateful for ‘so, how is your mother doing’ or similar just now. Whether or not a poltergeist would respond to just being ignored was, though, much better than that.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” he admitted. “I mean – Professor Nash said it’s basically – well, it’s really hard, anyway, to get them to leave forever, but if everyone in a room kind of ignored it, it might go bother someone else instead of them. That would work, I think.”

16 Joe Only generally? 329 Joe 0 5