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hh_mirror((Daughter of Hounds is the sequel to Low Red Moon, Chance Matthews Silvey's canon. This application posted with the permission of Chance-mun. WARNING: Contains spoilers for Threshold, Low Red Moon, and Daughter of Hounds.))
“Shit.”
The word issues forth from the mouth of a nine-year-old girl dressed in a pink-and-white zebra-striped fur coat and Hello Kitty snow boots as she stomps through the door to the Sorting Room. The girl has shoulder-length ash blonde hair and yellow eyes. Not hazel or light brown or amber or honey colored, but yellow, like on a school bus or the middle bulb of a traffic light. Yellow like the sun, like sunflowers, yellow like the moon on an October night. Aside from that, she’s just a nine-year-old girl named Emma Jean Silvey.
After a long silence during which she looks around with those odd yellow eyes, taking in her surroundings, she speaks again, this time in question.
“Pearl?”
There is no answer, so she calls out another name.
“Esmeribetheda?”
Not the two names she would normally call out when lost and confused, but the last time really strange things had happened in her life, those two had been at fault, at least partially.
But the only sound in the room comes from the scratching of the Dictaquill, which Emma Jean, or Emmie, as she prefers to be called, investigates. There was a time in her life, when she was a mere eight years old, when the coat she’s wearing didn’t hang a half-inch too short above her wrists, that she would have said a quill that moves on its own was bullshit, that there must be strings and wires controlling it, because Deacon said inanimate objects can never move of their own accord, that there’s always a magician controlling them with wires or magnets or something. But now Emmie knows better.
She stares at the quill for a few more seconds before talking once again.
“Bullshit.” The quill dutifully copies down the word on a piece of parchment bearing the words “Shit,” “Pearl?”, and “Esmeribetheda?” at the top.
“I am a stupid quill.” The quill pauses, in a way that strikes Emmie as offended, but then appears to resign itself to copying down those words, too. Emmie decides the quill is really stupid, because if it were a smarter quill, it would refuse to copy down such a mean statement about itself.
And underneath where the quill has written all those words is a form of some sort. A matching one lies to the side of the one the quill is writing on, and Emmie picks it up. It seems to be some sort of application. And not just any application, but…
“This application is just as stupid as you, quill,” Emmie says, with a quick glance to the quill, which copies down her words, now with harsh, hard strokes. “I mean, what kind of an application doesn’t even ask you your name at the top? There’s no point in applying somewhere if nobody even knows who you are.”
Another look around the room tells her that there’s no walking out of here, and so she may as well do something to amuse herself. If she had her backpack, she could play with her dinosaur toys or read a book. She could call Deacon on her cell phone to ask him to pick her up from…well, she doesn't exactly know where she is, but they’d find a way to figure it out. But she doesn’t have her backpack, and the room is pretty boring, so she decides to give the application a go. She’s not even sure what it’s for, but whatever it is, she can always turn down an offer of acceptance if she doesn’t want to follow through.
“My name is Emma Jean Silvey, but nobody calls me that. They call me Emmie. E-M-M-I-E.” She spells it out, just in case the quill wants to spell it with a “Y”. She hates when people do that.
1. What is your favorite cheese? Why is it your favorite?
A phrase from Alice in Wonderland, which Emmie first read when she was six years old, comes to her mind: Curioser and curioser. Except she decides that for this application, it should be changed to “Dumber and dumber.”
“Is this an application to culinary school?” That’s the only explanation Emmie can think of for why any application would ask her about her favorite cheese.
She gets no response, and so she sighs in an irritated manner before answering, “I like American cheese. That’s what Deacon uses when he makes grilled cheese sandwiches. I don’t know if that’s my favorite, because I haven’t tasted all the kinds of cheese out there, but I definitely like it better than blue cheese, which tastes like shit and mold.”
Emmie has relatively worldly tastes. She loves sushi and other things most kids her age would turn their noses up at. But she draws the line at blue cheese. Perhaps Deacon’s fear of fungus has been passed down to her. Nature 0, Nurture 1.
2. Who would you kill first, Barney or Carrottop?
Okay, so not an application to culinary school, which is a good thing. Emmie doesn’t want to go to culinary school. Maybe a survey, then?
“If you mean Barney the dinosaur and Carrottop the annoying guy on all those collect-call commercials….” Emmie pauses to consider her options. “I’m just a kid. I don’t kill people. And even if I were older, I still wouldn’t.”
A memory briefly flits into the corner of her mind, a memory of someone who was supposed to be a kid and did a lot of killing, and she shakes her head. “Only in a life-or-death situation, maybe. I don’t know. Deacon didn’t let me watch Barney anyway.” Or the Teletubbies, but she leaves that unsaid so her mun is not guilty of fourth-wall breakage. “He says it’s the stuff that mental retardation is made of.”
