HOGWARTS STUDENTS » COLLINS, ERIK » HARCROFT, CHARLES » HARPER, HANNAH » KEAREY, KEEGAN » MACFUSTY, TYNAN » O' FEARGHAIL, MAIREAD                                         » COLLINS, DAHLIA » LEJEAN, HELIOTROPE » MACEVOY, MARY BETH » O'MALLEY, HARPER » PIENAS, OBDEREDRIA » WINTERGREEN, PAX » ANTONOPOULOS, EIRENE » FALKIN, PHILO » GRIN, ASHER » HENRY, ASHLEY » ARCHIBALD, FERRIS » BOG-GOYLE, SYLVIA » WAKAHISA, NORIKO     Class starts at 3:00PM. Feel free to ask questions! The astronomy classroom has now been remodelled to be 'indoors' (see post for details) and have windows that look outwards into an animated  image of space, similar to the Great Hall's ceiling enchantment. At the center of the room is a large sphere that is being used as a projector; underneath is the old armillary sphere. Desks are arranged in a circle around this globe and two alcoves (southwest and northwest) have small fireplaces to heat the room, which are raised slightly above the floor with steps leading to them.

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Ah....the second years. Last year they'd been the first years, and - as odd as the idea might seem - he almost missed their smaller, more innocent faces. Well, some of theirs, anyway - O' Fearghial, MacFusty and Kearney were about as innocent as the 6'7 professor was short. But most of them had been the wee tykes that stared at the globe-projector with wide eyes. Full of incomprehension and apathy.

Not that that expression was unusual in this classroom. Tapendra rubbed his forehead, sighing. Halloween was swiftly coming and while that meant a drain on his wallet, it did mean lots of free candy and a night standing around awkwardly while the children socialized. One of them would cancel out the other, he was sure.

The classroom was shut against the high winds from outside; the winds in September had been gentle and not unpleasant, but these were cold, biting. They carried the promise of early snow.

Adjusting his tie, he drew his wand and set the windows, the blank sheets of white turning to a wide vista of rolling ice sheets. The look of it - combined with the natural draftiness of the tower - made him want to put on a coat.

As it was, when the children arrived he was in his usual spot, leaning against the globe and attempt (with his usual lack of success) to shoo Kepler off the top of it. The grey cat simply ignored him, twitching his ears.

"Fine, you useless lump," he muttered, folding his arms. As the children found their seats, he beamed at them, all sunny optimism.

"Good afternoon!" He said, tapping his wand on his palm. "You're all looking forward to the Halloween Ball this year, I hope?"

Noriko was not looking forward to the Halloween ball.  Last year's Halloween ball had been awful -- even though she had gone as a Muggle-eating shark in an attempt to scare her classmates, she had ended up more terrified than terrifying.  People had been transformed into werewolves, and she had fainted, and then Professor Bombay had had to carry her away to safety.

The entire event had been traumatizing, and with Professor Bombay now gone, Noriko was not feeling optimistic about this year's soiree.  Who was going to save her in the event of another massive werewolf transformation?  Not all of the current professors at Hogwarts seemed to have the wherewithal to keep her safe through such a feet:  Professor Storm did, clearly, and Professor Trishna, for all of his math and Muggle-loving-ness, was very tall, which meant he'd be very good to climb on unless the werewolves managed to chew through his knees or pull him down.

Noriko was in the process of considering all this when he surprised her by asking a question.

The Slytherin let out a peep, nearly jumping out of her seat.  Her face turning red, she raised her hand to ask a question, waiting until the tall Astronomy professor had called on her.

"Professor Trishna," she started, and then stopped.  She wasn't sure how to phrase this without someone making fun of her.  "Do you think anyone's going to get eaten at the dance this year?" she asked, blushing furiously.  "Because I don't think I want to go, if they will."

Tapendra regarded the girl with his usual expression of mixed surprise and confusion. Wakahisa's responses were never predictable, it seemed - well, other than her being scared of things. If there was any student who needed the stalking aid of Maiko, it was Wakahisa - the girl probably jumped at her own shadow.

