Pity CATS didn't eliminate the RATS on Cascade Hall

The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners

March 23, 2009 3:01 PM

The Ridiculously Anal Testing of Skills (7th years) by The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners

Two weeks of examinations was bad by almost anyone's standards, but when they came along with the name 'Ridiculously Anal Testing of Skills' they took on a whole new aspect. Examination timetables had been handed out a fortnight beforehand, so no one could legitimately claim to be caught unawares of when their exams were to be held. The hall had been rearranged for the exams and the waterfalls silenced. At the front of the room the examiners sent by the council conferred quietly (except in the case of one wizard) while waiting for the students to arrive and settle into their appointed seats.

Two of the examiners required no introduction. David Weatherby and Bernard Starsky had been at Sonora only the week before, examining the fifth years taking their CATS, and were almost certainly still familiar to the seventh years from when they'd taken their own CATS. Nothing much had changed since the week past, although Starsky had started to favour his right leg somewhat. It seemed, beyond all reason, that this had also caused his vocal volume to increase. Alongside the two wizards, the final examiner, Aurora Septentrion, looked far more feminine. It helped that she was a witch. A little below average height, her blonde hair fell loose down her back, although with such order that it was almost certain that there was a crafty charm at work keeping it neat and untangled. A pair of elliptical spectacles was perched on her nose, framing her light blue eyes. She didn't smile, at least not in this environment; Septentrion took her work and responsibilities seriously.

The specially designed examination quills were handed out once the students had found their seats, and papers and examination booklets were placed on every desk by the younger two examiners. The third watched all with a suspicious eye, keeping a close eye on the time.

"This," Starsky bellowed at the students without preamble, "is the first of your RATS examinations. We expect you to take them seriously and not to do anything dishonest. That means no cheating. No distracting others taking examinations. And no cheating." He engorgio'd his clockwork stopwatch and charmed it to stick to the front wall. "You will start when the second hand reaches the top, and you have two hours and thirty minutes to complete the paper. Begin."

This was, of course, only the beginning. Written examinations were being held of a morning and after a generous hour and a half break for lunch - and, undoubtedly, practice. And cramming - practicals for the same subject took place in the afternoon, although in a one-on-one format with the examiners. This would continue over the next two weeks while every subject taught at Sonora was covered. It was long and grueling, but at least once it was done there was the concert to look forward to.

OOC: Same as with the CATS, pick your examiner - from those mentioned in the post - for the practicals. Good luck.

Subthreads:

Scat, RATS by Anne Wright with

Oh RATS... by Dalila Bastet

Pity CATS didn't eliminate the RATS by Connor Pierce with

0 The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners The Ridiculously Anal Testing of Skills (7th years) 0 The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners 1 5

Anne Wright

March 27, 2009 7:55 PM

Scat, RATS by Anne Wright

She had considered everything. Falling on the stairs could have, in theory, broken her leg, but Wolfe would have just put it back to rights in a few seconds. Failing all of her exams on purpose would just leave her as an idiot who only had CATS scores to work with and spent the remainder of an awful life washing dishes. Bribing the Cabinet to order an Eighth Year might have worked, but even Uncle Roland - the only rich and influential relative she had - wasn't that loaded.

She was going to have to take her RATS.

Anne wasn't worried about failing them. It wasn't something she said out loud, of course, but she had privately thought she was probably the smartest person in the year from early on. Nor was she worried about college - as long as she kept an E average, her scholarship was probably safe. Anne just, with a violence she'd seldom felt about anything except the Pecari Quidditch team in its glory days, didn't want things to change, and RATS were just one more reminder of how soon things were going to change whether she liked it or not.

