Grayson Wright

February 03, 2021 6:57 PM

Getting closer to the answers (Ellie) by Grayson Wright

Naturally, doubts began to cree in before he even reached the corridor the library happened to begin in. It could not have, Gray thought with resignation, have really gone any other way.

Yes, said logic – Tarquin was one of the people currently covering parts of Selina’s job. Yes, Gray was quite confident that Tarquin and Selina seemed to have some kind of friendship outside of work. Yes, Selina herself was absent again today, which did make it entirely proper and correct to go to one of her deputies to report the incident in the staff room and his new theory based on it. But….

If he was right, uncertainty whispered, then one of the figures in the jar in his hand was Selina, or had been, once upon a time. There was nothing really deeply revealing or personal about the tableau he had viewed (well, at least not deeply revealing or personal about Selina, unless she deeply wished for it to remain a secret that she could be persuaded to invite people to dinner parties so other guests could make advances toward them; the guy coming on to someone and the person he’d been coming on to might consider it personal and revealing, but Selina was comparatively in the clear), but it still felt…gossipy, he supposed, to possibly expose someone else to it, as if he was meddling in other people’s business, one of them a colleague, and more than that, his supervisor.

On the other hand, though, he reminded himself, Tarquin seemed to be her friend. At that point, his left foot (he had run out of hands) pointed out that he couldn’t actually say for sure that that would make it better from Selina’s point of view. He could not, after all, say for sure how he would react in the same position, which made it even harder to guess how another person might take it.

He let his right foot (which pointed out that Something had to be done, and that also, by this time, he was already nearly there) make the decision in the end and entered the library as planned. Before he could cross all the space between him and rapping impatiently on Tarquin’s office door, though, he was interrupted by an approaching student.

“Yes, Ellie?” he asked, politely, willing himself to patience. It was not, after all, as though this was a matter of life and death, or even of whether or not the building burned down. It would hurt nothing and no-one to do his actual job before he rushed along playing detective-solves-the-case. “Is everything all right?”


OOC: Ellie's interruption planned with her author.
16 Grayson Wright Getting closer to the answers (Ellie) 113 1 5

Ellie Alperton

February 04, 2021 8:51 PM

I've got a theory... by Ellie Alperton

Philippe had said he wanted to come too, which was entirely fair but did mean that Ellie couldn’t just sneak through the library and into the Aladren Common Room and thus to Professor Wright’s office. The two of them would have to go out of the library and to the corridor version of his front door. That, as it turned out, was incredibly good luck, because who should they see coming in as they were heading towards the doors but Professor Wright himself?

Ellie hurried to close the distance between them, not wanting to shout across the library, but wanting to make sure her little legs caught up to his rather longer ones, especially as he looked like he was on a bit of a mission.

“Excuse me, Professor?” she called out, once she was close enough to be heard without breaking library volume rules. “Oh,” she stated, noticing the glass of swirling mist in his hands. “Is that Philippe’s family?” she asked, “Only, they appeared in the hall, and we were coming to find you to ask if you could gather them up because they were talking about something rather personal,” she added, finding that as the one who’d caught Professor Wright’s attention, and she supposed as the older one and the Aladren, it felt a bit like her job to explain. “They were re-enacting something that actually happened too,” she informed him, glancing at Philippe to check she was doing okay and to see whether there was anything he wanted to add.
13 Ellie Alperton I've got a theory... 1456 0 5

Grayson Wright

February 07, 2021 5:50 PM

I think it's a good one. by Grayson Wright

“Phillipe’s family?” Gray blinked, confused. He was fairly sure that the reason the figures in the jar had looked vaguely familiar was not because either of them was a version of Holly or Raoul….

“Interesting,” he said. “An actual event, you said? A…memory.”

It was so obvious now that he couldn’t see how he hadn’t seen it before. Perhaps it was because he had only very recently seen one for himself, or because he couldn’t think of how on earth various people’s memories – or rather, manifested copies of memories – had come to pop up, seemingly spontaneously, around the school, but it was clear as anything now. Which, considering the category of spell which mostly worked with memories, was going to be pleasant to explain his failure to notice earlier to the higher-ups – but that was for later.

“But no – I don’t have Phillipe’s family. This is another one I just encountered, and was coming up to confer with Mr. Fox-Reynolds – in the hall, you said? We’ll get right on that, we’re trying to capture them wherever we can…”

A door opened, Tarquin perhaps drawn by some disturbance in the library-space-time (quite its own category compared to regular space-time, though it did have certain similarities to bookshop-space-time) caused by too many people congregating at once within the library’s confines. “Ah, just who I was looking for,” he said, before Tarquin could observe that the children were already supervised and take the opportunity to vanish again. “Good news – I think that we might have just cracked the case about these things that keep appearing. From what I saw here – “ he lifted the memory jar slightly to indicate what he was talking about – “and what Ellie was just telling me, it seems like they’re probably memories. Copies of people’s memories, that is.”
16 Grayson Wright I think it's a good one. 113 0 5

Ellie Alperton

February 10, 2021 7:27 AM

Thanks. He helped. by Ellie Alperton

“That’s what we thought!” Ellie stated when Professor Wright used the word ‘memory.’ “Philippe especially,” she added, a little more quietly. She didn’t want to seem like she was hogging credit, especially as she had been skeptical, but nor did she want to miss out, and she had been fairly in agreement by the end of their conversation. It was a little bit silly, she knew, but she was almost annoyed that Professor Wright seemed to have got there without their help. The main thing was that it was solved though. And that, even if he’d gotten there without them, he didn’t think that they hadn’t gotten there too.

“Only, the one I saw – the other one I saw – was kind of horrible,” she stated, again painfully aware that people could have terrible memories. What did it mean that Heinrich hadn’t recognised the scene she had been describing? Even if it had happened to his sister, surely he’d know about something that big? But that meant it was Freddie or Hana’s, and she also couldn’t imagine something that dark and horrible in Freddie’s past. Maybe it was ‘imaginings.’ After all, you could replay a real conversation in your head, and that was kind of imagining it, and that would explain both things… Except Professor Wright also seemed convinced about the memory idea.

She supposed they could deal with the fact she’d seen a horrible one later – that was long since past, and scooping up Philippe’s family could take priority. Once he’d passed whoever that was over to the librarian.
13 Ellie Alperton Thanks. He helped. 1456 0 5