Paul had been surprised at first, getting a message just as he came into the common rooms. And his surprise had only heightened when he found it was about Quidditch. Ah, but how could he forget? He was the oldest one on the team now, having been there since first year. It was only fair that he would become captian, still Paul grimaced. Only because they had to though. Like when he became Prefect, it was only becaus they had to.
But... he did enjoy Quidditch to a point (he was Beater, he liked to hit things, that much was obvious), and so he accepted, sending an owl back with his acceptance. It was soon after that, Paul wrote up a sign up sheet with his best handwriting (struggling with the word "captain" so close to his name, far too close for comfort) and hung it on the bulletin board. Hoping he could be a leader for once, and not embarrass himself, put himself in too much of a spotlight... again. Short and sweet, it read;
Aladren Quidditch Sign Up
Join the team. Sign up below with name, year, position. Try outs are Saturday the seventeenth. All skill levels accepted.
Daniel glanced at the bulletin board on his way out to breakfast on his first day of class, and slowed down when he spotted the Quidditch sign-up sheet. He debated mentally for a moment, then took out a pen and added his name name under Paul's.
Daniel Nash II, Year 3, Chaser
He stepped back, frowned at the newly added line, then decided it was fine as it stood and he didn't need to muddy the water by adding 'or where ever needed' after his position. He'd been Chaser last year and he was comfortable with how that had worked out.
Something had to stay the same this year. Between Mom getting engaged and Holly getting Prefect, Daniel really needed everything else to stay stable.
The new captain was a change, but he could deal with it. It wasn't like keeping Geoff was even remotely an option. He didn't know Paul all that well, him being significantly older than Daniel was, so that was fine. He hadn't know Geoff all that well either.
It was fortuitous chance, he supposed, that Aladren happened to be the only House keeping its Head. That was reassuring, too, but didn't really affect him. He was moving from beginner to intermediate classes. He was about to have a step-dad again. He was about to share classes with his sister. It seemed like well over half of the school's professors had changed over the summer.
And Holly was going to self-destruct sometime in the next couple of weeks and Daniel needed to be ready to put her back together.
Maybe he should try out for Beater.
But no. No, that would be a change, and Daniel was going to need to minimize the changes going on around him if he didn't want to follow Holly into insanity. The first months of the engagement were always the worst, when everyone was all so happy and hopeful. He just needed to hold it together until after midterm. Then things would start falling apart, Mom and Anton would start fighting about little things, and by next year, they'd be divorced, and Daniel's life could go back to normal.
And by then, he wouldn't need to be a Beater anymore, so Chaser it was.
He nodded at the sheet and headed out to get breakfast.
1Daniel Nash IIReturning to the team130Daniel Nash II05
As she spied the Quidditch sign-up sheet the first morning back, Jera remembered a conversation she'd had with her Pa over the summer. She was going to be fifteen by the end of this year; some girls in the year above had been real young ladies by that age. They wore nice clothes and campaigned against girls playing Quidditch and would probably be in arranged marriages with pureblood socialites. To Jera, all that sounded truly horrifying. Still, she wasn't ignorant. The Powells were a decent pureblood family in America - the Valsons even more so in Europe. Though neither family was prone to disownment (the branches weren't large enough to be stripped of even the most rambunctious soundrels), certain expectations were held. But marriage? Jera still felt very much like a child. She wasn't ready for such grown-up words.
So, like she and her father had discussed, she wasn't going to think about growing up until she was good and ready. She had the rest of her life to be an adult; she was in no hurry. Her own mother didn't get married until she was in her late thirties, anyway. Jera had quite enjoyed playing on the Aladren team last year. Especially when they'd won against Crotalus. So she would keep playing Quidditch until she decided not to. Which may be never.
Reading the sign over, Jera noted that Paul was the new captain. She had been expecting it, since Paul had always been on the team as far as Jera knew. There was another name, too - it was unusual for Aladren to have many returning players. Maybe this year would be different? Adding her name to the list in small, angular handwriting, Jera wrote Jera Valson, 4th year, Seeker.
Quidditch was one of those issues where, for once, a level of indecision persisted in the family. On one hand, it was good exercise, and it served to keep the boys well outside of trouble's way. There might be a bit of camaraderie with someone who wasn't entirely appropriate, maybe some brawls over a contested win or sufficiently intense team rivalry, but that was better than some of the other pastimes which, sadly, various relatives of his had engaged in. Edmond had only seen the 'edited' versions of family history, and had only been told of the existence of others by Morgaine, but he could still list off at least five separate times when, for lack of anything better to do, someone had chased some girl who was already engaged or done his level best to get killed by another gentleman and almost started a feud. One actually had started a feud, which was actually the reason Edmond was heir of the Savannah Careys. If the very first Richard hadn't been an idiot and ended up dead, then his son would have been the second patriarch, and Edmond's father would have never come anywhere near Bellevue in his whole life unless he was being disowned or there was a war that killed off every other man in the family.
Or so Morgaine said, anyway. She also seemed to find that highly ironic for some reason, though he wasn't sure why.
Quidditch had its problems, though. For one thing, it still officially had girls in it, and since girls who played were supposedly unnatural in some way (Edmond thought that was a pity; Morgaine probably would have made a great Seeker, and it would have been good for her to do something with people every now and then), there were concerns about them using a guise of teamwork to introduce Liberal Ideas. Another issue more specific to Edmond was that it was rather violent, and keeping him healthy and more or less sane was a family-wide obsession. If the other boys would have respected his rank, technical though it was, and not made fun of him for it for most of his natural life, Edmond really doubted Julia would have even let him learn how to fly.
Since she had, though, it seemed important to him that he do his best to support the House. With the real thing all scattered around, the House was supposed to serve in lieu of family, and he'd been raised with the idea that you do whatever is necessary to help out the family. Plus, there weren't many other ways at Sonora to practice cooperative leadership, and since no Carey had been a prefect in more than five decades...Well.
Given the general...character of Aladren, he didn't even think his year would be held too much against him. It might not hurt that he was used to acting older and was at least a few inches taller than the average twelve-year-old kid, either.