Pen Pals on Sandbox

Selina Skies

June 17, 2022 5:12 AM

Pen Pals by Selina Skies

The large tawny owl swooped in towards the house, trying to maintain an air of subtlety as it tapped on the window. To some degree, it would be expected. All the Muggleborn students had been visited by their liaison by now. They had a broad understanding of the school and its workings, including the fact that all future letters would be delivered by owl. For those from magical backgrounds, of course, this was perfectly normal, and a number of Sonora’s owls were heading to those sorts of homes too - they were on missions to those with no prior connection to the school, no family enrolled already to answer questions and make them feel welcome, in order to try to make the whole process of settling in a little easier.

The school had taken care to select the more patient and docile of its birds, the kinds that wouldn’t nip or fuss at inexperienced, perhaps slightly nervous hands as they attempted to relieve them of their letters. The kind that appreciated an owl treat (because after all, who didn’t love those little pellets of brown and mousy goodness?) but who would not ruffle their feathers and sulk if such a thing was unavailable. The kind that would wait patiently a couple of days, in case any response to the letter they carried was forthcoming.

The missive the owl delivered addressed the new student by their name, and then continued with the same message for each:

We are pleased that you have selected Sonora Academy as your new school. We are excited to welcome you on September 1st. We know it can be daunting starting a new school, and we would like to make that easier by offering you the chance to exchange letters with an existing student.

The project is voluntary. If you would be interested in taking part, please write back with a letter of introduction. Our owl will wait two days for your response. After that, you will be assigned a pen-pal who is currently in their first year at school, with whom you can exchange letters during the summer.

Please specify in your response whether you have an owl at home or easy access to a local owl office. We will try to pair people to ensure access to owls, and can provide information about local services or loan of a school owl where necessary.

We look forward to welcoming you in September,

Selina Skies,
Deputy Headmistress.

The term itself was drawing to a close, but the deadline provided would give them time to set up partnerships and check the owl statuses of those involved. There probably wouldn’t be time to do much more than share a couple of letters during the summer break, but hopefully it would give the new starters a feeling of familiarity with the school, and a more comfortable beginning.

OOC: OOC - welcome to Sonora! You have received the above letter and can now reply to it. Your post should be a mixture of narration (describing your character getting the letter) and quoting the actual letter they write in return.

At this point, your character is aware of Sonora, and has been accepted. If they are Muggleborn, someone has been to visit to explain the basics of the world to them.

If everything goes well with these threads, we are willing to consider them canon interactions (they really happened for your character). As noted above, there will be a thread limit here of three posts per person, as we’re working within a set time frame (the summer holiday) and with something that would be time consuming (writing and sending letters).

Remember that a post needs to be at least 200 words. As you are at home, you may write for other characters of your own, such as family members, but it would be preferable to write as much as possible from just your student's point of view.

Some things to consider:
- How does your character feel about getting a pen pal? About using owl post?
- What background can you show us in terms of their home - give us a sense of the environment they are writing in
- What writing materials do they use? Are they using a quill or a ballpoint pen? Do they have neat writing?
- What are their thoughts and feelings about the content of their letter? Are they an open book, or is there a contrast between what they are saying and thinking?

We will start posting the new school year on June 17th, though from our characters' point of view, it's September 1st. Until that time, please only post on the sandbox or OOC page.

If you have any questions, please put them in notes to me as we post, write them on the OOC page, email us, or join our student chatzy. (Password: sonorachat)

13 Selina Skies Pen Pals 26 1 5

Rowan Westfall

October 10, 2023 4:18 AM

Who knew having your dream come true could be scary? by Rowan Westfall

When he saw the owl Rowan slid off his chair so fast he nearly tripped, as he hurried over to the kitchen window, having to get up on the counter to lean over the sink and unlatch it. He couldn't even begin to hide the excited smile as the owl flew in, landing on the back of the chair Rowan had been sitting in. He gingerly took the letter from the owl, being careful to stay clear of its long talons, even if it seemed nice enough. He considered calling for his father to tell him another letter arrived, but figured he might get in trouble if he disturbed him in his study. Rowan could handle this on his own, it was only a letter.

