The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin' thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear

outfit - @marisol

No matter what anyone said, Søren was not going soft. Absolutely not. When it came to children, he had already been soft. It was just that he didn't often have the chance to interact with them, so people didn't know. There was really no reason for a smuggler to interact with children or for children to come up in an every day conversation. Still, he did have a soft spot for them which didn't mean he was going soft. There was a definite difference there and he would point it out with his dying breath. He had, though, chosen to start working at the new school. It was partially something to do with his guilt over being a snatcher, but since he'd never actually turned in a child to the Death Eaters, he could probably have acted just as a smuggler and stolen kids and delivered them somewhere safe. This had more to do with his worry about the children. They were vulnerable enough as it was, he didn't trust this school even a tiny bit. Any professors and security had to be vetted by the Death Eaters in charge in order to work here. It wasn't a stretch to think that some of the people assigned might be cruel or cold. He was worried about the kids. He was now working in security, officially to keep the kids inside, but mostly because he wanted to make sure they were as safe as possible considering their circumstances.

He didn't have many shifts, though. Some afternoons, some mornings. Never more than four or five hours in a row. He appreciated that, as worried as he might be. His smuggling job as still his main one, and he had snatching to do as well. That included both getting the kids he found out of the country -with the smuggling- and the adults he found into the Ministry. Yes, all right, things were easier now and he was much tempted to not hand anyone in. Before, it had been just as well. He felt a bit guilty but he was an opportunist. Now that the muggleborns were mostly let go except for the ones that had been on the run... well, things were different. It made whatever he did all the more final. So he'd dimmed that down a bit. He was thinking about quitting, but doing that would bring the Death Eaters' attention to him. It could get his smuggling work found out or it could get him suspected enough to remove him from the school altogether. That was just a whole lot of trouble that he didn't want to deal with. Could he have foreseen this? Maybe, possibly, but he wasn't one to think about the consequences of his actions much. Clearly. He had a stab wound to show for that and he still hadn't learned his lesson. It was just like him to get tangled up in all of this, really. Not that he was trying to untangle himself. He was a free man, he could spend as much time as he wanted here. Nobody was looking for him or waiting for him. He was sure even his mother had stopped hoping for his return by now.

Søren had just decided to do his rounds and try not to interfere too much. He also couldn't really afford to draw too much attention to himself. Unless he spotted something going truly wrong, he'd try to blend in. Just another guard. He wouldn't bring the kids candy -no matter how well intentioned it was on his part, it was still just plain creepy- and he would just keep to himself. That ought to work, really. Nobody had any reason to really pay too much attention to him, unless it was a teacher that needed something for some reason. So while the kids didn't have school on weekends, he still did have his job to do. He'd taken the cafeteria job, or whatever they called that room. Anyway, it meant that he could just sit on top of a table in the corner and look around the place so the kids wouldn't get into food fights or whatever. What did kids do anyway? It was open for any one of them to wander in if they wanted to, though there wouldn't be any food most usually, there were some snacks today. Who the hell knew why. Maybe it was a weekend thing. Maybe it was a professor or a guard that felt generous. It would still be an improvement after Kolna, he figured. Even if it was just pumpkin juice and some pastries. It was there and he hadn't taken anything. Stealing food from kids was like stealing candy from a baby. Easy, but still morally questionable. Really, he was the last person to speak about morality, but he tried to hold on to it when he remembered about its existence.

London Calling

Marisol's Outfit

They had been here nearly a month now, and Mari was still completely unconvinced about how this was a better situation. Yes, they were out of that hell hole that they had called housing before. But she thought that they had lost the freedom that they had had before. She had liked being able to come and go as she pleased, and she wasn't sure that she liked this whole having to go to class thing again. It was stupid. They weren't actually learning anything useful. And she was quite sure that they weren't going to be using any of this in the real world. They could at least teach them properly. If they were going to go through the trouble of teaching them anything at all, they could have done it in some manner that didn't make this a completely waste of everyone's time, and whatever resources they were actually using. It was a joke. And she thought that they all knew it. There were children here that were small enough that they had been taken away from their parents too early. Children that had been stripped of their childhoods far too early. And that wasn't fair. Mari felt terribly for them, and she wasn't a caring person.