Weeks. That was all. In a few weeks, she would be done with Sonora, and it would be the second-worst thing that had yet happened to her. At Sonora, there was structure and a staff full of people paid to tell her what to do and one last off chance that Aladren would win the House and Quidditch Cups. Outside, there was freaking college and autonomy, which were supposed to be good things but just allowed her to do whatever she wanted, and that was always going to be the wrong thing, and then she would land in rehab and then -

She realized she was gripping her forearm far too hard, the remains of her nails digging in painfully, and grabbed hold of the end of her slightly tangled ponytail instead, taking a deep breath as she did. Blasted blood pressure. She hated it when that happened.

Her right leg bounced nervously beneath the desk as two of the proctors handed out the day's booklets, which looked - in the unreliable light of memory - as thick as the three-subject CATS ones had in her fifth year. Charms; because a tiny grain of sense had stopped her from taking everything the school offered for the hell of it, Charms would be her first exam instead of Care of Magical Creatures. She could do Charms. Sure. Charms was easy.

On a good day, anyway.

She threw herself into the exam just as she did most of her classroom exams: at full-tilt, only checking her speed just enough to keep her never-fabulous handwriting legible. What had looked like a thick booklet before the exam appeared to have sprouted a few dozen extra pages in the time between a proctor dropping it on her desk and Starsky telling them to start, and she couldn't see how she could work through them all in two and a half hours. When she finished five minutes early, she spent another minute looking around, waiting for Starsky to call the time she had felt sure was right on top of her.

After the written exams were all taken up and they were all dismissed to lunch, Anne felt shaky, as though she had been recovering from a long illness and wasn't quite back on her feet. Two hours and twenty-five minutes of focusing on exam pages made even dimmer by her shadow falling over them left the lights looking abnormally bright. She was sure that she put it together in the first five minutes of lunch, but her hamburger was only half-eaten when the hour and a half they had been given for lunch ended.

During the long wait for her name to be called for the exam practicals, Anne worked on wand movements, using one of her shoes as a model to practice on. It made the time pass much faster than just sitting there would have, and there was an amount of amusement to be derived from it; it wasn't really every day that she had a tricolored shoe with laces as wide as her arm, though she had to shrink it back quickly to get it out of the way and be ready when her name was called.

At long last, she was distracted from her work by the half-welcome, half-nausea inducing call for "Wright, Anne". Only pausing long enough to shove her shoe - now blue and black, for luck - she unfolded her legs, got to her feet, and went in to meet her potential doom.

Her examiner was shorter than she was, with long, perfect blonde hair and light blue eyes; she might have been Gwen Carey's mother. Gwen's really, really strict mother. Anne took in Aurora Septentrion's put-togetherness and started at once to berate herself for not even hitting her head a few licks with a hairbrush before slicking it back into a ponytail, much less putting on makeup. People who managed to look well-put-together were slightly intimidating when there was evidence to support them having a certain level of intelligence; being a RATS examiner certainly counted. She smiled awkwardly.

"Hi," she said.

The examiner didn't smile back. Oh, Merlin, she did look like a failure just waiting to happen. "Miss Wright?"

"That's me," she said, trying to sound bright and managing, as usual, to sound slightly manic instead. "Ma'am."

Septentrion gave her a cool glance-over, and Anne felt her face burn. She looked like a dropout and sounded - worse - like an idiot. "Welcome to your Charms examination. If you will..."

It was the most vigorous Charms exam she'd ever had, making her think more of a practice duel than anything. She had to levitate a heavy pitcher and hold it there, silence a raven and a frog, shrink a rat, engorge a spider, demonstrate her ability to turn a variety of objects a number of colors, do satisfactory Summoning and Banishing Charms, produce a full glass of water, replicate a locket - and that was only what she could remember. Later, she wasn't quite sure if more or less had happened; it, like the written exam when she tried to describe it to Geoff, seemed fuzzy.

After the exam, she took twenty minutes to have a late-day cup of coffee (bless the prairie elves), and, once she had finished it, went back to her favorite musty corner of the library, levitating seven years of class notes and written-on textbooks over to the table to help her prepare for the Defense Against the Dark Arts exam.

