Early evening, shortly after this thread.


Aileen stalked toward the staff room, her face a pinched, pale contrast to her dress, which was as black as her mood. She turned the corner, the ends of her hair nearly whipping the portrait on the wall, whose inhabitant ducked with a squeal.

Throwing open the door, Aileen stopped short at the sight of Tapendra, lounging with a cup of tea.

Damn! She’d forgotten that professors actually relaxed here in the evenings, typically when she was at home putting her feet up.

Offering him the briefest of nods, she began dissecting the room with restrained fury. She looked underneath the furniture, checked the papers on the tables, and around the mugs cluttered on the counters. Nothing. It wasn't here!

Well, time to risk biting Tapendra’s head off.

"Tapendra," she finally turned to face him, greeting him in a coolly strained voice. "Have you noticed a piece of jewelry lying around? A cameo, to be specific."

When she’d been in the staff room earlier that day, she remembered slipping the pendant in her pocket after the chain had broken. An old gift from her mother. She was aggravated less for sentimental reasons and more so because she wanted to avoid the Reid matron’s wrath.

Putting her hands on her hips, she casted a dark look at the patterned rug, as if the force of her foul mood would bring the missing object to the surface. Aileen could only imagine what Tapendra was thinking. That she was attached to her jewelry? Or perhaps she’d been Imperiused since yesterday. Really, the answer was simple. This was all Kesali’s fault.

Tapendra had just been innocently mixing tea (putting in plenty of sugar and milk, naturally) at the midpoint in an otherwise plain and normal day. The other professors were done with their classes; he was mostly done with his. Ah, the perils of his class relying on the night sky...but it was cloudy today. He'd probably have to cancel tonight's star gazing section.

Landis was in the room, too; Tapendra had acknowledged him with a polite nod and the standard exchange of greetings, and little else. The man seemed occupied, and Tapendra had no inclination to bother him at the moment. Morgan wasn't the sort one bothered for idle chit-chat.

And then the door flew open and in came Aileen, her face a mask of anger. Last he'd seen her, she'd been smiling sweetly and genuinely; now she resembled a harpy. She turned on him and he leaned back automatically, hip against the counter and empty teacup clutched protectively to his chest.

"A w-" He started, as she darted around the room looking for something. A cameo - oh, yes. A necklace type, wasn't it? He hadn't seen it, but he really had to wonder if the necklace was the source of her fury. It seemed unlike her - unlike even Aileen in her school years - to be so enraged over a mere necklace.

He glanced at the chair that contained Landis for a moment. "I haven't seen it, no," he said. "Did something happen?"

Tapendra clutching his teacup to his chest only caused her irritation to spike. Aileen focused a glare on him, then glanced in surprise at Landis lurking in one of the chairs.

She was so tempted to lash out. Hadn't she just told him she'd lost her necklace? Was he blind? Could he do something other than stare at her like she'd grown claws and a hippogriff beak? Look around, perhaps. Lift a finger.

Aileen shut her eyes for just a moment. It wouldn't do to verbally eviscerate him; he might crush his teacup in terror. Though she understood the meaning behind his question, she wasn't so sure she wanted to answer in her state, or with the librarian present.

"Oh, you could say that," she replied darkly, lifted up a stack of papers, then went still.

It could have easily fallen out of her pocket while she and Kesali had been dancing. Dance-arguing. Though he was long gone by now, even leaving her to deal with the candles (she'd called a house elf, naturally), there was no way Aileen was setting foot in that room again.

She leaned against the counter, her eyes boring a hole into the air. "It had better be in here, and not up there."

You could say that was such a wonderfully roundabout way to say that, yes, something had happened. It was also one of those phrases that also meant ask me about it.  Admittedly, with Aileen's mood being what it was, that was likely going to be a questionable judgement on his part. But the way she stormed about the staff room also, well...

She was upset, that was for sure. He doubted this was over something that trivial.

"A student giving you trouble?" He asked, though that didn't seem likely to produce a reaction of this magnitude. He set his tea cup down and started searching the staff room himself, lifting the books on the tables and frowning. Then he smiled, slightly, at a private joke. "Or did you run into Kesali in one of his moods?"