She didn't exactly get along with everyone that she came across, but she did think that she was going to need to take care of these children. They needed someone looking out for them, and Mari would gladly act out. She would draw attention to herself if that meant that they were going to get away with something. It wasn't fair that they were going through this. Not now. Not yet. It wasn't fair that any of them had to go through this, but she had had her mother until she was fifteen years old. She was fifteen the last time that she had seen her mother, and now she was seventeen. She was seventeen and it had been more than a year since the last time she had seen her mother and father. That was heartbreaking. But it was nothing next to what those kids had gone through. It was nothing next to what she would fight for to get them back to where they were supposed to be. They were the reason that Mari would fight this. That she would act out. And act out she did.

There was no one that could say that Mari was quiet about things. She never had been, and she was likely to be very in your face about it. There was no part of her that had ever had to be subtle in her life, and she didn't plan on starting now. Not about this. There was nothing that she was going to do that was going to draw enough attention that no one else got hurt. But she liked to try. She liked to be distracting. To try and keep everyone else safe. It was complicated. It would always be complicated. But now things were different. Now the Minster had made more changes, and Mari didn't trust it. She didn't trust anything about it. There was no way they were just letting them walk away free and clear, and only check in when they were told. It didn't feel right. Not when they were keeping them here. Not when they had set this place up to keep track of them… It didn't make sense. Why keep them here? Why keep them separated if there wasn't some reason… There had to be something that they were all missing. There had to be something that they hadn't caught yet.

And maybe there wasn't. Maybe she was just paranoid. But being paranoid had kept her alive this long. She wasn't about to discount it now. There were classes all the time, but Marisol didn't all the time, and she wasn't going to try and sit around and do her homework either. She had decided that there was no way that whatever they were going to try and fake teach them in Theory was important, and so she simply hadn't done it. There was no point. It wasn't like they were going to be using any scores that they got on anything here. If they did, it was just going to be to reassign the seventh years to crappy jobs. Probably the same crappy jobs that they had had before. Maids and gardeners and cooks, and whatever else it was that they had been. Heading into the Mess Hall she thought that she would see if she could steal something to snack on as she made her way around the campus. That was the one benefit to this place over the alley. There was at least food. She wasn't starving anymore… Tucking her hair behind her ear, Mari expected that the Hall would be empty, and so she pulled the door open, and was halfway across the room before she sensed that she wasn't alone, and spun around to find whomever else was in here. Her eyes sought out the person and she smirked when she saw who it was. "Hello Søren…" Perhaps she shouldn't use his first name, but she had learned it, and so she was going to use it...

Maybe he should just quit snatching. Especially now that the muggleborns had been let go, the fates of the ones he caught got more and more gruesome. After all, these weren't just runaways anymore, they were fugitives. Okay, they had always been fugitives, but the fates of those caught didn't really differ from those who chose to register. Now, though, the ones already in the muggle camps were let go just not completely freed, and those who were caught were kept in the camps and probably mistreated even worse. Did he know how exactly? No, he wasn't involved with that side of things. That wasn't exactly his business. Still, now that things were different maybe he should think twice about handing over innocent people to the Death Eaters. He would still do it, probably, but he'd feel guilty. Maybe if they paid him more per head that guilt would go away. It was a good plan that should definitely be explored. Now wether the people at the ministry would see it his way and actually give him that raise was iffy. They probably wouldn't and he would be left to deal with his guilt until it drove him to either alcoholism or quitting his job. Or death, because his job could be very dangerous and that didn't mix well with being drunk. Either way, something was gonna give at some point and he surely did hope it was his salary and not his life. Happy endings, right? Not for the people he handed in but they weren't going to have a happy ending anyway. Big deal.

