Aileen lounged on her towel, a book in her hand, a hat on her head, and her legs stretched out from underneath the beach umbrella. She'd had a very relaxing day so far. No runaway umbrellas, and no disasters requiring professor intervention. She set her book down and scanned the shore, glad to see that the students remaining on the beach this late afternoon were behaving.

She stood, picking up belongings, and heading towards one of the cafes, where she could sit in the shade and sip a cool drink while she kept an eye on things. Stepping around stray volley balls and larger rocks, Aileen did a double take when she saw someone wearing jeans. On the beach! He was laying on his stomach, his arms cradling his head, and - oh Merlin, it was Tapendra.

Pausing, she opened her mouth, about to poke fun at him. But she thought she head him sigh, or maybe it was a snore, and Aileen stood there looking vaguely disappointed. He was sleeping. That ruined things.

Or maybe not! His mobile phone glinted in the sun, sticking out of his back pocket. She cast a surreptitious glance around them, and cleared her throat lightly. The students seemed distracted though, and he didn't stir.

Aileen hadn't played Angry Birds since the first night of their trip, but the ridiculous muggle game had invaded her thoughts. They'd even popped up in one disturbing dream where the birds had dive-bombed a pyramid while Abby and Naomi had been climbing on it. But if she just played a few more levels, perhaps she wouldn't think about it anymore!  Tapendra was sleeping, so he wouldn't have the chance to throw a smug grin at her.

That decided, Aileen leaned over him and slid the phone out of his back pocket with her thumb and index finger, very careful just to touch the phone. Then she set her towel down a few feet away from him, and opened her book, nestling the phone between the pages. It took her a few attempts to start up the Angry Birds game, but when the familiar tune played, she glanced at Tapendra, relieved that he still hadn't stirred.

She got through the first few levels fairly easily, but soon enough the levels started getting more and more difficult. And the birds had changed! Tiny blue birds hopped on the screen, just three of them to take down the pig's building. Aileen let out a big sigh as she failed the level again and the pigs gloated.

"Horrible little blue birds," she muttered under her breath, so immersed in the game that she didn't notice Tapendra had finally moved.

It had been a long day; waking up early in the morning to surf, like the day before, was nice - and offered a bit of solitude. His times at the castle had certainly taught him to value that! But unlike Ignan, he didn't prefer it to the hustle and bustle of dealing with the kids. It just helped him think.

And it gave him a chance to smoke on the beach when no one was around to see; that helped him think,too, even if it also made him cough and choke and snub the things out.

So after a long day of surfing, swimming, yelling at the kids and reading, it hadn't been hard to roll onto his stomach, flop down and doze off. The fact he was also slathered - in a healthy dosage, of course - with a tanning potion mostly had to do with a bet...that he was going to win. For sure. The fact Georgiana had giggled when he'd agreed made him wonder if she was sending him up.

He wasn't asleep, exactly, just rather in a light doze. He was  first aware of someone being next to him only when Aileen started the game up, Tapendra shifting slightly and sliding his eyes open. He stared for a moment at Aileen's thigh, this being the closest thing to his face at the time, before he actually moved to look at her, his tattoo glinting in the sunlight as he did.

The smirk was lazy and automatic; partially from the sheer amusement that she'd actually steal his possessions to play a muggle game, and partially because he'd been right: She did mess up when different birds entered the equation! Hah. He won this round, no matter what she said.

"Having fun?" he asked, finally, after watching her for several minutes. He had a feeling a footfull of sand was going to come his way, but he'd been able to sneer long enough; time to catch her at it!

Aileen jumped at the sound of Tapendra's voice, dropping the novel she'd been using as a decoy to hide the phone, and then shooting him a guilty, annoyed look. She smoothed out her hair, and rested the phone on her knee while the pigs cackled their victory.

"Of course not," she answered in an offended tone. He was smirking at her. She couldn't believe she'd been caught!

