Selina Skies
November 20, 2020 7:09 AM
Explanations, Confessions, and Wild Theories Welcome by Selina Skies
After her chat wth Katey, Selina had considered what to do about the little ghost dragon (other than possibly write an incredibly whimsical but rather tragic children’s story). She had not yet recounted the events to anyone (including her granddaughter because she couldn’t think of a way to make it funny and lighthearted rather than sort of sad).She had debated long and hard what the best medium was for bringing it up. A notice in the staff room was less confrontational than bringing it up at a meeting, but it did not allow for use of tone of voice. Well, some posters did, but they were generally regarded as very annoying. People needed to hear or read this information once, not have it repeatedly squawked at them, and she couldn’t be bothered faffing around with all the fiddly little charms to make it know if it was talking to a new person or not. Still, she wanted people to think and reflect, and so giving them time to do so had seemed better. She could always nudge them at the next staff meeting if nothing had come of this.
And so she had placed a poster on the noticeboard where it would easily be accessible to all staff. It was a normal, printed poster with no flashing text or annoying sounds, just polite hand written letters (she had checked with Giselle when she started about any accommodations she would need for checking the notice board, but had been assured that she had enough tricks up her sleeve that no accommdation was necessary).
Dear Staff,
A few days ago, a strange manifestation was seen on campus. It was not thought to be dangerous, but was slightly out of the ordinary and did not meet with any immediate or obvious explanation.
If you have been teaching any classes that may result in such happenings (either directly, or by students engaging in unsupervised practise) please let me know. This is not a current cause for concern, and situations of this nature are bound to arise in a magical environment. We just want to make sure we have accounted for the situation, and whether we are likely to have an ongoing problem to deal with. Any additional theories about this situation are also welcome. MARS/Mirage Chamber are already under investigation.
Warm regards,
Selina.
She had decided not to specify that it was the manifestation of a plushie dragon for several reasons. One, it sounded decidedly weird, and even for a magic school, it verged on the comical to mentally unbalanced side of the scale. Additionally, although she hadn’t mentioned it to Katey, she was aware of someone here who had a plushie dragon, did not have a full grip on his magical abilities and who… well, who might currently be a little bit upset and have reasons to fixate on death.
She had sent notes to Grayson and Osvaldo, asking them to work together to double check the Mirage Chamber and MARS for any leaks or signs of degredadation in the spellwork, and made a mental note to stop in on Mary and check whether she had any light to shed, if she didn’t come forward herself within a couple of days.
One thing that she was unaware of, of course, was that the ambiguity of her notice might lead people to think that the manifestations they had seen had been noted and was being taken care of. Whereas, in actual fact, Selina had no idea that anything beyond a little ghost-like plushie dragon was roaming the hallways.
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Selina Skies
Explanations, Confessions, and Wild Theories Welcome
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Giselle Duell
November 20, 2020 7:52 PM
Seek the gaggle under the full moon, the answer will find you by Giselle Duell
It wasn't often that Giselle frequented the staff lounge. She wasn't avoiding it, she just had had things to do. There was settling in, and then working on lessons, and teaching the lessons, and grading the homework, and... she didn't want to be a bother to the rest of the staff. She certainly wasn't avoiding interacting with people, her therapist said that wouldn't be good and she should be talking to people and getting involved. She just had so many other thing to do, she went to the staff meetings, there were people around at meal times, and Valentine came to visit her whenever she got the chance... and those excuses began to wear thin. She had promised to attempt some actual social activity, it would be good. Not everyone was a viscous, evil, manipulative... witch.Giselle scanned the room as she entered, it was empty at the moment and she breathed a sigh of relief, and then felt guilty for it. Well, she had tried, no one was here, back to.... Nope. She chided herself, you're not getting off the hook that easily. She moved into the room and scanned around again, she should probably check in on the notice board while she was here. How much time did she need to commit to waiting for someone to come before she could escape back... head back to her rooms? Running her wand over the notices on the board, their words whispered in her ears. The one from Selina caught her attention.
A strange manifestation without explanation? She thought back over her classes lately, none of them would have caused any sort of strange manifestation around the school. She thought of the strange hints that had been dancing about the edges of her divination lately. Was there something strange going on? If the MARS and Mirage Chamber were being investigated... could there be something wrong with the school's charms? This was something she would have to look into, maybe she could find out some useful information for the Deputy-headmistress, that would be helpful. She should get on that right away, that was way more important than waiting around to talk to someone.
She spun around to head back out, but was stopped when her wand tapped into something that wasn't there when she entered the room as she was trying to get her bearings again. It was a person! A look of apologetic horror flashed across her face, "I'm so sorry!" She pleaded taking a step back, "I didn't hear you come in. I was..." she gestured towards the notice board, "examining the notices."
