neutral_omens | (no subject)

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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.

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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.

Luna felt a chill* in the air that in Hogwarts meant that one of the ghosts was standing quite close to you, and looked up to see a blood-drenched girl who was slightly transparent.

"Hi. What's your name?" she smiled. "Mine's Luna. Luna Lovegood." Then she giggled. "Oh, I've always wanted to do that after I saw part of a... James-something-or-the-other thing on Hermione's TV that time." She was about to offer her hand for a handshake when she noticed that both her hands were still occupied. Unperturbed she stuck her wand back behind her ear and stuck out her hand again. "How are you?"

*Well, not that she didn't already feel a chill in the air due to the fact that it was autumn and it was midnight afterall - it was a chillier chill, if there was such a thing, but that doesn't translate well to written prose now does it?

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!"}

"Hi. Er, yes, it's rather a fine night. And I'm hoping that it remains so." Luna cocked her head at the nice-looking but rather unremarkable man who seemed to have suddenly come upon them. She had no idea that so many people would still be up. "Are you a Muggle then?"

Newt blinked. He'd been called many things in his life, ranging from "incompetent" through "stick-insect" all the way to "you! The guy with the ugly hair and the glasses!" but he'd never heard "Muggle" before. He wondered vaguely if he ought to be insulted.

He settled on a blank stare and an "Um?"

"Oh, you are a Muggle then!" exclaimed Luna delightedly. "This is my, um, second? third? Oh yes, this is my third time meeting a real live Muggle. So nice to meet you. My name's Luna Lovegood, by the way. What's yours?" she said.

"Newton Pulsifer," he said, bemusedly. "And uh. Excuse me, is it just me or is it unusually foggy around here?" He added, waving his hand through Carrie.

"Um, you might not want to do that..." Luna trailed off as Newton's hand came away wet with blood. "She's just a bloody ghost. As in, a ghost who has a lot of blood on her. There's nothing to be scared of, really." she said reassuringly. "She's a lot less scary than some of the ghosts I've seen."

Newt examined his hand, looking puzzled. It did feel wet after waving through that fog, but he couldn't see anything on it. "Um, ghost?" He asked, worriedly. Peering back at the "fog", he realised that if he squinted, he got flashes of angry-looking girl covered in blood like eye-floaters*. His eyebrows did a small jig on his forehead. "Um, I... okay?"

_{*Newt was one of those naturally un-occult souls that never saw the supernatural unless they were trying. Of course, he'd thought he'd seen Agnes in the smoke, but that was ten years ago and besides, he didn't believe in ghosts. Something** was telling him to start quickly though...

**It might've been the kissing demons or the angels or something.}

"Oh, are you going to faint then?" asked Luna interestedly. "Dad says that's mostly what Muggles do when they see ghosts. That, or run screaming in terror. You don't look like you're going to run screaming in terror though, and also, I'd prefer it if you didn't. Screaming makes my ears ring." she explained.

By now Newt's expression was fast leaving the zone of confused and well into befuddled. Possibly even reaching into terminally bewildered. "Um. Okay. I won't run screaming in terror then. Um, uh, hi?" He said cautiously to thin air.

Carrie swallowed her irritation at not being noticed. At least it was preferable to having the poor guy run screaming, which is what usually happened if a living person accidentally glimpsed her. She remembered how awkward it had been tracking down her surviving classmates to apologise before the Almost-Apocalypse. It had been kind of frustrating when the world hadn't ended after she'd gone to all that effort. And at least the girl could see her, and appeared to be a normal human ("normal" being a relative term).

She smiled, just in case she suddenly became visible to Newt, and said, "Hi, I'm Carrie White. Nice to meet you."

Newt whirled around, thinking someone new had entered the scene. Then he realised the voice was coming from right next to him. He cautiously squinted at the mist. "Uh, Newt Pulsifer," he said, twisting his head sideways the way you do when someone points out a cloud that looks like a gerbil. "Hey! I can kinda see you... uh, whoah. Where'd all that blood come from?"

