Julian Umland
September 23, 2013 4:39 PM
Receiving a letter. by Julian Umland
OOC: They’re not necessary to understanding the post, but Julian’s original letter to John and some lead-up to his reply to her can be found in these posts, which also have two follow-ups also on WtS. BIC:A tired, scattered-looking owl had arrived at breakfast time, but so late in the hour that Julian had only just had time to take the letter from it, narrowly avoiding a snapped finger, before she had to run to class, her loosely braided hair swinging behind her and her feet turning under her so her arrival in Charms was more of a graceless tumble than an entrance. It had only been after she got to her seat that she had even put the tight scroll, the overlapping circles with J and U (the product of her brother’s habit of wandering through junk shops and very used bookstores of both the magical and Muggle variety; he had found two individual initials and made a sort of Venn diagram of the imprints for his letters) pressed into the green wax sealing it letting her know it was from John, in her bag, something to pursue later, something she didn’t even have time to think of during the day.
Finally, though, her classes were done, and when she opened her bag to look for her homework, she found John’s letter again and went down to the common room with it instead of starting work on her Potions essay. Finding a comfortable seat on a couch, she smiled around at people nearby and then sat back, letting her shoes fall to the floor and tucking her feet up behind her, to lift the seal and get to the content.
Jules,
I enjoyed your drawing of a chizpurfle (see, I checked it against the book! You could have, too!) and your letter except for your spelling. Enclosed are my corrections. Remember this one since you’re reading about them in class and your professor has to read what you write about them: par-a-site. S-i-t-e. Like a construction site, or the site in your body where the parasite latches on. ‘Y’ does not work that way very much. Whether or not a parasite has a thorax depends on what kind of parasite it is.
Julian took a moment to scribble that John had not made a new paragraph for a new idea, as her original question wasn’t the same idea as her spelling mistakes. She loved it when she could catch John out in an error. That done, she read on to his second paragraph. You did leave your yearbook at home. I pretended I needed to work more on division with decimals than I really did so I could look for it during my homework time and found it under your bed. Your classmate’s name is Keme RunningBear. I read everything I could find about the Blackfoot tribes and their history and mythology/religion, but it was very incomplete – I could not find anything about night, and if they have a story about the origin of fire, one of the books I saw said they had not told it, and that seems very strange. The earliest one just describes it being made in a way you really could make it. The more I looked at it all, the more I saw how it was all very like stories from other places – there was one story like when Odysseus’ men escaped from the Cyclops and another like Orpheus and Eurydice and one I think might have been a little like Odin but I need to check that – and since the stories mention liver being good to eat a lot, I kept thinking of Prometheus, but if he was there, I didn’t see him.
I think, now that I’m writing this, that I remember reading something about the liver being important in the East. It was just an interesting fact, though, and I can’t remember where I read it. If I don’t mention it in my next, bother me about it until I remember to go find out.
Thunder is a person, sort of, in the stories I read. People pray for or for no rain to him, and he kidnaps people and hangs their eyes from the ceiling, but he is afraid of the raven and can't kill him. The book just had it as ‘Thunder,’ though, so I don’t know if it’s the same word as your friend’s name in the original. Could you ask him?
I am very busy, too, but tell me more like this. I spent two days reading new things because of that letter. Everyone says hello, hope you’re well, and everything.
John
Julian rubbed her eyes, and really hoped for his sake that there were a lot of people like him in his year of whatever school he landed at, though it only took her a second to realize that might not be good, either. John really would just walk up to Keme, if he had been the one writing back home to a younger sibling, and ask him all that, even though she really shouldn’t have written in the first place and certainly had no intention of insulting her classmate by telling him she’d used him to divert her little brother. Knowing John, he would be surprised if Keme was offended, even – not that Julian knew if he would be, he had seemed okay talking about his home and culture and all, but still, what if he was?
Of course, John would have done all his research here and asked as the person who knew him, rather than sending the matter home to Joe. That was the difference between them, she guessed. Either way, though, she doubted it would occur to him that people might find it odd to be researched.
She took out his corrections to her letter, half-expecting to see a corrected diagram of the chizpurfle in there, too, but that didn’t emerge. Shaking her head after she finished being corrected, she began to look through her bag for something to write back to him on, scattering quills over the rug along the way. She left them until she was done, though, and then picked them all up at once, along with a few crumpled papers of some kind, she didn’t even know what those were, which she began to spread out in case they were actually something important which shouldn’t have migrated to the very bottom of her school things who knew how long ago, now.
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Julian Umland
Receiving a letter.
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Julian Umland
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