"I highly doubt that it will come to that, Wakahisa, or that our guests would tolerate it," he said, as reassuringly as he could. "Though I have no doubt some students-" He glanced at the Gryffindors - "Will be causing trouble, that's rather in the spirit of the thing, if I understand it correctly. To a point, anyhow."

Trick or Treat, after all. And children could be so...well, cruel about the definition of 'trick'. Hadn't some big prank been perpetrated last year? It had been before his time here, but he was sure he'd heard Cyhirae mention it. He wouldn't be surprised it the buffet exploded - which was his concern, really, since he planned to establish a fortress at one end of it and not move all night unless he had to.

Still..."Are any of the rest of your planning something?" He asked, smirking slightly. "Or are you planning on giving it a miss, hm?"

Obderedria, as it happened, was putting the finishing details on a doodle for a costume design[1] between licks of her Sugar Quill. If she thought Halloween was fun in the muggle world the young Hufflepuff found the magical kind to be much more exciting. It was almost somewhat easier to make a costume than buying something cheap at the store, at least if magic was used.

Such as this particular idea. She wasn't sure how the notion entered her head but she was taking two characters from scary films -- although one wasn't really that scary given it was stop-motion in plasticine -- and creating her own thing out of it with borrowed elements from each.

As such, being distracted by the topic Obderedria said "I have any idea for a costume--but no one is really going to be eaten--wait--" She blinked while trying to mesh her train of thought and the conversation. "Well, part of this is based on a story where a barber supplies fresh bodies to be made into mincemeat pies----"

Coming out of her mouth like that it sounded incredibly dark!! Admittedly Sweeney Todd didn't bother her that much for being presented as a musical and that Ms. Lovett was played by the same lady that voiced the singing teapot so she couldn't be that bad.

Still, everyone was going to think she was a Bad Witch now that she had blurted it out in front of class. Blushing profusely, Obderedria turned her head down so it was blocked by her shaggy mane of brown and green.

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polyvore

Looking over at the young Hufflepuff, Tapendra's expression probably didn't add to the confusion for other students - he grinned, genuinely enthusiastically.

"What, you mean Mrs Lovett?" He asked, considerably more cheerfully than he, perhaps, should have. "Brilliant idea! I loved that film." He had the presence of mind to not mention the meat pies in front of Wakahisa; no doubt the poor girl would have been put off the things, which would have been a shame. The house elves always made such good ones.

Admittedly, thinking about that particular story made him not want one quite as much as he might have otherwise. He cleared his throat pointedly, adjusting his tie.

"Anyway - shall we get underway, then?" He asked the globe, rather than the students. The globe, unsurprisingly, made no response.

"Now then - last year, as I hope you remember, we discussed much of the Earth's geological and biological history," he said, waving to the snow-filled windows. "We've spent the last of our classes together playing catch-up...and making sure you still remember your star names and constellation names correctly. And how to spell them correctly." He sent a rather sharp glance at the Gryffindors. 'Piesees' indeed!

"Today, we're going to restart that unit, and hopefully finish up Earth and the inner planets this year, eh?" He smiled slightly; Earth was usually more interesting to students than Venus or Mars, he had to admit, though he personally rather liked Mars. Perhaps one day he'd get to go there.

"So - last term we discussed the Earth's rotation around the sun and how it revolves on its axis. Earth has a 23 degree tilt to its axis of rotation, creating - in very scientific terms - a wobble. Who remembers what the results of the wobble are?"

Eirene frowned sternly at Obderedria after she announced she was going as a barber who had created pies out of people parts. People parts! That didn't even make sense! A barber cut hair, not limbs. Eirene would have to tell Noriko how silly it was after class, or her friend would never stop having nightmares.

Her frown faltered in surprise as the professor praised the film, and she nodded eagerly when he began the lesson. Eirene was excited about Halloween too, even though last year Sasha had never shown up and everyone had almost gotten devoured by werewolf wannabes.

