Sadie-Lake Chalmers
February 07, 2021 3:20 AM
Is this what I'm supposed to do? (tag Prof Wright) by Sadie-Lake Chalmers
Sadie made her way towards Professor Wright's office, not really sure whether or not she was doing the right thing. She wasn't sure whether the part about talking things through with staff was an instruction (but phrased as a polite request) or something the school felt they had to offer but that students were to take them up on only if it was really urgent. It could not be said to be urgent, although it bothered her a little bit that her memory had been on display. She therefore wasn't sure whether she was bothering Professor Wright unnecessarily, or whether the school would be annoyed with her if she didn't follow up. She was erring on the side of checking in, fully prepared to be told to go away and that it wasn't important (though she thought he would probably use nicer words) because then at least she would know, and it seemed less awkward to try talking to Professor Wright than to Philippe.She had also dutifully signed under the memory she had seen, even though she couldn't imagine that the person was particularly bothered. It hadn't seemed very private or controversial, but it seemed at least polite to let them know, and the staff wanted them to sign, so she had. She had included her year and house, as she suspected there were a lot of people who didn't have a clue who she was.
She knocked on Professor Wright's door, going in when called to do so.
"Um, hi. Professor," she managed eloquently, wondering how exactly she was supposed to start a conversation this bizarre. "We're supposed to talk to the people who saw our memories?" she checked. "Or, if it's only if they were important ones, I can go away again. I just wasn't sure if you preferred if we did or didn't," she added, the 'you' being the collective staff that Professor Wright represented. "You saw mine," she added, meaning him much more specifically this time, so as to explain why she was in his office rather than her own head of house's.
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Sadie-Lake Chalmers
Is this what I'm supposed to do? (tag Prof Wright)
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Grayson Wright
February 07, 2021 5:12 PM
It might not be the worst idea. by Grayson Wright
It was approaching the busy time of the year for teachers and students, when the major papers and projects came due for students and teachers had to mark them all as quickly as possible, all while continuing to at least somewhat competently supervise the students and keep on preparing them for exams…With the Advanced students, and even the fifth years to some extent, it was relatively easy to assign them review tasks to be completed independently, but this was quite impossible with the Beginners, and the third and fourth years were far enough away from major exams that they probably didn’t feel the fear enough to be trusted to their own devices, either.To keep it reasonably manageable for everyone, including both the students and himself, Gray staggered the end-of-year submissions to his own classes. The Advanced students submitted their research papers well before the Intermediates finished their end-of-year projects, both so they could have more time to study for RATS unimpeded and so he could have time to grade the work and also be available to consult with students who wanted to go over specific problem areas before the end of the year. This system did not, due to his own flaws (tendencies toward procrastination and occasionally freezing up when he felt overworked, which just made the problem worse), work as well as it possibly could, but it worked well enough to generally keep his head above water, and so he stuck to it each year.
He was, accordingly, working on Advanced papers when he heard a knock on his door. “Come in!” he called, quickly tucking the paper he was working on back into a folder for the sake of the student’s privacy as the door opened. His eyebrows raised slightly in interest as he recognized the student it revealed. “Sadie,” he said. “Come in, sit. How may I help you?”
He had had a suspicion about the memory he had seen, and it was quickly proven right as she hesitatingly explained why she had come. When she was done talking, he nodded.
“I see,” he said. “I’m guessing that was your mother I saw?” An observation which, combined with the contents of the memory, meant he felt as though he were treading on thin ice indeed…. “She mentioned giving you your name,” he explained. “Would you like to talk about it at all? Or hear more about what I saw?” he asked.
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Grayson Wright
It might not be the worst idea.
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Sadie-Lake Chalmers
February 08, 2021 4:19 PM
Okay, if you say so by Sadie-Lake Chalmers
Sadie was told to sit. Sadie sat. Professor Wright confirmed what she already knew, although added the fact that her mother had talked about her name. Then he asked her what she wanted. She fidgeted uncomfortably. Luckily, he gave her some options. And his comment had prompted a question of her own.“Did she say my name?” she asked. In some ways, it was useful that it was Professor Wright who’d seen it, given that he already knew how stupid her name was and how she felt about it. It meant she didn’t have to do so much explaining about why she was here, wasting his time, about something that was probably too stupid to be bothered about…
“If you don’t mind?” she checked, when she asked if she wanted to know what he’d seen, “If you have time?”
She felt the ends of her hair running through her fingers and didn’t know how they’d got there. She tried to stop because mom always told her to. Mom didn’t like when she fiddled with her hair, it made her look nervous. Sadie-Lake was bright and happy, and knew how to smile for a camera, and was #SuperandSpice. She always knew what to think because her mom told her what her opinion was. But Sadie-Lake wasn’t here. She only existed inside a heavily filtered digital world. And Sadie, just plain Sadie, had never even been given permission to exist.
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Sadie-Lake Chalmers
Okay, if you say so
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Grayson Wright
February 10, 2021 10:28 AM
What do you think, though? by Grayson Wright
Over the course of the years, it was easy to lose the details of a memory, at least to one's conscious recollection. Seeing Sadie now, Gray suddenly recalled her as a timid first year at her orientation session more clearly - when he had observed the same uncertain timitidy, years after the source he had assumed at the time - unfamiliarity - should have long since dissipated."No," he assured her, recalling that quite a lot of memories had been seen by more than one person and that she might therefore be concerned about the hated name being heard by others. "She didn't say your name specifically - that's why I wasn't sure that it was connected to you until just now."
