neutral_omens | (no subject)

Date: October 25th, 1999 - Late night, near midnight
Status: Public it is, then. (Er, if you don't mind, that is, Carrie.)
Setting: Outside, on the Manor grounds
Summary: Luna is practicing her Astronomy and waiting for Saturn to rise so that she can track it and hopefully predict where and when it will rise in 60 years' time.

Luna fiddled with her telescope, finally managing to make it stay upright properly. She sighed, taking her wand from behind her ear, and peered through the telescope, trying to find the waning Moon in the telescope's viewing field. It was just rising. Mars was bright tonight, but Saturn, the planet she was interested in, would not rise for another hour or so. Pointing her wand at the parchment in her hand, she noted down the positions of the stars in the sky, paying particular attention to the relative distance between the Pleiades and Taurus. If her calculations were correct, this was the area where Saturn would appear.

She was tracking the movement of Saturn every month in order to find if she could satisfactorily predict where it would be when the time came for it to intersect with Halley's Comet, if it did intersect with Halley's Comet. It never hurt to be extra sure of things, and two sightings of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks would definitely confirm their existence.

Threaded | Flat

Unlike Luna, Carrie was mostly ignorant of the names and movements of the stars, but she did think they were very pretty. She floated through the grounds, happy for once, watching stars above her and moths fluttering around and occasionally through her.

Suddenly she heard a soft sigh from nearby. She followed the sound to see a girl with a telescope, making notes with what looked like an unusually long pencil. Carrie wanted to go and talk to the girl, but she remembered too clearly the last time she'd run into someone in the grounds and wound up as drinking fountain to a demon duke. Well, how many demons would disguise themselves as a skinny young woman with an interest in astronomy? But then, how many demons would disguise themselves as the sort of guy who lurks in dark alleys in a dirty raincoat? Carrie pondered this conundrum briefly, then decided this was not the way to get things done. She drifted to within the girl's range of vision and was about to speak when she remembered that her "new friend" was likely to run screaming. She hovered in an agony of confusion, not daring to do anything.

Newt stretched and cracked his knuckles, wandering outside into the starlight. He really ought to be finishing the job and heading home to Anathema, but having just managed to electrify the walls of a bathroom, he felt he deserved a break. He'd found that by now, deliberately trying to break things broke things just as well as trying to fix things*. His current strategy was to prod random things - after all, if It (and he had started to think of his, er, disability, as a kind of Force) didn't know whether he was trying to fix things or break them, maybe it would get confused.

He was broken out of his reverie by the sound of voices. However, upon looking in their direction, he saw only one person - a girl he vaguely recognised, what was her name? Lucy? ...and she seemed to have her own personal fog.

"Um, hello." Newt said cheerfully. "Lovely night, isn't it?"

_{*It put him in mind of being twelve, and telling an annoying kid to shut up. "Ah, but it's opposites day!" the kid had said triumphantly. "So i have to talk more!"

"Fine then!" Newt replied, "Talk! Talk lots!"

Logically this should have made the kid shut up. Except that he had just grinned at Newt and continued to chatter, and when Newt complained he'd looked injured and said "But you asked me to talk! Talk lots, you said!"}

"Well, I went to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, so it'd be weird if I got picked on because I practiced magic, wouldn't it?" smiled Luna a little crookedly. "No, they just thought I was 'a little eccentric'. All I'm saying is, you shouldn't mock people because of their beliefs." Luna sighed. "People can be so narrow-minded."