"I do!" She wobbled her fingers in the air. "It changes the seasons, and affects how much sunlight you get on earth. And it can make," she paused to glance at the windows. "An age of ice!"

Sylvia was reading a grimoire under her desk, but listened to the pointless chatter with half an ear.  What she heard did little to improve her opinion of her classmates.  She all ready regarded Wakahisa as a waste of good dungeon space, and Drea had been scraping along the rocky bottom of Sylvia's patience for a while now.  Bored by the girls' blathering and largely indifferent to Halloween, she turned the page of the tome in her lap and glanced over a particularly gruesome wood-block with interest.  Four or five poorly drawn wizards screamed silently in the shadows of her desk.

Glancing up from her book, she realized that class had begun in truth, and decided to favor Professor Trishna with her full attention, at least until he turned his back on her.  As she had no interest in the wobbling of planets (seriously, when were they going to need to know this stuff?) Sylvia didn't even bother trying to beat Eirene to the answer.  She rolled her eyes anyway, to show her exasperation with this bookish pest and silently counted it towards her participation for this class.  At least she was showing an interest, right? 

Astronomy isn't even proper magic anyway, she reasoned, tapping impatient fingers across the pages of her hidden tome.  So what does it matter whether I pay attention? 

Heliotrope had an oddly shaped bookbag called a mermaid's purse[1] or that was at the very least a colloquial term. The purple-tinged sea growth bulged in the middle like a perogie, a cheese and potato noodle/pasty as described by Obderedria but Helio had stopped paying attention at the mention of cheese. From the natural pouch tendrils that could be used for bag straps came out from each corner. Often Heliotrope would pick up the wrong pair and then dump the contents of her bag over the floor.

When the class went to the subject of review and the planet wobble, Heliotrope went looking in her bag for her notes. Notes that by this point were washed into a pulp and lost several times over even with tutor times with Sasha Schlagenweit. But still she looked. Until she was distracted by the water beetle that crawled away from its refuge in her purse.

Heliotrope watched it crawl across the table. She put her cupped hand over it. With her webbed fingers that captured the beetle in the space her hand covered. She felt the tickle of it crawling on the underside of her skin. The distraction was enough that she did not flinch into an instinct to seek space for hibernation at the mention of Ice Age.

She lifted her hand and the beetle continued elsewhere. Her neck craned to follow. Eventually the bug was crawling up the back of Silvia Bog-Goyle's seat, headed for her neck, and Heliotrope leaned over her workspace to watch.

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link

Asher was immediately drawn to the globe with its cat, reluctantly taking his seat towards the back of the class only as the Professor turned his attention on his young students.  Though Asher had been thinking long and hard about Halloween, he'd been sidetracked by a particularly interesting history of Halloween at Hogwarts that he'd discovered in the library, which also explained why he hadn't actually done any of his homework for today.

Last year's Halloween had been exciting, and Asher had high hopes for its sequel.  Of course, werewolf attacks obviously couldn't happen every year, but he fully expected something similarly dramatic to occur.  Drea's costume idea sounded intriguing and vaguely familiar.  He tried to remember whether his aunt had ever mentioned a story like that.  Or perhaps one of the guests?  Thus occupied, he missed Professor Trishna's question and listened with mild interest to Eirene's answer. 

Right.  Seasons.  His aunt's muggle-books had explained all of this at length, so he'd drifted off during the last class and now slumped in his seat, prepared to be bored out of his mind.  Last year he'd been decently intrigued by so many of his classmates' ignorance, but by now the novelty of it had worn out and Asher merely found it irritating.  So instead of paying attention, or pretending to pay attention, Asher allowed his attention to wander, coming to rest on the ice sheets that roiled outside the windows. 

Until some unusual movement within the tower caught his eye.  From his vantage point at the back of the classroom, he noticed as LeJean paused in her riflings and quickly spotted the source of her fascination: a water beetle, headed determinedly towards one of the nastier Slytherin girls.  He was all too happy to watch its steady progress up the back of her chair, and was forced to suppress an excited snicker as it reached the collar of her cloak. 

