Relaxing. Or trying to (Prefect's Lounge). on Sonora Lounges

Amelia Layne

October 30, 2019 5:30 PM

Relaxing. Or trying to (Prefect's Lounge). by Amelia Layne

Amelia had a headache. A literal, painful-pulsating-pressure-in-her-right-temple headache. She pressed her fingers into it as she gave the password to the prefect's lounge, intensely grateful that there was some compensation for being a prefect and that it took this form. She needed some quiet away from the hustle and bustle of the school.

Why are people such...people?

Realistically, finding out there was someone defacing the stalls in the girls' bathroom was not anything that worthy of worrying over. It was so ambiguous that it was hard to tell who it was even aimed at (though that could have been the point. Even if it was a Thing, though, the odds were low that it would turn out to be a Thing Amelia would have to get involved with - Emerald would deal with it if it somehow turned into a Thing about her and her posse of sisters, and she assumed it would be mostly the problem of Pecari if it was a swipe at Tatiana Vorontsova and her...dress sense) and even if they did figure out who the target was somehow, there were still much worse things happening in the world - or even, in fact, this very school, she thought with an uncomfortable stomach twist. But the whole prefect body had the potential to have to deal with it, and today, that was inexplicably driving her stress level up. Amelia so did not want to get involved in some large-or-small-scale drama of bullying prevention. She would do it if she had to, of course, it was her job and just the right thing to do, but she...really didn't want to. At all. She just wanted to put her head down, get through her exams, and be done with school, but there was drama going around and one challenge left to do and it had her baffled all over again how her cousin had handled being Head Girl that year they had gone several months without any staff. Without adults, Amelia was pretty sure the inmates would have already burned down this asylum, at the rate things were going.

Of course, her inability to solve her latest essay prompt from Professor Brooding was not helping with her outlook on things, she had to admit. Everything always seemed worse when her classes weren't going as smoothly as they might. In the lounge, she hoped she could at least work without that sense that someone was going to ask her for something at any moment, and accordingly, flopped down on a sofa with her books to try again to puzzle something out of them. She quickly realized a problem with this setup, however, and glanced around for a table she could Summon over to hold the books. "Are you using that?" she asked someone near the nearest small table, wand in her hand but still half-reclining where she had flopped.

16 Amelia Layne Relaxing. Or trying to (Prefect's Lounge). 360 1 5

Kir McLeod

October 31, 2019 5:21 PM

Same by Kir McLeod

The prefect lounge was more or less a tranquil place. It had the definite advantage that his sibling was not allowed in there. Nor were several other people who were in no way annoying like Ness was but were still responsibilities. Evelyn, Zara, sort of Nathaniel, a first year girl who seemed to have adopted him and who he had been informed was called Ellie. That last one wasn’t such a problem, actually. She had just one day appeared at the other end of his table in the library, asked if she could sit, and then buried her head in her book without another word to him for the hour she’d sat there. This had subsequently become a habit, only with fewer words. She just sat sometimes. He had got her name from Zara, along with the fact that she was pretty quiet in class too. He figured it was either some protective Teppenpaw headboy vibe he gave off or she fancied him. Anyway, he counted her amongst his ducklings and, whilst he was glad that he was a generally nice person that people went to, he was also glad to sometimes be able to get away from that, if he felt the need to work with fewer interruptions, or just… freak out about his upcoming exams without anyone he was supposed to be a role model to seeing that. After all, in a couple of years, he would be writing them all reassuring owls telling them how they were going to be just fine and not to stress. This would be a deeply hypocritical move, and one that they would be able to call him out on if they knew how stressed he was.

Today, he was sprawled out on (mostly on… a large amount of leg overhung the end) one of the sofas when Amelia walked in. This was another advantage of the prefect lounge - the select band of people who were allowed in here were almost all people who Kir actively liked, or at least felt neutral towards. There was zero chance of running into Winston or Simon in here because they weren’t allowed. He also got to feel a pleasant sense of smugness about how much that must piss both of them off, alongside the absolute assurance that he wasn’t going to have to endure their company. There was a chance of Victor’s, but Kir was pretty sure the last thing Victor wanted was any form of confrontation. The last tête-à-tête they’d had being decidedly interesting…

He glanced up, giving Amelia a polite nod but returning promptly to his book because she looked somewhat like he felt, and he was pretty sure that almost all seventh years were currently running on the rule of heads down, don’t disturb unless something is very on fire. Or you needed a table.

“Not really,” Kir admitted, shifting his backpack and a handful of notes off its surface. He had dumped them there on account of it being a convenient horizontal surface, but he could not be said to be properly using it.