"Accio cameo!"

The necklace shot out from under the tea table and into Landis' waiting hand. From his seat by the fire he raised eyebrows at them both.

"Merlin forbid this loss contribute to your ire," he said, letting it cross the room again at the sharp flick of his wand. His tone was not sarcastic, not sharp or unfriendly. He had few daily interactions with Reid, but did not care to sour them at a moment when she seemed so particularly... volatile.

Aileen glanced at Tapendra sharply, remembering the glare party at the staff meeting and Kesali skulking about like a ghost afterwards. He was probably moping because she hadn’t allowed her icy exterior to melt in his oh so captivating presence.

“Thank you,” she told Mr. Morgan as he floated the necklace over, dropping the ire from her tone for a moment. Now that one matter was solved, she felt a touch calmer, and secured the cameo in her pocket with a charm.

“If by moods, you mean disturbing shifts in behavior, then yes,” Aileen turned back to Tapendra, lowering her voice in case Mr. Morgan wanted to pretend to focus on his work.

“I had the joy of witnessing, oh, about five of his personalities surface this evening. Only one of them remotely professional.”

She gave Tapendra a smile that could rival Maras’ frightening grin.

Tapendra, who had his back to Landis, attempted to hold back an embarrassed blush and frown. He'd have thought of that! In about 5 minutes. Maybe. Years away from the regular use of magic was certainly an excuse, but...well, he'd been a wizard longer than he'd been a 'muggle'.

"Good thing we had a functioning brain in the room, eh?" he muttered, the comment not ungrateful, but rather a bit rueful. He glanced at Landis and gave him a nod of thanks and brief but warm smile.

Still, his embarrassment was soon overcome by curiosity, as Aileen calmed enough to start explaining her ire. He'd just been joking about Kesali, but it seemed that was actually the cause. He leaned on the table, hands apart, and watched her as she spoke. In the two run-ins with Kesali he'd had, the man had really only worn two or three 'personalities', as Aileen put it. What were the other two, he wondered?

"I can't say he's been that erratic towards me," he confessed. "Just had a bizarrely short temper and a tendency towards the dramatic, and perhaps an inability to utilize reason. And a remarkable skill at unprofessional behavior." Sort of like what we're being now, he thought to himself.  "What did he do?"

Tapendra's description sounded accurate. Aileen could name a few other unpleasant traits, though she assumed Kesali's attitude toward men would be different from how he'd acted toward her.

Aileen hesitated, glancing at the unobtrusive librarian. Tapendra did not seem to have any issue continuing their gossip in front of him, and she questioned whether Mr. Morgan cared at all about their conversation. She was usually much more cautious, especially around staff members she didn't know well, but Tapendra had asked, and not in an accusatory or mocking way.

"He wanted to meet with me to supposedly discuss plans about teaching the first and second-years how to dance. We've been assigned that lovely little task together."

She pursed her mouth. He knew how out of her element she was around the younger years.

Crossing her arms, she lowered her voice a touch more. "I go up there, and he suggests practicing the dances," she waved her hand in the air as if it were no big deal. When really, Kesali was lucky she'd agreed to that at all.

"Which would have been fine if he hadn't started making unwelcome comments. Coincidentally," she smiled an unpleasant smile again, "his nasty, insulting moods occurred after the multiple times I told him he was acting inappropriately. And when he wasn't insulting me, he was offering half-hearted apologies, pretending indifference, sulking, and prancing around the room."

Aileen shook her head, throwing up her hands. "Other than that he was a complete angel!"

Of course, she had left out a lot of details. That about summed it up for now.

Tapendra quirked an eyebrow. Her description - while likely accurate, based on his experience of the man - was a little vague. It did seem...odd, though. He didn't comment on the odd parallel to yesterday, though did find the image of Aileen dancing with the shorter man rather amusing. Kesali was probably better at it than he was, though. He seemed the sort.