"Oh, hey... you..." Søren looked at the girl who had spoken. Beautiful girl, just a bit of mischief in her eyes. He didn't know her name. Should he? If she was here then she was of school age and he never handed in any kids, so that meant that he hadn't met her before. Had he seen her around? Probably, though lately he was distracted. Distracted enough to miss her? With her nut brown skin and slender shoul- no, no, stopping that train of thought right there. Wasn't even allowed to leave the station. No. Teenage girl. Far too young. In his care, his responsibility. She didn't even have a wand and was in a desperate situation. That would be taking advantage in every possible way, he could not allow himself to even think that. He wasn't that much of an ass, okay, but he had terrible self control and tended to always make the worst choice possible. Always. Point in case, his ex wife. She was trouble rolled all with a pretty bow but did he see it? Yes, fine, he did. Did he care, though? No, not really, and look where that got him. This girl was as much trouble as Celine, if maybe for different reasons. He could smell that a mile away. Or was that her shamp- no. No. Fucking stop. Bad Søren. "I'm afraid I don't know your name."

Most guards here would probably take offence at being spoken to by their first name by a student. These were violent people and whoever fucking thought that putting them around children was a good idea was probably either an idiot or an asshole. Søren, however, was not like that. He was a smuggler and a snatcher and a hitman, but he wasn't a bad person. At least, he tried to tell himself that. Plus, it was just a name, nobody died by being called by their first name- okay, fine, he was sure that some of these lords and ladies around here might get a coronary if someone called them anything but their title. But like what level of self obsession did one have to have for that shit, okay? IT was just plain ridiculous. No, Søren was a normal guy with a normal sense of ego which meant that he didn't mind being called by his first name. Though, how she heard his name in the first place was beyond him. Then again, he was a handsome person so he wouldn't be surprised if people sometimes talked about him. Yes, that made sense. "Is there something I can help you with?"

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[attr="class","underwavesheader"]LONDON CALLING

[attr="class","waveshsubtitle"]TO THE FAR AWAY TOWNS

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[attr="class","wavesundtext"]If there was anything that Marisol thought that they were going to be able to do, it was disappear. But that wasn’t the case here. It was nearly impossible to disappear in this school, and she hated it. She thought that she would have rather gone back out to the alley. She would have rather gone back to picking up garbage, and cleaning public toilets, and everything else that she had bene doing, that meant that she was lesser. She would have taken lesser like that. This… This was hell. This was a façade that was made to look like they were being nicer. It was a fake school, filled with phony classes, that had nothing to do with what they were actually going to need to function as adults in this world. They were magic. They had been born with the same magic in them that the rest of them had. Just because they were from a different world. Just because they were from a world where she could have an iPhone in the summers, and no one was going to question it. A world where she could wear cut offs, and converse, and fit right in. That was the world that she knew.

That was the world that she was going to have to figure out. Because for as much as she knew that she was going to have trouble adjusting to a magical life in the beginning, it was nothing to trying to live in it now. This was a different kind of torture all together. Because they knew what they could do. They knew that they were pretty. They knew that they were smart enough to make their ways in the world. And she thought that there was something to be said for that. There was something that they were going to have to do. Something that they were going to have to figure out. They would let them out of this place soon enough. Even if it was another whole year before she got out of here in some staged form of a graduation. She could go looking for her parents. Her parents that she hadn’t heard from in the Alley. That she knew that she was going to have no chance of hearing from in here. They were lost to her right now, and Mari wasn’t handling that all that well.

She was their only child. And if they had come looking for her, she had never seen them. They had missed one another, over, and over again. But she knew her parents. They wouldn’t have abandoned her like that. They would have fought for her. Fought to see her. To find her. To know what was going on with their daughter. And she just had to hope that they hadn’t hurt them because of her. Were they alive? Probably. She assumed that they were alive, but it wasn’t that that worried her the most. More than anything, she was worried that they would have wiped their memories of her. That they would have had their lives replaced. Been sent away, to go and live as other people. She was worried that that was exactly what had happened to them. That they had gotten to them. That they had wiped their memories, replaced their lives. That much she wouldn’t put past the Death Eaters. And it was better than admitting that she was worried that they would have just murdered them. She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want them to be dead because of her.