16 Anne Wright Scat, RATS 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Anne Wright

March 28, 2009 1:28 AM

Especially if you carry the plague by Anne Wright

Morning Two of RATS dawned way too bright and way too early for Anne's liking. For a moment - maybe five minutes, maybe ten - she lay very still, just asleep enough to still dream and just awake enough to know she was dreaming, and thought about just blowing off her Defense exam.

By the time she rolled out of bed - if she had it in her to drag herself the class the day after losing a game, she was definitely capable of enduring one more day in RATS Arena - and made her way down to the Cascade Hall, there was only a single, burnt piece of French toast left. Since the thought of the charred bread was almost enough to make her gag, she had two pancakes with her eggs and coffee instead. When the food was gone, so was her remaining free time for the day.

She felt better about the Defense exam than she had about the Charms one, not so much because she was better at the subject as because she now knew what to expect. It wasn't nearly as hard as she'd been lead to believe it might be. Tough, certainly, and she knew it would get harder as the days wore on, but nothing like the expert-level exams she had constructed in her head. She still worked fast, which turned out to be lucky; the last essay took a little more explaining than its predecessor, and she was just putting on the finishing touches of the conclusion when Starsky - the loudest of the lot - called time again.

There was pizza for lunch. This time, she actually finished it. She still hated having to take the exams because of the symbolic value, but it was such a relief to have them be so much less impossible than she'd believed.

Practicing defensive spells in public being somewhat inadvisable, she spent most of the wait time watching other people go into their exams. It was, surprisingly, not half-bad for entertainment, unless she was far too easy to amuse today. She thought she could get used to this mood.

When her name was finally called off the list - the Defense class was much smaller than the Charms one, but W was still a long way down the alphabet - she was assigned to the same proctor as she had been for her Charms exam. She felt a bit better about it this time; her shoes still weren't the same color, but she'd brushed her hair and worn a set of pressed robes. "Good afternoon, ma'am," she said, almost getting an upbeat tone of voice right.

"Good afternoon, Miss Wright," Aurora Septentrion replied. Her hair didn't appear to have moved at all since Anne had finished replicating a locket the day before. It was a tad disturbing. "Ready for Defense Against the Dark Arts?"

The first jinx came too fast for her to think to deflect it magically; instead, she threw herself, rather ungracefully, out of the way when she saw the smaller witch start to lift her arm. She wasn't the most social of people, but a working memory of CATS and half an ear for school talk kept this from coming as a total shock.

As with CATS, there was the question of how aggressively to attack back. It wasn't likely that she could actually win a duel with a certified RATS examiner, but what if things got a little out of hand and she did somehow hurt Aurora Septentrion? She couldn't imagine it would do her marks any good, or her record. In the end, though, nothing did go too terribly wrong; though her shoulder would still sting for a while, she had neither been "killed" nor done any damage to her examiner, who immediately began taking notes.

After that was done, there were still tasks left. She had to demonstrate how to deal with a pogrebin, deal with the boggart in the cabinet (and there was hoping what went on in exam cubicles was confidential), and perform a variety of spells she'd learned over the years. When Anne was, at long last, allowed to leave and return to her thick stack of History notes, she did it feeling reasonably good over how her exam had went.

16 Anne Wright Especially if you carry the plague 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Dalila Bastet

April 01, 2009 3:01 AM

Oh RATS... by Dalila Bastet

It had been a rather dull term for Dalila after she lost the Quidditch match. She had reluctantly told both of her parents and Jake that they had lost, but each letter had been unnaturally positive, even for her, and Dalila didn't know or care whether they all believed that she was okay with it. After that, she had spent a great deal of her time, either hanging out with Lexi, or studying. The studying had been boring, but it had lead to Dalila actually reading most of her textbooks and finally understanding things that she had been guessing about for seven years. So, when the morning of RATS dawned, Dalila took a seat, feeling very well prepared. The quills and exam booklets were passed out and the instructions given. Dalila turned around in he chair to find Lexi and give her a quick thumbs-up before beginning.

