6 Nov 2021, 20:06
The Smaller They Are
5th of November, 2021
12:06PM
"Whip out your wand and let me see you do it then!" Yelled a boy whose voice was filled with a sense of adrenaline rush, a grin from ear to ear stamped upon his face, a lining of silver spanked on his teeth as he spoke with a crystal clear lisp. His hair had just gotten raffled by a fellow first-year dressed in black and red robes of Gryffindor who jokingly pushed Enrico as they bantered about who was going to be the best wizard of their generation. The freshly concluded Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson had made everyone feel the thrill of getting to use magic in a practical manner, and though the Hufflepuff had not started his road to professional spellcasting as well as he expected, he was still capable of being delusional and blind of his failure, soon turning it into a stock to laugh at with no shame or regret.
"Listen, just because my wand failed to cast a spell doesn't mean it's going to happen every bloody time I try to do magic! I was just going super easy today, but you can bet that next time I'll try twice as harder!" With the majority of the class rowdily bumping into one another, everyone's legs were twirling and bending like they were gummy worms. Eventually, Enrico pushed his way to make it in front of everyone, stopping them at a halt, and dared to do exactly what he had asked; he whipped out his wooden wand the same way he used to swish around his home-made plastic ones back when he was even younger.
In the meantime, Rico kept walking backwards, blind of anything that was behind his back.
"Alright ladies and gentlemen, get ready to witness a spectacle like no other!" Enrico lifted his hand high up in the air swifter than the chilly breezing air of Autumn, his neck whiplashing at the sudden impact, his back and knees giving up on him - probably tired of his constant clumsiness. As the process of falling began, his wand flew higher than he did as his grip was anything but firm. And the fact that his hands got sweaty quickly, regardless of the weather, contributed to such a factor.
The worst part was that the cobblestoned ground that everyone was walking on was flat and clear of anything that might have set this chain of events. Enrico could barely walk straight with his eyes wide - helped by a set of glasses, mind you - refraining from ever closing and stuck on whatever laid in front of him as he moved. This was to be expected.
The fall felt like it was taking forever, Enrico could swear that he was yawning at a certain point, but then suddenly, and to his surprise, the clash was much more gentle than he was expecting. Reasonably, he expected to feel a crunch aching at his back the second he lost his footing, but it almost felt like someone had managed to grab hold of him mid-air.
With a silly smile still stuck on his face, and the shocked expression of his fellow peers, eyes gleaming at him as if he had just killed someone, Enrico turned around to see what was it that blocked any incoming harm. At his utmost surprise, he was genuinely shocked to learn that it was a boy - a student - that he had ended up falling on.
"Oops." Is all that he could manage to chuckle from underneath his breath, yet loud enough to be heard. The stranger seemed to be carrying something along the way. What it was, he couldn't identify, as his glasses seemed to have fallen off as well, luckily for him, he didn't have to search for them any longer than a couple of seconds and refrained from making the situations even more embarrassing. They were sitting atop his forehead in a rather uncomfortable position. Once he locked them properly on his face, he could see that whoever this boy was, was not happy. And Enrico was not in the mood to be eaten alive by a fellow student.
"Sorry mate," the Hufflepuff apologized casually, his right hand offering a lift back up, while the other awkwardly scratching the back of his head.
"That thing was broken before I bumped into you right... right?"
@Avery chen
7 Nov 2021, 22:57
The Smaller They Are
The door to the classroom burst open, and kids clamored through the doorframe for lunch break. All of a sudden, the entryway to the classroom seemed too small as hands and feet struggled to shove themselves into the corridors, pushing and squeezing as they lugged their bags along with them.
Avery Chen was one of the first kids out the door. He clutched his violin case to his chest as he dove through the door, protecting the instrument with his body while his mind was dead-set on reaching the Rehearsal Room for a quick practice before finishing up lunch ahead of his next class. The Rehearsal Room was hardly empty these days, especially in the evenings. There were many fellow musicians who hoped to claim the room for themselves, and he figured that lunchtime was a smart way to fix this problem.
However, once he filed into the corridor, he was joined by a mass of students diving outside from their own classrooms. And so, the slow procession began as the mass of heads and robes accumulated. The small boy bumped through the crowd like a pinball, as taller upperclassmen accidentally stepped on him, or as he shoved through the crowd to move faster, but to no avail. "Excuse me!" he called out, "Coming through!" the usually nice and good-natured boy was overtaken by a fierce determination to reach the Rehearsal Room before anyone else did at this point, and he pushed through two sweethearts who were holding hands. "Sorry!" he called out, just a tad sorry, but his mind was dead-set on getting where he needed to be. They glared at him before rejoining their hands.
