Overwhelming (Open)

[hollybrown]

Holly slowly crawled over to the large, puffy armchair collapsing into its soft depths. She felt herself sink down in the cushions sighing in content. Her eyes wandered the room, watching fellow students work on homework or play games. She felt exhausted from having to maneuver around the school until she finally found a place to relax. The fire flicked casually in the grate, casting a warm glow over the room.

Holly felt very comfortable at the moment. The temperature was perfect; everything was quiet. "I wonder what mom is doing right now," she mumbled closing her eyes softly. Her lashes felt heavy and soon she fell into a peaceful sleep. Her mind drifted through memories of working at St. Mungo's with her mother. Bam! Holly's eyes snapped open, looking around for the sudden noise. "What the," she growled. Rubbing her eyes, she glanced around rather perplexed. There seemed to be no one there...

[Jez Cuthbert]

"Merlin!"

Despite his precarious position - spreadeagled on the Student Lounge's chandelier - Jez put more thought into expressing his frustration than into remaining balanced; fortunately, without the clumsiness that self-consciousness often imposed on him, his natural grace preserved him and he didn't fall. He clung onto the swaying chandelier for dear life, if life could be called that at the present moment.

"Damn and blast it!" he fumed to himself, before he realised that he'd already woken up the poor solitary soul who he had been at such pains not to disturb while getting up here - not only because he preferred to carry out his... alterations... unobserved, but actually because she'd just looked so peaceful and he'd thought it would be unkind to wake her. (If you would prefer to believe only the former of Jez, dear reader, he would quite agree with you that you should keep your opinion of him untainted by doing so, but sadly you would be deceiving yourself). He'd used a charm to make himself featherweight and levitated himself up here... everything had been going very well in fact, until a moment's inattention had landed him here, finding out quite how uncomfortably spiky chandeliers could be.

The girl was looking around the room now; she hadn't looked up as of yet, but she would surely have heard his last exclamation and therefore he was rumbled. Hopefully she wasn't a Ravenclaw, as the thud (and the ensuing curses) had been caused by his Advanced Charms book falling to the ground (well, the curses partially his pain as well). It was now lying in a position that would have caused his childhood English literature tutor great distress. ('Would you like to be bent back on your spine? Well then, don't do that to your books!') Its pages would be bent too; Jez felt some regret for the accident, fool as he was.

He supposed that he was in no position to be choosy as to who spoke first... he might as well take the initiative.
"I'm sorry for waking you up," he said honestly, "and if it helps, so is my Advanced Charms book which actually made the thud. It didn't mean to - I mean, I didn't intend to drop it," he clarified, realising that by personifying his textbook, he risked sounding like a blathering madman, which under the circumstances might be unwise. "Could you do me a favour and pass it back up? It's nearly curfew so I need to be as quick as I can," he explained. He tried to regard her expression as best he could from his bird's eye view, which was not very well at all.

"Or I can summon it up here if you don't want to risk getting involved in a prank," he added, not knowing how to interpret the expression which he couldn't see. "It would be helpful if you passed it though," he added, feeling that he should make that clear. "The book is heavier than me at the moment so the momentum from summoning it could knock me over to the other side of the room." That was a considerable way, but Jez wasn't exaggerating. It hadn't occurred to him that he might be appearing even more deluded at this juncture than he had when personifying his textbook: the charm that was making him feather-light had no visible effect.

Well. Jez had his own style of sanity, even if it was not to everyone's taste. To the general observer, Jez may have appeared partially crazy, but such unenlightened observers evidently hadn't viewed the room from the perspective of a chandelier...