4 Dec 2023, 21:36
Clear Skies & Stifled Highs
Speech: #96a193 (English)
#96a193 | Italic (Scots Gaelic)
#96a193 | Underl. (German)
Thoughts: #a193a1
Others: #9394a1
2023 / 11 / 23
Time:
Somewhere in the afternoon | 2pm
Mentions:
@Rebecca Lark
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Reducio- A tabard with lilac and golden stripes, featuring a gold star flanked by the words "PRIDE OF PORTREE"
- A black cloak with the initials A.C.T.C. embroidered on the inside of its collar
- Black shoulder and elbow pads
- Purple fingerless gloves
- Squeaky-clean long white trousers
- Black knee and shin guards
- Muddy black quidditch boots
A gust of icy air slashed across Alasdair's scarcely-covered arms, sending cold shivers down his spine. The climate of the Scottish Highlands wasn't for the faint of heart, and though the young lad had been brought up among these very hills, taking in the chilly winter winds each year, he could scant deny that he should have worn something warmer. The thought of his family home, his native Lochindorb, pulsed back and forth in his mind, bringing up fond memories of the rolling hills surrounding that mysterious black lake, as well as the sturdy castle walls that had stood tall for more than seven centuries. He felt, if only for a split second, as though he were in the castle's dimly-lit main hall, brushed up against the ancient hearth that had warmed twenty generations' worth of young lads just like him.
Alasdair thought back to the days when he was barred from even leaving his family's ancestral castle without layers upon layers of clothes. His parents had always been fairly strict and authoritative, especially when it came to how their only son presented himself in public. He scoffed, and imagined how his parents would scold him if they found out that he'd left his dorms in what could essentially be called summer clothes. The young Scot shook his head, annoyed with the fact that he distracted himself with something so trivial during practice. With a tenacity typically not seen in twelve-year-olds and a big scowl on his face, Allie pressed himself onto the school broom. He straightened his back, took a strong hold of the broom's shaft, and pulled back his shoulders, propelling him towards the goalposts ahead of him at an electrifying pace.
Von Tschirnhaus-Comyn's thin fingers tightened around the quaffle he now held in his right hand, and as the wizard approached the three hoops, his eyes desperately paced from the red quaffle to the goalposts before him. Weighing it ever so carefully, Alasdair waited to throw the ball as hard as he could, trying to make out the perfect angle to score some ten glorious points. His grip tightened, and he imagined a stadium full of spectators looking down at him. The raspy voices of quidditch-stars-turned-commentators buzzed through his ears, and he could hear the fans crying out his name already. Then, the arena and all the imagined fans and viewers within it fell eerily silent - would Alasdair make the throw?
The goalposts, which had looked small and far when the boy first charged towards them, now towered over him like flaming hoops at a circus. Going as fast as he could, Alasdair felt his cape flutter in the wind and tears forming in his eyes. He squinted, trying to make out how far he would have to throw, but his watery vision made it increasingly difficult to do so, which made it obvious to the Scot that he would have to just wing it. Alasdair pulled back his arm, the grip on his quaffle stronger than it had ever been, shaking ever so slightly as the muscles throughout the arm hardened. He shook his head and tried to wipe away the tears in his eyes, but when he found that it just got worse the harder he tried, he figured that he could do naught but send it, slinging his arm forward and guiding the quaffle to where he thought the goalpost was.
"Pit air iteag!"
Unfortunately for the young Scot, he missed by quite a lot, and he could only make out a blotch of red whizzing past the brown goalposts with his dewy eyes. Before he knew it, he scraped the side of the outermost goal post, losing his balance and ending up with a nasty scratch on his left arm. Shocked by the sudden collision, Alasdair tried his best to regain his composure, trying to take a hold of his borrow school broom with his right hand. However, the broom, having been used by generations' worth of students before Von Tschirnhaus-Comyn, had seen its best days decades ago, and now spiralled downwards, with the frightened first-year desperately holding onto its shaft.
Alasdair frantically looked about himself, trying to see whether anyone had seen him spiralling down to the ground like a drunken fly. Funnily enough, his first thought immediately jumped to how terribly embarrassing it would be for someone to see him like this. As he tried to regain control, he mused that, if his sister ever got word that he near-fell of a broom after failing to score a goal, Alasdair would keep hearing it till the day he died, which, if he kept up being such a miserable quidditch player, wouldn't take too long. He looked down at the ground beneath him, and put up a frenzied wrestle with his broom, trying his best to steer it back into the air properly.