He reached the cobblestones of the cloisters within the Courtyard, and the crowd thinned slightly. Grateful for more air, he let out a loud sigh of relief. Conversation still buzzed around him, as other rowdy first years were exhilarated after the recent class in which they just learned a cool spell. Avery would've liked to join in on their friendly banter otherwise, but he had Caprice No. 19 to work on for the next half hour or so. That room was gonna be his.
"Alright ladies and gentlemen, get ready to witness a spectacle like no other!" A bright, high voice of an excited boy called out. Something -- or someone, rather -- hit him from behind, sending Avery careening towards the cobblestone ground, violin still clutched to his chest. His dark brown eyes widened as the ground came closer to his face, but he was unable to reach out a hand to break his fall as both arms were still holding the violin case. All of a sudden, the case crashed to the ground with him on top of it, and something heavy landed on top of him from behind in an Avery sandwich.
Dazed, he pushed himself off the ground and into a kneeling position. "Oh no, no, no...Please, not again..." he mumbled and prayed under his breath, rapidly unzipping the violin case with nerve-strung hands, hoping that the case had done its job of protecting the delicate instrument within -- the instrument that had already seen so much trauma in the Courtyard over a month ago at the hands of Hildegard Schneider, who was now his number one enemy. That crazy witch and her sadistic violin-smashing broke his heart; thank goodness for Winnie Harper, who came to the rescue to fix it! However, he didn't know if he could withstand a similar heartbreak a second time.
He sighed in relief as the violin looked intact, strings still strung, bridge still standing. However, it was overlaid with a dark dust and smashed rosin pieces. The rosin for his bowstrings must've been crushed or shattered under the impact, splaying onto the wooden instrument. He gathered whatever pieces he could salvage and placed it back within its compartment, hoping he had enough small pieces for his bow to play notes today.
"Sorry mate," the boy who had sandwiched him said sheepishly. Avery ignored his outstretched hand as he surveyed the damage before closing the case carefully. Now he had to go to the lavatory and dampen a cloth to clean the instrument and perhaps write to his parents to get more rosin owled to him. Even if he hadn't had to tend to his violin, he wouldn't have taken the boy's hand anyway, out of indignance. "That thing was broken before I bumped into you right... right?"
He carefully zipped up the case of his most prized possession. The violin was like a friend to him. Anger sizzled within his veins before the blood came to a full boil. His eyes narrowed into a glare as he stood up to survey the boy. A small boy about his own height -- a first year, by the looks of it, and a Hufflepuff, according to the yellow on his robes. His brown curls stuck out at odd angles, matching Avery's own bird's nest of black, and freckles decorated the boy's awkward grin. Perhaps they could've been friends or even partners-in-crime on a parallel universe, but alas, it was not meant to be, as today's events determined. "No," Avery began, his own squeaky voice laced with poison. "The rosin was not broken, and you had no right to break it. How dare you prance around, waving your stick like a toy, thinking you own the place? People have places to be, and you with your loud, rude behavior -- it's so selfish! Best spectacle in the world? Merlin's soupy beard!" he spat venom at the boy, the snake within him coming out for once. To be honest, he didn't know what Merlin's soupy beard would be like, but it sounded yucky and that's all that mattered in his spinning mind.
His luck at getting the Rehearsal Room was likely nil at this point, so he might as well shoot some venom.
@Enrico Gathorne
7 Apr 2022, 10:30
The Smaller They Are
Dialogue: #f58300
@Avery Chen
There was no denying that Enrico was taken aback by his victim’s response, and though one would expect such a reaction, the Hufflepuff was deluded to believe that everything he said or did was meant to be responded to with a laugh. However, for this boy, laughing was far off from the list. His face was stern and almost seriously scary. Enrico was not usually one to be easily threatened as he always had a clenched fist and a sharp tongue to fight back with, but knowing full well that he was the one carrying the fault for this outcome weighed him down.
To make things worse, Enrico was not the kind of boy who could see his many faults. He avoided them just like he avoided many of his chores back home or the responsibilities he had as a Hogwarts student. So it came to no one’s surprise when he lashed back with arrogance of his own, a couple of arched, angry brows assisted with his foul mood change as he stomped his feet on the ground. His face had twisted into an awkward red, making him look like a squealing pig.