He was concerned. It was one thing for a child to wish to go by a different nickname than the parent would prefer. It was one thing for a child to be self-conscious about their name, along with everything else - that was just, well, children for you. They were self-conscious. Humans in general were self-conscious - Gray was rapidly approaching his forty-second birthday and he still had the uncomfortable experience from time to time. Putting together Sadie's overwhelming shyness and uncertainty, though, with what he remembered the memory-woman saying, he was not sure he liked the composite at all, though he also couldn't, in all honestly, outright accuse the woman of abuse on the basis of that. Shallowness and lack of empathy, perhaps, but there was so little evidence just from that. Even if her mother was a perfectly functional parent on the whole, though, and he was reading entirely too much into any and everything after the staff's collective failure in Evelyn's younger years, he still wondered if Sadie might require evaluation about her nerves, if something was wrong that he should perhaps mention to Selina, as reluctant as he was to put anything else on Selina's shoulders right now. The situation perhaps bore watching.
"I don't mind," he assured her. "And I have plenty of time. She was waving a...sort of rectangular object around, I assumed it was a hand mirror, and she said she'd - I believe these were her words - given you a special and unique name so other people would know you were special and unique. She didn't want you to shorten your name, which I'm guessing you had asked to do?"
He considered his options as carefully as he could under the circumstances, where he could not exactly sit and have a proper think through them all before proceeding. "I think that all, as far as I can remember - she seemed to be correcting your smile and telling you to pose? I didn't understand all of it," he confessed. He hesitated, and then added, "if you'll forgive me for offering my own opinion, I thought her arguments were a bit flawed - not very sound arguments. People can't tell a thing about your personality just from your name, and it doesn't matter if you share it with no-one or with a thousand people. My father and I have the exact same name, and we're each our own unique person just the same. Sadie's a very nice name, and you should go by whatever you feel more comfortable with, now that you're old enough to decide for yourself - if you'll forgive me for offering my own opinion," he said, a moment before realizing he'd already said that part before. Still, he was on thin ice here, and it seemed wise to stress that this was his own opinion, not a fact, as much as he did the faultiness of Jenna-Lee's reasoning.
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Grayson Wright
What do you think, though?
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Sadie-Lake Chalmers
February 10, 2021 7:00 PM
I don't know. Sorry. by Sadie-Lake Chalmers
Oh. He hadn’t known it was hers? Sadie sort of thought that the teachers just knew stuff, and now wondered whether she should have just kept her head down after all.“Her cell phone,” Sadie answered quietly, not sure whether she was really being asked for clarification or whether those words would mean much. It was still bizarre to her that someone could not recognise one. Like, she was hyper aware of their lack of existence at Sonora but her life still involved shuttling between the magical and the non-magical world so much. Magic felt like little pockets of world sometimes, not a whole connected world in itself. She had to travel through the non-magical world to get between the bits of magic. But maybe that was because she was Muggleborn or a kid or something. Clearly Professor Wright never ventured out into her parts of the world if he hadn’t even seen a cell phone. “It’s a…. Muggle thing,” she trailed off, not really sure she could competently explain and not sure that it mattered.
Her mom waving a cellphone at her scarcely narrowed down the list of memories, nor did going on about her name, though the suggestion that she had spoken back and made a request narrowed it some. It didn’t really matter. The interactions were all the same whichever version of it it was. Sadie’s face turned crimson as Professor Wright reminded her of the edict that she should be special, unique, and widely known.
“Thank you,” she stated quietly, appreciating his input even if she appeared to be thanking her own knees rather than him. It meant a lot to hear him say something nice, even if she wasn’t sure it was going to change very much. She wasn’t sure what else to say. She probably just shouldn’t have bothered him. It wasn’t important…
“Should I go now?” she asked.
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Sadie-Lake Chalmers
I don't know. Sorry.
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Grayson Wright
February 16, 2021 7:20 PM
It's all right. You can take your time to think about it and answer later. by Grayson Wright
Cell phone. A Muggle thing. A cell - that was a prison room, or a room in a religious house, or the bounded compartments in a honeycomb. Phone - phony, as in symphony - sound, that meant. The two things didn't come from the same language, so it seemed odd to put them together into a term, but English was notorious for robbing any language it met or even vaguely heard of of any stray vocabulary."I see," he said, though he really didn't. "A - compartment for sound, then? Is that what it is?"
This would not, of course, explain what Mrs. Chalmers had been doing with the thing - the cell-phone - unless it was kind of like a Muggle wand, and the movements she had made with it had been intended as something akin to wand movements so she could...record her speech to Sadie? Odd thing to want to preserve so much, he thought, but then, his father had often had facial expressions that suggested he held a similar attitude to historical subjects and the contents of novels and such - a polite incomprehension of why anyone would think their contents worth writing down. So perhaps he was just getting old.
His brain possibly aging excessively, however, was not the point of the meeting, and neither was learning about Muggle technology. He studied her for a moment before he answered the question.
"You may if you want to," he said. "Or you can stay if you want to discuss the matter further. Or you may go now and come again another time, if you find you want to discuss it later." He was slightly encouraged by her reaction to the unsolicited offering of his own view of things - he interpreted it as mainly positive, despite its sparseness - but was unsure of the wisdom of pushing her any further. Clearly she had some drive toward independence, to have changed her name as soon as she'd gotten to Sonora, so he thought it best to give her leeway to chart her course here, at least for now, barring further incident or information coming into his possession that suggested a need for prodding.
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Grayson Wright
It's all right. You can take your time to think about it and answer later.
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