hh_mirror | The Hogwarts Hocus Halloween Hextravaganza, Before Midnight.

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Current Location: The Great Hall
Current Music: Halloween – Aqua

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The Hogwarts Hocus Halloween Hextravaganza, Before Midnight.

((Okay, the party will be divided into two parts, one taking place before midnight, and one after the Halloween spell is starting to work. This is the first part, obviously. The other will be posted immediately afterwards but takes place roughly five hours later or so, in game time. Remember, this post is for partying only, and no people-turning-into-their-costumes crack!))

ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, IT TOLLS FOR THEE

Jack watched the words that were magically carved above the door to the Great Hall, in plain view of everyone entering it, and he smiled secretively. Everything was set. Tonight was going to be interesting. Who would have known magic could prove to be so useful? He made a mental note to investigate this even more for next year. Now that Sally was here, he'd be able to discuss it with her at great length. She always had such lovely ideas.

Since Jack was not exactly a beginner in the scaring people business he had carefully checked out the atmosphere of Hogwarts and gotten a distinct impression of what was considered frightening here. Outside the Great Hall the lights were out and shadows lurked in the corners. At irregular intervals (but always when one was least expecting it) the mad cackle of a deranged evil clown echoed through the Entrance Hall. Small cats black as midnight stroke around the walls, not speaking to anyone but constantly smiling evilly at anyone passing them, showing gleaming, pointed teeth. Also, because Jack never had it in him to resist the absolute classics, bats were hanging upside-down near the ceiling.

Inside the Great Hall, it was less dark and spooky, but still obviously Halloween. Cool white mist was trickling along the floor. Jack-o’-lanterns hovered in the air around an area cleared for dancing. Along one wall stood a large table with various Halloween treats: pumpkin pie, candy corn, toffee apples, hot cider, mini-cakes and a large bowl of punch.

The Halloween party could begin.

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Most unfortunately, it had--again, for more reasons than Stephen knew. "The prospect of facing one's death does tend to concentrate the mind," Susan admitted. "And the gaps in my memory don't help...the whole situation is just absurd, and I don't much appreciate that, either."

She rubbed her temples, feeling unaccountably weary. Part of her would more than welcome a calming draught, but her current paranoia rebelled against the idea. "I'm not certain that would be wise," she said. "Much as I appreciate the thought, I'm not sure I'd want to take anything that might dull my wits." That in itself betrayed the level of her worry--that she felt she needed full command of her senses did not bode well.

Stephen knew and understood what it meant to feel one needed to be alert at all times. He also knew it was not a state one could sustain for long and still retain full mastery of oneself. "When you sleep, can you stay asleep for long? You can trust the wards in my quarters." Susan was still occupying the quarters Stephen had been allotted by the school when he accepted the professorship in potions; he had offered them for her use when she had emerged from the popcorn room, feeling it unwise for her to return to her known former residence before she had regained as much command of her situation as she could. It was no hardship for him at all, as he had always retained the dorm room he had occupied as a student with River in Ravenclaw, and found it just as comfortable, perhaps more so, it retaining fewer memories of the relationship with Sarah that seemed to have fallen apart around him.

"You know best what is safe for you, of course. There are doses and concentrations of certain potions which would not incapacitate you unduly or for too long. I only fear these worries will harm you overmuch, hold back the very recovery of memory that you need in order to face those who hate you."

Loath as she was to admit it, he was probably right. "I don't sleep long," she said. "Nightmares, usually. Which is ridiculous, but there you are." She'd had one decent night's sleep thus far, and that was only because she was still exhausted from being unpopped. "Oh, sod it all, you're right--I have to get a handle on myself, before I can get a handle on the rest of it," she said, somewhat grudgingly. "However much I might not like it. And I don't."

Gods, was she lucky Stephen had found her before...anyone else. She'd be in a real mess, otherwise. "I haven't really thanked you yet, have I?" she said, the irritation draining from her voice. "If you hadn't been there when I was...disoriented, I'd likely be in a great deal more trouble than I am right now. You don't know how much I appreciate that." Susan was very sparing with compliments and thanks, but in this case she meant it wholeheartedly.

Stephen's mouth quirked. "My dear, if it were not for you, I would still be married to Walden Macnair. Should you be popcorned a hundred times, and I your sole caretaker through it all, I would not have repaid that debt." It was a partial truth. He helped her out of friendship, not out of obligation. Still, it was true that was how their friendship had begun. More, he thought it might amuse her somewhat to remember it, divert them from this grim talk.

Susan laughed. "That was Eros' day, wasn't it?" she asked. "As I recall, a great many people wound up married to someone they would never, ever choose while in their right minds." That day at least was somewhat vivid in her memory--major events, like it and the Fool's Day body-swap, were relatively clear and whole. She chose not to think about what Eros' day had done to her life--if she was ever going to get herself back to normal, she had to dwell on something else.