"You should really take better care of your gadgets," Aileen added, handing him the phone. "It fell out of your back pocket, by the way. That's what happens when you wear jeans on the beach."

She refused to ask him where the red birds went, and why the muggle game makers were so cruel as to allow the blue birds to knock themselves out. They certainly weren't useful for anything else. Aileen glanced out at the water, hoping Tapendra was the only one who had caught her with the phone. Abby would never let her hear the end of it, otherwise.

Sighing, she met his eyes again. "I know you can't survive without it, so I rescued it for you. You're welcome."

Aileen returned his smirk, though she was well aware no one in their right mind would believe a word that just came out of her mouth.

"Why thank you, Aileen," he said, inspecting his phone (and noting the drained battery) before sliding it back into his pocket. "Who knows what would have happened to it, all lost and alone! I wonder how it fell out, though, considering it was safely there when I dozed off.."

"Perhaps it ran away." His look was mocking, pointed and direct. "Of course," he said, "That doesn't explain why you started Angry Birds...?" The question was phrased with a kind of over the top innocence - complete with a delicate bat of the ol' eyelashes.

He rolled back onto his stomach, rubbing his face on the towel to re-create his sand pillow. "Did your fingers slip and accidently start the game? But from looking at you, it almost seemed like you were enjoying it." He snorted. "But that's crazy. Aileen Reid only enjoys..." He trailed off, and turned his head to look at her. "I'm sorry, what do you do for fun again?"

Alvis sat in the shade of his rented umbrella, his beach towel scattered with parchment, his open notebook, and half a pound of his mother’s penuche. Though he was dressed for the beach, his clothes were perfectly dry, as he’d carefully positioned himself far from the surf and hadn’t moved from his towel all day except to get some lunch and to fetch an extra bottle of Aunt Naimh’s sunburn treatment for an overcooked second-year.

The papers he was pouring over were not, as some may have assumed, his summer homework, but were instead notes and scribbling on his various projects, including some Dungeons & Dragons character sheets, a rough sketch of Runner’s decorative patterns, and the letter from Casey O’Doherty that had appeared in his room the previous night. A half-composed draft of his response was trapped beneath the heavy sketchbook he used to keep his most important notes and designs. He’d been contemplating a way to respond to Casey as quickly as the O’Doherty boy had without murdering some poor post owl, but the activity had been abandoned in favor of sketching Professor Trishna’s tattoo.

Alvis had spied the marking yesterday, when the Professor’s surfing group (which included his own great-aunt) had returned from their early lesson, and it fascinated him. It wasn’t the sort of thing you imagined a teacher having, even at Hogwarts, and even if they were only thirty-three. He couldn’t help wondering what it meant – symbolically, magically, and personally – but it seemed rude to ask, and he’d sooner swallow one of Foley’s live crabs than risk insulting his favorite teacher.

So he sat back and sketched from afar as Trishna slept. Alvis didn’t even notice that Professor Reid had turned up until Trishna woke and turned to speak with her, obscuring Alvis’s view of the cartouche. Alvis pouted over his sketch – he still hadn’t gotten the last three symbols – but the female professor’s presence reminded him that he’d meant to ask her about the runes. So he sketched a reminder mark into the upper-right hand corner of his page and began gathering up his scattered papers as he watched for a break in their conversation, when he would have the chance to slip in.

Aileen attempted to look as nonchalant as possible when Tapendra gave her the mocking wide-eyed look and questioned how she'd started up the Angry Birds game. She shrugged, gazing out at the ocean with an indifferent expression. She opened her mouth, about to tell him she'd just been brushing sand off of the screen and the game had started (and almost believing it herself), when he wondered what in the world she did for fun.

"Plenty of things," she sounded mildly offended again, tilting her head and giving him a look over the tops of her sunglasses.

"Normal things, Tapendra. Reading, shopping, laughing at you falling off of a surf board a dozen times in a row."