He slid back onto the chair, carefully opening the letter and wincing as he tore the fine parchment of the envelope. He pulled the letter out, dropping the envelope on the ground, and immediately admiring how lovely the windey hand writing was. He started to read, his eyes scanning the page, occasionally having to pause to figure out what a word was, as the cursive was a bit more difficult to read than print. It took him a minute, but he finished the letter, and his smile couldn't have been wider.

A pen pal. Rowan had never really had one of those, well, he'd tried it with one of his friends a couple years ago, but she wasn't consistent enough in replying and lost interest after two letters. Rowan grabbed his notebook off the dining room table, along with his pen and the letter, and put his shoes on. He ran outside, usually he'd curse the hot air of late summer, but there was a wind blowing off the ocean, cooling Rowan's little corner of the world off considerably. He started walking down one of the many deer trails until he reached his destination.

The world seemed so bright right now, even though things were much the same, ever since Rowan had been accepted into Sonora he felt like everything was more colorful. He could hardly believe it when an actual wizard showed up at his house, claiming magic was real, and that Rowan of all people had the ability to do it. Rowan was fairly sure this was all a dream.. a wonderful, perfect dream, but a dream nonetheless. There was no way things could be this perfect right now, he'd spent so much time wishing the fantastical was real, and now when he'd finally given the knowledge that he didn't have to wish anymore, he couldn't get it through his head. He had to enjoy this fantasy while he could, because he couldn't help but wonder how someone as normal as him could be a wizard, and it made the whole idea feel a little fragile, like that wizard would show up again and tell Rowan they had made a mistake.

Rowan plopped himself down on the dirt as he reached his little hideaway, a lean-to built against a mossy boulder, the space big enough to fit Rowan, and littered with bones and old rusty cans or what ever he found around the forest. His parents didn't know about his place, not that it was important that they didn't, Rowan just liked the feeling of something being secret and only his. He couldn't imagine a better place to write his first letter to his knew pen pal.

He smoothed out the letter again, making sure it didn't get wet or muddy from the ground, and pulled out his own notebook.

Hello! My name is Rowan Westfall, I'm your new pe-

Bad. That wasn't how you started a letter at all, it should be more formal than that, he didn't want to seem like a fool. Rowan ripped the page out, regretting only bringing a pen so he couldn't erase.

Dear pen pal,

That was better.

My name is Rowan Westfall, and I'm starting at Sonora this September. I currently live in Astoria, Oregon, although I used to live in London. I love the forest here, as well as reading, drawing, and music. My parents both work from home, and they're both muggles. I still can't believe magic is actually real, though I doubt you feel the same way.

That was a good start, right? He hoped so, he wasn't at all practiced at writing letters, and while thinking about what to include about himself, he couldn't help but feel less and less interesting, and would probably end up boring whatever student he was paired with. He rewrote it a few times, producing several variations of the same letter, getting more and more frustrated. Who wanted to read a random letter from a boy who just reads or draws all the time? There were kids out there who were probably writing about pet dragons, or riding unicorns, or flying, or whatever children raised by wizards did.

The world was still bright, but now a bit... daunting. Yeah, Rowan was supposedly able to learn magic, but he was also leaving home for months at a time to go to this school. Would it be like his old school? Would the teachers be nice? Would he be able to make friends? Or would he be stuck as being the quiet, awkward kid again? With another couple friends who he wasn't even that close with? That wizard had explained somethings, but now that Rowan really was thinking about this, he had even more questions, and he didn't want to just put all his concerns on a pen pal.

He was a bit frustrated trying to come up with the perfect letter, and eventually gave up, taking the first okay one and adding a few more things along with his situation of having no access to another owl, before gathering his things together and heading back to the house.

He wasn't smiling anymore, and he walked slowly and carefully, hyper aware that soon he'd be away from this place for months, and it terrified him a little. Who knew having your dream come true could be scary?

