Mortimer Brockert

December 06, 2019 1:29 PM
Another year was beginning and it was time for another Opening Feast. Once everyone seemed to be in attendance, Mortimer placed a Sonorus charm on himself and began to speak. "Welcome to Sonora for the new first years and welcome back for all older students. First years, you should have receieved a blank badge at the end of Orientation." At least they hadn't gotten it when they first got there, some were liable to lose it. "You will dunk the badge in the Sorting Potion and it will turn the color representing your house which are blue for Aladren, yellow for Teppenpaw, red for Crotalus, and brown for Pecari. Afterwards, you may join your house table."

After the first years had been settled, Mortimer continued."Would Connor Priory and Ivy Brockert please come up and get your Head Student badges." He continued. "In addition I'd like to call up Heinrich Hexenmeister, Nathaniel Mordue, Caitlin Pierce and Michael DiCaprio to receive their prefect badges. Congratulations." Mortimer really really hoped that Mr. Tate's mother and Uncle Clifford did not give him a hard time about the Pecari not getting prefect. And that Mr. Mordue was over his mental breakdown.

Once the new prefects and Head Students had returned to their tables, Mortimer continued, "Our Midsummer even this year will be a ball. Prefects and Head Students will be required to lead it." This might take away from the joy and accomplishment some felt at receiving their badges, but he thought that he'd give them fair warning.

"Now we will sing the school song." Or they would, rather. Lyric sheets were passed around and the song began.


Every day we strive
Learning to survive
Life’s hardships and to solve its mystery.
Learning to defend
Our honour and our friends,
Flying high to meet our destiny
We will stand and face those who want to harm us.
We won’t let the world transfigure, jinx or charm us
I won’t fight alone, as long as you are with me.
Sonora be my home, my tutor and my spirit
Vasita quoque floeat; Even the desert blooms.


That done, he dug into his steak and bourbon.
Subthreads:

Aladren

Teppenpaw

Crotalus

Pecari
11 Mortimer Brockert Opening Feast 6 1 5

Mara Morales

December 07, 2019 3:53 PM
Having a sister two whole years ahead of her here should, Mara thought as the first years were led into the Cascade Hall to the varied reactions (mainly mild interest or indifference, she thought, except for those she assumed had family in this group, including her sister, who was watching her from a table full of people with red badges on their green robes, which made them look almost Christmassy) of the rest of the school, have meant coming in with more knowledge about the Houses than had been included in the school information packet. Jessica, however, had been remarkably unhelpful on this point, to the point Mara had wondered if she was being deliberately difficult. All the information she had been able to wring out of her sister was easily summarized in a short list:

Aladren: The old Head Girl was from there. They had a lot of trophies in the trophy room, but Jessica wasn't quite sure why, as they looked pretty uninteresting to her. Their Head of House was Professor Wright, the bespectacled, possibly-sarcastic Charms teacher.

Crotalus: Jessica's House. Their Head was Professor Skies, the Transfiguration teacher and Deputy Headmistress, and Jessica hated her. Apparently this antipathy had not originated in the fact Jessica seemed to blame her for Crotalus for having what Jessica considered horrendous taste in decor, but Mara couldn't imagine it had helped; Mrs. H. was the kind of person who judged people severely based on how they presented their homes, and she'd passed some of that along to Jezi.

Pecari: Sort of loud people, though Jessica's German friend Hilda - the one apparently responsible for Jessica taking up German last year - was there and Jessica seemed to like her. Jessica had never mentioned who their adult was.

and finally Teppenpaw: kind of schizoid, apparently, as it contained both Johana Leonie, whom Jessica seemed to like best of the other girls at the school, and Zara, who was a "spiteful, stuck up, ungrateful, lying little - certainly-rhymes-with-witch" (Mara had never understood Jessica's aversion to swearing when it was appropriate to do so, but it was a whole thing with her). Their head was the Herbology teacher, whom Jessica liked, at least as well as she liked anything around here.