Still, her description sounded rather like...rejection? No - probably...no, surely not. Surely a man like Kesali wouldn't go for ice queens. He had to know by now that such people had little to no patience for dramatics, didn't he?

"For me he was an arse from the start," he said, shrugging, and choosing to not describe the circumstances that had led to that - for now, anyway. "And got worse when I didn't take it well." On either occasion Kesali seemed to expect minimal resistance, as far as he could tell. He sighed, running a hand through his hair. "I'd thought he was only doing that to me. Is he really doing that to other staff members?"

Landis' work was not the sort that required much focus. Nevertheless, he found himself able to fully concentrate on the shipping list for next week's small order with Aileen and Tappy in the room. It was not that they were being particularly distracting by any unbiased opinion's take, but their topic of conversation was one in which Landis was most interested. Though he did not appear to be listening as his eyes roved over the parchment held loosely in his hand, he was somewhat surprised. Landis had had problems with Kesali before from their very first meeting, but what others saw fit to vent about in the staff room he kept to himself. He had not considered - except in the most fleeting, abstract way - that Kesali's odd behavior would put him at odds with the professors.

Landis had assumed that Gale's enmity towards him was born out of self-centered small-minded pettiness, indignant that Landis had not wished to frolic in the forest and cozy up to Muggles too, angry that he had simply turned around and left. Nothing much for Landis to concern himself with. He ignored better conversationalists all the time. But he had not thought that Gale was stupid enough to treat every staff member the same way.

"Is he really doing that to other staff members?"

It was as good of an opening as any, and Landis wanted to know more. "He is," the librarian confirmed, his voice just loud enough to carry. He capped his ink bottle with quick, precise twists, then glanced up at the other two. "I found him extremely unprofessional as well - erratic, even aggressive. Very... melodramatic." His expression soured, mouth twisting into a small sneer. Anyone could tell what Landis thought of that personality trait.

An arse from the start. Aileen glanced at him curiously, then looked over in surprise when the librarian revealed that he too, had been a victim of Kesali's eccentricities.

"And here I thought I was special," Aileen said dryly. It actually made her feel slightly better to know she wasn't the only one the Charms professor had crossed.

All three of them were rather vague about Kesali's specific actions. But again, she somehow doubted that Kesali had gone off on rants about their fading beauty or hidden desire for the tango.

Aileen raised an eyebrow at Tapendra, "I assume he did not imply you deserve it because of your cruel actions in school?"

Tapendra the Terror! She held back a smirk. Aileen wasn't so sure about Landis (he very well could have been a terror - a silent one), but glanced at him, including him in the invitation to tell more.

Melodramatic. That was such a wonderful word for it, really; Kesali seemed to radiate drama. He wondered if the name could do anything...well, simply or blandly. Probably not, Tapendra decided. He seemed the sort to do whatever he was doing with some level of passion, negative or otherwise.

Tapendra smirked at Aileen slightly. "Let me know if he pursues you in the halls and yells at you," he said, halfway thoughtfully and halfway jesting. "Then you'll be about where I am, Kesali-wise." They could keep score, maybe. Whoever got the man to burst into tears or punch them won new opportunities n the field of unemployment, maybe.

"No, my transgressions were more recent than that," he said, shaking his head slightly. Tapendra had really only been upsetting to one person in school - the small scruffy man in whose office he now sat as Head of Ravenclaw. And Graham had had it coming.

He looked to Landis, the man's words stirring up a vague memory. He raised a hand to his chin, stroking his beard thoughtfully. "Professor Storm mentioned something about him being aggressive and inappropriate towards you during a card game, Mister Morgan," he said, quirking an eyebrow. "In front of some of our foreign guests, as well - is that what you mean?"

Kesali was really making mates at a break-neck pace. It was something of a relief. While Landis was certainly not unaccustomed to dealing with folk of a certain stubborn quality in his criminal dealings, the equation laid before them was rather simple. The more staff Kesali alienated, the better the chances of a new face at the high staff table after holiday break. Landis would be happy to add Kesali to the list of ex-professors, a prolific category that included such gems as Woolfolk, Bombay, and Gunnar.