One might be able to argue that, if Astronomy was held earlier in the day, Mairead would be more likely to pay attention.  Perhaps, there was some truth to the theory.  Being the last class of the day did make dozing off and spacing out all that much easier but labeling it as the primary reason for the Gryffindor's lack of attention was being generous. 

Astronomy made no sense to Mairead.  It was vague.  Symbolic.  Stupid.  And, really, it seemed to try to suck all the fun out of lying on your back in a field and watching stars drift slowly across the sky.  Friendly, twinkling stars that were almost indistinguishable from the others.  School always seemed hell bent on over thinking everything and Astronomy ... well, it tried to over think little spots of light that were really really far away and would only ever effect the lives of any of them if they were about to destroy the planet. 

As usual, Mairead had plopped herself in one of the desks furthest from the front of the class.  At the announcement of the day's lesson, Mairead's head had fallen to the desk in a melodramatic pantomime of a despondent swooner.  With her forehead on her desk, only those seated to her immediate left and right would have been privy to the face she made, without fail, Rene's peppy voice was the first to answer. 

"Why the bloody 'ell do we care?"  Mairead didn't necessarily speak loudly enough to address the whole class but she also made no attempts to keep her voice down. 

Tapendra, who from his own angle could not see the bug that was inching ever closer to Bog-Goyle's neck, shot Eirene a smile.

"Correct, Miss Antonopoulos, though that's not all it can cause, of course." He hadn't, admittedly, gone too far into the details of the Earth's axis the year before - beyond explaining the very basics. Most of the children had given him blank looks on the idea of the wobble, even after a week of discussion.

It was enough to make a man cry, sometimes. It was a wonder he hadn't broken down a bit last year, he thought-

"Why the bloody 'ell do we care?" The voice wasn't loud, but it was enough he heard it, blue gaze shooting to the speaker. It wouldn't have been hard to guess who it was, anyway; O Fearghail and her group tended to be the voices of active dissent.

"For quite a few reasons, Miss O Fearghial," he said, resting his hand on the large globe again. "As Miss Antonopoulos has stated, the wobble of the Earth can cause ice ages - namely, it effects global temperatures. Ice Ages are nothing new, of course - last year we talked about ancient periods of extreme glaciation that may have occurred in the early development of the Earth. Do any of you remember some of the theories surrounding that?"[1]

1.	In this case, he's referring to incidents such as the Huronian glaciation or Snowball Earths.

Silvia sighed and turned a page in her grimoire.  Of course she didn't remember any such theories and, deciding that it was going to be one of those classes, she resolved to focus her energies on learning a few hexes instead.  Just because everybody else was going to spend their time failing to understand some useless muggle-theories didn't mean she was.

As these thoughts were going through her head, she became increasingly aware of a strange prickling sensation at the base of her neck, as if someone was looking at her.  Glancing over her shoulder, she found several of her peers were looking at her, quite intently, including fish-breath LeJean and the muck-blooded Grin, who was, in fact, grinning.  Annoyed by the unwarranted attention, she made a face at her audience, assuming they'd noticed her book, or were just being weird for the heck of it.  People like Grin and LeJean were prone to this kind of thing, and Silvia didn't intend to encourage it.

But as the prickling sensation continued, she lost interest in the pages of her book and silently began to will the idiots behind her to look away.  Paranoid now, she imagined someone was messing with her hair.  Or was someone really messing with her hair?  She could imagine one of the other students doing something horrid--cutting it maybe?  Panicking now, but trying to appear casual, she reached a hand back and ran it through her hair.

"Iee-yeh-Mother-of-Mordred-what-the-hell?!"

Silvia leapt from her seat, prickly water-beetle squirming in her hand.  Glancing with outright horror at the insect that had been crawling in her hair, she threw it across the room with a quick flick of the wrist.  The grimoire, which had been resting in her lap, hit the floor with a sickening thud, skidding lightly into open space.