This amount of information was, Mara supposed, better than nothing, but as she took her turn sticking a badge into a literal witch's brew, it really did not feel like nearly enough. When prompted, she withdrew the badge and looked at it, trying to ignore how weird it was that it wasn't dripping like a normal object recently immersed in fluid. Blue. Aladren it was, then.

She sat down, self-consciously half-smiling without even being sure if anyone was looking at her, and looked over toward Jessica again. Her sister half-smiled, too, and half-raised one shoulder, as to say well - guess they're all right after all!. Then the Headmaster began to speak, and Mara was just settling her expression into polite, bland attentiveness when the speech was over already, six people having been given extra badges for student leadership roles and then a Ball was announced. She sang along as best she could with the sheet music that appeared from nowhere, glancing up at Jessica again when they got to the bit where the word 'us' was rhymed with itself (her sister pulled a face, doubtless disapproving of the tactic and the corniness of 'transfigure jinx or charm us', and Mara had to look away quickly lest she crack up), and then there was food. Again out of nowhere. What was with these people and making things appear out of nowhere, and doing so right in front of everybody?

Looking over the food, she thought again about the line about 'charm us,' which suddenly seemed less funny as she considered the bits of witch legends and Greek myths and stuff she knew. She did not want to play Persephone. However, she had already eaten at the welcome party with Leonor (who was in Pecari, further confirming they were probably all right) and Jessica's attitude strongly suggested that there was nothing in the food to make them like it here, so she shrugged to herself and started serving herself food.

She caught another student's eye, though, before she could dig in, and so automatically half-smiled again. "Hey," she said. "I'm new here. Does everything always just appear out of nowhere like that, or is that a trick for special occasions?" she asked.
16 Mara Morales Settling in. 1472 0 5

Heinrich Hexenmeister

December 07, 2019 5:55 PM
Heinrich's summer might have qualified as boring. Johana Leonie and her brother had come to visit for a little while, but they had bonded more with his younger two siblings the previous summer when he had opted to stay home, and of course Johana Leonie and Hilda were best friends at school. Heinrich felt too old to spend time with the boys and he didn't want to impose on Hilda's time with her friend, even had Johana Leonie not made him a bit uncomfortable anyway just by being from Germany. Uncle Karl had asked if he wanted to invite a friend over, too, but he had declined, knowing Evelyn spent time with Ness over the summer and he didn't know when exactly that was happening and didn't want to risk conflicting. So he'd just said no and that was that. Except Uncle Karl was now under the impression that Heinrich Liked Somebody, which was all kinds of awkward, not least because Heinrich wasn't one hundred percent sure he was wrong.

He did not Not Like her, after all, and any thoughts beyond that he did not allow himself to entertain. It was just safer that way, and every book he had ever read just confirmed that viewpoint.

So nothing much of note had happened, which was fine because he didn't need his life to be more interesting than it already was. Besides which, he didn't have anyone at school to really relate the events of his summer to anyway, so having a good story would be wasted. He sat down near empty seats at the Aladren table, as he hadn't made any new friends in his House since Masha left. He was early anyway, so some of them filled in as others arrived, but the one next to him stayed empty until the first years came in and one of the newly sorted Aladrens claimed it.

He nodded politely at her, and said "Welcome," to her - which with his accent sounded more like he'd just forgotten the last consonant on the same word in his native tongue, but it was close enough to be understandable. He knew that first vowel was an e and not an i, he knew the W in German was usually a V in English and he should adjust his Ws to English Ws accordingly, he new the O made a different sound in this word than in the German one, but his mouth refused to accommodate such wrongness. He could fix or or another but not all three. This time, he got the O right. He was still working on it.

All too soon, the first years were all sorted. Heinrich turned his attention to the Headmaster with a feeling of dread pooling in his gut. He was going to be named prefect. He knew this because he was the only Aladren left in his year. Last year had graduated two Aladren prefects because there were no seventh years, so the House needed all the ones they could name. Heinrich's only question was whether or not he'd be the only Aladren called up.