"How in gods' name did you wind up with Macnair?" she asked. "Was it simply unfortunate proximity? I'm afraid I can't recall just how the spell worked."

A snort of rueful amusement. "Lord, no, I had not been in the habit of proximity of any sort to Mr Macnair. At his Sorting he struck me as the sort who feels a surplus of brawn exempts him from exercising his brain. And, too, he was a servant of those vile -- " Stephen shook his head. "No matter, they are gone now, and he with them. No, it was not a matter of being in the same room or somesuch, that is certain. I confess I cannot remember exactly what did happen. It was like unto the way that certain tropical illnesses come on, a sudden onset and after that delirium. I do recall some strange events: the castle turning pink? everyone's clothing being replaced by pink formal attire; and, of course, my wedding, which was a perfunctory thing conducted by someone called Kaibaman."

Somehow, through a truly Herculean effort, Susan managed not to laugh. "Well, I suppose it could have been worse," she said. "Although not by much. Just think, if she'd been around, you could have wound up with that terrifying woman from Sparklipoo--Miss Swan is her name, I believe."

Stephen did laugh at that. "To be quite frank, I should prefer Miss Swan. Besides the obvious fact that her gender, unlike Macnair's, would not mean my being dismissed the service or hanged under the Articles of War, Miss Swan has no troubling allegiances to forces of evil. Her primary allegiance, from what little I know, is to herself."

Actually, Stephen would have been an excellent match for Miss Swan, though Miss Swan would not have been such a good match for Stephen. The doctor had access to various kinds of drugs, and willingness to prescribe them freely -- not to mention that one of Stephen's first and only gifts to Macnair, under the influence of Eros, had been a giant bundle of coca leaves.

"Herself and her garbled English," Susan agreed. She tried picturing Stephen and Miss Swan together, and failed utterly--even putting their names in the same sentence seemed wrong.

She had very vague memories of her own Eros' day experience, for which she was grateful--she didn't really want to recall the details. "At least most people were able to get out of their marriages...I imagine there would have been a small-scale war, were that made too difficult."

"And yet some stayed wed," said Stephen, thinking of Voldemort and Dumbledore. "I too would have stayed wed without your counsel. Macnair and I were agreed on that point, whatever other differences we had. Strange to think of such a creature avowing any honor, but there it was. It was a true marriage and we would have stood by it. It was you who gave me the means of honorably dissolving it. I had no idea that could be done. The wizarding world has its own ways of doing things, and this marriage --" Was consummated, but he did not think he had ever told Susan that, and did not intend to tell her now, or to remind her if he had told her and forgotten. The absurdity of the marriage itself he could find amusing, now, at a safe distance; other elements he could not.

"Marriage is a bit less sacrosanct on the Discworld," she observed. "At least, among some people. "It's not at all unheard-of, for people to divorce, and it isn't generally considered dishonorable when it happens." She still couldn't quite wrap her mind around the idea of Voldemort and Dumbledore, but...what was the Earth expression? Whatever floats their boat.

"Some things you tell me about the Disc sound to me similar to my own world, yet in this, my world differs greatly from your Disc, at least in the time from which I come. Sure it is not rare for marriages to be unhappy, or for men to take mistresses; an actual divorce, though, is not easily come by, and is not looked kindly upon by society." Then again, was it so much an artifact of his time, reluctance to divorce? Stephen thought of Ryuuji and Nightwing's marriage, and how they had kept it intact though it had been made under duress and remained unconsummated. (Stephen had never known of the consummation, when it did occur, months after Ryuuji and Nightwing had returned from Paris a married pair.)

And to speak of mistresses reminded him that when last he and Susan had spoken candidly, before her popcorning, she had been aware of his infidelity to River. She also knew that River had since been popcorned herself; she had sent him her heartfelt condolences; this did not elide the fact he had dishonored the marriage while River still lived.

"I am not one to sit in judgment on such matters, for a certainty," he said, by way of an oblique acknowledgement.

"From what I've seen, the prevailing attitude on the Disc seems to be that life is too short to spend in an unhappy marriage," she said meditatively. "Some religious socities frown upon it, but on the Sto Plains--particularly in Ankh-Morpork--it's hard to find much of anything that's unduly frowned upon."

She munched a mini-cake, thinking. "Really, if you look at it, it seems many people simply aren't monogomous by nature. As you've said, look how many people take mistresses--and certainly, on the Disc as well as here, many marriages break up because one (or both) parties meet someone else. I think the idea of having a single 'soul-mate' is oftentimes purely romantic fiction." Unlike all the other girls she'd gone to school with, she'd never had any time for the sticky, sappy kind of romance--it was, when you got right down to it, stupid, and worse than that it was silly.