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Giselle Duell
Seek the gaggle under the full moon, the answer will find you
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Grayson Wright
December 04, 2020 7:32 PM
But what was the question? by Grayson Wright
Selina had spared Gray the dilemma of whether to say something about the situation with Oz Spellman or not, but duly reporting their interaction when the staff as a whole had been asked about the boy had not taken the issue from his mind. It was possible that he was overthinking the issue – specifically, the last remark Oz had shouted as he had essentially fled the room – because of Evelyn, but, well, the problem was that they had all let Evelyn down. Twice. Once with her powers, and then, not realizing –Well. Logically, most students probably did not have childhoods as horrific as Evelyn’s had turned out to have been, but it was impossible to say who did or did not, and he did not want another omission like that on his conscience. He thought that Oz was just failing to adjust well to the introduction to the wizarding world, but…well, who knew? And how to know? It seemed there should be some solution, so that explosions didn’t need to happen to draw someone’s attention to things, but he couldn’t think of what it was.
Hopefully, he thought, Isis would have better luck with Oz than he had, anyway. Ought he ask Isis or Selina about it sometime in the staff room, outside the formal context of a meeting? He walked into that room and paused upon seeing the new Divinations teacher, more from surprise than anything. He couldn’t recall seeing her here before, though admittedly, he hardly haunted the space himself.
At the moment, she seemed engrossed in the bulletin board, which meant there was probably something new on it. He started in that direction, then jumped back, startled, when she turned and appeared – or so it seemed for a flash of a moment, before both common sense and her words kicked in – to have her wand drawn as though to go on the offensive.
“Oh, no, entirely my fault,” he assured her. “I should have…walked louder. Or greeted you earlier, collegially,” he added as an afterthought. He wondered, as he shoved his own, transparent-fronted glasses further up, if he should identify himself by name, or if that would just come across as condescending; he had no idea if she’d recognize his voice from staff meetings alone. “Anything new in notices?” he asked instead, assuming that was what she had had her wand out for in some way.
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Grayson Wright
But what was the question?
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Giselle Duell
December 06, 2020 6:31 PM
How important is that? by Giselle Duell
OOC: CW: Referenced ableism BIC:
The person was a man, and Giselle didn't immediately place his voice. It wasn't Killian's or the Headmaster's those she'd recognize right away. This was.... the charms professor! Professor Wright! This was quickly confirmed with a subtle motion of her wand now that they were a little farther apart. She shook her head at his apologies. "No, I was careless. I am sorry." It was silly to expect everyone else to adjust their behavior, just because she had a problem. It wasn't their fault after all, why should everyone else have to do extra work just because of her? This had been a lesson drilled into her during her time under Lia's tutelage. She couldn't expect them to make up for her deficiency. She'd been careless in her actions and that was all there was to it. "You are fine."
Wishing to change the subject, Professor Wright did just that. Terrific. "Yes," then paused, since she wasn't actually one to visit the lounge much, she didn't know when the one from Selina had gone up. He may have read it yesterday when he was in here. "Well, I guess that depends on when you were here last..." she gave a weak laugh, "They're pretty much all new to me." That sounded terrible. By The Pythia, why was she doing this to him? Why was she trying to be social?
She tapped the notice she had been reading to distract him from her terrible attempts at talking, "This one is fairly recent though from Selina, apparently there is something odd going on?" She moved aside so that Professor Wright could read it himself if he wanted to. "I was about to go and do a little.. research." She smiled weakly, "Maybe I can come up with something helpful."
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Giselle Duell
How important is that?
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Grayson Wright
December 17, 2020 7:38 PM
I'd say it's fairly important. by Grayson Wright
“No, no,” said Gray, somewhat anxiously; it seemed somehow wrong that Professor Duell should blame herself when he was the one between them who had been more able to prevent the situation. Obviously she was not helpless, and it would be insulting to treat her as though she was, but the fact remained that he was most likely more able to react properly to sudden obstacles. It seemed it would also be…if not insulting, at least some other form of disrespectful, anyway, to ignore that fact and pretend that Professor Duell could see as well as he could.... “Shall we call it no harm, no foul?” he suggested, thinking this would be far more practical than trying to keep up with points in a debate on the topic of fault, much less trying to sort through what was what on any delicate topic in his head in this context.“They could be for me, too,” he observed when Professor Duell said all the notices were new to her. “I have to admit I don’t check that board as much as I probably should – or make it in here every day, of course.” He stole too many moments from his work for writing to ever feel he worked enough, and consequently did not like to give the impression he might be shirking his duties.
The interaction had not yet fallen completely apart, but it was definitely awkward. As he had never been spectacular at being the one to smooth out the initial bumps in an acquaintanceship, he assumed this would go further downhill if continued. It made sense, therefore, to retreat as soon as possible after reading the notice about strange goings-on. Once she mentioned research, though….
“Oh? General research, or within your subject area?” he asked curiously, wondering how that would work. The only thing he could imagine involved trying to predict how they would find out what was happening, and that came with so many messy complications for the very idea of the free will that he was somehow sure that wasn’t the answer….
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Grayson Wright
I'd say it's fairly important.