He was.

His heart lurched and he flinched visibly at hearing his surname called out across the whole hall. He wanted to disappear far more than he wanted to go up in front of everybody, but he couldn't do that. (Or rather, he wasn't permitted to do that. He was capable of a camouflage charm that was near enough to invisibility to suffice for all practical purposes.) He got up and accepted his badge, hating every moment that he was the focus of attention.

He was relieved to drop back into his seat and hunch back in on himself, allowing attention to divert to the Midsummer event. Or he was glad by that until it was revealed he would need to lead that off. Nothing about that was good and his shoulders straightened up again and his look of betrayed dismay was directed at the Headmaster. "Nein, bitte, nein," he murmured, not intending it to be overheard.

He did not want to have to find a date. He did not want to dance at all, never mind first and in front of everybody. He didn't even want to go to a ball. There had been one during his first year, but his English had been so bad back then that he'd had no idea what was going on, and he'd only been eleven besides. Now fifteen, and fluent, a ball was much more fraught with expectations he had every wish to avoid as much as possible.

He could only hope that with the number of prefects and Head Students on the floor, he would blend in, and no names would be called out. Sonora was not a big school. He expected most of the people in it had heard his surname before today, but he still didn't like attention being brought to it.

The girl next to him was looking at him, and he jumped a little, realizing she was one of the ones who might not have heard it before, and a momentary panic struck him before she spoke and he realized his family's European publicity wasn't what she was thinking about at all. He relaxed a little bit, at least down to his baseline anyway, as he was only rarely ever completely relaxed around others. He looked at the spread of food spread out over the table, not having noticed it until she pointed it out, but he was used to it now. He been to enough meals here that the suddenness was entirely ordinary to him.

"Welcome to Sonora," he began with. He managed the same pronunciation of the first word as earlier, for which he'd give himself points for consistency but not accuracy. Sonora was easier to say right because he wasn't fighting German habits. "Und yes," And. He knew it was And. Why couldn't he just say And? "It is always sudden," he informed her. "That is how the elves move the food from the kitchen. It is easier than carrying so much so far."
1 Heinrich Hexenmeister I saw this coming and I am still uncomfortable with it 1414 0 5

Mara Morales

December 08, 2019 3:31 PM
Mara stared at the older student, and not because he bore a surprisingly strong resemblance to what she imagined her father might have looked like as a teenager. Nor was she thrown too much by his accent - for perhaps three seconds after the first vill-kom, she had wondered if he was a vampire through sheer pop culture influence, but then had first reasoned that his undertones were way too normal for a walking corpse and had then further reasoned that she had read in one of her books that vampires were evil animals or something and therefore not qualified for wizard school. Instead, it was purely and only the content which took her aback for a moment.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Did you just say elves? You're saying that the cafeteria workers here are elves?"

Maybe, she thought, he had the word wrong - clearly, English wasn't his first language. Jessica had mentioned that, now that she thought of it - that while they had a surprising range of origins for such a small population, it was mostly diversity of culture, not of race. Which definitely fit with the sight of this room; it was, for the most part, whiter than the majority of the output of a Sunbeam factory, with just a sprinkling of other options (Mara supposed that it made a measure of sense, insofar as such a thing could make sense, to classify the De Matteos as whole wheat and herself as multigrain; while she didn't look especially like Dad herself, the fact remained that she was, in fact, half-Very White American)....

There was another kind of bread she thought this room was well-stocked in, though, and it was not one she thought that her new friend was particularly full of. A lot of the mildly culturally divergent white people in the room, though, clearly had money. It wasn't just that Jessica's ears weren't the only pair adorned with decent-sized and flawless-looking diamonds, or that one girl over at the Pecari table whose elaborate hairstyle and jewelry made her look like a Victorian era princess. It was in the tablewares in front of them - real plates and cups instead of cheap plastic trays and paper milk cartons. It was in the tables and chairs, which were also not just cheap plastic, or even just cheap metal. It was in the marble floors, the chandeliers. It was in the very way which a lot of the students sat at their tables - their postures, the ways they turned their heads, their resting expressions. Mara wasn't sure if they would even consciously recognize this in each other, but it was something one learned to notice when one's father was One Of Them and one's mother was just The Help.