She had finished just in time for the old guy to yell out “One minute!” She breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. All she could hear was the scratching of quills, rustling of papers and the footsteps of the proctors. It was relaxing, and that last minute was up all too as the tests were collected and everyone was dismissed for lunch. Even though she had felt fine through the entire exam, Dalila stared at her sandwich with distaste. Like the sandwich was going to ruin her chances at getting through these exams. Therefore, she went to practicals on an empty stomach.

Dalila heard her named called in with the first group, half of her cursing her last name and the other half glad that it's going to be over sooner. She approached the the woman with a little apprehension. She was shorter than Dalila, yet somehow still extremely intimidating. “Miss Bastet?” she asked without looking up. Dalila coughed nervously. “Yes?” she said, as though she weren't sure who she was either.

“Welcome to your Charms examination. If you'll please turn this pitch of water into wine.” Dalila stared at the pitcher. It was gigantic. Dalila had only worked with individual glasses. A bead of condensation slowly dripped down the side, making the pitcher look like it was crying. It knew it was going to explode accidentally. She took a deep breath and tried. It only took her two tries to get the entire pitcher and nothing had exploded. But ten she was asked to levitate it, and then make the wine vanish and reappear again. Finally she had to duplicate a frog, but had been overzealous with her wand work and had made four copies instead of just two. Dalila tried to see what the woman was writing down, but the clipboard was turned just enough so that she couldn't see anything but her name at the top. She quickly tried to correct the situation and had managed on vanishing two of the frogs, but one had managed to escape and was hopping towards the door. Becoming a little hysterical, she did the first thing that came to mind...and summoned the prodigal frog back into her waiting hand. Sighing loudly she stuck the frog back into the box and looked at her proctor apologetically. “Sorry.”

“Don't be,” she said, without looking up from whatever she was writing. “I was going to ask you to do a summoning charm.”

“Oh. Okay.” she said, not knowing what else to say. She waited for further instruction, but the only thing that came next was Septentrion saying “You'll be getting your results in a few weeks.” Dalila took that as a cue to leave.

0 Dalila Bastet Oh RATS... 60 Dalila Bastet 0 5

Anne Wright

April 02, 2009 8:55 PM

Or gnaw exceedingly on the furniture... by Anne Wright

Day Three wasn't the final day, as it had been with CATS, but it was easier than Days One and Two. This was because the exam scheduled for it was History of Magic, which had no practical requirement. All that was being asked of her was to get through a few hours of document analysis, fact recollection, and essay-writing, and Anne would even have time to take a nap before she started studying for Potions again.

With that thought in mind - a nap sounded like the highest degree of luxury in the chaos of RATS - Anne was much more cheerful approaching her History exam than she had been in weeks. She could do this. She was good at this. For today, at least, she had nothing to worry about.

She remained in this unusually optimistic state until the exam officially began, at which point she settled down to business. The multiple choice questions were a mixed bag, ranging from the easy (when the Statute of Secrecy became law, which family getting eaten started the Vampire Wars) to the very obscure (she had to fight down a laugh when a clever exam-writer decided to ask which governor of South Carolina had pushed through several clearly pro-pureblood laws in 1847; he was her great-great-grandfather). In the end, there were some answers she hadn't known, but it had the feeling of an easy section overall.

Document analysis was a little trickier, since - though she had read a lot of historical documents in her time - Anne's grasp of arcane grammar and word connotations left a little to be desired. She had to think and think hard about both a series of document-based objective questions and a few more document-based short answers, making her glad she'd wrapped up the factual recall section so quickly.