Stephen watched Susan eating, and did not speak against it. Enough people had partaken of the party food by now that had it been drugged or charmed, he would already have observed the effects, unless it were a charm that took some time to show an effect, and that had not been the case with any of the other charmed foods and drinks that had plagued the school in the past. Provided she did not allow the food to leave her sight or attention between taking it from the common platter and consuming it, there should be no harm done. All the same, he himself would not eat anything that was not given him by someone he trusted, not at Hogwarts.

"I have said the same myself," he reflected, happy to follow her line of reasoning into a purely abstract, philosophical -- and therefore eminently safe -- realm. "Curiously, the person who has taken the most umbrage at my saying so -- my saying that a man can be quite sincerely attached to two, three, any number of women -- is also among my acquaintances the most prone to straying from his marital bonds, and with the least trouble to his conscience at that. Monogamy is rather like monarchy: an imperfect system, but one to which I can see no viable alternative. In my youth I was given to revolutionary sentiments. The failure of the French taught me otherwise." Susan had likely been privy to Stephen's occasional vitriolic rants against Napoleon.

"There's a saying, and I'm not sure who coined it, that revolutions never do any good because they always come around again." One cake was enough, for now--they were almost unbearably sweet. "Ankh-Morpork has seen countless revolutions and one major civil war, and until Vetinari came it always wound up right back where it started."

She poured another cup of tea, not trusting herself to drink more punch. "It's not just men who can be attached to more than one woman, either," she chided him gently. "Several of the women I've run into--not counting the Seamstresses, our ladies of negotiable affection--have kept several men simultaneously." She couldn't help but snort. "I always wondered how they had enough energy--in my (admittedly limited) experience, one is draining enough." It didn't help that Imp and those who had come after him had all ended badly--if she was a little bitter, she had a right to be.

Stephen chuckled. "I know very little of what women say among themselves, about such matters. It would not surprise me, sure," he allowed, remembering revelations his first wife once had made (http://estebanmd.livejournal.com/34372.html#cutid1) concerning a conversation between herself, Jack's Sophie, and Stephen's friend Clarissa Oakes.

"Well, to be honest neither do I, and I am one," she admitted. "I was never what you might call a social creature, back home--the people I saw most tended to not be 'people', in the classical sense of the word."

Which was likely part of why Stephen and Susan got on so well. "I could never be called a 'social creature' either. I have been consulted in matters one would consider to be of a personal nature, mind, as a physician. A ship, too, is something of a floating microcosm, a world unto itself. One cannot live in such close quarters with such a press of humanity without learning something of their ways. That floating world is masculine in character, of course. I did once have a woman as loblolly-boy, a matronly efficient Polly who came highly recommended by a Dublin doctor I had known; and there are ships where the gunner will take his wife aboard. Captain Aubrey has always preferred not to have women aboard, when he had the choice." He thought of Clarissa again and smiled. Clarissa had been a stowaway, and Jack had not been pleased in the least to have her presence forced upon his ship as a fait accompli; Stephen, though, had found her most agreeable, though not in the way Jack might have suspected.

"I should understand women better than I do, now that I have been one. It was while you were popcorn; there is a potion that accomplishes the change." Suddenly a speculative look crossed his face. "Do you think Teatime would recognise you, were you a man?"

"Playgrounds are much the same," she said, shaking her head. "I took the children to several different parks, and I told them that if they could get the hand of playground politics, the adult world would hold no fears." The fears of adults were so pale in comparison to those of children...adults feared only the tangible, while for children the imaginary often held much more terror. "They really are a small cross-section of society, with everything that goes therewith."

Susan had to laugh at the idea of herself as a man. "Unless I could do something about this hair, he'd recognize me if I was a poodle," she said, indicating her veiled head. "I've never tried dyeing it, but something tells me it wouln't take. It's like the birthmark, I think; bits of soul genetics no magic can erase."

"Ah, yes, the hair. I had quite forgotten it, I confess. Next to the things one sees routinely at Hogwarts, hair that moves of its own accord seems so trivial as not to be worth mentioning. You are quite right; it would give away your identity readily."

"I suppose I could wear a scarf, but that would likely attract more notice than not." Bugger. "It's not even as if I could cut it off, either--it attacked the last hairdresser that tried."

"That does sound formidable," Stephen agreed, suppressing a chuckle. "It would seem you have a weapon besides the famous poker, then, at least."

"I can certainly see it trying to strangle him," she agreed. "Though I'm not sure it would be very effective."

Stephen grinned. "It might slow him down a bit." This was not a serious discussion of tactics. He hoped to keep the conversation light, or as light as it could be.

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The Hogwarts Hocus Halloween Hextravaganza, Before Midnight.

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