((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.
( On to the application! )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,
marmalade peanut butter and jelly will rule the world. _____ejs_____