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Giselle Duell
December 23, 2020 4:10 PM
Sometimes the question is more difficult than the answer by Giselle Duell
Giselle breathed a sigh of relief when Professor Wright accepted her apology, and didn't seem to want to hold it against her. That was good, he seemed like a nice enough man, although she couldn’t say she’d known all that many ‘nice men’. Andrew was probably the closest, but he was her brother and didn’t factor into that equation at all, even if she knew where to put him. For that vast majority of the time that she’d known him, he was nice as well. Other than the fact that he’d killed their parents and abandoned her in Greece as a child. The flare of anger died down almost immediately as the more rational part of her brain took over again. That wasn’t fair, she chided herself, he’d been just as much a victim. She could feel a part of her wanting to argue that, needing to… justify itself? She did her best to shove it back down and make a note for yet another topic of discussion at her next session.She gave Professor Gray a smile that spoke of uncounted hidden mysteries, “My subject area is nothing but research Professor. Although the sources I draw upon, while a bit more ephemeral than a stack of dusty books, can be quite enlightening.” She refreshed the image of her fellow educator and considered it for a moment. He was obviously a scholar, she suspected that he liked his books. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but how closely did he cling to them? Was he one of those that dismissed her field of study as a waste of time, or did he know there was more to the world than the simple charms they all knew? “Tell me, have you studied much in the field of Diviniations?”
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Giselle Duell
Sometimes the question is more difficult than the answer
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Grayson Wright
December 29, 2020 8:27 PM
But the answer can't make sense without the question. by Grayson Wright
Part of Gray wished to protest the characterization of what he did as working with stacks of ‘dusty’ books. In his opinion (though he knew there were other opinions, some very sharply expressed indeed) it was altogether wrong for books to become particularly dusty. If a book became dusty, it meant that for one thing, it was not being properly cared for (dust, after all, was hardly beneficial to most things) and for another, that it was not being used. Books, he felt, were like living things to some degree, in some ways – spellbooks especially, but even the mundanest of them shared some of the quality – they needed to connect with others, to interact. Books, to him, were meant to be handled far too much to have time to accumulate dust.He could, of course, go on about this at length, but he doubted that would be appreciated. Even most of his fellow bookworms wouldn’t find it terribly compelling as a topic of conversation, and to anyone else, he’d seem either absurd or delusional or both. So he bit his tongue.
“Not as deeply as I could have,” he admitted when asked if he had studied much of her subject. “I’m afraid I didn’t pay as much attention in school as I should have in any class – I didn’t learn that learning’s fun on its own until I was an adult. I was too busy with fiction back then. Most of what I know about Divination is about the point in history where Charms started to become a distinct discipline from Divination and Potions, more than just about Divination on its own. Though I’m happy to do my best to follow if you ever want to ramble about the topic,” he added, thinking from her tone that perhaps she did, or at least that she was perhaps feeling out whether she was to be stuck in the unenviable position that Divinations teachers could end up in – that of the colleague everyone regarded as a bit of a joke. It seemed reasonable enough to suppose that some of them deserved it, but he didn’t know the lady particularly and therefore was in no position to say if she was the genuine article or not.
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Grayson Wright
But the answer can't make sense without the question.
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Giselle Duell
December 30, 2020 1:22 PM
What if the question doesn't make sense? by Giselle Duell
Where most people would have nodded along as Professor Gray spoke, Giselle did not. This was not because she did not want to encourage him to continue, nor was it because she didn't find what he was saying interesting at some level. It was merely because she had no notion that such a gesture meant anything, or that it was a common thing to do. She'd naturally never seen anyone doing it while she talked. Instead, she simply stood and listened to him. In the process her head swiveled slightly off center from him so that one of her ears would be in a better position.Her face pulled into an unconscious grimace as he mentioned not paying attention during classes in school. That had been a luxury that Lia had not allowed her. The reward for earning good grades had been simply not suffering the penalties for getting poor grades. The expression did not improve when he mentioned potions. That had been the class where she had suffered the most, there had just been so much that she couldn't get right, so much that relied on colors and observed motion. She sighed, pushed the memories aside and tried to give him a smile. He hadn't mentioned anything about her 'dusty old books' comment, and he invited her to 'ramble' about her field. Maybe he wasn't the standard scholarly type.
"Perhaps another time?" Giselle replied with what she hoped would be taken as an encouraging tone. There was quite a bit to 'ramble' about and she wasn't sure if she was ready for such a lengthy interaction with someone new... yet. The thought of discussing some of the finer points of magical theory without being (overtly) graded on it, sent a thrill through her. She suspected that had things turned out differently and she'd come here to Sonora, she would have been most likely sorted into Aladren. What a different life that would have been.
Suddenly realizing that she'd mentally drifted off for a moment, she snapped back to Professor Wright, "I'm sorry," she stated a bit submissively, "I guess I drifted off there for a moment." What had they been talking about? Right, research. "I will need a little more to go on than what Professor Skies has put in the notice here. If I can get a location and a time, I can try to find out more of what happened there." The cards, she thought, would be the best place to begin. There were other methods that might get better information for others, but not for her. "You haven't experienced the phenomena, have you?" Actually... another thought popped into her head, maybe....
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Giselle Duell
What if the question doesn't make sense?
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