Students Outside the ISS

[alt_moderator]

Alternity gave many of its characters the ability to carry on conversations that were not able to be monitored by the Protectorate. Chief among these were the Order's private lock, for Order members only, and the "ISS" or "I Solemnly Swear" lock, which was created by Fred and George primarily as a way to speak to Terry.

But there were a number of students who were never part of the ISS lock. These students often had to rely on off-journal communication, or carefully couched statements to one another, to make their shifting ideas and allegiances known.

This thread is for any and all questions for the student-characters who were never part of the ISS: Lavender, Linus, Seamus, Padma, Blaise, Zach, Michael, Megan, Ernie, Eloise, Ginny, Daphne, and Milli. And although they don't have played journals of their own, it's possible that if you have a question for an NPC who was not on the ISS lock, we might be able to relay an answer....

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I have two questions!

One. For those of you who weren't in the know, did anyone ever suspect that Harry's mudblood servant was a secret mega genius? Or even that she was simply smarter than she let on?

Two. To those of you who were excluded from the Galleon network as well as the ISS, did you feel any resentment when everything came to light and you saw how much excitement you'd missed out on?

[alt_ernie]

Wouldn't call it 'missed excitement.'

I don't know.

See, I wonder sometimes if things would've been different if I hadn't turned down Sue like that. When she approached me, that is. (Course I had to find out after all was said and done because people have a habit of obliviating me. Story of my life, really. Oblivious. That's me in one.)

So yeah. I wonder whether it would've made a difference to have a place where you could think and sort things out and not be so alone or feel so hopeless or so bloody terrified about tripping up.

Because I was. All the time.

But that's the rub, innit? Too much of a coward to take a risk, so I blew my chance to not be as much of a coward, but even then, might've still been in over my head.

Figure it's more that I resent myself, if I'm being honest.

And you know, being honest doesn't come easy. Had to really work at it, you know. To be honest about what I did, and what I didn't do. And what was real and what wasn't.

So that brings us to part one, I guess. Because you get told things enough, things you're supposed to just accept. And some of them don't fit or make sense. So there's these lies you tell yourself to stay safe, because you're too thick to see what sort of choices you have beyond 'follow the rules' and 'don't rock the boat', and you tell them to yourself often enough, you start to sort of believe them because otherwise you've got nothing to hold on to.

And then a whole bunch of people turn round and go, 'Yeah, those were all lies though,' and this reality you cobbled together with spellotape just sort of falls apart, and you feel like a right idiot.

Which is to say, there's a whole tonne of things that I didn't know, but part of it was because I didn't want to know.

...and now I've gone on far longer than I thought I would. Anyways.

[alt_seamus]

I'll take the easy one first: Hermione. No, I never suspected. Well, I might have said I thought she was too clever for her own good, but -- yeah. Here's the thing, it wasn't exactly a safe thing to speculate about, so I tried not to. There were a lot of roads I knew I was better off not going down, so I just didn't.

Resentment. That's a much harder question.

I resent that I wasted so many years giving my loyalty to people who despised me, who saw me as a tool to be used and disposed of.

So much of who I was at seventeen came out of who my friends were when I was twelve or thirteen. My friends, the people who I could count on and trust more than any others, were Padma Patil and Stephen Rosier. They treated me like I was worth something, like my ideas counted, like who I was mattered.

But they were part of a system that considered me a second-class citizen at best.

I can't honestly blame the revolutionaries for not trusting me at all, at the point when there was something to trust me with. I'd made my choices. Or had choices made for me.

When I think back it's not them I resent. Most of the time.

[alt_megan]

Some of the excitement I didn't miss out on. I was just on the wrong side of it.

They were right to exclude me from the Galleons, as it turned out. Because, well. You know all that now, how things went with betraying Sarah. I was still following things Umbridge that horrible toad certain people told me, and it would not have gone well.

Thinking back after I knew everything, I did feel some resentment, but it was at how things went years earlier. Because I think being made the butt of jokes by some people and then being left out by others contributed to how things went. Also that sort of thing puts one in a spot where one is quite vulnerable to anyone who takes the slightest bit of interest. Which can be dangerous.

There were good reasons for my not being told, but it's hard to have any hope of doing better if one is isolated. The person who gave me any hope at all was Harry. He would talk with me about serious things, and he helped me start doing better. So I suppose that in a way I was in a separate network with Harry. But then he always was the one who was kindest to me. (Besides Sue, who was a brick.)

[alt_padma]

Well, it was fairly obvious that Hermione was more clever than she let on, but it didn't really occur to me that she was practising magic, because I thought surely if she were, someone in authority would find out about it and do something. What really didn't occur to me was that the people in authority were helping her. Or at least, turning a blind eye. Or something like that.

As for resentment, I think some of that sort of reaction's natural. I mean, there were two secret, seditious--excuse me, I mean, revolutionary--societies going on under our noses. But of course it made perfect sense in retrospect, that they could only include people they really trusted. If I'm resentful of anything, it's just that we had to grow up in the sort of place where we were taught to value differences like that. It's hard because some of my best friends at school actually were halfbloods--Su Li and Seamus, especially, but even people like Corner. But there was always a line they couldn't cross, and a line we purebloods wouldn't cross. And it was all artificial.

[alt_blaise]

One. Of course not. It was obvious that she thought more of herself than she'd any right to have done. There was trouble about that more than once, and I still have no idea how she avoided being sent back to the work programme as unsuitable (which she clearly was). Or, really, how she avoided being put down for failing to meet standards for staff at Buckingham.

But then, it wasn't mine to question Harry Marvolo.

Two. You're asking about the seditious groups that formed around Marvolo, I suppose. I don't know enough to of the particulars to give much of an answer--except to say that resentment doesn't come close to how I feel about the fact that they lured Daphne in and then coaxed her into getting herself killed.