Launching into Madness Jack Burnett PV Closed

Jack blinked, frozen in shock as an unexpectedly hot, steaming substance of some sort plopped into his hair and trailed its way over his cheek. At first he thought the culprit might have been the boiling tea-pourer from the Valentine's event, Persephone Barret herself, but he was quickly cured of that notion. The four horror-stricken faces of the girls at a table across from him said otherwise.

The Slytherin's lips parted slightly for a moment, as if unsure what to say, before one of the girls was immediately apologizing and hurrying toward him with a napkin. Well...that was unexpected. She must not have heard of him or known who he was. If she had, Jack imagined she might have reacted quite differently, especially since she was a Gryffindor. There were several first-year lions he could list off the top of his head who had a less than savory opinion of him and were not shy about sharing said opinions with others.

As one girl came at him with a napkin, another seemed to make a break for the Great Hall's exit, which struck the redhead as peculiar. His curiosity only heightened as two of the other girls followed after, soon leaving only the one who had attempted to assist with cleaning the mess she had made.

Most strange of all was the fact that the girl left behind was so intent on making up for her blunder, she didn't even appear to notice the others had abandoned her. At least...that's what it looked like, but Jack didn't like to jump to conclusions. He preferred to get them confirmed instead.

"I'd find that hilarious, too," he laughed softly at the Gryffindor's explanation of her behavior. "And naturally you'd have to get her back. Maybe with something else next time, though - something harder to miss with and less wasteful."

Though he smiled, it was half-hearted and didn't reach his eyes. Accepting the napkin and wiping his face and hair, his gaze became distant as he thought of a Gryffindor he knew who would have been highly distraught at the blatant waste of food. But that Gryffindor wasn't here right now. A different one was and the least he could do was pay her some attention. The boy shook his head to clear it and glanced back up at the girl.

"I'm fine, thanks," he told her with a small, honest grin. "For a second there, I thought you might have been trying to hit me on purpose, so I'm just glad you weren't. I've been attacked more brutally in the Great Hall by other Gryffindors before; this is nothing." Jack smirked wryly. "Not like I don't usually deserve it."

Glancing back the way the three other girls had vanished, he asked, "Are they...coming back? If they wanted a napkin for the milk or whatever, there were plenty right there..."

@Adelyn Sinclair

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indentA laugh accompanied Adelyn as the Slytherin boy in front of her suggested a much more accurate target the next time around, shrugging, "You're telling me. Maybe they should add a physics class here." She purred, adding a wink before mentally smacking herself in the head. Physics? Seriously? Physics didn't apply here in the wizarding world. There was nothing in physics that said you could transfer yourself from one room to another with a snap of a finger. Quantum physics would beg to differ... But it didn't matter. If this guy was like any other wizard that Adelyn had met so far, he was just going to look at her like a freak, mentioning anything that sounded remotely muggle-based. For all she knew, he could have been the descendant of some great wizarding family.

indentRealizing that she was essentially on all fours on the table (having of desperately tried to give the boy a napkin before any more soup hit his black cloak), Adelyn's face gained a dash of pink before she quickly moved herself to the same side of the bench as the Slytherin boy. Sure, she was a little unsure of him, she couldn't lie. He was a Slytherin, after all, and there was something about the way that older Gryffindor's scowled when they mentioned the green house that made Adelyn a little more cautious around her snake peers. But internally, Adelyn scolded herself. The color of his tie shouldn't match his personality.

indentRight?

indent"Hit you on purpose?" Geez, maybe it was Gryffindor's who needed an attitude check. "The hell is wrong with them? You tell me their names, I'll give them a piece of my mind." She scowled, her eyes fluttering over the Gryffindor table. She made eye contact with a Third Year Gryffindor, who she widened her eyes at in a threatening manner as if to say "who are you looking at?" The Gryffindor, confused and a little freaked out, looked away slowly as if trying to process what had just happened. It was only in Adelyn's nature to help out anyone who was being teased. However, the Slytherin boys next word made her doubt herself.

indentAdelyn shifted her gaze back to the stranger, an eyebrow cocked. A humorous tone dripped into her inquiry, but the look in her eye made her seem a little more serious than she was giving off, "You usually deserve it? What are you doing to these guys that warrents that you get hit in the face with food?" She ended her question with a chuckle to ensure that the mood was kept light. Seeing that the ginger-haired boy had missed a pea on his black coat, she quickly reached over to grab it, making sure her fingers didn't brush against his cloak as she flicked it off, offering him an apologetic smile.

indentSuddenly, Adelyn was made aware of the absence of her friends. A little surprised, she looked down, scanning over their empty spots with eyes that were slightly widened in surprise, "Huh. I guess not? I'm not so sure why they would've run off like that." She shook her head, looking back at the first year boy, "Some Gryffindor's are just like that. They see anything green and they bolt." She sighed. Adelyn, being muggle-born, wasn't yet accustomed to everything that a life at Hogwarts had to offer, but the tension between the houses was something she had picked up almost immediately.

