Jessica Hayles
October 29, 2019 9:16 PM
I really shouldn't be surprised (At the Teppenpaw Table) by Jessica Hayles
OOC: Occurs at the same time as the Zara and Felipe thread below. BIC:Jessica still wasn't exactly sure when things had gone wrong, or why, but clearly, they had. She shouldn't, she supposed, have lost her temper over the perceived insult to her parents, but....
But nothing. Zara might think she was All That and a Sack of Taters, but that didn't make her thought correct. Jessica did not think she was All That or a Sack of Taters (potatoes, at least, were unpretentious and pleasant to spend time with. Mommy limited the number of them she could have because they would make her fat, but Jessica enjoyed a number of dishes with potato in, including just...potatoes). Jessica also did not think that anyone had the right - regardless of the degree of That they were or their relationship to tubers - to insult her parents when she was entirely confident that person had never so much said as exchanged a hello with them. Come to that, nobody had the right to talk to her the way she had just been spoken to, either. She squeezed her arm until it hurt, trying to battle down the urge to burst into angry tears and then the urge to stalk out of the library after the other girl and ask her just what the heck her problem was, directly, the way she imagined Mara would have done it.
Since she was not Mara, however, she sat at the table until she was quite sure she was composed, then got up, flipping her hair dramatically over her shoulder, and went down to dinner, intending to pretend this whole thing had never happened. Once she reached the Cascade Hall, however, she was presented with evidence that she wasn't going to be able to do that - specifically, Zara all tete-a-tete with Jessica's only real friend in this dump.
Of course she did that. Jessica knew it was probably the wrong thing to do, but she rolled her eyes before she even knew she was going to do it. Irritated, she made a point of walking right past them and then past the Crotalus table entirely, instead going over to the Teppenpaw table.
Two could play this game, she thought. She had no intention of whining at Teppenpaws about what a stuck up snot their housemate was, but she wouldn't mind at all if she made Zara think that was what was going on here. Make her sweat a bit. However, property rights were things she had been taught since birth to regard as second only to the Ten Commandments in terms of authority, and she didn't have rights here, so she hesitated slightly and then, for the second time this afternoon, tried to be polite.
"May I sit?" she asked the person closest to her.
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Jessica Hayles
I really shouldn't be surprised (At the Teppenpaw Table)
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
November 02, 2019 12:10 AM
Ja, that is fine! by Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
Johana Leonie was enjoying her meal, enjoying her day, and enjoying life when a new person joined the moment. They were in the same year and thus in the same classes, so Jessica Hayles' face was familiar enough for Johana Leonie not to need a re-introduction. Still, the girl was not a Teppenpaw, which made it unusual to see her here. The thought crossed Johana Leonie's mind that either something was horribly wrong - in which case she would like to help - or that Jessica was just a friendly, outgoing person - in which case she would like to be friends. Either way, conversation was going to be a good thing, so she nodded, accepting the request to take a seat."Is your day good?" Johana Leonie asked, proud that her English had at least improved to the point of reasonably big small talk. It wouldn't get her much further than that unless they wanted to talk about academics, as those were the only two things she had really used English for so far, but it was a start. Besides, she could mimic sentences pretty well and she heard people ask about each other's days all the time. "You want be Teppenpaw today?" she added with a joking tone, hoping it transferred well enough into the foreign language.
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
Ja, that is fine!
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Jessica Hayles
November 02, 2019 12:06 PM
Thank goodness. by Jessica Hayles
Jessica couldn't help but smile in relief when she got a positive response. "Thank you," she said politely, and then pulled out a chair and sat down. "Or - danke," she added with an extra smile, remembering that Johana Leonie was one of the students in their year who spoke what she now recognized as German more than English.She wasn't too optimistic yet - Zara had also been polite enough to her at first - but Jessica had a vague inkling of an idea here. Hilda seemed to like that Jessica was willing to try to stumble through a few words of German here and there; she and Johana Leonie were both outsiders because of their foreignness, just as Felipe was, and sort of vaguely as Jessica was, since she was as culturally removed from wizards as Germans were from Americans. Maybe, just maybe, there was a possibility of friendship here. Jessica would like a full-blown faction which had no use for that rhymes-with-witch currently probably talking trash about Jessica behind her back - wasn't that how things worked in girl world? If they came for you, you got a group together and came after them ten times harder? - but she wasn't enough of an optimist to really hope for that. At the moment, most of what she hoped for was just making Zara paranoid about what Jessica might be saying to her roommate. But maybe at least she could...something for the longer term. It would be nice to have another girl to talk to, even if they barely spoke the same language.
