Playing keepaway on Aladren Commons

Captain Thomas Fitzgerald

August 21, 2010 12:57 AM

Quidditch Sign-Up Sheet by Captain Thomas Fitzgerald

Daniel's advancement to secondary Assistant Captain had required an alteration to the sign-up sheet Thomas had prepared, but he was more annoyed with himself for that than anything. He should have predicted the addition last year, when Jera originally joined his graduating class. It wasn't unheard of for captains to have their roles thrust on them with no prior experience, but nor was it common. The only reason for Coach Pierce not to go ahead and put Daniel on notice would be a deliberate attempt at sabotage in favor of Crotalus.

Since the promotion meant that hadn't happened, Thomas was happy to make the alteration and, remembering it after the page of his Potions text started stubbornly refusing to make any sense, post the list a little after midnight after the first night of classes. Then he went to bed, figuring that the chapter and a plan for what to do if the players didn't turn up in the numbers he needed could wait at least until morning.

Aladren Quidditch Sign-Ups

Want to be on the Aladren Quidditch team? Sign up below, providing your name, year, and preferred position. Try-outs will be next Saturday afternoon at four o'clock, with weekly practice times to be announced. All levels of experience are welcome, and school brooms will be available. Please see Captain Thomas Fitzgerald or Assistant Captains Jera Valson and Daniel Nash if you have any questions.

Beneath this, Thomas had included his own, technically unnecessary, sign-up as a demonstration of how to do it properly:

Thomas Fitzgerald, 7th, Chaser

Subthreads:

Playing keepaway by Brad Hayman

Noticing stuff. by Grayson Wright

Being entirely too philosophical by Edmond Carey

I'm here again by Daniel Nash II

Getting round to it by Jera Valson

Signing up, finally by Devlin Shortt

0 Captain Thomas Fitzgerald Quidditch Sign-Up Sheet 0 Captain Thomas Fitzgerald 1 5

Brad Hayman

August 21, 2010 10:12 PM

Playing keepaway by Brad Hayman

Brad was loving it at Sonora. He’d already gone to school here for a whole year, but he was still baffled by all the awesome opportunities that came with a magical education. He could work with fascinating and dangerous magical creatures, go on an adventure in the Gardens, and then nestle in his room with his collection of Superman comics all in one day. Okay, so he could read his comics whenever he wanted, but they were so amazing that they were worth mentioning along with his magical journeys.

One thing he hadn’t done yet at Sonora was play Quidditch. He’d taken flying lessons last year, and it had been really, really cool because he’d felt like a superhero. He’d wanted to play Quidditch, but he’d been a tiny bit intimidated by the people already on the team. Being a Muggleborn, he hadn’t been exposed to a lot of Quidditch; soccer was his thing, and he’d shown that when he’d represented his school in the big RMI-v-Sonora match. He thought he was a pretty good goalie, but unfortunately, he’d only gotten the position of Starbuck’s back-up. He’d been mad about that for a good while, but now that he thought about it, it was probably for the best. After all, the older kids deserved to get more playing time, right? When Brad was older, he’d want to get more privileges. It made sense.

So now that he was a little older than last year, Brad was a little less intimidated by the Quidditch sign-ups on the board in his Common Room. He’d done some flying before, but he definitely wasn’t a pro at it. He could get better, though, because he was really dedicated; when he wanted something, he worked hard to get it. That was what all the best heroes did! With a positive attitude, he walked up to the sheet and scrawled his name in large letters:

Brad Hayman, 2nd, Keeper

He wasn’t a Quidditch whiz, but he knew from the matches he’d watched at Sonora that the Keeper was the most similar to the goalie in soccer. It sounded like the perfect position for him!

0 Brad Hayman Playing keepaway 0 Brad Hayman 0 5

Grayson Wright

August 21, 2010 11:14 PM

Noticing stuff. by Grayson Wright

Sitting up too fast, Gray briefly thought he was at home and that he needed to check the kitchen to make sure everyone wasn’t dead before he noticed the wall didn’t look right and glanced at his watch. Then he swore. It was one-thirty in the morning.

It wasn’t entirely abnormal for him to fall asleep in a chair in the common room with his work all over the table, an occurrence which he blamed on whoever had been gifted with the bright idea to make the chairs very large and extremely comfortable, but nor was it something he considered good operating procedure. He never slept well in chairs, having either extremely strange dreams or extremely realistic ones, leading to things like one corner of his brain being determined to convince him that the entire family was dead and he was just now remembering that. And to things like being drowsy while working with Fawcett and McKindy, both of which were disasters just waiting to happen when he didn’t have the steadiest hand or greatest hand-eye coordination to begin with.