This guy, however, didn't have that look, and yet here he was, an ocean away from where his accent suggested he came from. She wondered what the story there was. Major diplomats' kids would look like Jessica and the others, but an attache's kids might not.

"I guess...yay for efficiency," she said, still looking dubiously at the food, which was apparently sent up by elves.

"The headmaster guy - he said your name is...Hexy-mister?" she said, and grimaced, knowing she had just botched that a lot. "Sorry. Not my language, and I'm not that good with names I only hear once," she explained. "But it sounded like it might be how you say this name my sister showed me in the yearbook - are you related to anyone named Hilda?"

She felt like she was taking a step off a high dive, but she wasn't doing anything wrong. Dad had said it hardly mattered out here. Jessica had said it was okay. And yet, it still felt like a rush to the head, actually casually referring to a sister in conversation with a new person and not meaning Lola. Not a bad one, though. Mara liked high dives. And she was so far inclined to think she might like being a wizard, too.
16 Mara Morales Yeah, that's totally fair, man. 1472 0 5

Heinrich Hexenmeister

December 11, 2019 1:37 PM
“Elves, yes,” Heinrich repeated, careful enunciating his pronunciation at her doubt, but he was pretty sure he’d had it close enough to be understandable the first time, too. She had repeated it correctly, after all. Her question grew more precise and he did not know that word. Cafe - something about coffee? It was becoming rare that he did not know a word, and it almost surprised him that this one caught him out. It had been a few weeks since he last hit completely unfamiliar vocabulary. Maybe it was a slang term for the kitchen. That was what seemed to fit best into that slot in the sentence and he still had a lot of trouble with slang.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “Sonora has Prairie elves for cooking. They are like House elves, but with longer ears.” Even before Things Went Wrong, his family had not been well to do enough to have their own House elf, but some of the people Mom and Dad visited - with him and Hilda in tow - did. House elves had long enough ears, in his opinion, but somehow the Prairie variety did not look as completely ridiculous as one might assume. It was likes rabbits and hares. One had ears long enough for it to be a notable feature and the other had even longer ears, but it still suited them.

It did not occur to him that the younger girl might not know what a House elf was. His experience in this school was that he was the one lacking vocabulary and while her English was accented - possibly a regional dialect, though his ear for that was poorly calibrated - it was definitely more fluent than his own. She had used a word he didn’t know. So it had to be him who was causing communication faults because his English still wasn’t good enough.

Then he winced as she butchered his name. He didn’t like his name, especially how it sounded to English speakers who only knew ‘hex’ as a bad kind of spell, but that didn’t mean he liked hearing it murdered like that.

“Yes,” he said, hurrying to confirm her guess before she could try to say his surname again. “Hilda is my sister.” He tilted his head in curiosity. “Who is your sister?” For that matter, he realized she had gotten his name from the prefect awards, but he didn’t know hers. “I am sorry. I did not catch your name either.” ‘Catch your name’ was an idiom. He had seen it in a book. He was eighty percent sure he was using it correctly.
1 Heinrich Hexenmeister Thank you for your understanding 1414 0 5

Mara Morales

December 11, 2019 2:33 PM
Prairie elves did the cooking. Prairie elves. Which were different from house-elves, because ears. Or ear length, rather. Right. Because that was a totally normal thing that everyone knew about and casually discussed in passing.

Freaking elves. She was going to kill Jessica. This was exactly the kind of thing she had wanted to know about and which Jess had not told her, and now she looked stupid in the group specifically designated as smart people.

