This is your brain on brooms. on Quidditch Pitch

Amy Fox, Flying Coach Extraordinaire

June 24, 2009 11:41 PM

First Year Flying Lessons by Amy Fox, Flying Coach Extraordinaire

As yet another term began, Amy once again realized that her time had been spread thin, between practices, games and appearances with the team and her responsibilities at Sonora. She had signed on for yet another term; although she had questioned her decision multiple times upon learning that Bulla would not be returning. She knew that she was not wanted here. She knew that there were few students who liked her, not that she truly cared about their feelings, and that most merely enjoyed her presence to poke fun.

After last year's debacle with the visit from the ministry and then that silly little Crotalus play involving herself and Wolfe, she had seriously considered not returning. The play was supposed to be in fun, and she knew that it was partly funny, but her relationship with Wolfe was odd and she really didn't know what to think of it.

On the political front, WAIL had been sending her belittling messages regarding her character. They questioned her sexuality; although she had been publicly seen on dates with Brent McIntosh, another popular Quidditch player and the uncle of one of the students at Sonora.

And her family...well, that was a farce in and of itself. Although she had cleared up her act and gone to work at the school, they still wanted little to do with her. She was an embarrassment, so it would seem, and was still considered the 'black sheep' of the family even though her cousin Eustace had publicly come out of the closet and had taken a Latin lover.

Walking out on to the pitch, Amy glared at the watch that now adorned her wrist, indicating that she was running late for the day's lesson. Robe billowing behind her, Amy marched up to the group of students before coming to a sudden halt. "Alright, as most of you are aware, I'm Coach Fox. I am your Flying Instructor for the course of the year. Although I am aware that a good number of you have had some training in flying, you will all start with the basics."

Raking a hand through her sun kissed, red hair that ended dramatically at her chin, Amy surveyed the group before her. She found it amazing how the students seemed to become smaller as each year passed. "We have precisely one hour to complete this class, and then I have to get on to practice, so please do not interrupt me with silly remarks or by doing anything stupid. Flying is a serious matter and if you do not pay attention you can get hurt." Her eyes darted to a student who seemed intent on whispering to their neighbor, "Is that understood?"

With a sweep of her hand, she indicated the mound of brooms to her right. "Alright, as I stated, we will be starting with the basics. Everyone must participate. If you fail to do so, you will not pass this course. Do not even try to sit out on principle," she stated, her eyes darting to each and every girl in the group.

"I need each of you to come forward and select a broom. Once you have done so, I want y'all to get into a single file line, about an arm distance apart, with your broom on the ground below your wand arm." Stepping back, she waited as the students did as she instructed, noting that some stayed back, having obviously brought their own brooms. Once they had moved into place, Amy accio'd her own specially made broom over, and placed hers on the ground.

"As I am about to demonstrate, you will need to command your broom into your hand, in order to begin flying. You will need to place your wand arm directly over your broom, and, with the word Up!, the broom will- eventually- fly into your hand." Placing her hand over her broom, Amy instructed the broom, "Up!" and the familiar handle leapt easily into her palm.

"Once you have activated your broom, you may, slowly, get on it and hover around the field. Please do not go higher than ten feet above the ground. Also, you may not go faster than you can physically run. If you have any questions, please feel free to come up and ask them." She was about to direct them to begin when she paused for a moment before saying, "I also need to make it clear that no horseplay is permitted. Anyways, you may begin!"

OOC: Alright y'all, please leave a detailed response, a minimum of five paragraphs. Be creative and have fun. I left this lesson more open-ended in order to see what your characters might get in to.

Subthreads:

This is your brain on brooms. by Jose Hernandez with Jethro Smythe

Up, up, and away...or not. by Marissa Stephenson

Playing it safe by Edmond Carey

0 Amy Fox, Flying Coach Extraordinaire First Year Flying Lessons 0 Amy Fox, Flying Coach Extraordinaire 1 5

Jose Hernandez

June 25, 2009 9:24 AM

This is your brain on brooms. by Jose Hernandez

Jose had been looking forward to the flying lessons. He'd been on a broom exactly two times before, and he had a Quidditch try-out coming up in just a few days. He listened to the Coach's instructions with interest, hoping for some extra insight that he hadn't already gotten from Saul's ramblings, but she was keeping things pretty basic, like she'd promised.

That was perfectly O.K. with him. His previous experiences had all both inside an RV, so as not to get spotted by muggles, so he'd had only about five feet of space for forward and backward movement, and a hover height of maybe two feet. Not exactly ideal flying circumstances.

He went to collect a broom from the pile and was impressed by how new they all looked. But then, the one magical broom the California Pierces owned was made almost half a century ago and doubled as their sweeping broom. His hand-me-down falling-apart Converse shoes looked new by comparison.

Picking one that looked really new - so about five or six years old - Jose joined the line of other students in front of the Coach.

Everything she instructed them to do, he'd done before, but he'd never done anything more than she told them to do, so he felt it was a solid introductory lesson for his skill level.