Personally, he was more concerned with someone sneaking up when it was clear that he was out of it and reading whatever he’d been working on prior to falling asleep. Tonight, it was only homework, since his latest script had devolved into complete farce at about seven-thirty and that wasn’t the genre he was going for, and he didn’t really care if the other seventh year Aladrens cheated off his Potions essay, but another time, it might have actually been something he was writing. He felt shaky even knowing other people were seeing his finished products; unfinished ones were worse. That upset him tremendously. The closest he’d ever come to hexing someone in his life had been when he found out Anne had actually read most of his blue notebook after she found it for him, and he was normally sane enough to realize that him attacking someone who took college-level Defense classes for fun was a really stupid thing to do before he even thought about it consciously.

Tonight, though, nothing seemed to have been touched. Shoving everything together without any concern for order, he looked around the common room to see if he was the only person who was liberally interpreting the curfew tonight and noticed something off about the notice board. Figuring it would bother him all night if he didn’t check it out, he went over to see what the new thing was.

The first thing he observed was that it probably wasn’t exactly a new thing, and had, in fact, probably been there for a day or two. It would have killed Thomas to have told him about the list – or else Thomas had, and Gray had just forgotten about it. It was true that his attention span could become short at inconvenient moments, especially when he was stuck on a plot point and had inconvenient homework weighing on his mind like a minor boulder in the pit of his stomach. For all he knew, his roommate was the one with a right to be cursing at a fellow roommate right now, though he had a feeling that doing so would be going against Thomas’ whole political-man routine. One of the things that made being a writer better than being a politician was that, while it wouldn’t be too remarked upon if he wasn’t, it gave him every right to be as dissolute in his language and behavior as he wanted, at least when his mother wasn’t around to hear or see. Gray would be eighteen in a few days, marking a full year of legal adulthood on his part, but he still lived with his mother, had no intentions of ceasing to do so any time soon, and so maintained a healthy level of respect bordering on fear of her.

The second thing he noticed was that some second year was making a move on his spot. Gray was surprised to feel irritated, but feel irritated he did. That was his spot. He had worked for it, fallen off a broom a few times for it, complained about it, and even used dissolute language in his evaluation of it more than once without even trying to claim artistic license. New kid didn’t just get his spot. He calmed himself by reminding himself that Aladren was almost sure to need him again, and that there was really no other position he possessed anything like the physical prowess needed to play. Half of the Aladren strategy was keeping the ball as far away from him as possible, but they needed a warm (or maybe even cold; he didn’t know, if it came right down to it, just how picky Thomas would be) body to fill that spot because they needed the ones with a scrap of talent in the more active positions. So the only way Brad Hayman would get his spot would be if they actually had more than seven players, which was…unlikely, or if he just didn’t sign up. He decided to sign up before he forgot about it again.

Grayson Wright, 7th, Keeper

16 Grayson Wright Noticing stuff. 113 Grayson Wright 0 5

Edmond Carey

August 22, 2010 12:41 AM

Being entirely too philosophical by Edmond Carey

Life, for Edmond, was largely a matter of habit. Making certain actions automatic saved on time wasted, which was a useful skill for a scholar as well as, apparently, a Carey patriarch, but he had originally developed it as a means of pleasing his foster family. Inefficiency simply wasn’t something Julia was prepared to accept.

One of the habits he had developed to help him in getting through Sonora was that of checking the notice board each day before he left the common room in the morning and before he went to bed at night, to ensure that he was aware of all official things going on at the school that the staff had deemed it necessary for him to know. The rest, he deemed to be none of his business and assumed that only negative things could result from him learning about it. The staff guided them, and Edmond was happy to be guided. The time, as his sister and foster mother liked to remind him, would soon come when he would have to make almost every decision on his own, or at best with only advice, which might be conflicting, from them and his wife, assuming the first two survived Morgaine’s Active status and he acquired one of the third.

Even now, though, he had to make some of his own decisions. The family was not in favor of him continuing to play Quidditch, and was, in fact, even more against it now than they had been before Father’s…retirement, or assumed death, or whatever exactly had happened to his father. When he had been only the heir to the Savannah Careys, there had always been a chance that Father would remarry and produce another son, which would make his death all right, but if he died now, the patriarchy would pass to the Richards. No one except Morgaine, who Edmond suspected would resent not being able to take over independently much more if it was only a distant cousin supplanting her instead of him, would object to that, but his grandson was Clarence, a self-declared soft Muggle-lover. Edmond wouldn’t care about that so much himself, since the family’s anti-Muggle policies were among the reasons they apparently had a much darker reputation than Julia had ever willingly let on to him, but everyone else, even his sister – the educated Acting Matriarch, who was unmarried, had no intentions of ever marrying, and planned to work publicly once she finished her Healer training – found the idea distasteful at best. It was becoming indelicate and quite embarrassing, the way they carried on about him having children.

