Welcome to Charming, where swirling petticoats, the language of flowers, and old-fashioned duels are only the beginning of what is lying underneath…
After a magical attempt on her life in 1877, Queen Victoria launched a crusade against magic that, while tidied up by the Ministry of Magic, saw the Wizarding community exiled to Hogsmeade, previously little more than a crossroad near the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the years that have passed since, Hogsmeade has suffered plagues, fires, and Victorian hypocrisy but is still standing firm.
Thethe year is now 1895. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.
Complete a thread started and set every month for twelve consecutive months. Each thread must have at least ten posts, and at least three must be your own.
Did You Know?
Did you know? Jewelry of jet was the haute jewelry of the Victorian era. — Fallin
Divination and the afterlife, two of Elliot's main interest areas. He did not think he could have stayed away from the English Society of Mysticism & the Unknown event if he had wanted to, and he was far too interested in other people's perspectives to want to. Oh, this event was guaranteed to have its portion of people he preferred to avoid — wealthy crackpots, and people who were more attracted to death than they were to life — but it was so rare that multiple seers would be in one place.
Elliot finished an earnest conversation with one of the wealthy crackpots about tarot, and then turned to the redheaded woman nearby as the other left. "I'm sorry," he said, a classic Elliot introduction, "But I think I may know you.* What brings you here tonight?"
Ara didn't get out much, and she considered herself a very poor seer at the best of times, but this was the sort of event where she at least didn't feel like a complete fish out of water. She didn't have many opportunities to indulge her own interests, so it was nothing if not a novelty.
She was part-way through a circuit around the room when she thought she recognized someone. She was already headed in his direction anyway, so Ara continued that way, and came upon the man just as he finished his conversation with someone else and turned her way. "Mr. Carmichael," she greeted as she realized she did know him. "Arabella Russell. You taught me Divination at Hogwarts." She smiled. Divination had been the only class she'd had any aptitude for, at all. "I suppose I'm continuing to pursue that interest here."
One of his students, all grown up! Elliot remembered Arabella Russell, if not well — she'd had a real talent for Divination, but she'd left Hogwarts before her N.E.W.T.s. "I'm glad to see it," Elliot said, tone genuine. "I remember your dreams."
Ara smiled, pleased to be remembered. "Unfortunately, they've never been very reliable," she said. "But I live in hope that one day I'll be able to make heads or tails of them." She wondered sometimes if she'd have made more headway on that if she'd been able to stay on through her NEWTS--not that there'd ever been much chance of that.
Elliot nodded back to her. "You may be surprised to hear it," Elliott admitted, with a conspiratorial expression on his face, "But I often find myself with similar problems." Sometimes he Knew things, often he tried to parse a feeling or an impulse — and sometimes his dreams were unclear and ominous, leading to conversations like the one where he had tried to tell Miss Shalott Dempsey that someone meant her harm, and had only ended up scaring her.
Ara smiled ruefully. "It's frustratingly imprecise sometimes, isn't it?"Oftentimes, Ara thought. It was probably best that Sight was a natural-born gift, because she thought it would be a hard sell as a learned skill. But then again, that might have just been her own personal frustrations with her own abilities talking.
"Honestly?" Ara asked. "I get so few opportunities to indulge this part of me, I'm just here to soak it all up." There wasn't a lot of opportunity to do things just for the sake of it in her life these days.
Now that was something Elliot could empathize with. "Me, too," he said. In case she thought he was teasing her, he added, "I left Hogwarts a few years ago." Six. He'd left Hogwarts six years ago, which was longer than he had taught there, and the things he had left Hogwarts to find did not seem any closer now than they had been then.
"Ah." Ara could certainly relate to that. Hogwarts felt like a very long time ago, and she hadn't gotten to finish out her time there. Not that she'd ever fit in particularly well at school, anyway. "What have you been up to since then?" she asked curiously.
"Some personal research," Elliot said, as if his personal research was not scattered amongst a series of confusing piles and rarely updated. "And Society, I suppose." His mouth twitched up into a self-aware smile. He was not very good at Society. People knew it, although he was not sure that Miss Russell did.
"I see," Ara said, nodding, though "personal research" was, of course, very vague, and Ara certainly didn't spend anytime in society. The closest she got to society was passing society types in Diagon Alley. "I hope the research is at least going well?"