“Uh, you want any help moving it?” he offered, because it seemed impolite not to. “If so, can you stand back? I’ve been tending to overdo everything lately, and I’m not sure that having a coffee table slammed into your kneecaps is super helpful,” he grimaced.

13 Kir McLeod Same 366 0 5

Amelia Layne

November 01, 2019 9:49 AM

I don't think either of us is having fantastic success, though. by Amelia Layne

Overdoing things. That sounded...not fun. If Amelia thought she was losing her grip on her magic, she thought she would just have a total meltdown and end up in the loony bin, because that was the kind of thing that had the potential to bite someone hard in the rear come RATS time. The examiners - stone-hearted automata that they were - were not exactly known for their sympathy for the amount of stress on examinees as they examined the work done in front of them. Truly, Amelia was amazed they found enough sociopaths in the relatively tiny wizarding population to keep the field of educational assessment up and running.

"I think I can get it, thanks," she said, but reconsidered which charm to use. It would look really bad if she now slammed a table into her own kneecaps after refusing the assistance. Instead of Summoning the table over to her sofa, then, she instead levitated and floated it gently across the relatively short distance so it could rest beside her.

"And the first years think everything they learn is useless," she joked. Aladren first years were probably known for that in particular, though not at present - the tiny Aladrens were like dormice so far as she could tell, not much trouble at all. However, this was not always the case and she was glad that they were not like some Aladrens could be, at least not yet. If they became more typical of the species later, well, that was a delight for future prefects and presumably for Professor Wright, not for Amelia Layne. "Though I do wish they could just promise to test us only on - at least only Intermediate up on RATS. We already proved we remember most of the Beginner stuff on CATS, don't you think?"

16 Amelia Layne I don't think either of us is having fantastic success, though. 360 0 5

Kir McLeod

November 02, 2019 12:52 AM

Yeah. No. Not really... by Kir McLeod

Kir really, really appreciated Amelia not making fun of him. He could have avoided the issue by not offering to help her move the table, but that would have felt very impolite. It was generally embarrassing that he was messing up spells but he thought it was pretty common or forgivable with the exam stress. However, with him being a guy, the inherent humour about anything wand related practically wrote itself. Couldn’t keep control. Had an over-enthusiastic wand right now… The worst part being that he wasn’t sure there wasn’t a grain of truth in there. Sure, there was just some nervous energy with the exams, but there was also the fact that he just couldn’t wait for them to be over. That was partly because they were exams and they sucked, but it was also because he couldn’t wait for school to be done, and to get to see Zevalyn more than once a frigging term. And he wondered whether his subconscious was just throwing everything at this process out of impatience and frustration - like the harder he hit this, the sooner it would be over. Or just because he had too much energy right now. Either way, the same root cause could be responsible... He realised he was jiggling his foot and stopped.

“That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it,” Kir agreed, when she mentioned testing only on the later stuff. It seemed unlikely they’d get hit with anything that basic, at least from a spellwork point of view. This was designed to test if they’d been able to specialise and hone their skills in the last two years, after all, “Or assuming that if I crammed it in there for the CATS, it must still be in there somewhere,” he added.

13 Kir McLeod Yeah. No. Not really... 366 0 5

Amelia Layne

November 02, 2019 12:24 PM

Guess we can only try our best. by Amelia Layne

"I hope you're right," said Amelia. "It's fine for Charms, and even Defense, but I cannot remember every single little random incantation we ever learned in Transfiguration, so I worry about not being able to recreate something even from more recently for that exam."

She technically didn't need Transfiguration for what she was doing, which was fantastic, because Transfiguration was hard. If she had been in any other House, she wasn't sure she even would have continued Transfiguration after her CATS. As it was, though, Transfiguration was the class with the most prestige, as far as snobbery over who was smartest went, and so there Amelia had struggled on for two extra years. It was really kind of pathetic, especially since the Charms teacher was Aladren's Head of House and had been preceded by the old Care of Magical Creatures teacher. Shouldn't that have cancelled out some of Transfiguration's mystique? Crotali weren't exactly known for being that smart, were they? Certainly it wasn't impossible for one to have a brain, but it wasn't really their Thing.

"I am so not going to miss Transfiguration," she informed some mix of Kir and the ceiling, making a slight face as she stated the obvious. "I'll miss some stuff around here, I guess, but definitely not that. You?" she asked, now speaking definitely to the other person in the room, even though there was no practical reason to continue conversing instead of going back to studying. Studying would be smart. Talking, though, still seemed preferable somehow.

16 Amelia Layne Guess we can only try our best. 360 0 5