She raised her eyebrows at him for a moment and leaned back on her elbows, noticing a fourth-year student sitting nearby. Alvis Norling  was gathering up his papers and looked about as comfortable on the beach as Philo Falkin had yesterday. Ravenclaws. Ravenclaws were the odd birds. She liked them anyway, because they generally did well in her class.

Her expression turned more amused and she glanced at Tapendra, as if to say no, she wasn't so strange in comparison to some.

He reactivated the phone's screen, eyeing her scores a slight raise of his eyebrows. Her scores were, once again, annoyingly high. He turned the phone off, frowning. He didn't see Alvis, even as he rolled onto his side to face Aileen, his head propped up on his arm as he shoved his phone back into his pocket.

"You shouldn't comment about my surfing," he said. "I didn't see you trying it. I bet I did a thousand times better than you ever could." He paused as he took in her swimsuit, his words dying on his lips as he actually considered he'd been about to insinuate it'd get blown off. That...wasn't something you said! Even to Aileen.

"Reading and shopping? Really?" He snorted. "You never go out? Be social? You can't tell me you never go out with your friends, Aileen," he said, with a roll of his eyes. "Never go to parties? Paint? Do puzzles? Go shopping with the girls for..whatever it is rich women shop for all the time. Shoes?" He sighed. "You had all those friends in school, do you spend time with them?"

"I wasn't aware you required a complete list," Aileen murmured dryly. Perhaps they were on different wavelengths, but she hadn't intended any real criticism with her comments about his jeans, mobile phone, and surfing skills (or lack of). If he thought he was going to get an answer by patronizing her, he was mistaken.
 
She glanced at him, then at the tattoo on his back, wondering when and why he had gotten it. It was an interesting design, and she recognized the hieroglyphs, but she resisted commenting on it for now.
 
"Do feel free to go back to your nap, Tapendra. You seem like you need it." Aileen didn't bother telling him his phone was safe; she hoped that was the assumption.
 
"Mr. Norling," she said a bit louder, smiling at the student nearby. "If you have a question, speak up. But if you're going to hover, please stand over there and block the sun for me, will you?"
 
That would have to work as a subject change, since Aileen didn't fancy the idea of a student overhearing their conversation.
 

"Eep." The squeak slipped out before Alvis could stop it, and he almost dropped his notebook. In the brief second that it was loose, one of his parchment sheets - the original copy of the hieroglyphic note he'd sent to Casey - slipped from his grasp and fluttered to the sand. Alvis dove to swipe it up before it could get wet.

"S-Sorry, Professor," he muttered, nodding to Professor Trishna to include him in the apology. "I didn't mean to, er, lurk, I just...didn't want to interrupt."

He cleared his throat and shifted around Professor Trishna, moving somewhat unconsciously to a place where he was blocking the sun. "I was hoping to ask you about something I saw in the Temple of the Muses. I noticed these, er, markings on the wall that didn't seem to match up with the rest of the hieroglyphs, and I was wondering if they were anything like the runes we study back home."

So she didn't want to answer. Fine. And he wouldn't be curious - if he could help it. But somehow the image of her sitting alone reading all the time was just...well...depressing. He didn't want to feel bad for Aileen - it was far more fun to tease her when he could just be at her for shoving him into the mud at school! She wasn't fun when he had to think of her as being miserable and trying to hide it.

Thankfully, Alvis saved both of them from each other, and he rolled to look at the boy, since his angle towards Aileen meant the 4th year had been invisible to him.  "Not a problem, Norling," he said with a quick smile, and couldn't help a glance at Aileen. "You didn't interrupt much."

He sat up, drawing his legs into his usual lotus position, and rubbed his head as the shift in position. "Urgh," he said to himself, before looking back up. "What markings? Are you sure they weren't just Coptic?"

"It's quite alright," Aileen reassured Alvis at the same time Tapendra did, stifling a sigh. She'd forgotten how jumpy the younger Ravenclaws were. Scolding him, even in partial jest, felt like swatting at a kitten.

