The Bauer/Douglas Family (bauerandcompany) wrote in weddedto_sonora, @ 2013-10-18 14:53:00 |
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Current mood: | stressed |
The Outsiders' Alliance
The first thing Alicia noticed, and noticed with great relief, on Monday afternoon was that the group she had dubbed the Alpha Males during the first session had not yet closed ranks for the day. They had formed an impenetrable circle during discussions and coffee break on Friday, but their stances now were looser, more comfortable, less guarded, and she knew she was not likely to get a better chance. Putting on her most confident smile, she walked over.
“Good afternoon,” she said brightly.
There was a moment’s hesitation, during which the two ringleaders – Edward Foxcroft, tall and thin and with hair only a little lighter than her mother’s, and Geraint Crowley, shorter, darker, and heavy-set, with glasses – glanced at each other before Edward bowed slightly. “Miss Bauer, Sports, right?” he said.
“That’s right,” she said. “And you’re Mr. Foxcroft, the head of our law enforcement, right?”
“I am,” he said. “This is Crowley, Transportation.”
“You’re my great-uncle’s provider of assorted hot beverages,” Crowley observed. “As well as a major player in bringing the World Cup to America, of course.”
“No less a task,” Alicia said, liking that he had also taken to referring to the game as though it were real, but not sure what to make of him pointing out that she was the coffee girl as well as a general message-runner first. Did he mean to be demeaning? She couldn’t imagine his day job was much more glamorous, and besides, she would put her tea or her coffee beside his and invite the comparison any day. She had read books on those subjects and practiced rather a lot, too – not that the practicing, at least, had been entirely without material as well as skill benefits to her, of course. “It’s an honor to work with Councilor Crowley, he’s a very impressive wizard.”
“Which is why he wouldn’t be caught dead working with Geraint,” Edward contributed, and got punched on the arm for his trouble.
“I would suggest you pick someone not in charge of actually taking the Cup Portkeys to their locations to insult, Ed,” suggested Crowley. “I might just…misplace one….”
“And then get promptly removed from office for incompetence,” replied Edward. “You can’t win, Crowley. I will beat you every time.”
“Someday, Foxcroft, someday,” Crowley laughed. He turned his attention back to Alicia. “I’m sure we’ll have the opportunity to work closely together,” he said. “Along with our colleagues in Internationals and Catastrophes, of course.”
His expression was slight, but telling. “I look forward to it,” Alicia said, sensing that she was just about to outstay her welcome. The attempt had not been a complete failure, they had not given her the cold shoulder, but something had failed to click. She would have to retreat gracefully, the better to try again another time. She saw little Jasper, now regulating their half of the nation’s magical creatures, and decided it was time she did that. “If you’ll excuse me?”
Jasper nodded very gravely as Alicia approached him. “Bauer,” he said solemnly. “Good afternoon.”
“The same to you,” Alicia said. “Have you had time to consider your position on the Snidget preserve any further?”
“I have,” he said. “And if you’re planning to argue that a non-native species should only be held somewhere closer to the Council, where we can control it better, you’re out of luck,” he added.
Alicia smiled. “I wasn’t,” she said, and he looked surprised. Either he had come up with the argument himself and thought it good, or else it had been in his intelligence folder and he had been expecting to cut her feet out from under her. Which was it, she wondered? “I think having one here is an excellent idea – you know how emotional people get about the history and origins of Quidditch, it would save a lot of people the trouble of traveling to England,” she continued. “It’s just the exact location that’s the problem. We need to work on how to position your project and my new stadium so they’re close enough together to get the benefits of double tourism, without being so close together we break your department’s regulations, and not so close that we get too much of a commercial area up there and attract attention from the Muggles….”
Jasper looked thoughtful as she talked, then surprised her by pulling the debate out until their moderator arrived and called the group into council.
To her surprise, Crowley was the one who seemed most in charge of his situation – at least so long as he didn’t have to talk to Grant or Jessica, anyway. She got why Jessica annoyed him, she thought, Muggleborn and all, but what in the world was his problem with the guy playing the part of International Relations?
This could be harder than she had expected. She had forgotten, it had been a while since she had had to remember, much of what it was to work with people she didn’t know at all or really have much to speculate about from.
She spent much of the first recess with Foxcroft, hammering out concessions to make in light of the need for heightened security the recent upswing in Dark activity had made evident, but though they successfully presented that and she voted with him for the Defense budget, as agreed, when it came to it, he didn’t return the favor as she had asked on the Colorado Pitch deal, instead voting with Crowley and one of their lackeys. At coffee break, they added insult to injury by closing ranks, forming a laughing, joking circle at one cafeteria table and pushing excess chairs away just to make the point.
Alicia pursed her lips. So, they wanted to have parties, did they? Well, she could play that game, too. As she looked around, she saw Grant of International Relations sitting alone, staring blankly at something, and it occurred to her that she might have an opportunity there. He was from the right sort of family, but not in with the rest of the crowd, which meant that there had to be another reason why some people were in and others were out.
“Hi,” she said, approaching him with her cup of coffee and glancing over his table very quickly. There was every chance she would be rebuffed, but she thought she had more of a read on him than some of the others, plus, no one wanted to be too alone during this game, she was pretty sure. “French lessons giving you a hard time?”