The essays came last. Two short, answer-the-question ones, and one document-based question. Since she had yet to have a really good time on one, Anne started with the DBQ. Some examiner had way too much time on his hands; trying harder than she had through almost the entire exam, she only came up with a few facts about the Ordinances of 1182 that came from outside of the document itself. She wasn't sure she'd even studied the stupid thing in class; it seemed like one of those things she'd just glanced at in passing while she leafed through a text. She wrote as fast as she could once she had an idea to work with, but only succeeded in making her hand cramp up.

There wasn't much time to work it out, though; she had two more essays to write. Scribbling down her thoughts on early Council politics and party realignments during the mid- to late nineteenth century, she scribbled down the end of her last paragraph as the proctor shouted from them to stop.

Not a bad exam at all, everything considered. The written section had been tough, but this was the exam she was the most confident about. It felt dangerous to think about it in definite terms, so she didn't, but if she made an O on anything, she thought this would be it.

16 Anne Wright Or gnaw exceedingly on the furniture... 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Anne Wright

April 04, 2009 9:02 PM

Or get into the pantry... by Anne Wright

The optimism that had carried Anne into History of Magic failed to stick around for Potions. This wasn't her best subject. She had only taken it so Geoff wouldn't inflict his obsessive tendencies on innocent bystanders - he was more jealous about his potions than most guys were about their girlfriends - and while she was still, objectively speaking, doing well, it was the subject she felt least-prepared to tackle a high-stakes examination in.

As she waited for the exams to be handed out and the start time announced, Anne couldn't stop twirling her exam quill around and around. Her left knee bounced up and down under her assigned desk. She was staring through, rather than at, the back of the head of her person in front of her. Though she felt more blank than anxious, old habits died hard.

The upshot of the written exam was the lack of formality to the essays. Some of the multiple choice questions were next to impossible, and the final essay was pure murder, but the conventions of style and form that applied in most subjects were absent in Potions. These exam-readers had less than no interest in her ability to write a sentence without hurting the language; if her facts were straight and her meaning in a statement clear, she could use all the sentence fragments she wanted. Though it felt awkward to do it wrong, she took advantage of that grace offering.

After lunch, Anne wanted very badly to go back to her dorm the way she had the day before, but she sternly suppressed the impulse and settled down in the foyer to cram one last time for the practical. She had made more potions than she could count over the past seven years, and she had no idea which ones she'd have to pick from today. She'd worked all the review sheets and practice essays, but, as far as Anne could tell, there was no way to predict what would come up in any given year.

Once the line wound down, Anne found she was not to be reunited with Aurora Septentrion, at least for the day. Instead, she had David Weatherby, who she'd taken a few of her CATS with two years before. That - along with the fact that he wasn't freakishly perfect - made her feel a lot more comfortable around him than she thought she might have otherwise. That could only be a good thing, right?

"I'm sure you remember the drill, Miss Wright," he said as they approached the work station. "You have three potions, one Easy, one Medium, and one Hard. If you pick Easy, your top potential score will be an A. Your only way of scoring an O is to pick Hard."

"Drill remembered, sir," Anne said, looking over the three cards. There was no way in hell she was picking Easy; that was career suicide. Her fingers hovered over the remaining two options, the portion of her brain with logic that was, on a good day, actually logical acutely aware that she had left the brains of the Potions operation in the foyer some time earlier. The downside of working so frequently with a genius was losing, or at least feeling as if she had lost, all ability to perform adequately on her own.

Finally, she looked up. "What the heck. I've come this far. I'll do the Hard one."

Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it was even a really stupid mistake. But she had to know. She couldn't spend the rest of her life wondering if she had settled for an E when it had been within her grasp to make an O.

Mr. Weatherby made a note of her decision. "I'm sure you'll do an impressive job," he said kindly.

Anne tried nothing fancy, instead confining herself to what was on the card. Geoff's "improvements" on class procedures raised their grade almost as frequently as they sent Anne's blood pressure through the roof, but she didn't dare make a stab at prettying things up without him. She usually had at least three things going at one time, and while keeping the items all straight was grueling, it was also - for now; she knew it would bring her to her knees later in the evening - kind of exhilarating. When she was actually doing something difficult and constructive, she thrived on pressure.