When he arrived back at the house, he tied his letter to the leg of the owl, hesitantly giving it a few strokes, a little worried it could try to bite him, and released it back out the window in time to hear his mother coming in through the front door.

71 Rowan Westfall Who knew having your dream come true could be scary? 0 Rowan Westfall 0 5

Cecily Welles

October 12, 2023 2:19 PM

I've heard it happens a lot, but I don't really know about it yet for myself. by Cecily Welles

Cecily had found her first semester at school difficult, socially speaking, and that had been a surprise. It was not, after all, as though she had led a particularly isolated life before Sonora. She had spent her whole life as part of a large family – admittedly, most of it was technically composed of adults and not other children, but still: a large family – and her father was a politician. A popular, handsome, youngish politician, even, with a beautiful wife from an almost fairy tale-like background – the sort who got attention for reasons other than how much people hated him, sometimes, even if he did get some of that kind of attention, too. Cecily had learned how to wave correctly and smile at cameras when she was two years old. She’d learned where photographers were allowed to be and where they weren’t and how to handle both situations before she could even remember. Her father joked that she was one of his most valuable assets. The public had always been a familiar part of her life, so why should she have expected school to be any different?

It hadn’t taken her long, though, to figure out that something about her approach once she was actually at school had felt...wrong. That there was something...different, somehow, about dealing with other kids her own age instead of with either her uncles, her two little brothers, or the public. That nothing was superficially wrong, nobody disliked her, but she still didn’t feel like she was managing what Mom and her uncles and most of her aunts had managed: to really click with people and form firm friends. And so, in confusion, she had withdrawn into herself until she could consult other opinions.

Everyone who knew John Umland knew he was probably not someone to ask for social advice, but Cecily had done so anyway. For one thing, her father would have been disappointed in her had she failed to exploit every resource at her disposal, however unlikely that resource seemed to be to prove useful in context. For another, well, John did have friends, so clearly he’d done something right, somewhere down the line. Most importantly, though, John was her favorite of her mother’s brothers, the person who hadn’t seemed to object to being chosen as hers when her little brother George had been born and everyone else had seemed to suddenly like him best instead of her. It didn’t really occur to her not to consult him on one of her problems. And, unlike Mamma and Uncle Joe, who had repeated the same things about being herself and nice to everyone that they’d said before school, John had come through with practical, easy-to-follow advice.

”Just ask people interesting questions, if you can’t think of anything else to say,” he’d told her at midterm. ”That’s how I got to be friends with Clark – I think it was something about whether beetles from one place would work better than beetles from another in a potion? Oh, and if your year doesn’t work out, just talk to different people next time. I didn’t have any friends in my year, really, but Clark was a year ahead of me and your aunt Sammy was a year behind me.”

She had no idea if this would work any better than anything else, but by the same token, she had no reason to think it would fail. When Professor Skies started looking for people who could be pen pals with incoming first years, she therefore volunteered immediately, and once she got home for the summer, she waited on pins and needles for her first communication.

When it finally came, she was so overexcited that she had to read it three times before she really took in a word. Once she did, though, it looked promising. Someone else who had roots in the West (Cecily’s family was originally from Alberta while Rowan’s had just moved to Oregon, but still – same general part of the world, she thought), but also in another country (she was Canadian, he was English). Their backgrounds were different enough to be interesting but similar enough to not seem entirely strange, probably? Maybe? And reading, drawing, music, those were good hobbies…

She took great pains with her reply, wanting it to make a first impression with only her neatest handwriting. She went through three sheets of parchment and had to sharpen her quill before she produced a draft she thought looked acceptable, but finally, she read it over one last time and decided it was as good as it was going to get. With that in mind, she had folded it neatly, sealed it with wax, and tied it to the return owl to seek out its recipient.

Dear Rowan,

Hello! It’s nice to meet you. My name is Cecily Welles. I just finished my first year at Sonora, and I’m in Crotalus House. Right now I’m at my parents’ house, which is outside of Ottawa, in Canada. They sent me to Sonora because that’s where my mom and two of my uncles and one of my aunts went to school. Mom and her brothers are from Alberta (which isn’t very far from Oregon), and Aunt Sammy’s an American, which is why she was there.