"Nice to meet you too." said Luna, smiling back at her. "And apparently this is Newt Pulsifer? That's an odd name. I thought you said you were Newton..." said Luna, looking at Newt. Then her face brightened. "Oh, I get it! It's a kind of nickname isn't it?" She carried on, "Well, the only nickname I've ever had was Loony. I wouldn't really mind if you called me that, though it isn't a nickname I would really give myself. But then nicknames are supposed to be given to you by other people, and most people who knew me called me that anyway when they thought I wasn't listening. I suppose you could call me Loony then, if you wanted." Turning to Carrie, she said, "Do you have a nickname too?"

"Oh, there was a ghost in my school who had blood stains all over him. They were silver though, and didn't drip so much. I think he liked having blood stains on him though. It made him scarier. Even the prefects were afraid of him." commented Luna.

"Um, hi Luna, hi Mr Pulsifer," Carrie said. "The blood's sort of a long story, I got it dumped on me back when I was alive. And I don't have a nickname, unless you count what the kids at school used to call me, but those names weren't very nice." She looked at Luna again. "Did you get picked on too? It wasn't very nice of them to call you Loony." She did, however, think that perhaps they had been right in Luna's case. She'd only been speaking for five minutes and Carrie could already tell she was at least a little eccentric.

"Oh. So that was it." Luna said. "I was wondering too, but it's not exactly polite to ask about things like that. Of course, then you get the ones who boast about it, but generally they don't like to talk about it." Luna nodded satisfactorily. "I wasn't exactly picked on. They just didn't really like me. Except for Harry. And Ginny. And after that Neville. Hermione and Ron are still having trouble adjusting to me. As for the rest of the school, well - let's just say that they thought I was different." Luna really hadn't minded being different. She just wished that people wouldn't keep taking her things like that - it was rather inconvinient. This ghost girl was probably ostracized as well, going by what she had said, and Luna felt a brief surge of pity for her.

"Hey, that means that you were a witch too, right?" exclaimed Luna suddenly. "That's great! I never thought that I'd meet another witch here. Well, besides Draco, of course, but he doesn't count - at least, not really."

Newt blinked. Most of that conversation had gone right over his head. Witches? Draco... wasn't there someone by that name staying in the manor? Bullying. A subject he knew quite a bit about, and latched onto gratefully.

"I was picked on. Kinda. I mean, mostly I just got laughed at, really. But the really mean kids didn't tend to notice me."

"So what did you get laughed at about?" prompted Luna gently, absently pushing her wand up behind her ear from where it was threatening to fall. Newt looked like he would have made a good Ravenclaw. Or perhaps a Hufflepuff. And indeed the latter looked more likely. Luna thought that perhaps she already knew why Newt got looked down upon. In Hogwarts it was usually the Hufflepuffs who got picked on for their good nature and their loyalty. She wouldn't be surprised if it was the same way with Newt.

"Well, um. Mainly because I kept fiddling with electronic things. And breaking them."

Too late, Newt remembered that he was supposed to be the resident electrician. "Um! But that's all, totally behind me now," he gabbled, "And uh, I'm now quite good with computers, actually!"

"Oh," said Luna, a little surprised. Hmm, perhaps her judgement was a tad off. Then she smiled brightly again. "Elek-tronic. That's Muggle right? I've never really gotten the hang of that either - it's always much easier using magic. I've always found it strange how Muggles can manage without magic, but there, I've broken one of Hermione's rules again." She paused. "I can just manage to turn on my computer, but I tend to just write out my things the regular way, and Hermione's charm translates it to the computer for me. And I'm always afraid of breaking it. I suppose if my computer did get spoilt you wouldn't mind fixing it, would you?"

Pausing a while, Luna wondered why people would pour blood on Cass-, no, it was Carrie. Then it struck her. Turning to Carrie, she said, "Was it because you were a witch that you got picked on?"