It still started to catch up with her before the potion was finished; by the end of the exam, she was out of breath and flushed. Her arm ached, as did her temples. Since there was nothing obviously wrong with her potion that she could see, though, Anne wasn't too concerned about those things. She'd have plenty of time to rest them off, but she'd never get a second chance at making a decent score on her Potions RATS.

Mr. Weatherby made a few more notes, then smiled at her. "A very nice job, Miss Wright. You're free to go."

Her knees almost went weak with relief, but Anne found the energy to nod. "Thank you, sir," she said, then took David Weatherby at his word about her liberty.

16 Anne Wright Or get into the pantry... 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Anne Wright

April 04, 2009 10:52 PM

Or scratch around in the walls... by Anne Wright

On the morning of her Transfiguration RATS exam, Anne woke up and got out of bed with grim resolve. Three exams left, one less than she had already finished. She could do this. She could get through this. She had to; it would be the biggest waste of time, energy, and willpower ever seen if she gave up now. The worst was over, and it was time to finish the game.

With that thought in mind, Anne donned her oldest and most comfortable sweatpants and t-shirt that didn't match, tied her hair up in a knot, and plowed through breakfast with a will. The food itself didn't matter; the important part of the morning was having enough energy to finish the written exam without getting woozy and lightheaded.

Her sense of purpose lasted exactly as long as it took for Aurora Septentrion to drop a thick test booklet on the top of her desk. At that point, Anne started to feel as if her insides were evaporating.

This exam was important to her. It would probably never be reached, but she had wanted to do research in the field of Transfiguration since she was a kid. Transfiguration class had also always been good to her; in spite of the frequent teacher changes, she had held a consistently high grade in the course. It would be a slap in the face to all her many professors of the subject if she did badly now.

And she would never be able to look anyone else in the tiny class in the face again. There was always that.

Her chest seemed to close up as soon as time was announced, and she fought to breathe. Not this. Not now. She could not flip out now. For one thing, she needed every second to get done. For another, if she had a panic attack just now, they might all have to retake the exam or something. Talking was prohibited.

In...and out. In...and out. In...and out.

After an endless moment, things cleared up and she was able to open her booklet. Though Anne's was heart still pounding erratically, she immediately set to work to make up for the time she had lost.

She finished in time, which suggested one of three things: that she was beyond brilliant, that her episode had been a lot shorter than it felt, or that she had gone through the whole exam getting everything wrong. Since she didn't find it at all difficult to point out a hundred different areas where her intellect was inferior to that of, say, Zack and she really hoped she hadn't failed, Anne decided to assume option two was the right answer.

After lunch, her separation from Aurora, Queen of the Hair Products, was brought to an end. She smiled at the proctor as she came up to her. "Miss me yesterday?" she asked.

"Welcome to your Transfiguration exam," Aurora Septentrion replied, though Anne thought she smiled slightly. "To pass this portion of your RATS, you will correctly demonstrate, through use of proper form and incantations, competence in several areas of Transfiguration. Are you ready to begin?"

"As ready as I'm going to get," Anne said, eyeing the table in front of her with some doubt. "Let's get it over with."

This time, she showed off a little. Some things were what they were - Switching Spells, for instance - but the ones that allowed for more creativity let her demonstrate just how good she was with detailwork. It was, however, almost impossible to tell if Aurora Septentrion was impressed by her display in the least. She would still have to wait to get her results to know, once and for all, how she'd done on the exam.

Finally, Aurora Septentrion looked up from making her final note. "You're dismissed, Miss Wright," she said.

Anne nodded. "See you tomorrow."