"Ich habe keine Deutsch," she added apologetically. "Sehr...not much." Why. Could. She. Never. Remember. The word. For little? "Klein? Sehr klein? I'm sorry," she said, giving up with a chuckle and lapsing into English. "I'm on a team with Hilda," she explained, speaking slowly and clearly, knowing the two other girls were friends. "I tried to learn a few words of Deutsch while I was at home this Christmas. I'll stop now."
Accordingly, she suppressed the urge to say naturlich when asked if she wanted to be a Teppenpaw today. "Of course!" she said, just as humorously. "You guys are supposed to be the greatest! Plus it's fun to change things up sometimes, yeah? Especially since there are not a lot of people in Crotalus. Only two of us in my year. Do you like having a roommate?"
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Jessica Hayles
Thank goodness.
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
November 04, 2019 7:17 PM
It is a good! by Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
Johana Leonie wasn't sure what it was about her that made her classmates consistently try for German when they interacted. She was always a little torn because on one hand, it was helpful and really nice, but on the other, it was kind of a harsh reminder that she wasn't doing well enough in English for people to just use that language. She supposed that if she knew more languages, she would probably do the same thing for other people, and she would do it to be nice. Jessica was probably trying to be nice too then."That is not bad," Johana Leonie smiled. "Why learn you Deutsch?" she asked, perking up at the thought that maybe Jessica had friends or family who spoke German.
The girl spoke faster when she was excited, although she did seem to be trying to slow down. It was another Catch-22 for Johana Leonie and she decided to appreciate it at face value. She wasn't entirely sure of everything Jessica was saying but she seemed happier about it and it was in response to Johana Leonie making a joke, so maybe that meant Johana Leonie's joke was okay. That was good. Joking in English was harder than just using it because she wasn't ever sure if she was actually being funny, so it was nice to have some confirmation. She kept up her smile, happy to have a happy response. She got the words "Teppenpaw," "Crotalus," and "people," which was a big clue for figuring out Jessica's question.
"I like roommaten." Truth be told, she didn't know one hardly as well as the other, but Zara had always been nice to her and it was nice to have someone there. She was definitely closer to Hilda than Zara, but it was a little bit like what she thought it might be like to have a sister; it wasn't like she and her sister would always do everything together, but they would live together. It was hard to tell since she and Friederike Albert were so close, but she thought she might have liked to have a sister too. "Have you any roommates?"
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
It is a good!
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Jessica Hayles
November 04, 2019 7:38 PM
I agree! by Jessica Hayles
Jessica was pleased to hear that she had not sounded terribly horrible - or at least that there was someone in Teppenpaw who was actually polite enough not to just be rude to someone she barely knew. That was going to keep annoying her for a while, she thought; she had always been taught that politeness was one of the most important things there was, to the point she felt bad now about finally allowing the edge of her temper to show at the very end with Zara. How anyone could just be so tasteless as to just blab an opinion of someone else's parents....No. That conversation was over. Gone. Now she was having a different conversation, with someone who wasn't nasty for no reason.
"I like languages," she said. "And I got the idea to try German because I'm on the team with Hilda Hexenmeister," she added, deciding not to mention that part of her motivation had been the vague annoyance she always felt at seeing something she couldn't understand. She knew it was silly - if she tried to learn every language she ever heard someone speak that she didn't understand, she'd find herself in a hopeless position very soon - but German was at least something potentially useful for her. A lot of cosmetics were made in Germany these days. But she was definitely not mentioning business now, both because it had gone so poorly before and because she was not sure how well she and Johana Leonie would be able to communicate about such a complex topic. "You and Hilda are friends, right?" she checked, though she was already confident of this fact.
She filed away, too, the fact that Johana Leonie was apparently not as detail-oriented as she. Of course, if she had been shipped off to school in Germany, she would have probably been too busy just trying to keep up to notice many things about people, too, but it was still a thing. A mostly useless piece of information, but the more pieces of information she had, whatever the quality, the less likely she was to make another mistake.
"I don't have any," she said, shaking her head 'no' as she answered the question to help out. "It's just me. Which is okay. I have my own room at home, too. This is my first boarding school." She enunciated carefully on the last bit, aware that a Georgia accent could too quickly turn 'boarding' into 'boarin' if she didn't pay attention. "Where are you from?" she asked, aware there were lots of places that spoke German other than Germany itself.
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Jessica Hayles
I agree!
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