#rev starters

Like stone --- that was how Maxime felt. Stone-faced, stone-hearted, her lips pressing together in a thin line. She’d show tenseness, nothing more, at these new developments, all her other emotions hidden. Those would be for her and her alone, not for the Wraiths that now seemed to be everywhere, not for their satisfaction. She tried to listen to the Wraiths talking about Baudouin Polignac, but all she felt was conflict as she did, and so she just focused on those around her. And then it went dark, and Maxime’s expected the worst, but it was just fireworks. Fireworks remembering students who had died, honoring Neville, and Maxime wanted to scream no, no, no --- because she couldn’t show her rage, her grief, her sorrow over them. Not in front of them. Her knuckles were white as she clenched her fist -- not that she could tell, in the dark, but she knew -- and when the darkness cleared, and chaos followed, flyers dropping around her. Regain posture, she told herself, you need to be professional. Eyes looked at a person near her, and she remembered her position -- member of staff, professor, someone to rely on -- and asked. “Are you okay?”

“I bloody hate cobbled streets. They may look cute, but who the hell thought it’d be a good idea, all these stones of varying sizes? So impractical.”

“Listen, it was an ugly poster. I’m not surprised it got vandalized.”

Danielle wasn’t entirely sure how to feel — but then, when had she, ever? She had sat through the memorial with an appropriate look of grief on her face — Polignac had been a sleaze, she thought, and while his death was startling, she wasn’t particularly heartbroken over his passing. And now, after all the announcements, after the chaos the Knights and Order had havocked, she just felt tired. Bored, maybe even. Something seemed to be buzzing in her head, and she longed for a shower pounding down on her. She sauntered past the Great Lake, inspecting her nails, wiping at her eye-make up at the same time. “Quite a lot to take in, hm?,” she said, eyes drawing up to meet another pair. Neutral statements, falling from lips privileged enough to feel unaffected. Dani reveled in her numbness, knowing it was better than whatever a lot of the other attendees were feeling. “D’you reckon we’ll still sing Hoggy Warty Hogwarts tonight? I was looking forward to it.”

Where: The Three Broomsticks When: 3 January 2026 Who: Open

“Who the feck decided the order of the alphabet, anyway? Why is there even be an order to begin with --- shouldn’t the letters be free to be wherever they want to be? I would like to free the letters, ye know? If M wants to be first, she should be able to be.”

“Here you go! I made sure it had extra cinnamon, just like you asked.”

Feet tucked beneath her as she sat on bench, Nahla suddenly blurted out to the passing stranger, “Honestly, I’ve pondered it for weeks and I just don’t understand the mechanics of a howler. I mean, I understand when writing a letter, capitalizing signifies yelling. But then, if that’s the mechanism by which the spell is controlled, why isn’t lowercase whispering? I’ve studied the shreds of several letters but they all weren’t written with fully proper punctuation, which disproves my theory that it interprets sentence case as punctuation as regular speech....” She paused suddenly, cheeks somewhat flushed by the public nature of her outburst. “T-thoughts?”