16 Anne Wright Or scratch around in the walls... 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Anne Wright

April 04, 2009 11:43 PM

Or exist in general. by Anne Wright

The last two days of RATS promised to be easier than their predecessors. They were in the elective subjects (not that there were mandatory classes for all seventh years, but it was the term Anne had used before her CATS and kept in use because it was convenient), and the work would be, for the most part, written. As she pulled her hair into a ponytail on Morning Six, Anne was really able to see that the exams would end for the first time.

As for what she'd do after RATS...Anne didn't want to think about that. RATS and Concert prep had been what kept her on her feet after her last shot at the Quidditch Cup vanished. Without them, she'd have nothing to do but think about what was going to happen in June. Anne couldn't handle that. Not yet.

There were only three students sitting the Ancient Runes exam, which meant there were only three desks set up for them in the Cascade Hall. As Anne sat down beside Chris, the group felt both cozy and exclusive. That wasn't, for her way of thinking, a bad combination at all.

The exam booklet went fairly well. The translations weren't totally easy, but neither were they hideously difficult for someone who'd been doing quite a lot of translation for the past four years. Some of the theory questions were a little harder for her, but they still went well enough, as did the essays. She went to lunch feeling good about how she'd done on it.

Unlike CATS, the RATS for Ancient Runes had a practical. It was oddly serendipitous that the number of students was the exact same as the number of examiners. She was still placed with Aurora Septentrion, though. At least she'd gotten used to the only female examiner over the past two weeks; having some sense of the woman helped with exams, or at least felt like it did. When part of her grade depended on her ability to make up predictions, Anne was willing to take any scraps of help she could get. Even if it was a placebo effect.

She had to set a circle to deflect minor hexes (to Anne's extreme relief, it worked) and demonstrate different ways of casting runes for divination. Since Anne was a skeptic in general about attempts by non-Seers to see the future, she wasn't sure how she did there, but she was sure she'd only said things the definitions of the runes supported.

At the end, she shook hands with Aurora Septentrion. Muggle Studies didn't have a practical, so she wouldn't experience Session Seven of the practicals. Anne left tired, but still feeling good about her performance and generally optimistic about her chances of good RATS scores.

OOC: Ancient Runes practical assumed on the basis of class exercises; ignore that half if I'm wrong.

16 Anne Wright Or exist in general. 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Anne Wright

April 05, 2009 12:02 AM

In conclusion: RATS need to get going and not come back. by Anne Wright

Anticipating the end of RATS was, as it turned out, a very bad move; the resulting bubbly happiness had held off lots of much-needed sleep. Anne's dark eyes felt dryer than the Painted Desert as she received her exam booklet from David Weatherby, and her face seemed to have puffed up to around twice its usual size. It was a good thing she was finished with practicals; looking like the living dead could not be conductive to getting a good grade. Examiners were humans, after all.

She read the first question, realized she had no idea what it had said, and stopped to rub her eyes. This became very regular as she progressed through the exam. Her head began to throb dully while she was working on her short answers, and by the time she reached the three essays, she found it almost impossible to focus. Later, Anne would have no idea what she'd written, or even what the questions had been.

That might have made her burst into tears another day, but she was too tired to bother by the time they were released from the exam. She tried drinking coffee, which helped her eyes but only seemed to make her headache worse. That was, as she soon discovered, a problem. People give funny looks to a girl who's sitting perfectly still, a cup half-raised to her lips, and staring blankly at nothing. Headaches had never been a problem of hers, and Anne was only how coming to see how lucky that meant she was.

Giving up on doing anything constructive, or even fun, with the rest of the day, she pushed herself away from the table with difficulty and trudged her way up to the hospital wing and its lovely supplies of meds and beds. Rubbing her right temple, she looked up at Wolfe dully. "Some painkillers and a bed, please," she mumbled. "I just finished RATS."