"My name?" Mara thought she had said 'Mara' at some point, but, well, she could be wrong. Or he had just missed it in the general noise of a crowd and whatnot. This school was absolutely tiny compared to any school Mara had ever even seen the inside of in passing, but it was still enough people in one room to make a nuance easy to miss, especially since she wasn't speaking his native language. "It's Mara," she said. "Mara Morales."

She wondered if her first name sounded at all incongruous to him. She had looked it up online before, wondering what could have inspired her mother to give her such a name, and while it wasn't completely unheard of in Spanish-speaking cultures - it could be used as a pet name for Maria - she didn't think it normally went with Morales. It was either Hebrew for 'bitter' or Aramaic for 'lady,' which she thought was a telling example of a false friend between languages, though it did make the story of Naomi and Ruth rather interesting to think about from that angle after Naomi renamed herself Mara. In Arabic, it meant 'joy' and could be used for men or women, which seemed strange to her, and also odd because it was so totally opposite of the Hebrew and Aramaic definitions. Plus in Czech it was a dude's pet name. So there was that.

Most likely, though, a guy from Germany wasn't going to think about that, either because most people didn't have a passing interest in etymology or a habit of noticing incongruities in cultures around them or because, well, Mara was a native speaker. She didn't look particularly white, but she spoke English in a fairly standard manner with a bit of a Southern accent, as she mostly spoke it with Dad and Jessica and teachers and that was how Dad and Jessica and teachers at home all spoke. Having a name that was uncommon for her apparent ethnic group wasn't altogether unusual in America.

"My sister's name is Jessica," she added, going back to feeling like she was jumping off a cliff. "Jessica Hayles. Third year, red hair. We're half-sisters," she explained before the differences in surname or appearance - they really did not look alike at all. Mara was her mother made over in miniature, and Jessica had an equally strong resemblance to Mrs. H. "She's in the...red-and-silver House. She says it like 'crowt-less,', I don't know how to say these words yet," she added. "Plus I don't know if I believe anything she's said about this place anymore, because she never told me anything about elves being real."
16 Mara Morales Here's hoping you return the favor. 1472 0 5

Heinrich Hexenmeister

December 12, 2019 1:54 PM
“It is nice to meet you, Mara,” Heinrich said formally, falling back into English 101 conversational practice. It sounded more practiced and fluid than most of his sentences had so far, but it was equally clearly rote-learned. The sentiment was not completely lacking, though. Heinrich was never really a warm person, even at the best of times, but his politeness was born of genuine goodwill toward his younger Housemate. It was Good Wolf to be nice to people.

He nodded politely as she mentioned her sister was called Jessica; he recognized that name as one Hilda had talked about increasingly over the last year. Hilda’s friend group was definitely expanding, and Jessica was one of the girls it had enveloped. He even diplomatically kept his features neutral and open when she explained she had a half-sister and stumbled through naming Crotalus. He was in no position to judge either other people’s parents or their pronunciation of anything.

His image of high civility cracked though at her remark about elves being real.

His eyes widened in undisguised surprise and the word, “Oh!” escaped his lips. Realization hit hard, and his ordinarily pale cheeks flushed pink. “I am sorry!” he declared, another rote-learned phrase, but given more emotion than anything he’d said so far. “I did not realize you are muggleborn!”

It was his default to assume most people were purebloods. He had thought this of Evelyn as well until she introduced Pop-Tarts into his vocabulary and he’d figured out they did not have a common frame of reference for that item. Even then, he had assumed the problem was a cultural difference between Germans and Americans. Eventually, he had adjusted his mental classification of his best friend to half-blood, but that had taken much longer than it really probably should have.

Tonight, he had again attributed communication difficulties to their opposing countries of origin instead of their differing magical backgrounds. It was a culture shock had had avoided by dint of birth and so it wasn’t something he thought about very often, particularly since he had needed to deal with an entirely different kind of culture shock. Now that he was a prefect, he was going to have to fix that.