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@Jack Burnett

The mention of a physics class returned Jack's head sharply to the Gryffindor. His lips parted slightly in surprise and he studied her for a moment as if trying to imagine her differently. It was possible she was a half-blood or a wizard-born witch who had been exposed to the muggle sciences of physics, but something about the way she had mentioned physics class like it was the most natural thing in the world suggested to him otherwise.

"You're...are you a mudblood?" he asked innocently, his tone bereft of any judgement, scorn, derision, condescension, or malice of any kind. He didn't know if she would even be familiar with the term, but he supposed that answer in itself would probably be revealed in her reaction to it. He could use said reaction to aid him in deducing the answer to his question whether she chose to answer him or not.

He couldn't help but grin a little at the delayed change of color in the girl's complexion once she belatedly realized she had basically crawled on top of the table to get to him. Jack had assumed she had known what she had been doing from the start and simply hadn't cared what it looked like. Gryffindors tended to be pretty bold in general, after all. But it seemed, similar to Evelynn, this one's concentration on her mission had only temporarily blocked the embarrassment associated with the awareness of her bold behavior.

His grin was somewhat mellowed and the tint of his own skin turned slightly rosy, however, once she took a seat on his side of the table. Lowering his head as if he were assessing his own food, he hoped she wouldn't notice the sudden, mild uneasiness in his demeanor. When she asked about the Gryffindors who had hit him on purpose, his tension slacked somewhat, grateful for the distraction of the conversation topic.

"Heh...I appreciate that," he told her with a sheepish half-smile, idly stirring his soup, "But really, it's just between me and them. Another Gryffindor I was with tried to help me when they attacked, but I really wish he'd stayed out of it because now they have a target on his back, too. And, unlike me, he can't avoid them as easily because they're in the same house." He shook his head despairingly. "The last thing I need is for that to happen again."

Peering at her out the corner of his eye, he wondered what kind of person the girl was to be so ready to defend a stranger - and a Slytherin one at that - from her own housemates, especially without all the facts. For all she knew, he could have just made the whole thing up in order to set the lions against each other. Brave, pure-hearted, and well-intentioned, but also naïve was the impression he got of the Gryffindor girl. Considering this, he spooned some soup into his mouth with a thoughtful expression.

The girl's next question almost caused him to choke on it with laughter, however. He quickly grabbed some of the leftover napkins to dab at the trickles leaking out the corners of his smirking mouth.

"Oh...no," Jack said once he had swallowed properly and cleaned up whatever he'd spilled. "They didn't hit me in the face with food. D'Spacito punched me in the face and shoved me up against the edge of a table a couple of times while his accomplice, Morgan, toasted his actions with a goblet of pumpkin juice. Then she targeted my crotch with a metal cube - a former Christmas gift she had been angry at me for not opening the previous year."

Smiling sheepishly, he shrugged. "As for what I did...it's...kind of a long story. But the point is they thought their actions were justified, so they didn't see it as just attacking me out of nowhere. And I probably wouldn't have it any other way." Jack sighed. "Well...except for Tân. I didn't expect him to just jump in to defend me. I hadn't wanted him to get mixed up in it at all."

He hoped the fire-dancer was making smarter choices since he'd last seen him at the start of the month. There were still a good deal of time before he could check up on the second-year to see if he was successfully taking care of himself on his own. Like a mother trying to give her child a chance to be self-dependent, however, Jack couldn't help but worry.

The girl reached for his robes and the Slytherin tensed again, startled. When he saw what she was going for, though, he noted the deftness of her careful fingers as she dexterously brushed off a stray pea without touching his clothes. Before realizing it, he found himself returning the apologetic smile she cast him with a grateful grin and nod of his own.

Then, at the mention of the girl's previous companions, he raised a brow. "Green?" he repeated, then looked down at himself and got her meaning. "Oh. But...one was a Hufflepuff and another was a Ravenclaw, right? Or...are all of them hung up on house stereotypes?" As before, his voice held no judgement nor any other negative emotion; only pure and genuine curiosity.

@Adelyn Sinclair