My dad’s also a wizard. He’s a junior minister with our magical government in Canada, and Mom stays home with me and my brothers. Do you have any brothers or sisters? I have two little brothers, their names are George and Kenneth. Mom has two older brothers and two younger brothers. We’re the only girls in the family except for my three aunts, who are married to my uncles, and my grandmother. My grandmother is like you – someone whose parents were Muggles. I’ve heard a lot about life in the Muggle world from her, but I’ve never really been there very much. Do you like it there? Are you looking forward to coming here? Do you have questions about what life is like here? Grandmama and my uncle who can't do magic say that it's not as much different as people might think, but you're right, I've always just thought of magic as normal - the way you probably think about electricity?

I hope you’re doing well, and that I hear from you again soon. See you at Sonora!

Sincerely,

Cecily Welles

16 Cecily Welles I've heard it happens a lot, but I don't really know about it yet for myself. 1578 0 5

Rowan Westfall

October 14, 2023 2:52 AM

A new acquaintance by Rowan Westfall

Cecily’s letter arrived in the middle of dinner, the owl just flew right in, settling itself on a counter as they had a few windows open, letting in cool dusk air. Rowan dropped his fork on his plate, about to get up and run over to the bird, when his mother grabbed his wrist.

“Finish your food, then you can read it,” she said sternly.

Rowan finished the food, eating everything on his plate even after he was full, so he could read the letter. He wasn’t sure whether to be excited or terrified. He couldn’t help thinking that his new pen pal would find him incredibly dull, he’d been worrying about it ever since he sent off his first badly written letter less than a week ago.
Once he was released from the table, he took the letter and headed straight to his room, tearing open the envelope and starting to read the neat handwriting, not as scrolled as the letter from the school, but still incredibly beautiful. Did every witch or wizard have neat hand writing? Rowan hoped that wasn’t some sort of requirement at school, his handwriting was legible, but uneven with loosely formed letters.

Cecily Welles

It was a nice name, flowing nicely, and she sounded quite nice. Rowan didn’t even know someone could be so familiar with all their family members, not with so many aunts and uncles, and she lived in Canada!
He dug through his desk drawer, looking for something a little nicer than notebook paper this time, and found a pad of nice thicker paper with a floral pattern he gotten last year. It was unused as of yet, the paper to nice to use except for special occasions. This was definitely an adequate use.

Rowan settled down at his desk, carefully smoothing out Cecily’s letter next to his own, and started writing—being smart enough to use a pencil this time.

Dear Cecily,

It’s nice to meet you too! I’ve never been to Canada, but I’ve seen photos and it seems lovely, and I didn’t even know there were wizard politicians, let alone a magical government, though I probably could have guessed.

My father does marketing for a large company. I’m not completely sure what it is, he never talks about his work around me but he spends a lot of time on it so I don’t see him a lot during the day, even though he’s always at home. My mother doesn’t normally work, but she does a lot of clubs and volunteering at the local church. Other than that, I don’t hardly ever see other family, as I don’t have any siblings, and most of my relatives live back in England. We moved here when I was 8, after my grandfather died. Mother said it’d be good to get out of the city, and spend time in nature, and so we live a couple miles out of Astoria, in the woods.

We can walk to the beach and some docks, though it’s technically it’s not quite the ocean, it’s the bit of the Columbia river that leads into the ocean, making the waves a lot calmer than some of the other proper beaches we go to on weekends. Do you like the ocean? Have you ever been? I know Ottawa is inland a little ways, so you may have not gotten much chance to. I’ve got a box full of shells I’ve found, even a few crab shells, those are always hard to find intact. I do miss London though, even though I don’t think I could permanently leave Oregon. My grandfather lived a few blocks from us, and let me play on his piano when I was little—even though I had no clue how to play. I started taking lessons from him before he died, and I still do from a teacher here. I wish I could say I missed him, not that I didn’t love him, but it just feels like it’s just the way things are, you know?