“I apologize,” he stated again. “I think too much that German and American are confusing. I forget magic and not magic are confusing, too. I am born magic but German. I have different problems coming to Sonora. Yes, elves work in the kitchen. They are small magical creatures.” He held a hand about three and a half feet over the ground to approximate their height for her. “They have more power than they look. Strong magic. Complex spells like bring all food to tables at same time, very easy for elves. But they do not like a lot of attention.” He sympathized with elves a lot, he realized. “They keep invisible if they can. Jessica might know not much of them if she also of muggleborn is.”
1 Heinrich Hexenmeister I am a bad wolf. I was culturally insensitive. 1414 0 5

Mara Morales

December 12, 2019 3:01 PM
Mara was slightly surprised by the strength of Heinrich's reaction to realizing he seemed to have misunderstood something. "It's fine," she said, almost automatically, defaulting to the sort of response her parents would expect. "I didn't exactly say so," she acknowledged.

The real reason she couldn't say she was particularly offended, though, had little to do with that. Far more relevant was that he seemed genuinely apologetic and hadn't said anything in a way which seemed like he was being a jerk. Mara guessed people couldn't help making mistakes - heck, she would probably say some dumb stuff if she tried to talk about what wizards were like or what Germans were like, for that matter - but there was another way that could go, when people were deliberately...jerks. Usually about whether she spoke English (she did) or if she was in the country legally (she was) or whether her mom had only had kids to keep from being deported (she hadn't). Mara had had a few people ask something about whether Mamá was from Mexico that she hadn't thought were badly intended - not everyone who had ever asked if Mamá was from Mexico, but a few. She had never known anyone to say anything about the other stuff out of genuine harmless ignorance with no intention to offend. By comparison, not guessing that she was something unrelated to her racial and cultural background which was a word she had not heard before until a few weeks ago seemed harmless indeed.

She listened intently as he explained what elves were. Small magical creatures that were sneaky and had powerful powers. Legolas was not going to serve her lunch, then. She wasn't sure if that was good or bad. On one hand, that would be cool, but on the other hand, it would be quite a step down for the guy. She nodded once when Heinrich offered a defense of Jessica's non-communication.

"That's fair," she admitted. "All of our parents are...not this," she said, with a gesture which hopefully encompassed everything in the room. "So I guess we're both kind of outsiders," she concluded. "My mamá would kind of get it - she's from Colombia. That's in South America," she added, in case his western hemisphere geography was less than stellar. It occurred to her that she knew nothing about what Europeans learned about this side of the world. "We learned a little about Germany in my old school," she volunteered. "Do German kids learn about us in school?"
16 Mara Morales At least it wasn't intentional. 1472 0 5

Heinrich Hexenmeister

December 18, 2019 11:10 AM
Mara did not seem too offended by his gaffe. This was good. Jessica was also muggleborn, which he did not recall Hilda mentioning. He was not sure if that was because she did not know or she simply did not find it relevant. Generally speaking, Hilda was not inclined to share more than she was required to in order to communicate clearly, but at the same time, Hilda’s English was really quite terrible, and she missed a lot of things that should be very obvious to native speakers. So it was possible she just didn’t know. Yet, Jessica had been in her challenge group where she had Professor Schmitt to translate for her, so she very well might have known and not thought it was a fact worth sharing. That was possible as well. Hilda tended to disregard things she didn’t think were important, and ability and willingness to speak German were far more important to her than blood status.

That said, Heinrich panicked all over again as she asked if Germans learned about ‘us’ in school, and he had no idea which ‘us’ she was referring to. Americans? Columbians? Muggleborns?

Columbians were more her mother’s people than hers, he’d gathered, but the question had followed her explaining where Columbia was (which he knew, from his world geography lessons, but frankly the South American country wouldn’t have been the first Columbia he thought of if he was asked about it without context - he would have sooner come up with the District of Columbia, the capitol of the United States, which he’d studied about more recently in an effort to learn more about his adopted nationality). Americans were more generally her people, but they’d just been discussing how being ‘not this’ - as in magic - made her an outsider to Sonora as much as being German made him one.