Mari was trying to put that out of her mind when she caught sight of someone else in the mess hall. She had learned their names. Names were power, after all. She had learned that a long time ago, and Mari had listened over the last month, as they had talked with other adults… She had learned their names, and his was Søren. “Marisol. Mari.” She shrugged a little bit, because it didn’t matter which one he decided to use. She would answer to either one. Hell, she would probably answer to ‘hey you’ these days. “Not really. Not much is going to help us now.” That was probably not the thing to say to a guard, but he was sitting in here instead of guarding whatever it was that he was supposed to be guarding, so something about that told her that she could be a tad more honest than she would have been with the others. “Unless you’ve got some decent shampoo and some spa quality face scrubs in your pockets, I think I’m just going to have to live.” Really, Mari knew that that was materialistic of her. But those were the things that she wanted. Just the things that were going to make this hell a little more tolerable. Because there was no getting out of it. There was only learning to deal with it.

[attr="class","waveunbnotes"]TAG: @ søren // Marisol's Outfit

[attr="class","bbsiggydonttouch"]BB

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"The ice age is coming,  
the sun is zooming in"

    The pay here was terrible and the other guards were a pain in the ass. Most teachers were boring at best and nightmares at worst and he really struggled to find any good points in this job at all. Granted, he wasn't here every hour of the day or every day of the week. He was here on shifts of five hours at a time, four days a week and it was pretty easy to move the shifts around and get some other guard to cover for him. Not because they got along or anything like that, but because Søren was a convincing person. So he could occasionally switch things up if some other job came up or if he just plain didn't feel like going in that day. Did that happen often? No, not really, because he didn't like the idea of shit falling apart in here while he wasn't around. Not that he thought of himself as some sort of hero or anything like that, he was often the one putting his foot in it rather than helping someone else take their foot out. Still, he was somewhat good at getting bad situations to settle down, he was charismatic and chill like that. The kids here were all restless at best, on edge and angry and rebellious at worst. It was easy for them to lash out and the people that were most around were guards, but the guards weren't exactly chosen for their pacifistic natures, so that could get ugly. He just wanted the kids to stay in one piece, he didn't think that was too much to ask. It was all he could really do for them, anyway. 
    "Mari, huh? That's cute." There he went, putting his foot in it. Sure, she was pretty, but she was a kid and he was the Designated Safety Adult in this shitfest. "Maybe not. Sometimes the world goes crazy and stabs you without warning." He shrugged a bit and it may sound insensitive but he never really believed in moping about unchangeable things. Did she have a right to mope? Yeah, definitely. Was it a bit defeatist to say that it was unchangeable? That too, except defeatist wasn't the right word since Søren wasn't the one defeated in anything. Maybe... fatalistic? Probably. Thing was, she could either sit down and complain or she could keep herself busy. Either way, she was stuck here. Only one of those actions would distract her. "Then live it shall be, I have zero knowledge about shampoo quality and have never used a face scrub in my life." His mother used to, though his sister never did. They had different ways of taking care of themselves. He blamed their different cultures. Mother and daughter they may be, but Klara was raised Swedish and Majo had grown up in Granada. Culturally very different and neither of them had ever felt the need to change that.
    Sometimes, though, the most brilliant ideas reached him in the most opportune of times. Was it because he'd been looking at Mari's face very carefully and decided that she should get more reasons to smile? Yes, maybe a bit, but Søren was a moron so there was no point in paying attention to that. Point was that he was a smuggler, so while he wouldn't be risking his life by smuggling these kids out of Pyxis... he could probably bring stuff in. As long as it wasn't anything dangerous or forbidden, he doubted that he would get in trouble on the off chance that he was caught. Which he wouldn't, he was a professional. Really, these people had to vet their new employees' past more carefully. What if he'd been a... a... well, he was also a hitman so that wasn't exactly a hypothetical question. Not that he killed kids but... the point stood, dammit. 
    "But, if you like, you can explain to me exactly what shampoos and scrubs you'd like and I can see about getting you some." He shrugged, casting a glance around the room. "In secret, of course, I don't fancy getting fired."

@ mari - # # # - outfit

MADE BY VEL OF GS + ADOXOGRPHY 2.0