"Up!" he commanded with a hand over his broom, and it leapt right up into his hand, without any of the hesitation the ancient family broom had displayed even for Saul. Grinning with the accomplishment and his misleadingly apparent skill in the flying arts, he mounted the broom and lifted up into a low hover. He maneuvered around slowly, getting used to flying in less cramped quarters and having the option of turning if he wanted to.

Hovering over to one of his classmates who looked to be having a bit of trouble, he grinned encouragingly. "Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it."

1 Jose Hernandez This is your brain on brooms. 149 Jose Hernandez 0 5

Jethro Smythe

June 26, 2009 8:48 AM

Would a brain stay on a broom? by Jethro Smythe

Jethro was not intuitive. He knew that, and he also suspected it was the reason behind the frequent occurance of his being in a room with a group of people who were discussing him as though he weren't right there with them. It was like they were making it easy for him. However this occurrance came about, it had allowed Jethro to believe that the very last thing he should be doing is learning to fly. He did ponder dropping the class right at the off, but the coach made it clear - even to Jethro - that this was not an option.

Thankfully, the class turned out to be one of those where you could complete the assignment just by copying others. Jethro liked that sort of class best - he was least likely to get in some sort of trouble. The other boys and girls in the class went to pick up a broomstick. So Jethro did it, too. The other boys and girls laid their broom on the floor, then got it to obey their command of 'Up.' So Jethro did it, too.

The first problem made itself known when Jethro clambered onto the broom and it started to wobble side to side. He held on tighter, a worried expression almost making its way onto his face. "Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it," a voice said. Jethro didn't think it was in his head - he had heard it with his ears. That meant a person must have said it. He looked up and sure enough there was a person right there.

"I've got the hang of it," Jethro said, and the pun was unintentional because he would never consider that to 'get the hang' of something was to get better at it. "I just haven't got anything else," he confesssed as he rocked atop his broom.

0 Jethro Smythe Would a brain stay on a broom? 146 Jethro Smythe 0 5

Jose Hernandez

June 26, 2009 8:41 PM

No, probably not. It has no hands. by Jose Hernandez

Jose grinned a bit more warmly than before, glad that the other kid was having a sense of humor about his lack of poise on the broom. "Look at all this wide open space you've got," he added with an expansive gesture to the rest of the pitch before realizing that it was really really dumb to take his hand off the broom and quickly brought it back and stablized himself.

Once he stopped the cycle of overcompensation and steadied his hover again, he grinned at the other guy again. "Note to self, keep both hands on the broom."

He shook his head and rolled his eyes at himself, and introduced himself, having forgotten the point that he'd started to make before he'd lost control of his own broom. "Anyway, I'm Jose. Jose Hernandez. I'd offer a hand, but I kinda need it where it is." While he looked as Hispanic as his name sounde, his name was the only thing about him that did sound Spanish. His accent was pure U. S. of A.

1 Jose Hernandez No, probably not. It has no hands. 149 Jose Hernandez 0 5

Marissa Stephenson

July 08, 2009 8:35 PM

Up, up, and away...or not. by Marissa Stephenson

Since it was beyond improbable that eleven-year-old kids at magic school would be required to learn to pilot airplanes, Marissa had felt it was safe to assume flying lessons would be something like a gym class and had dressed appropriately for that. The carefully coordinated and fashionable clothes she had worn to every other class thus far had been swapped out for gray-and-white sweatpants and an old gray Fourth of July t-shirt. Her feet were clad in a new pair of sneakers, and her long brown hair was pulled up in a simple ponytail. Over all of this, Marissa though her robes actually managed to look odder than ever, but there was nothing she could do about that and it was consequently disregarded.

For the most part, anyway. Where she came from, maintaining a good personal appearance at all times was critical. Since her old school had gym uniforms, the only place Marissa had ever worn anything like what she was wearing now was out on a jog with her father and sister.

The flying coach's...show of personality did a good job of keeping Marissa from worrying too much about how badly her current wardrobe suited her. The best term she could think of to describe Amy Fox was 'no-nonsense', and Marissa knew at once that she did not want to be the one who was stupid enough to cause some nonsense. The part about being inattentive leading to personal injury only supported that decision.

There was one part, though, that caught her interest more than the rest of it. The part about no one sitting out on principle, followed by a Look at all the girls. Why would they do that? What principle was Coach Fox talking about? If it had been, say, Biology, she could have seen why the class might be a problem - some people thought it was too immoral to dissect the fetal pigs, and others were strong against Darwinism - but gym class? What was controversial about gym class?

She felt uncomfortably out of the loop. Obviously, she was missing something, and just as obviously, the Coach wasn't going to explain it to her. Her cheeks heated at the awful thought that everyone around her not only knew what it was all about, but that they knew she didn't and were silently mocking her. She reached up to slide the charm on her gold necklace back and forth, but remembered she'd taken it off for class and grabbed her wrist instead. No one knew. They were not making fun of her. It was completely stupid - not to mention insanely egotistical - to act as though she was that important.

