Mara Morales
July 28, 2020 10:59 AM
Note to Professor Skies. by Mara Morales
OOC: Discusses another character's mental health struggles. BIC:Mara wanted to think that she hadn’t known what to do, but that would have been a lie, and she did not hold with lying to herself. The truth was that she had known what to do. The question had been whether or not she wanted to go through with doing it.
Examining it, she didn’t think her reluctance had sprung from any nefarious motives. She might have made her way back to remembering why she’d kinda wanted to hex him in the first place, and might well still do so after all if he went around talking about her business anymore, but she was pretty sure she would derive no pleasure whatsoever from Felipe ending up dead. After their chat in the Gardens, she was pretty sure she would actually feel horrific guilt instead, knowing what she did, if she didn’t do the right thing. In business and law, there were a lot of places where the lines between right and wrong didn’t function quite the way they did among the common people, and she was reasonably comfortable with that, but this wasn’t such an area. The answer to how she ought to behave was perfectly clear. It was just the consequences which she couldn’t even begin to predict.
Note to self: add Divination to list of things to learn.
She didn't have the option to do so yet, though - at least not in an efficient manner - so she was just going to have to live with unpredictable consequences. Nobody ever got to their first million by being too reluctant to face consequences to make a move, so she made a face, then got out a quill and a bottle of dipping ink and a piece of parchment (the better to make it not obvious that a normal person had written the note instead of one of those purebloods) and started printing a note in anonymous letters, or the closest thing she could manage while writing with a quill. One of the things she had picked up on quite quickly was why old-timey people all had such fancy penmanship; part of it was training, of course, and she’d had to finish a calligraphy book last year just to do the thing Properly, but part of it was that writing with such objects either reduced one’s handwriting to an illegible scrawl or made it fancier. The tip was flexible, far more than even a gold fountain pen (she knew this for a fact, having borrowed Jessica’s little Pilot E95 before, and having gotten in quite a lot of trouble when she was little for damaging one of Dad’s Montblancs), and the inevitable pressure changes that came with shaping letters changed the thickness of the lines: thick on the downstroke, thin on the upstroke, and so forth.
She was not, calligraphy book aside, that good with a quill yet, and blotted the first attempt so badly in two different places that she finally decided to start over, but in a reasonable amount of time, she had produced a note:
You might want to watch student F. De Matteo. He was overheard asking another student to hurt him and talking about not being good enough to consider human. It was disturbing.
Mara looked at it dubiously, hoping the handwriting didn’t shriek that it was hers despite her efforts. If her handwriting was distinctive at all, it was all because it was so very plain. In school, she had tended to give the teachers exactly what they wanted, and in handwriting classes in kindergarten up to fourth grade, the thing they had wanted had been an exact copy of the letters in the copy-books. The only trouble had been that when she held her pens the way they had wanted her to, her handwriting had tilted too much to the right to match the copybooks, which had had very upright and rounded letters. She held pens at an upright angle and wrote upright letters – as a matter of habit. For this, she had allowed her writing to tilt right, along with (though it had been almost physically painful to do so) used little open circles to dot her ‘i’s.
It would have to do, she thought. She folded it up, taped it shut without thinking because she had yet to get on board with sealing wax, and wrote Professor Skies’ name on the outside in the same not-quite-natural way before and went down to where the school owls lived.
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Mara Morales
Note to Professor Skies.
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