John Umland
October 15, 2015 5:37 PM
...And I have a pretty taste for paradox (Office). by John Umland
The first day after the Satori was caught had not, when it was all said and done, been one of the best days of John’s life. He had only gotten through it by focusing on one concrete action at a time. He had, however, been thinking along lines not far from the truth since Easter, so after twenty-four hours passed with no new explosive revelations from that quarter, he had concluded that while he was in immediate trouble, it was not so immediate that he did not have time to think through his options.All of his education, John’s mother had often said, had practical applications, and one of her favorite morals to point out to him was the importance of thinking before he acted. After classes, he got out a notebook and started writing out all the facts he knew about the situation and everything he had been able to find out about Satori in one library session, then all the reasonable-seeming speculation he could come up with about what those facts might mean, then speculation about what might become a fact next. It had been something of a pain to get rid of the evidence afterward – sure he could not be too careful at this point, he had torn them all up, mixed up the scraps, burned the scraps, mixed up the ashes, then disposed of them in different places, burying some in two different places in the Gardens and flushing other bits down non-Aladren toilets – but seeing it all in black and white (or off-white, or whatever) had been helpful. Everything, in his experience, seemed more manageable when it was reduced to a list, even something that could mess up, if not his whole life, at least his currently rather comfortable situation if he managed it poorly.
He had two options: Confess immediately, or else wait it out and hope the Satori remained silent at least long enough for him to get back to Canada, where people were sane and prior research meant he already knew pretty much how the fallout would go if his indiscretions were revealed, and then decide from home whether or not he dared return in the autumn. A third – casting suspicion on someone else – had occurred to him, but he had rejected it almost at once, feeling dirty at the very thought, not least because the easiest person for him to frame was probably his best friend at Sonora. After spending a long time debating the merits and flaws of the first two, though, he had concluded that he did not have enough information to decide which was better. Unfortunately, the only way he had been able to figure out to get more meant going up into the lion’s den.
Lying on the fly was not something which came naturally to John, but problem-solving was. Mom and Paul had, in different ways, both taught him well. Given a little time and solitude, he was (if he did say so himself) very good at thinking through everything and then getting his story straight, so he did that. He practiced the Draught of Peace for three nights until he got a brew that didn’t make him vomit, become completely numb and detached, or lie on his bed grinning goofily at the purple bubbles streaming from his wand for extended periods of time, then wrapped up one tiny vial of that and put it in one pocket while an identical vial of Forgetfulness Potion went in the other. Based on his knowledge and hypotheses about the Satori, he thought that of all the magic he knew and was sure he could reliably perform, those two potions were his best chance of beating it if he was forced into a room with it. He also put as much of his research and future project plans as he could in order, put the papers in a document envelope with Clark’s name on it, and put that envelope in his trunk, hoping it would eventually make its way to his friend if things should go horribly wrong and that Clark would be able to do something with it someday. Then he took a preliminary dose of the Draught of Peace and went to see Professor Skies. He had considered seeing his Head of House (a much smaller and less dangerous lion) instead, but had ruled it out for several reasons. One was that he was just better at Transfiguration - it, more than any other subject, pushed him to the limits of his abilities, and Professor Skies was flexible enough in class that he could even push some of them for credit. He was sure he had more favor with her than with Pye. That was also because of the other thing - John was more comfortable talking to women, and Pye was both an adult male and ex-law enforcement, both types of people his brother Paul had taught him to avoid very early in life. Habit shattered under some kinds of stress but died harder even than usual under others. He crossed himself outside the door, prayed that Skies was too busy with the end of the year stuff to be completely on top of her game, and knocked.
Step One was Impression Management. He had begun working on that after the initial disclosure, trying to spend more time around Theodore and Leonidas to reinforce the idea that he was a Proper, Loyal Wizard. Those fellows would certainly never exchange a joke or analyze tactics from the last Quidditch game with a traitor, after all – they were, he’d gathered, younger sons, but still members in good standing of the Old Boys’ Club. Since Professor Skies encouraged cooperation, though, such associations weren’t what he planned to lean on with her. With her, he needed to be more of a Proper, Loyal Aladren - good student, curious, motivated, hardworking, involved, all that, but also a little oblivious to the things most people were more concerned about at the end of the year. After asking and obtaining leave to enter, then, he asked a question about one of his exams.
He adored Transfiguration and so, even knowing why he was really there, enjoyed the ensuing conversation. He was sorry to have to move on to Step Two: Information Extraction after it ended. “Oh – " he said, after starting to leave. “While I’m here – if you don’t mind if I ask – has there been, uh, confirmation that the thing we had here - the Satori - that it was a new species or just an invasive one, or if it's coming back?” He smiled. “We’re dying to know in Science Club. Lots of hypotheses about it.”
Don’t volunteer extra information, every book he’d ever read that included discussion of how to lie well insisted, so he didn’t explain that he was the club’s primary magizoology man, the one for whom physics and chemistry were second loves and herbology a flirtation he’d entered into because of its relevance to his and Clark’s Potions research and because it was a declared field of interest for Theodore. He assumed she was well-informed enough to know that already and would only go into those details if she expressed curiosity. His heart fluttered uneasily, though, even beneath the potion in his system, because of other things she was likely aware of or could probably easily learn. He was sure it was in his files that his biological mother had been imprisoned for violating the Statute of Secrecy and it seemed likely that the fact that she’d gotten a citation even before that because he’d had the bad luck to have his powers develop early and manifest unpredictably as a child was somewhere in there, too. Those incidents, along with the Satori's sophisticated use of language and the lack of any other evidence of a leak, were what he intended to borrow half-truths from to spin into minimalizations and defenses if it came up, and part of his reasoning for coming here was that it made those facts look less like things he wanted to hide if she had started a mole hunt on her own, but he was still really just hoping it would all go away, without him having to deal with it socially or think about all the moral issues it had brought up for him since it happened….
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John Umland
...And I have a pretty taste for paradox (Office).
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