"Sort of. But I got picked on all the time, way before anyone knew." Carrie shrugged. "Was that why nobody liked you? Everyone thinks magic would be fun, but it wasn't for me. 'S kinda nice to know I ain't the only one."

[[new thread]]

"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."

"Huh," Newt muttered. "Around here you'd be hard pressed to find something to believe in that wasn't real. Angels, demons and an antichrist, and now apparantly ghosts and witches. Oh my."

"Oh. Are you a skeptic too then?" said Luna. Just like Hermione. "You know, Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not real. And if you can see them, why, then they're definitely real. That's what I was doing out here - well, sort of." Luna paused, fiddling with her wand. "I'm on a Crumple-Horned Snorkack expedition, and this is one of the lines I'm working along." she said, gesturing towards her telescope, which was at the moment pointing at the ground.

"Yeah, you shouldn't be nasty to people just because they're different." Wish someone could have persuaded Momma that, Carrie thought ruefully. "Um, what's a Crumple-Horned Snorkack? Maybe I could help you look for one."

"My sentiments exactly," said Luna.

"Oh would you? Well, basically they have crumpled horns, and spots, and maybe it'd be better if I drew you a picture." She tore off a bit of the parchment she had been writing on, and drew a brief sketch of a Crumple-Horned Snorkack. "It looks like this. Do you have any pockets or things like that you could keep this in?" Luna asked.

"Thanks so much for offering," said Luna warmly to Carrie.

"Ah... I didn't know we had any rare animals around here..." Newt said, feeling flustered. This was obviously some sort of New Age believer in things - in fact she reminded him disconcertingly of a younger Anathema, perhaps three years before he'd met her. "I mean, I didn't say I didn't believe in things like... I mean, well of course I don't. But they seem to be real anyway."

He was confusing himself now. Dammit. "My wife's a witch, actually." He added.

"I guess for you it's 'Seeing is not believing', huh?" sighed Luna. "Do you think that they're optical illusions or something, then?" She would never have thought that Muggles, could be, well, so stubborn. Though she supposed that she couldn't blame them for it. It was like they were wearing blinkers or something. And horses can't take blinkers off by themselves. Someone else had to take them off for them.

"See, there's something you don't believe in, and she's your wife." Luna said, especially emphasizing the last two words. "I mean, really! The length you Muggles will go to to deny the existence of things that clearly exist baffles the mind."

"No, no, no, no, no!" Newt said frantically, waving his arms like a particularly epileptic windmill. "I don't mean they don't exist. I just mean I don't believe in them. I mean, I don't believe in, in," he looked around wildly, "Trees! I don't believe in trees! Why should I? They exist anyway? What difference is it going to make if I believe in them? Now, about ten years ago I met an angel, a demon, a lost tibetan, an antichrist and the four horsemen, some of which may or may not be hanging around here now, and you don't see me believing in THEM, do you?"

"Oh. Oh. Um, okay?" said Luna hesitantly, wondering if Newt had become unhinged as he windmilled his arms. "An angel, a demon, a Tibetan, an Antichrist and the four Horsemen, you say? Sounds like a song lyric." She was interrupted by a soft beeping sound coming from her telescope. "Oh dear, well, that's me. I'm doing some astronomical calculations, and well," she gestured somewhat aimlessly with her left hand, taking hold of her wand with her right. "You're more than welcome to stay if you like, though. Both of you." She turned to her telescope, muttering, "An angel, a demon, a Tibetan, an Antichrist and the four Horsemen, oh my."

Newt chuckled nervously, wondering if she was making a joke. Then he glanced at his w3atch. "Well, I guess I'd better be going. It's, you know, late. Um, nice meeting you. Er, and you." He added, turning in the general direction of the last place he remembered the ghost being and giving a cautious wave. And with that he turned and walked back inside.

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