16 Anne Wright In conclusion: RATS need to get going and not come back. 59 Anne Wright 0 5

Connor Pierce

April 06, 2009 12:08 AM

Pity CATS didn't eliminate the RATS by Connor Pierce

Though it was more opulent than most and more magical than almost all, there were some things in which Sonora Academy was kind of like any other prep school. Its students had a uniform and curfew, were answerable to residence directors of a sort, had to attend and pass at least some classes to stay in the school, and had pretty much the same messed-up cliques as every other school in America.

One respect in which Sonora was both like and unlike normal high schools was its testing. On one hand, Muggles had high stakes testing. His sister was taking AP Biology and Psych, and they were about to drive her crazy. On the flip side... Beverly was doing that of her own free will. She could have taken Advanced courses intead and still gotten a decent job and had a normal life. If Connor didn't take the exams with the worst name in the history of exams, his options were to wash dishes forever or announce his parentage at one of the sick Carey reunions Gwen had told him about. Neither option really appealed to him.

So here he was. RATS. Never mind that he still had no clue what to do with his life; the important part was to finish his RATS. Once he saw what he had the credentials to do in the Wizarding World, he could go about picking a career to get into. He'd heard dumber plans; his brother had gone to Maryland as an Education major, of all things, and changed it up about five times before settling on Psych because it was what his then-girlfriend, now-fiancee Lynn was into.

Care of Magical Creatures was up first, and Connor was more than a little reluctant to see how the practical for it was going to work. They had never worked with the more advanced creatures outside of the Mirage Chamber, and for very good, valid reason: the real things were likely to eat them. That would take care of the crisis of I-don't-know-what-I-should-do-with-my-life, but he wasn't keen to try it for about the same reason he wasn't considering going to a Carey reunion. He was a lot of things, but suicidal wasn't one of them.

The written section wasn't, all things considered, too bad; he thought he might have even come close to full credit for the essay question about dragon reservations. It caused one of those moments when he was half-sure the past seven years had been a dream - he was seriously writing an essay, for a grade, about dragon reservations? Wasn't it supposed to be about global warming or something? - but deciding the best thing to do would be to plow on anyway served as proof that it was all real; decisions didn't get made that way in dreams.

Luckily, the practical did not involve dragons, manticores, or anything else that could potentially eat him and his old proctor before they could do anything about it, and the day got to end on a pretty high note. Maybe RATS wouldn't be so bad after all.

0 Connor Pierce Pity CATS didn't eliminate the RATS 68 Connor Pierce 0 5

Connor Pierce

April 06, 2009 12:40 AM

Skipping the RATS-related puns this time. by Connor Pierce

Charms was easily Connor's biggest class. Apparently, being able to do charms was to wizards as being able to drive was to Muggles: the next thing to a necessity. You could, if it was absolutely impossible for you to learn, survive without the skill, but life would be a lot harder unless you had an obscene amount of money to fall back on.

Instead of being worried about the practical, Connor's main concern was the written, theoretical portion of the exam. A cornerstone of his problems with Transfiguration had always been the difficulty he had with complex theories, and upper-level charms had a few tricky ideas behind them, too. If an ability to extrapolate on the technicalities of a charm was a big part of his grade, he was finished.

It did feature, but not as heavily as it might have; if the practical didn't go hideously, he was sure he had scored in the passing range. He spent most of lunch and the wait time before the proctors got to his area of the alphabet working on a few last-minute charms. Most were simple, but who knew what the proctors would ask? They only had seven long years of material to draw from.

In the end, Connor was convinced they somehow drew from all seven. One minute, he was being asked to levitate a bust of Paracelsus; the next, he had to perform Geminio, a spell he hadn't been that great at when they covered it in class. As his locomotive charms were also a little weak, his attempts at making a teapot dance for the first time in years failed to be a pretty sight, too. In the end, though, he still had a feeling he'd passed, which was enough. Os would have been nice, but if he could just live through two weeks of tests, he could live without them.

0 Connor Pierce Skipping the RATS-related puns this time. 68 Connor Pierce 0 5