Private Message to Sally Anne Perks

[alt_ron]

Oof. Okay. Loads of stuff to tell you, and I'm so knackered I don't know if I'll remember it all. But at least I've got time to write. Um, I'm sat here in the middle of the forest being held prisoner by some bloke from MLE. Angus MacSomethingorother. Not a bad chap, but not much of a talker.

Anywiz, last night after the longest day ever, before we could go off to bed, Desai and Dolohov said Harry and I had to come talk to them and they said we each had to pick someone on our team to take over command for us. Well that was easy for me, at least. Obviously, I picked Malfoy, and then they made me give all my reasons. Also dead easy: I picked him because he's a natural leader. He pretty much expects people to do what he says, and they do. I think he was probably giving orders to people as soon as he could talk. (I didn't actually say that last bit.) I told them he was my choice because I chose the rest of my team specifically to work well alongside both me and him. I mean, I'd already sort of factored in that if anything happened to me, the others would follow Malfoy and stick together as a team.

Anywiz, today when it was time to form up for the afternoon session, which they'd told us would be a search and rescue thing, Harry and I got called out again, and they told us that we're the ones our teams have to search for and rescue.

So this nice MLE bloke's here to fight off anyone who finds me and make it difficult for them to rescue me. Mind you, he's also supposed to protect me if anyone on the other side tries to come snuff me before my side can get here.

So all I have to do is sit around all afternoon and wait to see what my mates can manage.

At least we got rid of Thomas. I didn't even have to think about it when they said I needed to pick somebody to give the other side so they'd have the extra wand for a while.

You know, he wasn't bad at first, and he even helped us win one of the exercises, but yesterday he made a complete arse of himself. Didn't like anybody else's ideas and was especially rude to Bones. So much so she finally got really fed up and told him off. And, really, Sue's ideas were as good as anyone else's.

Comments

I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up to No Good Private Message to Sally Anne

[alt_ron]

Needed MacMLE to see what I was writing. That's why it's just a PM.

And now he wants to twit me about writing my girlfriend. Nice. So I'm going to keep doing it. And he can just sit there and watch me.

Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up to No Good Private Message to Sally Anne

[alt_sally_anne]

So did you notice Bill's Order post? His 'MLE contact' wanted to know what I did with my wand to keep it hidden. Which is frankly a really weird question to ask BILL, I mean, why wouldn't this person come ask me if she wants to know? I mean the people from MLE can come ask me whatever they want.

Not that I'm complaining.

Re: I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up to No Good Private Message to Sally Anne

[alt_ron]

Sorry I couldn't write back yesterday.

MLE haven't come to ask you more questions, have they?

And why were they questioning Bill? That doesn't make sense. They know where I am. Or they could if they cared to find out, yeah?

What are you doing this week, anywiz? Bored without me?

I'm definitely not bored, but I'd rather be with you than here. How's that for a compliment?

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So for yesterday's big competition exercise, we had to find a whole load of wooden tokens that they'd hidden. I mean, there must've been 700 or 800 of them, maybe. Not that they told us how many there were, mind you. But we were supposed to collect as many as we could, each team.

Anywiz, we started off pretty much talking it to death. Arguing over strategy--like should we set some people to go kill people on the other side and steal their tokens (because that was allowed) and should someone be the healer for our group (because we could 'heal' people who'd been hit with the marking spell that meant you were 'dead'). Or. Should we pair up and one person search and the other stand protection? And they'd heal each other if one got hit. Or. Should we just search and not worry about what the other team was going to do except to be watching out for attacks?

For a while, Zabini and Thomas were arguing that we shouldn't worry about finding tokens, we should just stake out the return paths and ambush the other side when they came back at the end of the day to take all their tokens.

At least I convinced them that was a sorry strategy and that we really needed to find every token we could. I mean, the thing is, there was a lot we didn't know about these tokens, except Dolohov pretty well hinted that they'll be part of another exercise sometime. And see, the fact that they wouldn't tell us how many they'd hidden out there... that bothered me. And I started thinking what they might be planning to do with the ones we didn't find. I mean, we had no idea what charms they'd put on them, right? And they could totally have put charms on that had nothing to do with today's exercise. Charms they could activate later to use against us, if you see what I mean.

So I got them to agree that we had to try to find all of them and not quit until we did. No slacking off, so letting the other side do all the finding wasn't the right strategy. I mean, if Zabini wanted to try to ambush the other side, that was his lookout, but he needed to be finding as many as he could, too. We all did.

[alt_ron]

What would you have used to find a bunch of wooden tokens? We started with the obvious (because why not, right?) so we tried 'Accio Tokens in the Woods!' Which, yeah. We figured that wouldn't do much because you need to know pretty specifically where a thing is before you can summon it. And none of us really expected it to be that easy.

We did get a couple that way, though! I tried it on particular trees later on and got a fair few with Accio.

[alt_sally_anne]

I always start with Accio because why not?

[alt_ron]

Zabini suggested Imperiusing Bowtruckles to retrieve the tokens since they probably watched Dolohov and Desai hide them and they'd be sure to know exactly where anything was that'd been hidden in their trees. But we never did get close enough to a Bowtruckle to try that out.

Probably the best ideas came from Patil. She worked up a spell that could detect some of the magic that'd been put on the tokens. For a while we were just pulling them in, but they weren't all charmed the same way and so that spell kind of ran out on us. Even after Malfoy thought of a way to tweak it and make it draw another batch. Her other really good idea was to use a summoning rune, and that worked really well on one particular kind of token that we'd only found a few of up till then.

Anywiz, we worked our arses off for hours past dark. Oh, and we ended up with a truce with Harry's side, anyway, because they kind of came to the same idea that it was really important to find as many as we could. I guess Moon did some sort of analysis on the way Dolohov phrased the instructions and he figured we were going to need to use the tokens later and that it was more important to find as many as we all could than to worry about which side got more. So that was fine. At least we didn't have to waste time hunting each other and fighting.

I think Dolohov was sort of amused about that whole peace truce, though he didn't really say. And I'm not sure what Desai thought of it. It was too late for a debriefing last night and they had us up and flying at half-six again this morning, so we didn't do it then, either.

Mostly, I just want a nap now. Writing about all of it's made me dead sleepy.

And who knows when my lot will find me.

So, yeah. More later.

[alt_sally_anne]

Well this is a brilliant long letter and I'm sorry I didn't see it earlier.

The Strettons had me take Gemma and Phillip shopping today in New London. Right now I've got them running around at a park and I sat down under a tree.

[alt_ron]

Sounds nice. Did you get school things for Phillip? What about Gemma?

Anything for yourself?