He just wanted to be normal. To have a normal life for as long as possible. The thing he remembered most about Gwenhwyfar’s wake and funeral and the time afterward was people murmuring about what a shame it was that she’d died too young to have ever really lived. They had meant, of course, that she’d never married or had children, and she had been physically dead instead of merely constrained by duty, but the truth was that everything would be about duty, with no time for pleasure, once Morgaine stepped down, and if someone did kill him – and dear Merlin, it felt melodramatic to think that, but it was what it was – he didn’t want them to have nothing more original to say about him than that he’d always been obedient. Mentioning that he’d scored more goals than anyone in recent Aladren history or concussed a Crotalus captain wasn’t much better, but it was something.

So he rejoined the Quidditch team.

Edmond Carey, Third Year, Chaser or Beater

0 Edmond Carey Being entirely too philosophical 143 Edmond Carey 0 5

Daniel Nash II

August 24, 2010 9:54 AM

I'm here again by Daniel Nash II

Over the summer, Daniel had been counting on two things coming his way at the start of his fifth year. The first was prefect. That hadn't happened and Daniel had not yet forgiven James Anthony for getting it instead. He had been sure - with an error margin of only about 5% - that all his efforts over the last year or two would have put him over the top and made him the obvious choice for the position. James had done what? Volunteered to tutor? Daniel wasn't even sure he'd had anybody take him up on it.

So not getting it had been a blow. It had even shaken his equal certainty that he'd make Quidditch Assistant Captain this year.

Fortunately for his peace of mind, that didn't prove to be the case. The hints Coach Pierce had dropped were not just cruel teasing. He received an owl from Thomas announcing his advancement, and there was his name listed as an assistant captain on the Sign-Up sheet. It didn't quite make up for not getting Prefect, but at least he'd have a badge of some form.

Besides, both Head Boy and Head Girl this year were Aladren Quidditch Leadership and neither were prefects. That boded well for his chances in the Head Boy election. He could work with this.

It made signing up for the team an obvious choice, so he didn't hesitate at all to add his name to the bottom of the list:

Daniel Nash II, 5th year, Chaser

1 Daniel Nash II I'm here again 130 Daniel Nash II 0 5

Jera Valson

August 26, 2010 2:23 PM

Getting round to it by Jera Valson

There was no doubt that Jera was going to be on the Quidditch team this year. For a start, she was one of the assistant captains. Luckily, she and Thomas had the added back-up of Daniel as another assistant, because with both of them being nominated for Headship and being in seventh year, it would have been an incredible strain on their time otherwise. Neverthless, Jera had been on the team so long that it was inconceivable that she wouldn't spend her final year as Aladren's Seeker.

Of course, there was also the fact that Aladrens weren't generally the sporty type, and they often had difficulty filling a team. Jera wouldn't be the one to make their team forfeit a player, even if she really didn't want to play... but seeing as she was happy to play then there wasn't a problem. As much as it had terrfied her in her younger years, Jera now relished the thrill of a game. She liked the adrenaline, and she was good enough at flying to show off some stomach-churning moves these days. Plus competition had always been thrilling.

So it was that when Jera saw the sign up sheet (it already had names on it, which only went to show how busy she was, even a couple of days into the new term), she added her own details to it without second thought.

Jera Valson, seventh year, Seeker

0 Jera Valson Getting round to it 112 Jera Valson 0 5

Devlin Shortt

September 11, 2010 1:36 PM

Signing up, finally by Devlin Shortt

Devlin Shortt was a mere first year at Sonora Academy. He had arrived a little late compared to the other students. There had been a family emergency; one of his younger sisters, Bianca, had been sick and he just hadn’t felt right leaving for school until she was somewhat better. It was only a couple of days after the Opening Feast, and Devlin seemed to be pretty set.

The Quidditch sign ups had attracted the first year to the bulletin board. Devlin wasn’t sure if he would be good at Quidditch, honestly. He kind of knew how to fly a broom; riding horses was much easier to him, though. He observed the sign ups with a look of concentration. He was rather tall for his age (something that got him teased all the time, being tall with the last name ‘Shortt’), not that that really mattered in Quidditch. Finally, he decided to sign up.

Devlin Shortt, First Year, Anything

Since he didn’t know what he’d even be good at, the captain should totally decide that. He knew a lot about riding on a horse, but not about a broom. He’d just have to figure it out as he went.

0 Devlin Shortt Signing up, finally 0 Devlin Shortt 0 5