Aileen couldn't be sure who the student was addressing, but she wasn't about to let Tapendra get the upper hand. She returned Tappy's glance with a more pointed look and sat forward on her towel.

"Did you happen to copy anything down?" Aileen gestured at the stack of parchment.

Alvis shook his head, smoothing out the pages on which he'd taken his chaotic notes. "No, I don't think so. Copic resembles...Greek, I think....and these are different. More hieroglyph-like. Here, I wrote them down."

He handed the notes to Professor Reid. The symbols - which did resemble hieroglyphics, and part of Alvis dreaded that he'd only mistaken a batch of ancient graffiti for something important - had been recorded as accurately as Alvis could draw them, some contained in cartouches and lines while others drifted out in odd shapes. They were surrounded by notes which were less-readable, since most of them were in Alvis's own short-hand. Only the runes he'd been trying to find connections with were interpretable by anyone else.

"If the book I've been reading is accurate, the symbols inside the cartouches are royal names. I started wondering about it because I noticed that some of the  marks seem to be working around the symbols the way that the runes do on the heraldic armor in the gallery at Hogwarts."

He gave a little shrug and sat down on the sand so he was at the same level as the teachers. "It just made me wonder if the Egyptian wizards had their own runic language the way that we do, and if other countries did similar things. I guess it's a weird thing to wonder in the middle of the summer, but...it seemed interesting."

"Mmm," Tapendra said, sitting up fully and leaning over Aileen's shoulder to get a look at the notes Alvis had handed her. "They might not be of Egyptian origin, either. I don't recognize them." He thought for a moment, lips pressed together as he settled down next to Aileen, eyes scanning the paper.

"That Temple's from the Hellenistic period, remember. They could be from...any number of places, really."

"The symbols don't appear to be Egpytian," Aileen agreed with Tapendra, glancing over the parchment and raising her eyebrows. "You're right about the cartouches. Ancient Egyptians thought names had power, and that the cartouche would protect them from coming to harm. Not only while they were living, but after they died, as well."

She glanced at the student and smiled slightly, amused and a little impressed that he'd thought to copy all of this down. He was so quiet in class that she sometimes made the mistake of overlooking him, and spent more time than she liked shushing the troublemakers.

"It's possible that the cartouche was being used as a type of ward around these markings here," she drew a line under the symbols with her finger. "Or, it's just a random combination of symbols," she continued dryly. History's way of messing with them. "Which is still interesting, but not as much so."

With all the talk of cartouches, names, and powers, Alvis couldn't help glancing towards Professor Trishna again, ever so briefly, and wondering what name he'd considered so important as to write into his skin. Was it his own? Someone else's? Or something altogether different, giving the old writings a more modern twist? It wasn't any of his business, so Alvis held his tongue, but he wondered all the same.

"It's possible that the cartouche was being used as a type of ward around these markings here..."

"Really?" Alvis's attention swiveled fully back onto Professor Reid, and his eyes lit up. Already, his mind was lining up possibilities, of locking spells in place with cartouches for added protection and more.

"...or, it's just a random combination of symbols, which is still interesting, but not as much so."

Alvis deflated, but only a little bit. There was still a possibility. Possibility meant that he had things to experiment with, something to build on, something to test. That was a whole lot better than nothing, by far. "I see. Thank you, Professor. I'll have to see if there are any books about it in the marketplace. Maybe I can match the language..."

He took the page back, itching for a chance to dive into his research. Only a few weeks in to summer vacation and he was already missing the library at Hogwarts. His mind wanted to wander off into the possibilities of it all, but he forced it back on track for long enough to tuck the page into his notebook and offer both of the Professors a sheepish smile. "I, er, guess that's all I needed to ask about. Thank you both again. See you back at the hotel!"

With that, he gathered up his things and hurried in the direction of the hotel, still beaming and re-drafting his next letter to Casey in his head.