3. What time is it where you are?
Emmie isn’t wearing a watch.
“I don’t know. I also don’t know where I am, so even if I had a watch, it would say Eastern Standard Time, and I don’t know if that’s correct here.”
4. If you were Albus Dumbledore returned from the dead, which member of the Order of the Phoenix would you sexually harass? How would you harass them? If you are Albus Dumbledore, please answer as if you were Sirius Black.
This is the stupidest question yet, she thinks. “People don’t return from the dead. My mother died -- " she means Chance, but either way, it still applies “ -- and she’s still dead. That’s what dead means. Anyway, I’m not any of those people, and sexual harassment is for perverts and derelicts.”
5. If you are pushing to be in:
A. Slytherin - please state the clever, witty name of the bar in which you bartend, in the dark.
And dumber and dumber.
“What the hell kind of a question is this?” she demands, but the only response is the scratching of the quill as it writes down her words. Is she applying to culinary school or a bartending job? Or is she in a mental hospital? She knows all about OCD and schizophrenia and paranoia and lots of other disorders from the abnormal-psychology textbook she found in the library at school, and maybe this application is supposed to judge how crazy you are.
Emmie knows she isn’t crazy. And she decides she’s confident her answers will show this.
“I’m underage, so I can’t even go into a bar, let alone bartend in one. Besides, my father is an alcoholic, and so I don’t think it would be respectful if I worked in a bar.” Deacon has actually stopped drinking, for almost a year now, but Emmie knows that once somebody is an alcoholic, they’re always an alcoholic.
Thinking this about Deacon reminds Emmie of how worried he’s going to be when he finds out she’s missing…again. She hopes that when she finishes with this stupid survey, she can leave and go back to their house on Angell Street. She hadn’t expected that the door to the convenience store a few blocks from their house would open to this room. It had never done that before.
B. Gryffindor – Debate whether Harry should ultimately end up married to Fred or George. Use examples from a variety of world mythologies to bolster your argument.
“This question is a non-sequitur,” Emmie responds snippily after reading it. “You didn’t even say who any of those people are, and the only Harry I know is Harry Goldstein from my class at school. I’m pretty sure he’s not gay.” She stops, but after several seconds realizes that she hasn’t addressed the second part of the question.
“I’ve read a lot of books on world mythologies. Greek and Roman, Nordic, Aztec…even a book on Chinese myths and legends that I found in the Providence Athenaeum. But I can’t make an argument to a non-sequitur, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.” It was the best she could do for such a stupid question.
C. Ravenclaw – You guys are supposed to be smart. Explain why my desk is inundated with paperwork at all times, even though I’m constantly disposing of it.
At last, a question that made some sort of sense…at least relative to the other questions.
“It sounds like you’re inefficient. Maybe you should consider another career.” Emmie didn’t even know whom she was addressing. Maybe the person who wrote the application? In that case…
“You probably should see a psychiatrist, or at least a social worker. If you can’t even write normal questions, then you probably can’t be trusted with paperwork either.”
D. Hufflepuff – Prove you are not useless.
“That’s a very subjective question,” Emmie responds. “I might not be useful to some people, but I know Deacon and Sadie don’t think I’m useless. Maybe you might think I am, but you’re a nut job, so I don’t care about your opinion.”
Emmie thinks about adding the fact that she builds bridges, but it would take too much energy to explain that she’s not talking about suspension bridges or truss bridges, and she’s not willing to devote that sort of energy to this exercise, which strikes her as quite useless in and of itself.
6. Offer a bribe to the members of this community so that they will not squib you. Items used in bribery do not necessarily have to belong to the person offering the bribe. Do not threaten us rather than offering a bribe. A threat indicates you either don't really want to be here, or don't have enough sense to answer the question properly. The hat will automatically squib you, regardless of other votes, if you do.
Emmie reads this last question over several times. How can she offer an item that doesn’t belong to her in the first place? Also, while she knows what a bribe is, she’s never offered one before, and she knows that it’s not a nice thing to do. She considers issuing a threat instead; after all, she doesn’t really want to be here. But she decides against it on the grounds that she doesn’t want anyone reading the application to think she doesn’t have the sense to answer the question properly instead. That would be a huge insult considering the lack of sense in the application itself.
Finally, she decides on a suitable answer.
“If there’s something you want to know, you can ask me. So, I’m offering to answer your questions, but please don’t make them stupid like these questions were. I’m tired of answering stupid questions.”
I have read the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hogwarts_hocus faq, and understand it is a crazy, cracktastic sorting community and RPG. ____ejs_____
I have read thehogwarts_hocus rules and agree to abide by each and every one of them. ____ejs____.