I went to a muggle school, though I hope Sonora’s a lot nicer, I don’t think I could handle bad cafeteria food and sleeping away from home. We only moved here a few years ago, but the thought of leaving home behind is a little scary, I’m just glad my whole life isn’t going to be uprooted like when we first came to America. Did you ever get home sick? You have a lot more people to miss than I do, so imagine it might feel worse than only being away from your parents. Are they nice?

I am very excited about Sonora, a bit scared, but excited. I do like it in the muggle world, to answer your question, which honestly “the muggle world” is still a bit of a strange term to me. I’m sure it’s normal for you, it just makes my word and yours sound so separate, doesn’t it? We’ve got electricity, cars, recorded music, television shows, what do you have? Do you use floating candles or fireballs or something for lightning? How do you listen to music without it being live? Is it all just magic?

Thank you so much for writing, it means a lot. Hopefully you’re doing okay and having a fun summer, and I’m looking forward to meeting you soon!

Sincerely,
Rowan Westfall

There. That was good, right? Rowan knew his first letter wasn’t great, so he’d tried to model his after Cecily’s a bit. She was good at writing, and seemed confident in herself, Rowan hoped what he had seemed fairly interesting. It was neat that she lived in Canada, and the fact she was the daughter of the junior minister?! He genuinely didn’t know that was a thing. He’d just assumed wizards were under muggle law, or maybe even in covens.

Rowan felt like this was going well, she was interesting, and it didn’t feel like he had bored her, not much at least even with his first low quality letter. He hoped that this would at the very least give him a connection so he didn’t feel so isolated at the beginning of term.

He walked back into the kitchen, he’d have to go to bed soon, the owl was outside the window and resting on a fence post. Rowan’s mother was eying the bird a bit warily, and he didn’t doubt she’d been the one to shoo it back outside. He leaned up on the counter, waving his envelope at the bird to call it over, its silent wings bringing it over to land on the window sill so he could tie the letter to it’s leg. He took a piece of left-over chicken from dinner and set it down next to it. He didn’t dare feed it out of his hand, even if that’s be cool, he was too afraid it’d bite him a little in the process. It hesitantly eyed the offering, and picked it up sliding it down its throat all in one movement, before it flew off into the star lit night.

71 Rowan Westfall A new acquaintance 0 Rowan Westfall 0 5

Cecily Welles

October 18, 2023 10:59 PM

Maybe even future friends. by Cecily Welles

Cecily had worried a little about her letter, once she’d sent it off. Had she asked too many questions? Talked too much in general? Rowan’s first letter had left open the possibility that he wasn’t a huge chatterbox, after all, and you never really knew about people like that until you, well, knew them, did you? They might talk when asked to talk, or they might talk when they knew you, or they...might just not talk, depending on who they were. And if she was dealing with a type three and she had been too pushy….

It did not take her long, though, after she got his response to figure out that she probably hadn’t done that. Instead, he’d suddenly written a lot, about everything, which was good – she hadn’t really thought of it like that, but her long-distance conversation partner opening up a little must have been the outcome she had been looking for when she’d asked so many questions. It was considerable relief and a bit more confidence that she settled down to write her response.

Dear Rowan,

I would tell you more about the government, but I don’t really know that much about how the American wizards structure theirs – they have their politicians and we have ours. I like to think ours are better, but then, I’m related too many of them to really have an unbiased opinion.

Your mom sounds a lot like mine – even down to how she would rather live away from the city again, like we did when I was very little, I think. I’ve seen the ocean before, but not very often, because when we take vacations it’s usually to the mountains between Alberta and British Columbia. We go on hikes, and swim in lakes, and my uncle John shows us all the birds, at least when we can be quiet enough not to surprise them. He knows all about birds, I think maybe about every bird in the world – Mom says sometimes that she could believe it if someone told her that he’d originally been a crow that someone turned into a wizard and then turned loose on society. She’s only joking, but John does like birds a lot, and sometimes it’s almost like he can tell what they’re thinking.

