A Blossoming Rivalry PV Aislin Darragh

@Malcolm McGregor

Magic school as a whole was not particularly foreign to Aislin. It was a different island, yes, different people and cooking and sounds to fall asleep to, but she wasn't adjusting to the magic itself and that made the transition a lot easier for her than for the kids who hadn't grown up around witchcraft. Spells and potions had always existed around her home and she'd even learned some of the theory from her tutoring or while her mam brewed. None of it was jarring, but only a few places felt almost like home if she closed her eyes and just breathed them in. The greenhouse, she discovered upon walking in, was one of them.

Not her house, and not the greenhouse setting, exactly. Herbology was her grandparents' realm and they focused more on the tending of vast rows of trees than climate-controlled indoors, but everything she knew about dirt and growth cycles and all the bugs that played support came from them. Wand wood was the family trade, passed down for generations, and she was excited for this first class even if she doubted she had the patience to continue it herself. Case in point, her excitement manifested as not being able to sit still through breakfast, bouncing her leg while she ate her eggs.

Compared to the first years moving through the space with excessive caution or too little care, it was clear Aislin had been around at least some of this before. The tools were familiar, gloves and trowels and shears, as were the plants, all of them ingredients in her mam's potions in one form or another, though it took a bit of squinting to figure out some of them. She only got to handle certain ingredients and rarely the raw, still alive form. Her interest was clear, checking out everything around her, but she kept her hands pressed into the table and away from the action just as she'd been told to upon coming in and by adults in her family many times before.

Class started with an introduction and a roll call, all standard stuff. The necessary, boring stuff that she could never entirely pay attention through, waiting to hear her name and focusing in if Professor Toussaint-Fleischer's tone changed to anything more serious-sounding. She heard Darragh, Aislin, affirmed that she was here, and expected that to be the end of it for the next two minutes.

McGregor, Malcolm.

That was a name she knew. Abandoning her pursuit of surveying the rest of the greenhouse, tracing the curvature of leaves and glass panes, her eyes followed the answering voice to a familiar face. Aislin had met Malcolm before, only they'd been a few years younger the last time, but she still recognized him. Blond hair, wheelchair, freckles. She sat up straighter.

As wand wood farms from nearby counties, the Darraghs and McGregors were bound to be rivals. Anything to do with the McGregors brought a glint to her grandad's eyes, a fiercely competitive streak to her nan that Aislin suspected had stared down her opponents on the duelling piste decades ago. As her grandad had explained to her once, it was a competition about perpetuation, not victory. If the McGregors had been worse people, then maybe the Darraghs would have tried the much nastier game of driving each other out of business, but they weren't so they didn't.

Aislin hadn't remembered Malcolm was her age, or hadn't known. Them being here at the same time, in opposing houses and several spots apart, added a familiarity to the greenhouse beyond its hands-in-the-dirt approach. If she caught his eye, she'd grin and wink. She didn't know Malcolm well, but she knew the Darragh-McGregor dynamic, and that felt close enough. She couldn't do anything further now, Professor Toussaint-Fleischer launching into her introduction of Herbology, but maybe later she could go over to talk. Or they could race to see who could repot their mandrake first, if she could communicate that much. Aislin had never handled mandrakes, specifically, but it couldn't be so different from repotting any other plant, just louder and deadlier without proper equipment.

@Aislin Darragh

@Malcolm McGregor

Two things were in front of her, one tangible and one not. The first was a pair of earmuffs, fuzzy and blue, which she put on as instructed. She'd never potted a plant while wearing earmuffs before, but the novelty was kind of exciting and some of the fuzz just slightly tickled where it wasn't pressed firmly against her head. The second was a challenge. Aislin, Malcolm, mandrakes. They didn't need to race, but wouldn't it be sad if they didn't? There were plenty of other classes where a more methodical approach in the first lesson would be smarter, but this was just repotting a plant with a slight element of danger that they'd already accounted for. She was ready for this.

At the same moment Malcolm was reaching for his mandrake, so was she. This part didn't require any analysis, she knew you wanted to grasp low on the stem for a good hold, that you shouldn't waste your time bothering the leaves because that would probably just rip them, anyway. It didn't come up as easily as a weed, being much wider and heavier than a tiny roots system, but she got it up, risking a quick glance at Malcolm to see he had his mandrake, too.

She could not, of course, hear what Malcolm said, between the distance and the earmuffs and the mandrake shrieks taking up all she could hear, muffled as they were meant to be but noticeably growing louder as more of her classmates tugged theirs out of the soil. If she could have heard Malcolm, she would have concurred that he made an apt description of the mandrakes as loud and ugly potatoes. Aislin wrinkled her nose at hers but was also grinning, fascinated by the humanoid plant. It was gross, but gross was cool.

Mandrakes were plants, of course, but they were like humans, and like a little human growing too big for their bed, the mandrakes needed more space. Still with her firm grip on the stem, she moved the mandrake to hang over the bigger pot and picked up the trowel with her other hand. There was already quite a bit of soil (and fertilizer, by the smell) in there, so she just needed to create enough of a hole to set the mandrake down in, and then she could cover over it with more soil like a little blanket for this growing seedling. She had of course grabbed the mandrake with her right hand and was now wielding the trowel with her left, but it wasn't like this hole digging was an exact science, more of stabbing the trowel into the dirt and scooping some of it up while she packed the rest against the back of the trowel so it wouldn't slide down and fill in her progress. It might lose her time, though, if Malcolm had thought of that in advance and was currently wielding his trowel with ease.

In a minute she was satisfied with her hole, temporarily abandoning the trowel. Both hands were used to carefully lower the mandrake into the dirt--they could feel, probably, if they screamed like this when separated from soil--and she would rather slow down than do a careless job. It was at this point that she got just slightly distracted (rolled a d20 for fun to decide speed and she got a 2). The next move would be to shovel the excess dirt she'd piled around the top over the mandrake, but she stopped for a second after she'd released the stem to pat the top of the head of the root. Could mandrakes feel, really? Did it hurt them at all when they were so jarringly repotted like this, especially by the relatively inept hands of first years? "You're just little, aren't you?" she whispered to it. Consideration slowed her movements, Aislin taking a longer look at the mandrake as if that might answer her questions, and she did finish the job a moment later, trowel in her better hand and soil distributed evenly, but by the time she looked up to see if Malcolm had finished, it was likely he'd won, barring any major hiccups over at his table.