I agree to be a good sport and not get my knickers in a bunch. ____ejs____.
One day,marmalade peanut butter and jelly will rule the world. _____ejs_____
“Shit.”
The word issues forth from the mouth of a nine-year-old girl dressed in a pink-and-white zebra-striped fur coat and Hello Kitty snow boots as she stomps through the door to the Sorting Room. The girl has shoulder-length ash blonde hair and yellow eyes. Not hazel or light brown or amber or honey colored, but yellow, like on a school bus or the middle bulb of a traffic light. Yellow like the sun, like sunflowers, yellow like the moon on an October night. Aside from that, she’s just a nine-year-old girl named Emma Jean Silvey.
After a long silence during which she looks around with those odd yellow eyes, taking in her surroundings, she speaks again, this time in question.
“Pearl?”
There is no answer, so she calls out another name.
“Esmeribetheda?”
Not the two names she would normally call out when lost and confused, but the last time really strange things had happened in her life, those two had been at fault, at least partially.
But the only sound in the room comes from the scratching of the Dictaquill, which Emma Jean, or Emmie, as she prefers to be called, investigates. There was a time in her life, when she was a mere eight years old, when the coat she’s wearing didn’t hang a half-inch too short above her wrists, that she would have said a quill that moves on its own was bullshit, that there must be strings and wires controlling it, because Deacon said inanimate objects can never move of their own accord, that there’s always a magician controlling them with wires or magnets or something. But now Emmie knows better.
She stares at the quill for a few more seconds before talking once again.
“Bullshit.” The quill dutifully copies down the word on a piece of parchment bearing the words “Shit,” “Pearl?”, and “Esmeribetheda?” at the top.
“I am a stupid quill.” The quill pauses, in a way that strikes Emmie as offended, but then appears to resign itself to copying down those words, too. Emmie decides the quill is really stupid, because if it were a smarter quill, it would refuse to copy down such a mean statement about itself.
And underneath where the quill has written all those words is a form of some sort. A matching one lies to the side of the one the quill is writing on, and Emmie picks it up. It seems to be some sort of application. And not just any application, but…
“This application is just as stupid as you, quill,” Emmie says, with a quick glance to the quill, which copies down her words, now with harsh, hard strokes. “I mean, what kind of an application doesn’t even ask you your name at the top? There’s no point in applying somewhere if nobody even knows who you are.”
Another look around the room tells her that there’s no walking out of here, and so she may as well do something to amuse herself. If she had her backpack, she could play with her dinosaur toys or read a book. She could call Deacon on her cell phone to ask him to pick her up from…well, she doesn't exactly know where she is, but they’d find a way to figure it out. But she doesn’t have her backpack, and the room is pretty boring, so she decides to give the application a go. She’s not even sure what it’s for, but whatever it is, she can always turn down an offer of acceptance if she doesn’t want to follow through.
“My name is Emma Jean Silvey, but nobody calls me that. They call me Emmie. E-M-M-I-E.” She spells it out, just in case the quill wants to spell it with a “Y”. She hates when people do that.
1. What is your favorite cheese? Why is it your favorite?
A phrase from Alice in Wonderland, which Emmie first read when she was six years old, comes to her mind: Curioser and curioser. Except she decides that for this application, it should be changed to “Dumber and dumber.”
“Is this an application to culinary school?” That’s the only explanation Emmie can think of for why any application would ask her about her favorite cheese.
She gets no response, and so she sighs in an irritated manner before answering, “I like American cheese. That’s what Deacon uses when he makes grilled cheese sandwiches. I don’t know if that’s my favorite, because I haven’t tasted all the kinds of cheese out there, but I definitely like it better than blue cheese, which tastes like shit and mold.”
Emmie has relatively worldly tastes. She loves sushi and other things most kids her age would turn their noses up at. But she draws the line at blue cheese. Perhaps Deacon’s fear of fungus has been passed down to her. Nature 0, Nurture 1.
2. Who would you kill first, Barney or Carrottop?
Okay, so not an application to culinary school, which is a good thing. Emmie doesn’t want to go to culinary school. Maybe a survey, then?
“If you mean Barney the dinosaur and Carrottop the annoying guy on all those collect-call commercials….” Emmie pauses to consider her options. “I’m just a kid. I don’t kill people. And even if I were older, I still wouldn’t.”
A memory briefly flits into the corner of her mind, a memory of someone who was supposed to be a kid and did a lot of killing, and she shakes her head. “Only in a life-or-death situation, maybe. I don’t know. Deacon didn’t let me watch Barney anyway.” Or the Teletubbies, but she leaves that unsaid so her mun is not guilty of fourth-wall breakage. “He says it’s the stuff that mental retardation is made of.”