As she approached the collection of brooms, Marissa let go of her arm as a matter of necessity. Studying the group of vaguely broom-like objects in front of her, she picked the one with the straightest handle she could find. It was the best she could do; these clearly weren't quite what was to be found in her mother's kitchen, and she had no experience with or exposure to different models of the magical kind.

Once they were all lined up, she looked down at her chosen broom and tried to smother the little voice in the back of her head that told her this is stupid. This was not what she was used to, not by any stretch of imagination on Earth, but it was not stupid. It was a cultural experience or a different world's rules or something like that. Sure. Cultural alien gym class worked.

'Wand hand' was the term the wandmaker had used to refer to the hand she wrote with, so Marissa extended her right hand over the broom. It looked mighty earthbound to her. Since a figure of authority had told her magic would cancel out the laws of gravity, though, she felt she ought to believe it - or at least act as if she did. "Up!" she said firmly.

Nothing happened.

She felt a shiver of embarrassment run up her spine as her stomach clenched uncomfortably, but she forced herself not to pay attention to that. Plenty of other people seemed to not be getting it straight off, either. It was okay. She'd only just started magic school; no one was going to expect her to be perfect right off the bat. She just had to start over and be firmer this time. "Up!" she tried again.

Still nothing.

Four tries later, she noticed her voice was starting to get shrill and frustrated. She felt like she was about to start crying, which would be mortifying. She was eleven. That was far too old to cry in public, or even in front of relatives most of the time. She had to calm down. Marissa pressed her hands hard against her eyes to stop them from stinging, put down the urge to groan aloud, and took deep breaths.

Deep breaths. That was the key. That was what Miss Melanie had taught her to do before she took tests. That would get her calm enough to try again. When she tried again, it was all going to go well. She was a Stephenson, and that meant she always did what she set out to do. Even the two of her seven cousins who'd turned out good for nothing except the family gossip line were first-rate at what (stupid) things they did, and she was far better than Michelle or Jesse.

Letting out her last deep breath, she lowered her hands and squared her shoulders. Unfortunately, a quick glance to the side confirmed that her little mini-meltdown had attracted a witness. "Hi," she said, with a slightly embarrassed smile. It wouldn't do to take it all too seriously. "The broom and I had a misunderstanding. I'm better now."

16 Marissa Stephenson Up, up, and away...or not. 147 Marissa Stephenson 0 5

Edmond Carey

July 21, 2009 12:37 AM

Playing it safe by Edmond Carey

In some ways, Edmond had an advantage over his fellow first years. He had, after all, spent all of the life that he had any recollection of studying magical theory, and Robert had taught him the basics of defensive spellwork in secret over the past two years. Edmond had always suspected Julia knew, just because Julia always knew, but she had kept her thoughts on that to herself.

She had been more vocal about how foolish it was of Robert to teach Edmond how to play Quidditch. That served no real purpose, and it was against the spirit of Thomas's wishes. For once, however, Robert had opposed his wife, and Edmond was grateful. What sort of self-respecting wizard couldn't tell one end of a broomstick from the other? It was as far from normal as not knowing how to duel. Admittedly, he was immune to challenges and didn't get to fly very often when he was at home, but still. He could.

For this reason, flying lessons were the one variety he had a fair amount of confidence entering. He knew the coach was an apparently disgraced member of the Florida Foxes - Julia had been very thorough in reviewing the staff - and not the most pleasant of people, but Edmond thought it would be all right if he kept his mouth shut and did as he was told very well. She could hardly let any thoughts she had on his name affect his grade. It would be improper.

Of course, if propriety wasn't supposed to be her forte... Edmond decided to stop before he made his head hurt.

She was more...forthright than he thought was normal for a teacher, but Edmond could deal with forthright. It was not necessarily a bad thing, getting to the point. He'd had an awful lot of well-wishers whose well-wishes he wished they had kept to themselves, or at least written out the entire speech and given him the abridged version orally.

He was one of the students who already had his own broom to use, which gave him a minute to just study Coach Fox and, a bit more pertinently, his classmates. Nothing stood out. He had never been that good at observation games, and how much Robert tried to pound them into his skull had little effect on his abilities. This, of course, did nothing to end their efforts at improving him; observation was important for one of the patriarchs, which meant he had to master it at least by the time his father died.

Once everyone was back in order, he had no trouble getting his broom to come to him. Since he had much more difficulty with estimations, though, figuring out how high ten feet up was was the real challenge. Finally, Edmond decided to just play it very, very safe and go about as high as most of his classmates were tall - which wasn't really far enough up to be considered flying, but better that than the Wrath of Fox in their first lesson. Since he also wasn't too sure on how fast he could run - it just wasn't something he did a lot - he played that safe, too.

Hopefully, all this over-the-top rule adherence wasn't just making him look like a moron. Because that would be highly, highly unpleasant.

0 Edmond Carey Playing it safe 143 Edmond Carey 0 5