Clark Dill
April 12, 2021 8:32 AM
Who am I? by Clark Dill
OOC: Mentions of John Umland discussed with his author BIC:
Am I human?
Clark had been thinking about this for a long time. His father had always said his mom had been - not that his father really knew even that, though Clark had believed him without question for a long a time. Believed his mom was human and his father - his biological one, not Dad - wasn’t.
But then he’d been hurt out on the job. Nothing serious. Just some rocks fell out from under him, and he’d scrapped up his arm in the fall. The homeowner was a medic and insisted on fixing him up. There hadn’t been any reasonable reason why he should refuse and it was such a foregone conclusion that she hadn’t even waited for his permission before she’d cast a first aid spell to close the wound.
And it worked. The medical professional examined his arm, declared it healed, apologized for the unstable rock formation, and never gave any indication that there was anything remotely different about Clark’s arm than anyone else’s.
It could just be that he was half human, or that the phenotypes were close enough that nothing registered as unusual when she wasn’t expecting anything unusual.
Or it could be yet another clue that Dad was full of conspiracy theories that had no grounding in fact and Clark had always been completely human.
He wondered sometimes why Dad had ever let him do something as dangerous as play Quidditch, and as Seeker no less, when the chances were so high that he’d end up in the hospital wing at some point from it. Dad had faked all of his medical records so Clark never had to be examined by someone who might be able to tell the difference, but then he goes and encourages Clark to play the most insanely violent sport ever invented?
He hadn’t ever gotten hurt worse than an unpleasant bruise though, and even that had been rare. He’d had the devil’s own luck for seven years at Sonora and five in Toronto. The sheer improbability of it had been enough to keep Clark wondering if that was a sign that Dad might possibly know what he was talking about after all. That his special alien power was avoiding bludgers. And maybe Dad knew that, too, and that was why Clark had been allowed to play.
But the evidence against that had been mounting. Clark’s unquestioning faith in his father’s conclusions and rationality had been eroding.
He’d taken a chance and asked John about species differentiation. There was, unfortunately, no easy spell to identify if two creatures were the same species. That was mostly down to behavioral analysis (not helpful in Clark’s case because he’d been raised human and had noticed no particular abnormalities in his instincts, which was a fair part of the reason why he was questioning Dad’s assertion on his parentage at all) and cellular examination.
So, under the guise of developing a new charm for speciation, they had agreed to make the next Thursday Night Science Discussion about the cellular differences between species. He had resumed graduate studies for a Charms doctorate this fall, and he’d floated the idea to both John and his advisors that this might be his thesis work, pending further preliminary research. His charms studies for his Masters had been more geologically focused, so his advisors had been surprised he was going for a more biological study now, but they’d been very supportive of the idea, saying there were a lot more professional opportunities in biological charms than geological charms, and they started shifting his plan of study over the next few years to cover more Creatures and Medical courses than it had originally included.
He hadn’t exactly intended for his need to know whether or not he was an alien to shape his entire professional future, but it was important. This was something he absolutely needed to know, one way or the other.
And this was the best option he could see to get that answer.
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Clark Dill
Who am I?
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