welcome to chimera!

[Ruth Harper]

Ruth wasn't much one for breaking rules, and after getting her first detention she was particularly determined never to be caught out again, but desperate times called for desperate measures. The exam looming was not a particularly important one - it held no bearing over her overall grade - but it was one that was going to be held in public. A practical exam held under the judging eyes of the rest of the class was not an event that appealed to Ruth's sensibilities even slightly. Though she may not have been particularly shy or insecure, but rather reserved and quietly confident, she, like almost every other human being on the planet, did not like her weaknesses paraded for public commentary. And though she maintained a firm grasp on the theoretical, she lacked a certain power behind her proper spellwork.

In short, Ruth Harper struggled with practical magic, and her dislike of being publicly embarrassed was currently outweighing her fear of being caught out of her dormitory out of hours.

So she had shut the door behind her, though she had not locked it as she supposed that any curious prefect who came knocking would have no trouble opening any spell she could cast, and she had opened her textbooks, and she had retrieved her wand. And now she stood, in the middle of the classroom, hissing quiet repetitions of the same spell, over and over again. It was a constant process, though she changed up the spell and target every now and then, and one whose intensity had seen a couple of stray curls fall out of her usual tight bun and her cheeks redden a little with exertion.

She was being perhaps a little louder than she had first intended; frustration and the gradual easing away of fear had caused her to grow bolder than she knew. Hissing a particularly loud spell, made intense by her annoyance, she managed to send a chair tumbling halfway across the room, causing a series of loud scrapes and immediately pushing her into a state of panic. Outside the room, she heard quiet footsteps pause and come back in her direction.

Freezing in place, she watched, rather helplessly, as the handle of the door turned.

[Amelia Carrow]

As far as little Amelia Carrow knew, she'd been walking the halls alone. Soemthing about the echoing quiet was just sad. Hogwarts was an old school. It had a feeling of dust and centuries of loneliness when the halls were quiet. Little knew that she made a practice of walking the empty halls just to feel sad. Old things did that to her. It wasn't a weepy kind of sad. It was more like an art form. Poetically sad. A kind of soundless requiem, even. Of course it only helped that feeling to know that ghosts openly roamed the halls from time to time. She'd had quite a few chats with them when she was feeling particularly lonely.

Her silence was brutally interrupted when she heard a clashing noise coming from inside one of the classrooms. She paused and glanced back behind her. Amelia contemplated looking inside. Chances were it was just the professor. Such noises weren't foreign to the school, after all. She tilted her head to the side in thought and whipped her hair behind her. It was long and had a talent for mussing itself up around the ends. She straightened her robes before deciding to check out the classroom. Had there been more people around, she wouldn't have. She would have kept walking. This was simply too good. An array of possibilities flicked through her mind. They were all gossip-worthy. The professor mucking up a spell. A rogue beastie on the loose in the DADA classroom. Students sneaking off to cavort in private. She almost couldn't wait.

Her hand rested on the handle and then slowly turned it to open, "Hello?" She called lightly before peeking her head through the opening. She saw Ruth...Harper. Yes. A perfectly respectable name as any, she supposed. Ravenclaws weren't bad. The only reason she knew as much about her was because they were in the same year. Amelia had already been chosen for Slytherin when Ruth got sorted and to be honest, Amelia hadn't given her so much as a second thought since that day. "Oh. Er...are you alright? I heard some crashing and I thought maybe..." She let her words trail off. How was she supposed to finish that? She was hoping to find some juicy gossip to spread all over school? That was no way for a lady to act.

Amelia let herself in the classroom and closed the door behind her, figuring there was a reason it had been closed in the first place. She didn't want to be rude, now did she?