All of my grandparents who were alive when I was born are still alive now, but I think maybe I know what you mean. I wonder sometimes what it might be like if Dad was home more often, or if my brothers weren’t so much younger than me, but at the same time – well, like you said. It’s just how things are.

I can help you out with one of those things – the food at Sonora is really good. Sometimes I want something just the way it is at home and I can’t have it there, but what they have is still really good, and we can have all we want. They even have sandwiches you can grab between classes in the Cascade Hall, if you need to. Sleeping away from home is hard at first, though, and I do miss everyone a lot sometimes. Of course we write letters all the time, but I still miss seeing some people all the time, and seeing everyone at our big family dinners every month – my family is very nice, or at least, I think so. You do get more used to it eventually, though, so that’s good anyway. Or, well, it could be worse, because it would be worse if we didn’t get used to it, I think.

I never really thought anything about the worlds being separate, but I guess that proves I am just used to it, doesn’t it? But some things aren’t too different. We listen to music on radios and records – they just work with magic somehow instead of electricity. And we have a lot of different ways to travel! Brooms, flying carpets (even if those are illegal some places and legal others), and there’s the flying wagons we’ll go to school on, and some of us even have cars. My dad has a car, or at least, something that looks like one. It doesn’t work with the oils and levers and things that Muggle cars do, and it’s bewitched to be more comfortable than I think those are supposed to be, but it looks enough like one that technically it’s legal for us to take it out in public if we have to visit a Muggle city, or travel somewhere. The government even has its own fleet of them, though Dad’s is nicer. You’ve got us about the lighting, though; there’s floating candles and torches and lamps and a lot of different things, but the light is all fire. We don’t make it like Muggles do, though, so it’s safer – we can move it around it, store it, create it and put it out quicker, keep it where we want it to be, and all kinds of things. One of the first spells you’ll learn from Professor Wright (that’s our Charms teacher) is a spell that makes the end of your wand light up with a light that isn’t a fire, though; you have to be able to do that and make objects fly before you can learn to light a candle yourself (P.W. is a little uptight about being careful and making sure we know how to do things just right and everything).

We don’t have movies or TV at all, though – I only know what those are because I’ve heard about them, and once I saw a movie in a theater. I do wish we had something more like them in our world, but we have lots of books, and you can listen to plays that have been put on records or broadcast over the wireless networks, and even go see plays when you’re not at school, sometimes. I guess both worlds have to have some advantages – the Muggles get TV, but we get the Summoning Charm (once we’re old enough to learn it – I’m not yet, but it’s super-useful, you never have to lose anything again once you get the hang of it). Oh – I forgot earlier, when I was talking about music, but you can probably still play piano at Sonora, too, if you want to. We have several rooms which change to be what you want them to be for certain subjects, and one of them is the Music Room. When you walk it, a piano should just appear, and some portraits who can give you advice about how to play better if you want to ask them. Other rooms are for art, water (I like to go swimming a lot, and I think people make pools for parties sometimes and beaches for picnics sometimes and things like that), and sports, and maybe one more that I can’t remember right now? I’m sure there is, but I can’t remember at all. That’s one thing about Sonora – there’s a lot to do there, it can be hard to keep up with sometimes! But it’s a lot of fun sometimes, too.

Thank you for your reply, it was nice to learn more about you. We’ll be in all the same classes at school, since first and second years take all ours together, so we’re sure to figure out who the other is sooner or later!

Sincerely,
Cecily

16 Cecily Welles Maybe even future friends. 1578 0 5

Selina Skies

November 03, 2023 10:44 PM

OOC notes by Selina Skies

Hi Rowan,

This is an out of character note to inform you that term has now begun. You are welcome to post at orientation. We have also sent this to your email - please check your junk mail folder if you didn't receive it, as further information about sorting and start of term events will be sent to your email in future.

We're excited to have you on board!

Selina

13 Selina Skies OOC notes 26 0 5