9 Dec 2023, 04:30
Clear Skies & Stifled Highs
⋄ November 23rd, 2023 | Quidditch Training Pitch ⋄
⋄ Interactions: @Alasdair von Tschirnhaus-Comyn | Mentions: @Alyssea Brown ⋄
𝓘t was bitterly cold both outside and in, with the drafty old castle they lived in doing little to waylay the chilly melancholy that typically afflicted Bex during the colder months. She felt like she could never get warm, and had taken to bringing a blanket with her to her classes with the school's more permissive professors. Her nose was almost permanently red these days, and the knowledge that this was only the first wave of her suffering was a travesty that she would gladly complain about whenever given half the opportunity.
She would have been happier and far better off staying inside today. But a very special package had arrived for her at dinner a few days ago, delivered by her father's owl, Owlie, (who her father had made the mistake of allowing her to name back when she was a toddler), a normally gentle and regal bird who was uncharacteristically vexed and rumpled when she dropped Bex's comically large package off at the Ravenclaw table.
A Comet 180. A rather indulgent gift considering Ravenclaw's astronomically abysmal performance at their first match of this year's Quidditch season, but seeing as Bex had been unceremoniously anesthetized by a well-aimed bludger from one of Slytherin's seventh years, her father had seen the wisdom in giving her at least a slightly better (and safer) edge going forward. And what a beautiful edge it was. It was an excited little thing, her broom, and felt as eager as she was to take to the skies at a moment's notice.
She'd been spending every free moment she'd had since it arrived out practicing with it on the pitch, working on getting the two of them into the same rhythm. The broom, which she'd finally settled on calling Casper, had a tendency to want to fly as fast as possible regardless of the circumstances, and she'd been attempting to reach an accord with it on this matter, seeing as her role as beater was a lot less flying for sheer speed than it was flying with purpose.
As had become her routine this week, she had made her way out to the training pitch to log some more air-time with Casper. Additionally, she had Alyssea Brown's unofficial broom race coming up on Saturday as well, which gave her another good reason to practice. Hopefully she would be as familiar with Casper as possible by then, as she'd never raced before and didn't want to let Team Ride or Die down. However, as she prepared to mount her broom, she realized that someone was already utilizing the training pitch, which was unusual for this time of day. She herself had just been planning to catch what precious time she could in between her afternoon classes.
While she was wearing one of her warmer jumpers under her school robes, it was still unforgivingly cold out, and she'd prefer not to stand around out here if she wasn't going to fly. But it would be rather rude of her to interrupt someone else's practice time, especially if she didn't know them. Her time was limited, though, and she'd need to make a call soon and either cross her fingers and hope that the other flyer wouldn't mind if she joined them, or leave them to their own practice and head back inside for some hot tea.
Squinting, she looked up to see if she recognized the other flyer, but drew a blank. It appeared to be a blonde boy, though not one she recognized, and a chaser if the had to guess based on the quaffle he held as he rushed towards the goalposts. Apparently not a particularly good chaser though, seeing as his quaffle throw missed rather spectacularly. Bex winced in sympathy for his plight, only to watch in horror as the boy transitioned from an embarrassing but harmless quaffle miss to clipping the side of the goalpost and rapidly losing control of his broom.
Bex swore and mounted her own broom, Casper eagerly heeding her command to fly towards the blonde boy as fast it was able to. She bit her lip as she approached, knowing that while a crash or fall here was highly unlikely to be fatal (and would likely end up more embarrassing than anything else), it was still unlikely to be a pleasant experience for the blonde boy, and she knew she only had a few moments here to figure out how to help him right his misbehaving broom. She angled herself slightly underneath the other flyer and did her best to use the handle of her own broom to try and nudge his upwards, shouting advice to him as she did so.
"Grab on with both hands, not just your right! You've slipped forward, try and slide back towards the brush to give yourself more leverage!" She had only ever pulled off a successful save a few times in Quidditch practice, but she prepared herself to try and attempt it here if necessary. Worst case scenario, they could just abandon the boy's broom as a lost cause and pull him onto hers.
