Bertie Jackson
October 07, 2021 10:14 AM
Theory lessons (Tag Philippe) by Bertie Jackson
Bertie had been quietly minding his own business, eating dinner in the Cascade Hall a few nights ago, when there had been fireworks. Admittedly, only cake-height fireworks, but still. Fireworks. And all the fuss and bother had been to ask someone to the ball.The idiocy was starting early.
Zara had already mentioned at least five times how Felipe had asked her. She seemed excited and chittery about it, like it was newsworthy, when obviously they would be going together. They’d been dating so long they were practically an old married couple.
Bertie, for all that he was a stoic man of intelligence and reasoning, was not entirely without romantic inclinations, of course. He could see that the ball could be… intriguing. He just hadn’t expected everyone to start quite so early on being giggly about it.
That had left him with a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, Mara was not prefect, so she was perhaps not feeling as much pressure as some people to look for a potential date. On the other, who wouldn’t want to date Mara? Even with the odds in his favour (the gender ratio was so skewed that not even accounting for diverse sexualities made up for it - he’d run the math) he did not feel confident.
He had considered various different options, but had decided that he needed to do more research before committing to any of his ideas. He headed to the library, with the vague notion that books had never let him down before. Although when he saw one of his gaming companions sitting alone, he had a better idea. Not just any gaming companion, but one who was actually successfully dating another human. Of all Bertie’s spy skills, noting human relationships was the least attuned, but it was pretty easy to notice that Freddie had shown up attached to Philippe.
Also, he’d overheard someone say it. It still counted.
“Hi,” he said, approaching Philippe’s table. “Freddie’s your- You are dating Freddie, yes?” he confirmed. Given Freddie’s use of they/them pronouns in-game, Bertie wasn’t sure that ‘boyfriend’ would be the correct term. “How do you ask someone to go out with you? I mean, it’s a girl in my case, but I imagine the theory is basically similar,” he added, pushing his glasses up, even though they hadn’t actually slid down. There probably wasn’t much point pretending he wasn’t feeling a little bit awkward when his stammer gave everyone a nice indicator of that all by itself.
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Bertie Jackson
Theory lessons (Tag Philippe)
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Philippe Delachene
October 08, 2021 12:51 PM
Dependent Study? by Philippe Delachene
Philippe was working on his German coursework, trying to get it done on his own before asking Freddie to check his answers. His Independent Study was a lot easier with immediate feedback from a native speaker, though he wasn't sure it counted as Independent at that point. Was it a Dependent Study then? Anyway, he was making solid progress on the language. He was still obviously a beginner and his American accent in German was probably even worse than Freddie's German accent was in English (though sometimes it swung French when he was trying too hard to Not Be American that his tongue defaulted toward his other language). Written German, though, was going pretty good on the topics he'd studied so far, as long as he only wanted to use simple sentences in present tense.He looked up from his conjugations from the To Make infinitive when he heard someone greet him. He grinned at Bertie. "Hey," he returned, mildly surprised that the Aladren was interested in hanging out with him, but definitely not wanting to discourage it.
Or may he had a more specific purpose in mind than casual hanging out. "Yeah, I'm dating Freddie," he agreed, feeling kind of awesome that he was the person who got to say that.
Ah. Dating advice. Philippe wasn't sure how much help he was going to be on that score since he couldn't exactly recommend having a broken penseive show a memory to the girl in question about Bertie's family discussing his crush on the girl. It was a pretty specific set of circumstances that would be hard to replicate.
"Are you already friends?" he asked. That had been the first step; ceasing to be Freddie's friend's little brother in order to become Freddie's friend himself. "Because that helps." Though, in Anya's case, Alexander had just walked up to her and asked her out entirely out of the blue so apparently that worked too, "But it's not required. There's kind of two approaches. With me and Freddie, we sort of eased slowly into dating. We just did stuff together and got to know each other first, then we started calling the things we invited each other to do together dates. Some people just go up to a girl and say 'Hey, do you want to date?' and sometimes that works, I guess? That's what Alexander did with my sister, and they're dating now." He wasn't sure Anya was exactly representative of her gender, though. Or species.
"The important thing, though, is making sure you both agree on what you want to expect from the relationship, but that's kind of more once you decide you're going to date, rather than part of the process of asking someone out in the first place. But me and Freddie did talk a little bit about what we were looking for in a boyfriend before we were boyfriends, so talking about it before asking her out might help you shift from friends to more than friends. You can also ask about what kinds of things she likes to do. I know it helped me decide to ask Freddie on a picnic dinner date, knowing Freddie liked picnics. Does that help at all?"
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Philippe Delachene
Dependent Study?