[Ruth Harper]

Well. Though being caught by anyone wasn't something that Ruth had wanted, it was better that it be someone who wasn't a prefect, a professor, or Peeves, and so Ruth straightened her back and only blushed a very little bit as she eyed Amelia in turn. Thoughts of how to justify what she'd been doing in a way that was not quite so embarrassing raced through her head, but none of them sounded quite right, and so she ended up settling on something that was not quite the whole truth, but was certainly not a lie either. Ladies didn't usually lie to one another and, anyway, it wasn't like what she was doing was particularly illicit.

"Practising for our exam next Thursday," she answered, eventually, brushing the few curls that had broken free of her bun behind her ear in a way that was genuinely quite casual; it was obvious that, while Ruth might have been of a similar social standing, she wasn't quite the princess that most aristocratic girls aspired to be. "The defence against the dark arts one," she clarified, though the fact that she was in the classroom made it mostly unnecessary. Then, in a manner that would have been defensive were it not for the relative, guarded neutrality of her tone, she returned the question: "What are you doing out of bed?"

[Amelia Carrow]

Standing there in the quiet, Amelia had a brief urge to straighten the girl's hair. At the very least style it better than the bun she was wearing. Ruth had very curly hair. If it was anything Amelia wasn't a fan of - it was curly hair. She just couldn't imagine having curls. They seemed...tangley somehow. She didn't let herself dwell on it for too long, as Ruth was talking again. She reckoned she ought to at least listen, since she'd barged in on a harmless practice. Amelia raised her eyebrows as if she were interested, though she could feel her inner monologue making snide comments at the obvious statement regarding the Defense Against the Dark Arts exam.

"You don't say? I would have guessed Charms~" Ok, so she couldn't really resist at least one little stab. She flipped her hair with a swish of her head and crossed her arms across the front of her thin frame. She was still wearing her school blouse and skirt. She'd left the robes behind as the cooler air against her skin only helped that quietly old feeling she had been yearning for. She giggled lightly at her own comment, quickly making light of it, rather than letting it hang in the air as an insult. "Oh, I was just walking about. I know it's against the rules, but some were made to be broken. No harm in taking a stroll around the castle to enjoy the quiet. Of course then - it didn't stay quiet. Do you need any help?" She changed the subject.

Of course, she wasn't really getting anywhere with it. She wasn't good at most subjects. DADA included. It was an embarrassment, really. Slytherins were supposed to be good at this class. Still, it could have just been because she was on the side of the dark arts rather than fighting against them. Her heart just wasn't in defending herself from dark things. Maybe Hogwarts should have considered a Defense Against the Light Arts class?

[Ruth Harper]

Finding her back put slightly up by the fact that a girl she barely knew had made a sarcastic comment at her, she nonetheless found her initial annoyance fading as it was played off into a joke; Ruth was not a naturally suspicious person, and neither was she paranoid enough to think that Amelia had really meant to be rude. Relaxing her guard slightly, having established that the Carrow girl wasn't going to turn her in for her breaking of the rules, she raised her eyebrows slightly at the assertion that the Slytherin girl was simply enjoying the quiet of the castle at night. It was a foreign concept to Ruth, who got her fill of quiet from her everyday activities, and who never really felt the pull to explore dark corridors. She was really quite girlish - the thought of wandering around Hogwarts after dark was more of a frightening one than a peaceful one.

"Yes, well, I suppose the both of us are in the wrong, then," she replied, still guarded but with a tad more good humour. She did not apologise, despite the slightly backhanded barb from the Carrow girl; she was not inclined to apologise for things for which she was not sorry, and she was certainly not sorry for interrupting the quiet around Amelia's walk. She shouldn't even have been out of bed, after all.

Instinctively, she opened her mouth to answer 'no' to whether or not she needed help; she may not have been very proud when it came to clarifying things she understood or could do, but she was certainly not inclined to talk of the difficulties she had mastering the practical. Her fear of failure, however, had her swallowing her pride better, and after a moment or two she rethought her determination. "Well, it might be better to practice together," she answered, after a moment: it wasn't like only she had to do the exam, after all.