Coach Olivers
March 14, 2015 3:41 AM
Quidditch Game II: Aladren vs. Pecari by Coach Olivers
The match between Aladren and Pecari was a little earlier in the term as opposed to last year. Though Sonora was located in the desert, the weather charms surrounding the school made it chillier. On the morning of the game, there was frost covering the grass that would assuredly be disturbed as soon as the match got started. But in any case, today was cold and foggy. As long as it didn’t rain during the game, Florence didn’t see any problems, though the gloomy day made her a little sleepy. The scouts were out in the stands as well for this game, so for any players interested in joining a professional league, today would be the day to excel.This game seemed a little fairer. Both teams had seasoned players and no first-years on the team. It would make it a little easier to watch, or so Florence hoped. She really enjoyed being a coach despite only being a stand-in. It was a position she never would have imagined herself taking on before. After the players had come together, Florence gave a few minutes for the captains to make their team speeches before charming her voice and walking to the center of the pitch where the bludgers were strapped down, the Quaffle was on the ground, and the Snitch was still in captivity.
“Welcome to the second Quidditch match of the year. Today the match will be between Aladren, led by Captain Anthony Carey, and Pecari, led by Captain Rupert Princeton. Captains, please shake hands.” When Anthony and Rupert came together, she removed the charm from her voice. “I expect a good, clean game, boys. Good luck to both of you.” With that, she applied the Amplifying Charm to her voice once again. “When I blow my whistle, the game begins. The game ends when the Snitch is caught.” She held up the golden ball and its wings sprouted, ready to fly. She released it and it immediately took off and disappeared in the light fog. “Players, please take your positions.”
While the Keepers made their way to the hoops and everyone rose into the air, Florence put the whistle into her mouth and picked up the Quaffle. After waiting a moment, she blew her whistle and threw the Quaffle into the air. After releasing the bludgers, she went to her post to keep an eye out.
The game had officially begun.
OOC: As per posting rules, please post two paragraphs minimum. Creativity, detail, and realism will be rewarded. Reserves can post once to receive points for their team. Make sure your names are colored according to your house color as well. Stick to the rules. No one should be falling from their broom to their deaths/injury. Any questions, pin it to the OOC board and tag Coach Olivers. Good luck!
Subthreads: Getting started by <font color="blue">Captain Anthony Carey</font> with <font color="blue">John Umland, Beater</font>, <font color='tan'>Joella Curtis, Chaser</font>
Being protective by <font color="blue">Leonidas Bennett, Beater</font> with <font color=blue>Clark Dill , Seeker</font>, Coach Olivers
Keeping my thoughts to myself by <font color='blue'>Theodore W, Keeper</font> with <font color=tan>Annabelle Pierce, Seeker</font>, <font color='tan'>Liliana Bannister, Keeper</font>
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Coach Olivers
Quidditch Game II: Aladren vs. Pecari
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Coach Olivers
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<font color="blue">Captain Anthony Carey</font>
March 15, 2015 2:23 AM
Getting started by <font color="blue">Captain Anthony Carey</font>
Sometimes, especially since studying weather charms under Olivers in her role as professor last year, Anthony suspected the staff of deliberately always making the weather bad on the days they scheduled Qudditch matches on. Today wasn’t as bad as some - there was no pouring rain, no draining heat, no infernal plague of locusts or dust or whatever else whoever was responsible could dream up - but it was cold enough to make Anthony shiver as he joined his team, and fog could be worse than rain for obscuring the Snitch.He considered, and not for the first time, offering Clark the use of his own broom, but dismissed it again. It was too late for that; Clark wouldn't have time to get used to a different broom and Anthony wouldn’t be able to obtain a decent replacement. He should have just stopped dithering over whether or not he would offend the Seeker by making the offer months ago and, at the very least, borrowed brooms from home for Clark and John Umland both. They were both poor and possibly more than half-Muggle besides, but they were still Aladrens, so surely they would have seen the logic in it and swallowed their pride for the greater good. It was too late to think of that now, though. Maybe Francesca could do something with the idea next year if she still had to keep the pair on the team.
Today, though, Mr. Dill and Mr. Umland had to be teammates, not problems, and so he smiled calmly at them as well as the others as they gathered. “Good morning, everyone. I hope you all had a hot drink with breakfast,” he said, and then began what he refused to believe could be his last speech as captain.
“Pecari had a very good day in the rain last year," he said. "They're not going to have one in the fog today. We are as much better than them today as we've always been - if not more, if they've gotten cocky because of their...victory." Anthony pronounced the word with the smallest hint of distaste; he hadn't been at the game, but Malcolm had made it sound like a farce. "We are going to win this.
"Now. The fog is going to be the biggest problem for you, Clark, but we all have faith in you. Just keep your eyes open. Leonidas..." He hesitated for one second, but Clark needed to be well protected and Annabelle well and truly inconvenienced more than the Chasers needed help. He and Francesca, at least, could look after themselves. "Take care of Clark. Now..." He clapped his hands together. "Let's all go play."