Doing outside homework here seemed very strange to her, but that was undeniably a French-English dictionary beside him, and his look was very blank. He looked up at her miserably. “Crowley – I’m pretty sure it was him – slipped this into my folder, and I have no idea what it says,” he said.
Alicia looked at the note, seeing that Geraint Crowley had, along with the evident ability to write French, a lovely hand to write it in. “May I?” Alicia asked, and he nodded, so she took the paper and read it more closely, discovering that he also had a vivid imagination. “If I were you, I’d walk over there right now, in front of all his friends, and tell him you’re glad to see he’s come to appreciate all the variety in his family tree.” She paused, then added, “And tell him I just found the paper sticking out, just now, so he doesn’t know you had trouble translating it.”
“What does it say?” Grant asked suspiciously.
“I’ll tell you when you get back,” Alicia responded.
The challenge had been issued: Do you trust me? He had no reason to, of course. They were united only in being outsiders. That, though, could just be enough, when they were stuck here as outsiders for weeks. It did not hurt, either, that she was pretty sure he was appreciating the attention given to him by a pretty smiling girl after he had spent the whole exercise largely alone. She could be in Crowley's pocket - but she had looked (because she was) genuinely surprised and angry, just for a minute, during the last session, and her surname had never appeared in an office here. Still looking suspicious, he went over.
The effect was obvious at once. Crowley turned extremely red, and the rest of the table possibly (Crowley had been just about to stand up, and his hand was moving) prevented a duel by laughing loudly, Foxcroft saying audibly even to her, some distance away, “So much for that one, Gerry!” Flushed himself, Grant returned to where Alicia was standing.
“What did I just say about his family?” he asked.
“He said something very rude about your mother,” Alicia said. She decided to press her luck a little further. “Why would he do that, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my mother,” he said very quickly. Alicia raised her hands in a pacifying gesture, if hopefully not enough for the others, if they were watching, to notice at the angle she was standing relative to them. “Geraint and I were friends, before school, but – our families traditionally go to different schools, so we didn’t see each other much, and then that crew formed here, and then our grandfathers had a falling-out….”
“Charming,” Alicia said dryly.
“Yes,” he said.
Alicia thought very fast. On one hand, he could be very useful, with all this knowledge of everyone else that she didn’t have. On the other, she was assigned to Edmund Crowley all day, so aligning herself too closely with someone from a family his family had, assuming Grandpa Crowley was important, fallen out with could…have its downsides.
“Grant,” she said, leaning forward very slightly and using her sweetest tone of voice, “since I just did you one, can you do me a favor?”
Grant shrugged, looking confused by the shift in the conversation but not bad-natured about it. “Sure, I guess, depending on what it is.”
“Can you yell at me about how it’s none of my business, loud enough for them to hear you?”
“Wh – oh,” he said. “To throw them off that you helped me?”
“Exactly,” Alicia said. “It’s best for both of us, so they don’t realize I did the translating – which I’d be happy to help you with again if you need me to, later in the game – and so they don’t start thinking that other people are making alliances. It…keeps the options more open, at least for now.”
“Are we making an alliance?” Grant asked bluntly.
“I’m game if you are,” Alicia said. “I don’t really think good rhetoric is going to be enough to get those guys to give an inch anywhere the law doesn’t make them, so we’re both going to need at least one friend to have a chance of not getting stomped all over.”
“And since the next-best chance is Cohn….” He said, glancing toward the Muggleborn girl, who was, amazingly, not alone, either: she was talking to Jasper. “Ed isn’t so bad, but Geraint and Delacroix would go out of their way to stomp us if we were friends with her.” Alicia smiled to herself, noting the word we slipping in already. “Okay,” he said. “Anything else before I start yelling?”
“Do you know anything about Quidditch?” she asked hopefully, thinking, between his being a guy and being a big guy and the calluses on his hands, that this might be the case.
“I’m a Keeper,” he said. “Okay, here goes.”
He pulled off the show better than she expected, and Alicia made an equal production of moving away in a huff to next talk to Roberts, who looked lonely without Jasper. Odd, that the thirteen-year-old should be the leader between himself and the fourteen-year-old; it gave her more ideas. The next day, she ostensibly went to Jasper to talk more about Pitch placements in the northwest, but really to see if he was willing to tell her what he knew about Jessica Cohn, and if he liked the idea of quietly making some very vague promises to her in exchange for support.
Jasper was from a mostly Canadian family who still, in a tradition going back to their arrival in the Americas a hundred and fifty years earlier, sent their sons to Hogwarts to find English wives, though their daughters increasingly attended American schools. He had nothing to lose, and seemed amused by the whole thing – another of his oddities, but Alicia guessed she was hardly one to say much about what a normal thirteen-year-old should be like. Merlin knew she was pretty sure she hadn’t been one, either. He agreed, on the condition that she tell him anything she said to Roberts.
By the end of day three, she had lost a little more ground to Crowley in council, but overall was beginning to feel better about the situation than she had on day one, if still not as optimistic as on day zero. It was going to be a long, at the very least, four weeks.