“What are you on about?!” His voice squeaked, failing to make him sound scary, “it’s not like I decided to bump into you willingly! You came across my path just as much as I did yours! Had you been nice about it, I would have admitted my own behalf of this tragedy, but now I’ll spit back every insolent of a word that’ll come to mind!” His fists were shaped like a toddler’s impatiently waiting for food.
Enrico liked to think that he was fair, one with nature and kind to those around him. His placement in Hufflepuff supported his beliefs, though his actions clearly did not. And if there was one thing he absolutely hated, was being slapped with the truth. He was selfish, but hated to admit it, and was most definitely fully delusional about such a fact. He knew that he shouldn’t have been fooling around so clumsily to show off to his friends, yet he did it anyway and claimed that he had no fault regardless. He knew that he couldn’t get to cast the most simple of spells, and yet he boasted he could. Becoming aware of his own flaws only made the Hufflepuff angrier. Whether it was with the boy he dropped or himself, he didn’t know, and that made him sad. He almost wanted to cry in anger now. But he sniffed back everything back and wiped his face with his sleeves, pretending he was not in the midst of the courtyard, where students were galloping around and about like flocks of birds.
“What’s that anyway? Some sort of instrument?” Enrico asked, fully aware of what the object actually was, being a lover of the musical arts himself.
“Nothing magic cannot fix. Isn’t that what magic is for? To me, it sounds like you’ve had a bad day and now you’re just over-reacting and letting it out all on me. I would have even volunteered to help you myself, but I think not now.” Enrico was probably coming off as childish, and he was. He did not intend to sound so cruel, he hated such coldness with a passion. But maybe, just maybe, if he twisted the occurrence to make himself look like the victim, then that would be far off better than admitting his behalf to someone who was rightfully mad at him, right?
12 Apr 2022, 02:47
The Smaller They Are
The boy he was glaring at squeaked back in return, his voice perhaps just a few notes higher than Avery's own little-boy voice. He watched as the Hufflepuff shook his fists to his side and stomped like an angry toddler, saying it was Avery's fault as much as his own? Was it really, though? In Avery's mind, at least, he had just been minding his own business heading towards the Rehearsal Room. He refused to accept any possibility that he might've been too aggressive in his own crowd-weaving to get where he wanted to be.
And the boy didn't seem to want to back down, spitting back some venom of his own. This only made Avery angrier.
“What’s that anyway? Some sort of instrument?” the boy asked. Avery, head hot in the heat of the moment, took this to be a flippant dismissal of the importance of his violin. "What...what is this?" he repeated in disbelief, amazed at how the boy either seemingly didn't know what this beautiful treasure was, or tried to make it seem like it was no big deal. One could say that Avery was overly-attached to his prized possession, so anyone dismissing the importance of his violin was going to get a whooping. "It's a very expensive violin! More than anything you own would ever cost!" he claimed out of left field, trying his very best to make the boy realize just how important this object was, and how sorry he should be. Of course, he had no idea what this Hufflepuff boy owned, or who he was, but in Avery's mind, nothing was more important or more valuable than his violin, and he wanted everyone to believe how important it was.
He simply had a 'bad day' and now he was 'over-reacting'? No way! It was this boy who was over-reacting! Being so dismissive of the accident that he had caused himself! At the boy's proclamation that he would've tried to fix his broken rosin and clean the violin himself -- perhaps with magic, since he was suggesting it a second ago -- Avery found himself clutching his violin case more tightly to his chest, as if to protect it from the errant boy. There was no way he was going to hand over his beloved violin for some rowdy boy to fix. And speak his mind he did.
"There's no way I would've handed it to you to fix, even if you offered!" he exclaimed in horror, highly protective of his violin. Our boy had a big mouth, so the unfiltered words and baseless accusations came spilling. "Like, can you even cast a spell right? I wouldn't even know. You might just burn everything to a crisp!" Despite all the boy's theatrics and bragging in the hallway, he probably couldn't even cast a Reparo with his wand, for all Avery knew. Even if this boy was at the top of their class, he couldn't possibly cast a Reparo as well as Winnie Harper had done on his violin last month, after Hildegard smashed it. Winnie was a second-year, after all. And he would never let this first-year near his beloved instrument.
@Enrico Gathorne