3. What time is it where you are?
Emmie isn’t wearing a watch.
“I don’t know. I also don’t know where I am, so even if I had a watch, it would say Eastern Standard Time, and I don’t know if that’s correct here.”
4. If you were Albus Dumbledore returned from the dead, which member of the Order of the Phoenix would you sexually harass? How would you harass them? If you are Albus Dumbledore, please answer as if you were Sirius Black.
This is the stupidest question yet, she thinks. “People don’t return from the dead. My mother died -- " she means Chance, but either way, it still applies “ -- and she’s still dead. That’s what dead means. Anyway, I’m not any of those people, and sexual harassment is for perverts and derelicts.”
5. If you are pushing to be in:
A. Slytherin - please state the clever, witty name of the bar in which you bartend, in the dark.
And dumber and dumber.
“What the hell kind of a question is this?” she demands, but the only response is the scratching of the quill as it writes down her words. Is she applying to culinary school or a bartending job? Or is she in a mental hospital? She knows all about OCD and schizophrenia and paranoia and lots of other disorders from the abnormal-psychology textbook she found in the library at school, and maybe this application is supposed to judge how crazy you are.
Emmie knows she isn’t crazy. And she decides she’s confident her answers will show this.
“I’m underage, so I can’t even go into a bar, let alone bartend in one. Besides, my father is an alcoholic, and so I don’t think it would be respectful if I worked in a bar.” Deacon has actually stopped drinking, for almost a year now, but Emmie knows that once somebody is an alcoholic, they’re always an alcoholic.
Thinking this about Deacon reminds Emmie of how worried he’s going to be when he finds out she’s missing…again. She hopes that when she finishes with this stupid survey, she can leave and go back to their house on Angell Street. She hadn’t expected that the door to the convenience store a few blocks from their house would open to this room. It had never done that before.
B. Gryffindor – Debate whether Harry should ultimately end up married to Fred or George. Use examples from a variety of world mythologies to bolster your argument.
“This question is a non-sequitur,” Emmie responds snippily after reading it. “You didn’t even say who any of those people are, and the only Harry I know is Harry Goldstein from my class at school. I’m pretty sure he’s not gay.” She stops, but after several seconds realizes that she hasn’t addressed the second part of the question.
“I’ve read a lot of books on world mythologies. Greek and Roman, Nordic, Aztec…even a book on Chinese myths and legends that I found in the Providence Athenaeum. But I can’t make an argument to a non-sequitur, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.” It was the best she could do for such a stupid question.
C. Ravenclaw – You guys are supposed to be smart. Explain why my desk is inundated with paperwork at all times, even though I’m constantly disposing of it.
At last, a question that made some sort of sense…at least relative to the other questions.
“It sounds like you’re inefficient. Maybe you should consider another career.” Emmie didn’t even know whom she was addressing. Maybe the person who wrote the application? In that case…
“You probably should see a psychiatrist, or at least a social worker. If you can’t even write normal questions, then you probably can’t be trusted with paperwork either.”
D. Hufflepuff – Prove you are not useless.
“That’s a very subjective question,” Emmie responds. “I might not be useful to some people, but I know Deacon and Sadie don’t think I’m useless. Maybe you might think I am, but you’re a nut job, so I don’t care about your opinion.”
Emmie thinks about adding the fact that she builds bridges, but it would take too much energy to explain that she’s not talking about suspension bridges or truss bridges, and she’s not willing to devote that sort of energy to this exercise, which strikes her as quite useless in and of itself.
6. Offer a bribe to the members of this community so that they will not squib you. Items used in bribery do not necessarily have to belong to the person offering the bribe. Do not threaten us rather than offering a bribe. A threat indicates you either don't really want to be here, or don't have enough sense to answer the question properly. The hat will automatically squib you, regardless of other votes, if you do.
Emmie reads this last question over several times. How can she offer an item that doesn’t belong to her in the first place? Also, while she knows what a bribe is, she’s never offered one before, and she knows that it’s not a nice thing to do. She considers issuing a threat instead; after all, she doesn’t really want to be here. But she decides against it on the grounds that she doesn’t want anyone reading the application to think she doesn’t have the sense to answer the question properly instead. That would be a huge insult considering the lack of sense in the application itself.
Finally, she decides on a suitable answer.
“If there’s something you want to know, you can ask me. So, I’m offering to answer your questions, but please don’t make them stupid like these questions were. I’m tired of answering stupid questions.”
I have read the
hogwarts_hocus faq, and understand it is a crazy, cracktastic sorting community and RPG. ____ejs_____I have read the
hogwarts_hocus rules and agree to abide by each and every one of them. ____ejs____.I agree to be a good sport and not get my knickers in a bunch. ____ejs____.
One day,
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