Coach Amelia Pierce
February 26, 2012 3:10 PM
A Letter to the New Captain (David) by Coach Amelia Pierce
Three captains would be graduating at the end of the year and now that the year's Quidditch Final had concluded, Coach Amelia Pierce had considered the merits of who could succeed them. The new captains were, of course, straightforward. All of the Assistant Captains would be advanced to lead their respective teams. It was who would become the new Assistant Captains next year that required thought and possibly even discussion.She had reached her decisions and three letters went out on the leg of Boomer, her large eagle owl.
Boomer stopped second at Aladren, after visiting Pecari. He flew in through an open window (he was quite pleased with the return of spring because it made traveling in and out of the different parts of the school much easier for him when people were willing to open windows to fresh warm air instead of shutting them against frigid temperatures), found a perch, and waited patiently in the common room until David Wilkes appeared. At his arrival, he hooted to get his attention, and held out the leg with the letters attached to it. The top envelope had the fourth year boy's name emblazoned across it in the Coach's formal calligraphy.
The letter inside was scripted in fine penmanship on parchment that bore letterhead claiming its origin was "From the desk of Coach Amelia Pierce, Sonora Academy" and its contents confirmed it. If the letter looked as though its scribe had changed inks just before naming the new assistant, it was because she had put it aside and come back to it after she finished contemplating all the possible death plots - mostly fantasized rather than implemented, she hoped - that would occur based on the name she wrote next. She truly hoped John Fawcett would forgive her for being the first to grant a badge to one of the third year boys in his House because it was impossible to prevent them all.
Captain David Wilkes,
Congratulations on your promotion to Captain. You will be responsible for reserving the pitch for your practices and try-outs, putting up a sign-up sheet at the beginning of the year and recruiting as neccessary, hosting try-outs, and submitting your team roster within the first three weeks of school.
If you have a strong preference for someone other than Arnold Carey as your assistant, please come by my office before the end of the year to discuss it; otherwise, I will assume Mr. Arnold Carey will be the next Assistant. You may inform him of his promotion if he is your choice as well.
Congratulations and good luck next year,
Coach Amelia Pierce
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Coach Amelia Pierce
A Letter to the New Captain (David)
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Coach Amelia Pierce
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David Wilkes
March 01, 2012 6:22 PM
...I'm somehow going to be to blame for this, aren't I? by David Wilkes
David hadn’t meant to come back to the common room for a good while longer, but he’d been halfway to one of the places he occasionally lay low in when he realized he’d left one of the books he’d meant to carry along with him back in his room and had to turn back. He knew there was a chance he never would have used it if he’d gotten it the first time, and in fact a good chance he wouldn’t use it even now that he’d gone back for it, but now that he’d thought about it, it would bug him all day if he didn’t have that book on hand, just in case.So he went back to the common room and was surprised to realize that a hooting owl in the room was hooting at him. He looked at it for a moment in confusion before he recognized it as the coach’s owl, and then he looked at it in consternation, if that was what they were calling the feeling that his stomach was twisting into knots and was contemplating its options for losing everything in it these days. He had a feeling he knew what this was about, all things considered, and he would have known it meant his certain death even before they’d lost the Championship. Now that they had….
Taking the letter, he held out some dim hope that it had been written to tell him that Arthur and Preston had agreed to participate in gladiatorial games to figure out who the next captain should be and so given him the option of stepping aside and just letting them fight it out, but that died within a second of getting past the letterhead. Still, in its place, he did feel just a little moment of satisfaction, or pride, or something like that, upon seeing the words Captain David Wilkes written out. Captain Wilkes. It sounded more like one of the bad guys than one of the good guys, but hey, Muggleborn beggars couldn’t be choosers in this world, and it was the first and last time he was ever going to be captain of anything, so he was okay with that. Besides, most of the school still considered his team The Empire anyway; he made a note, again, to look up music spells to see if he could figure out how to play the Imperial March when Aladren came out to play its first game next year. He wouldn’t have to explain to the purebloods what it was, it would sound pretty intimidating anyway probably, and while it would most likely strike the other Muggleborns as weird, he would get a good laugh out of it….
…There was more in the letter, wasn’t there? Yeah, more stuff below the salutation. He guessed he should read that stuff, too, before he started checking out capes and helmets. Or at least checking them out for Arthur; David really thought he himself was…well, better off leaving it at that, rather than trying to analogize the entire team with the cast of Star Wars, especially since their token girl really bore no resemblance whatsoever to Princess Leia. He read on.
When he got to the part where his assistant captain was named, his first reaction was to be surprised, but then he thought about it a minute longer and realized no, this was really one of only two ways it could have gone if one worked under the assumption that Coach Pierce actually knew anything about the players who weren’t Crotali. He’d assumed she didn’t, since she’d named him as Assistant Captain last year, but this made him think she did. Unless it was just a consolation prize for Arnold, to keep him from getting too…Carey about things now that he’d lost, but that didn’t seem likely. And he needed to stop this trying to analyze Coach Pierce from a distance, too, before he talked himself into a fine old bout of paranoiac thinking.
He hung around the common room until he spotted Arnold, just as the owl had waited on him, and then stood up. “Hey, Arnold,” he said, then bit down on the inside of his mouth as memories of the few times he’d seen a certain animated program came to mind at the exact wrong time. “You get to be me next year. Congratulations.”
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David Wilkes
...I'm somehow going to be to blame for this, aren't I?
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David Wilkes
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