So he was stuck and didn’t know if whatever option he chose to address first would be read into too deeply as being how he viewed her as a representative of a group instead of a member of several.

“I - we - World Geography taught us to name the many nations,” he began carefully. “We had maps. I gave competition to see who names most countries in Europe, Africa, Americas, Asia, Pacific. United States, Columbia, I can find on map. In History, we learned most about Europe. Our colonies were in Africa. Americas had English, Spanish, Portuguese. Not so much Germans. Some emigrated here, but we had none territory. There were Wars. American muggles fought German muggles. Global Wizard War happened same time as Muggle Second World War. Much wizards fighting Dark Wizard Grindelwald and his people. Governments for America, Germany, Britian, Russia, all on same side in Global Wizard War.“ Though, in all honestly, Heinrich was not sure which side of that fight his personal ancestors fell on. He had suspicions and no desire to confirm them. Bad enough his country had clearly been the wrong side in the muggle war. He did not need to know his family was on the wrong side of the magical one. He had enough Dark Wizards in his immediate family without looking further back.

“Much Muggles fighting Hitler. Much wizards fighting Grindelwald. Much fights in Germany. Very dangerous. Hitler and Grindelwald lose on same year. After War, Muggle America and her Muggle Allies make Muggle Germany split - Magic Germany does, too, but voluntarily, to keep Muggle relations simpler - and the American muggles stay in part of West Germany for years, but we hear little more about them after Reunification. But I learn more American History after I move here when I eleven. I am from Utah now,” he added, because most people just assumed he was an exchange student not a permanent resident of the country.
1 Heinrich Hexenmeister Making up Magical German History 1414 0 5

Mara Morales

December 20, 2019 9:04 PM
A geography guy. Mara smiled, briefly. A kindred spirit, then, to a point. Mara wasn't sure she found geography itself all that interesting, but knowing lists and maps was the kind of thing that made her do well in class competitions, and which had seemed useful when she had planned to take up Model U.N. once she got to high school. Her dad was in business, sure, but she had thought before about maybe giving politics a spin herself. After all, her mother was officially a nanny. Nobody expected her to take up Mamá's line of work, so why should she feel any more strictly limited to her dad's?

She had tried to point this out to her sister once, when Jessica had been particularly down about the whole not-able-to-go-to-any-schools-the-board-members-would-respect thing, but it had not gone well. Jessica had not melted down to the point of saying it, but it had been clear just the same what she had been thinking: that it was easy for Mara to say, when she wasn't publicly a member of the Hayles family.

Sometimes Mara wondered if that was true - if it would all look different to her if she was Mara Hayles instead of Mara Morales. She couldn't figure it out, though. She felt like she was herself, and never mind that minor detail - however much she wished sometimes that it was different just in the interest of pure fairness. Plus, the rich kid who didn't want to be part of the family anymore was a full-blown cliche at this point, so it wasn't as if being publicly part of the family would have necessarily made her commit her whole life to Arvale Cosmetics.

That, however, was definitely not something she could ever discuss with Dad, or Mamá, or Jessica, and Lola was too little to discuss much of anything with now, so Mara just thought on it by herself.

She listened closely to Heinrich's description of World War II, surprised to hear that wizards had apparently had some involvement, too. Mara had been under the impression that after the Salem Witch Trials, these people had completely cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Certainly everything she had seen so far had supported that hypothesis. Apparently, though, there was a lot more information she was missing - which, on the whole, was not surprising.

"Utah, that's cool," she said when he said where he was from now. "I'm from Georgia," she added. "And always have been. So, wizards did the Cold War, too, huh? That's interesting. I had got the idea that nobody here had anything to do with anybody - " she tilted her head in the general direction of 'outside' - "out there, out where I came from," she explained, though she did not mean Georgia specifically.
16 Mara Morales I'm not going to contradict you. 1472 0 5