He shook hands with Rupert Princeton and then, deliberately, put all thoughts of civility aside. The Quidditch Pitch was no place to think or act like a gentleman. When the Quaffle rose, he did not let ladies go first, instead joining the scramble for the ball right away and emerging victorious. Flying toward the Pecari goals, he waited until the physical thrill of those first moments subsided before looking for his teammates. Lining up with one, he turned quickly to pass back and slightly down toward where he thought the other was, hoping to throw off Adam and Annette and prevent the sort of constant steals he'd heard his cousin Andrew had had to deal with in the first game.
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<font color="blue">Captain Anthony Carey</font>
Getting started
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<font color="blue">Captain Anthony Carey</font>
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<font color="blue">John Umland, Beater</font>
March 18, 2015 1:40 AM
Likewise. by <font color="blue">John Umland, Beater</font>
Once, near the end of a game of chess, John’s oldest brother had slipped a pawn past him and promoted it to...knight. John had looked at it in confusion for several seconds before taking it with one of his rooks and still did not know what Steve had had in mind. John had won the game in his next move. He’d read about how knights were useful, but found them hard to work with himself; when he won, he depended most heavily on his rooks, and games could often turn into dances around the board when his siblings, aware of this, tried to capture them. The most use he usually got out of his knights was capturing inconvenient enemy rooks, and that was only when he was lucky.He had decided not to mention it to his teammates, but John was not sure how well that boded for the Quidditch match, since he now, according to his own Quidditch-chess analogies, was a knight. A knight or a queen, but all things considered, he fit the first option better. For one thing, any comparison of his status on the team to Leonidas’ was sure to end with John being declared the less valuable piece. For another, the knight’s ‘hippity-hoppity moves,’ as their bishop had so eloquently put it last year, were closer to his style of Beating. All ways were the queen’s ways, as the Red Queen had explained to Alice, and he knew he was neither strong nor fast enough to play that way. He had to rely on knowledge of basic physics and aiming well.
Strength still played a part in it, though, a big part, so when the dining hall opened at seven, John was at the doors. He had researched how to eat before sports matches over the summer and applied the information he had acquired by selecting a bowl of warm porridge with pieces of apricot and a hint of cinnamon as the centerpiece of his breakfast. Though it pained him, he applied more knowledge still in his side selections, eating his toast warm with peanut butter on it instead of cold with real butter and, worse still, limiting himself to only a single cup of tea. Since that cup was both larger and stronger than usual as a result, he wondered for a moment if he should drink two glasses of milk instead of the recommended one to make up for it, but in the end he had stuck to one. He liked quite a few milk products, but had never been crazy about plain milk as a beverage.
Once he consumed all that, he thought he still could have eaten a little more (food had started to become a bit more interesting in the past few months; research indicated this was probably the first evidence there was some actual, rather than purely social and therefore irrelevant to him, significance to being thirteen since September), but since becoming violently sick in midair just sounded like one of those things that was not a good idea, he refrained. Instead, thus fortified, he went to the library to read for a while to steady his nerves before he started getting ready for the game.
Outside, the air was cold and, to him at least, bracing. The fog was less welcome - it was hard to see in and uncomfortable to stand in for long, so he didn’t expect flying in it to be fun at all - but he guessed it could keep them all cooler in the game than they would have been, so maybe there was a hint of a silver lining. At least everything - probably - wouldn't get as slippery as in a real rain. He still looked up to the sky and hoped for the sun to come out, though.
”We are as much better than them today as we've always been - if not more, if they've gotten cocky because of their...victory,” said Anthony, and John found himself torn between amusement and mild disapproval. He glanced around at the others to see if anyone else was having a similar reaction, then smiled for a second when Leonidas wished him luck. “The same to you,” he said.
Sometimes, he really did have to remind himself that he wasn’t supposed to like any of these people but Clark - that it was as good as a betrayal to his mother and middle brother to feel something he thought might be camaraderie with Leonidas, to think Francesca would be a very interesting person to argue with, or to very much want to play actual chess with Theodore, which was particularly stupid given the number of correspondence games he had going on most of the time. The reminders didn’t always work, either. He scrubbed the toe of his shoe through a yet-un-crunched patch of frost, as though to erase the thought, as he started to mount his broom. Definitely not something to think about now.
Leonidas had Seeker duty, which (since splitting the Beaters seemed to be the default Beating strategy for all the teams at Sonora) left John with the Chasers. He decided to assume Anthony had made that call because John had been a Chaser last year knew how Anthony and Francesca played. He noticed, of course, that this did not account for Leonidas taking care of the Chasers last year, which meant Anthony could have had a different reason, good or bad, for putting him where he was, but John forced it down a background buzz in his head. It was a distraction. He had once chance to prove to the team – to Theodore in particular – that he was good, or at least competent, at something out here, and the fog was really not going to help. He needed every scrap of focus he could get.