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Bertie Jackson
October 08, 2021 11:13 PM
Maybe I should stick to books by Bertie Jackson
Philippe led with a question, but followed it up with a whole load of rambling and speculating, which probably meant that Bertie’s lack of response—beyond an ambiguous head tilt to the side—hopefully went unnoticed. He was the one investigating here, and the less concrete information Philippe came away with about who he had a crush on, the better. He was a Teppenpaw, so he probably wouldn’t do anything intentionally malicious with the intel, but he might try to be helpful, which could be just as dangerous. The road to hell, and all that…The options appeared to be go slowly or dive right in, which really didn’t narrow it down much. He tried to analyse Philippe’s data a little more properly than the Teppenpaw seemed inclined to. Being feelsy worked for Teppenpaws. Jumping right in… Well, the asker was a Teppenpaw, but he had been going after a Pecari. That made some sense. None of it told him how to approach an Aladren. Probably with logic. Perhaps coming to Philippe had been entirely pointless. Of course, he hadn’t fully intended to. He had intended to consult books. Why had he strayed from that path?
The advice about looking into things that Mara liked was rather obvious, even if he hadn’t actually thought of it himself. He tried to consider… Outside of classwork, they mostly talked about codes and puzzles, which was his interest. He knew she liked make-up, in an analytical rather than a stupid way, but he wasn’t entirely sure how to share that interest, other than being very willing to look at any graphs or chemistry textbooks she might have. They had certainly swapped and shared plenty of books and stories. He supposed that, following Philippe’s model, he could ask her if she wanted to come and read with him in the library and call it a date…
“A little,” he nodded, when Philippe asked if his advice had been helpful. It had not given him a foolproof way to make Mara go to the ball with him, but that had been rather a lot to hope for. It was polite to tell someone they had helped, even if they hadn’t at all, and Philippe had probably scraped just above that baseline. “It certainly gives me more data to consider,” he stated, trusting that Philippe knew him well enough to understand that was a good thing.
“You’re learning his language,” he added, glancing at the materials around Philippe. He was trying to do that for Mara too, though it would narrow down the pool of candidates far too much to admit that. He also wasn’t convinced it was going well enough to be impressive. “That’s got to be challenging. Is it useful? For making him like you, I mean?”
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Bertie Jackson
Maybe I should stick to books
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Philippe Delachene
October 11, 2021 10:42 PM
It's good to have a wide variety of source material by Philippe Delachene
Philippe grinned as Bertie admitted he'd been at least a little helpful and provided data. Data was good. Data was important for making intelligent decisions even if you weren't an Aladren (though it seemed to Philippe that some Pecaris and even Teppenpaws found it more optional than important - looking at you, Alexander and Anya) so he was glad he'd been able to offer some to help Bertie. Probably not all the data he was going to need - Philippe was absolutely sure he hadn't said anything really profound or enough to provide exhaustive expertise - but it was at least a starting point, maybe.He looked down at his verb conjugations again when Bertie brought his attention back to them. "Oh, yeah," he agreed, nodding. "Communication is important, and Freddie's English isn't . . ." he stopped, not wanting to insult Freddie's English because learning a language you weren't born to was hard and he understood that English was particularly bad for non-native speakers, and as hard as it was, Freddie's English was far and away better than Philippe's German (though to be fair, he'd been at it longer), and about comparable to Philippe's French. "Well, he tries hard and he is fluent." There were just some deeper topics it was really hard to talk about because they just didn't have the shared vocabulary for it. "I just thought it might help me understand where he's coming from, though, if I learned some German, too. And my Dad's from France and my mom is from America, and she never learned his language, and Dad says that's 'fine' because he speaks English perfectly, but . . . I don't think it's really . . . 'fine'. When I asked him about it, he told me in no uncertain terms that I should learn German, that Freddie would really appreciate it. And I know my grandparents hold it against Mom that she never even tried to learn French. So." He waved at his books and homework paper. "Independent Study topic."
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Philippe Delachene
It's good to have a wide variety of source material
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Bertie Jackson
October 15, 2021 11:17 PM
You're not bad, for a Teppenpaw by Bertie Jackson
Freddie’s English was a mangled broom crash that had no respect for grammar, and his personality gave the impression that most of his thoughts would have been at the very least excessively effusive if not downright banal even if there hadn’t been a language barrier. But Philippe was a Teppenpaw, so he probably didn’t mind that latter point. Bertie also knew that the first point wasn’t something to hold against someone. Both from the point of view that it was elitist and xenophobic, and also because he knew full well what it was like to keep your hand down and your mouth closed, even when there was a perfectly intelligent thought in your head, for fear of not being able to get it out right.“I’m sure he will,” he nodded, regarding Philippe learning German being something Freddie would appreciate. Though, given that they were in an English-speaking environment and Freddie had several years head start, it was unlikely that Philippe’s level of German was going to improve their general level of conversation. Thankfully, he didn’t have that problem with Mara, because she was American and a native English speaker. By that logic, any token effort he made at Spanish should have been positive, but he wasn’t really prepared to accept anything less of himself than actual fluency (not whatever Philippe had meant when he had used that word just now). Which was a stretch, given that he was dysfluent even when speaking his own home language. “It’s frustrating, not being able to say what you’re thinking,” he acknowledged.
Again, in Freddie’s case, he suspected that really was ‘not much.’ If Freddie had been discussing nuclear physics and transfiguration theories with bad grammar, Bertie would have been perfectly willing to regard him as intelligent. It was more that he seemed to think hair dye and smiling were a personality that Bertie held against him.
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Bertie Jackson
You're not bad, for a Teppenpaw
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