"Professor Storm mentioned something about him being aggressive and inappropriate towards you during a card game, Mister Morgan. In front of some of our foreign guests, as well - is that what you mean?"

"Ah, no." Landis had forgotten that. On a scale of one to inappropriate, it was rather eclipsed by the bizarreness of their first meeting. "Though he did do that as well. I refer more to his attempt to provoke me into drawing my wand once I proved less than enthusiastic about taking a stroll with him in the Forbidden Forest at midnight. He waited to display his troubling behavior until we were out of the castle." It was not the full situation, but it was factually accurate and it was what these educators would want to hear. Kesali could traipse around the woods to his heart's content for all Landis cared, but a conviction would come on the basis of whether he was likely to do it with students.

Landis gestured, a short motion of his hand towards both Aileen and Tappy - encapsulating and including their experiences with his own as he continued, "Evidently he has an inability to suffer those with different viewpoints than his own." The comment was a bit rich coming from a man like Landis, unable to see himself in his judgement about the other. But he hadn't yet begun to shout down the halls after Trishna or grip his wand meaningfully as he stroked trees in the forest so at least his professionalism was still intact.

Aileen smirked back at Tapendra. "If he does, I'll be letting both you and the Headmistress know."

She was half-serious, but there was only so much that Aileen could tolerate, and she was not the most tolerant person. Tapendra was. That's what made this so strange. Kesali had talent, managing to cross all three of them before the winter holiday.

Professor Storm, too? That was encouraging. She looked at the librarian, not in sympathy but in solidarity, and silently grateful that Kesali had not yet singled her out in front of other staff.

Then he elaborated, and she glanced at Tapendra, wondering if he was taking Mr. Morgan's words with as much weight as she was tempted to do. She suspected that he was not giving them the full story about why Kesali wanted to take a nightly stroll with him in the first place, but if what he were saying was true, then the Charms professor seemed like more than a mere nuisance. Possibly dangerous.

"That's quite troubling."

Aileen assumed that Mr. Morgan had traditional, if not purist views, but she'd never seen him shout them from the castle turrets. That was more Kesali's style.

"Has he accosted you in the forest as well, Tapendra?" Aileen's dry tone implied that she certainly did not expect him to say yes.

Tapendra's face twisted for a moment at Landis's words. Kesali was certainly...odd about the Forest. He seemed to like it, for some bizarre reason. Tapendra had never liked setting foot into that forest - hags turning him into things aside, it was just unpleasant and unwelcoming. The whole place seemed oppressive, a place humans were not meant to be. It was dark and full of all sorts of terrors...

Still, exactly why Kesali would have invited Morgan for a midnight stroll was a little...hard to imagine. Tapendra would have thought Morgan's affiliation to the older ways was obvious - the man was Head of Slytherin, after all. It was all but part of the job description.

"So it seems, Mister Morgan," he said. Tapendra's own views were worn on his sleeve, and he certainly didn't like people disagreeing, but...well, there was one thing to debate social issues and quite another to pull your wand over it.

He found himself stroking his chin thoughtfully, nodding to indicate he was listening. He only paused when Aileen looked at him, raising an eyebrow and smiling slightly at her words.

"Actually, yes," he said. "The man seems fond of the place, somehow. Unfortunately he doesn't seemed limited to that staging ground. I encountered him in the forest at the end of October and things got...heated. Now he seems upset at the idea I mentioned the incident to Professor Storm." He frowned. "I admit my own actions were not the most professional, but -" he looked at Landis.

"I found him in the forest, knelt over the bloody and beaten body of Darian Morgan," he said, wondering if Landis even knew about that; somehow, he doubted it. Landis didn't seem the sort Darian would actually look for pity from. "Kesali'd rescued him from thugs in London and Apparated to the Forest. The scene was very much...very much like that when Grosvenor's body was found, so I automatically pulled my wand. Surprisingly," his tone slipped to the darkly sarcastic, "With how eager he seems to be to pull his wand on you, Mister Morgan, he didn't take kindly to the same treatment."