He had knowledge, though – both knowledge of things, and knowledge of how to apply the other knowledge. More or less, anyway. He had practiced a lot in MARS on top of team practices and thought he now knew more or less how Bludgers behaved: though they would for some reason (he wondered about the nature of the straps holding them in their case and the forces involved) fly into the air when released instead of attacking Olivers, at least one was sure to ‘sense’ players pretty quickly and stop moving in a straight line to attack the nearest warm body instead. As the Chasers all converged on the Quaffle, he ducked beneath their scramble to put himself in what he thought, from watching the moment of the Bludgers’ release instead of the initial rise of the Quaffle, would be the more threatening Bludger’s path.
He got it right, but underestimated the speed of the Bludger a little. He only just got his bat moving in time to hit it back toward the ground; three seconds, he was sure, and it would have broken his nose. As his nose was not his best feature anyway, he thought it was for the best that he’d hit the Bludger the way he had, even though it had not really gained them any tactical advantage other than allowing him to retain his usual level of attractiveness (or lack thereof) and avoid a lot of pain. The latter was, he guessed, a bit of a tactical advantage; it was hard to concentrate when one was in pain.
His thoughts raced as it went back on the offensive. If he just hit it in away from Anthony, back toward their own goal – no. He was definitely not strong enough to hit it so far that it would pose a threat to Theodore, but it would just boomerang back and he’d have to fight it again. Gritting his teeth, he flew quickly, for him and his broom, anyway, to meet it instead of waiting for it to come to him, flying in a half-loop to face the direction of the action, and redirected it, after a quick glance to make sure the robe’s owner wasn’t knee-to-knee with an Aladren, toward a brown robe when it tried to go for his ribs.
Blinking, feeling as though he were sweating already, John squinted into the fog and prayed that Clark didn’t have to dive through the Chaser level for the Snitch this game, at least not in the part of the Pitch the Chasers were in. In this mess, it would be hard to see him before he was right on top of them all, and John would have to leave the country if, hitting the Bludger away from one of their Chasers at some point, he accidentally cracked his own Seeker’s skull right before Clark would have collected the Snitch for them. He filed that away as another problem he couldn’t solve right now, though, in favor of following the action, staying close enough to see what had happened with his attempt and try to defend the Chasers if a Pecari Beater struck back or the ball just went toward an Aladren next and to make sure he knew where the Quaffle was and if he and the others were even going in the right direction.
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<font color="blue">John Umland, Beater</font>
Likewise.
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<font color="blue">John Umland, Beater</font>
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<font color='tan'>Joella Curtis, Chaser</font>
March 19, 2015 6:38 PM
Full of energy. by <font color='tan'>Joella Curtis, Chaser</font>
Joella had returned from the midterm break with great excitement regarding Pecari's due match against Aladren and this feeling had not waned over time. Her team's easy victory over Teppalus had in fact been her first and she was eager for another within the term. Admittedly the general attitude toward that win had not been quite the same as she suspected it would have been should the team not have consisted of so many second and first years, all of whom seemed to be inexperienced in competitive Quidditch.Today was rather too foggy for the second year's liking but it had nothing on the horrendous rain of the last game and therefore did little in impeding her high spirits. Not for the first time, the young Pecari wondered that she had never seen truly good weather on a match day. On reaching the pitch, Joella joined the rest of the team in warming up as directed by Rupert.
Since the holidays, Joella had resumed her usual routine practices in MARS and also taken the right amount of seriousness with her to the Pecari team practices. Even after all the delicious Christmas food over the break, the twelve year old felt in shape. She was both physically and mentally prepared to give her all today and help gain her house the Quidditch Cup.
She, for one, knew she wouldn't feel at all bad about catching Theodore Wolfseithcrafte out at his hoops as she had done a bit during the Teppalus match. Poor little Ginger Pierce had been laden with some fairly impossible shots from the Pecari Chasers but Joella would very much enjoy seeing the Aladren Keeper having even half the bad luck the Teppenpaw first year had.
It was only Rupert's speech that reminded Joella of her prior knowledge that Adam's young brother was to be opposing them. She found herself looking forward to seeing him play. As far as she was aware, Joella had never spoken to the younger Aladren and wasn't even sure what position he held on their rival Quidditch team but was nonetheless keen to see if talent for the sport ran in the Spencer family. At her Captain's words, she considered briefly that it should worry her but only found she had more than enough faith in her older team-mate that Adam's play would be no worse simply because of his brother being in the opposition. But then again, having no younger siblings she could not be certain of the power which Jack Spencer had over her fellow Chaser's game.
The whistle blew and Joella pushed off, racing to reach the Quaffle first. Seeing that the Aladren Captain had emerged triumphant, she hurried after him. She travelled fast on her speedy broom which was quite necessary to make up for the delay of extracting herself from the initial Chaser scuffle. Carey passed backwards, which would have been convenient had he not aimed down as well. Joella immediately changed angle from her higher altitude but unfortunately found herself just too late to intercept the pass.
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<font color='tan'>Joella Curtis, Chaser</font>
Full of energy.
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<font color='tan'>Joella Curtis, Chaser</font>
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