Ninth House | Official RP Thread

[Kristi]

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧.

W I T H D R A W A L – A term used to describe the physical and mental symptoms that a person has when they suddenly stop or cut back the use of an addictive substance,

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧.

It’s been a month since Thalia had touched an alcoholic substance, which yeah but at the same time nay. The whole thing with North and the crew that had disappeared for weeks had left her in a state of agitation she couldn’t quite shake. Her nerves, once drowned nightly in something brown and burning, now stayed sharp and frayed—buzzing beneath her skin like static. Mornings weren’t easier. She’d thought quitting would make her feel cleaner, lighter maybe, but the truth was it made her feel more haunted. Every sound was too loud. Every silence was a reckoning.

She missed the ritual of it: the cold weight of a glass in her hand, the way it bought her a few seconds of courage, or forgetfulness, or numbness. But mostly she missed how it masked the unease that clawed behind her ribs. She supposed her sisters were right, ‘How are you 16 and already a full blown addict’ and she should have sought therapy back then but at the same time, why would she? Alcohol helped calm her nerves and deal with her magic, they would not understand as after all, they were normal. They did not have to wear a whole pendant, to keep their magic in check because due to Thalia’s mistakes she got cursed by a mirror.

But anyways, enough of that, she had decided to get some fresh ear, dark circles filled her eyes, and her brown curls roughed and untamed, she had her camera with her (as she always did) and black coffee with her, along with chocolate almond nuts in a bag–they go really well together, actually, it was shocking. The chocolate almonds made the coffee’s bitterness almost disappear, and she enjoyed it thoroughly. The air outside bit at her cheeks as she walked. It was early enough that no one else was around—just the way she liked it. Just the way she needed it.

Her boots crunched against loose gravel as she wandered, camera hanging from the strap around her neck, fingers loosely wrapped around the coffee cup. er sleeves were too long. Her face looked hollow in the reflection of passing windows.

But that didn’t matter. Not today.

She raised her camera to her face, capturing a strange bird that flied with passion, and that was when she saw him… Agastaya Kumana. She had paused, bit her lips, as she took him to sight.. he looked exactly like her. They had to be related–they shared the same dark skin, sharp features and straight black hair and she told herself, this was it. This was the missing piece, to investigation b and everyone knows, Thalia, gets too excited at times, it had to do with her… condition after all. She couldn’t help herself but to raise her camera, positioning it towards the male —and click.

The shutter sound rang out like a trigger. She didn’t even check the frame. Her breath caught in her throat.

Agastaya turned.

And in that moment, it was like time had been dipped in honey—slow, thick, and golden with something like fear, or recognition, or fate. His gaze met hers across the distance, and though he didn’t speak, his eyes narrowed just slightly, like he was trying to place her, Thalia’s heart pounded in her ears. She lowered the camera slowly, a sudden rush of heat rising in her chest and she blurted the first thing that came out of her mouth, “Cool outfit,” She pursed her lips “I mean cool leg” no that sounded way worst, “How has vacation being treating you, anymore plans.” She tried to joke, before she slapped herself on the forehead. “I’m not weird, I swear.”

---

@eunoia

[eunoia]

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◇◆ Outside Dorms ◆◇

Ah, another cipher.

Something in Agastya knew he should probably be creeped out or maybe even a little upset someone took his photo… but it broke his stillness. Was an unassuming hello. A slow grin spread on his face—“Cool outfit,” Oh, what a way to his heart—“I mean cool leg” Lord, he was amused already—“How has vacation being treating you, anymore plans.” He genuinely couldn’t remember any notable encounters with miss Sterling. Was Orien-Eden part of that? Did he need the full, Orion-Eden Sterling? He’d never thought about it before…. “I’m not weird, I swear.”

The sun caught in the flyaways of her hair like she’d stepped out of a painting half-finished. “May I see?” He asked, his head tilted slightly. Enough to look up to the bridge—where his journal lay on the edge. He’d have to pick that up. “But thank you. And vacation was,” in his mind, he flexed his legs. Took a step, somewhere. Or to something. “Good. I hope yours treated you well, too?”

Thalia • @Kristi

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[raviola]

{ November 19th }

The telephone began to ring in the headmaster’s office. Surprised, Adrian Dear answered the call with the hand that wears his silver ring, and propped the phone up to his ear.
“This is the headmaster’s office speaking, may I help you?” He asked the question with a bit of disbelief in his voice, as most knew to call one of his assistants before they called him.

“This is the archivist speaking,” the voice began, concerned. “I have called you to let you know that your daughter has not come to my lecture for the past two days in a row, and has not yet contacted me to address it. Do you know the cause for her absence? I would like to excuse her, but I cannot do so without a note.”

The headmaster lowered the phone in his hand, and let his arm hold it flat on the table. When was the last time he had spoken with her? They had lunch… one week ago did they not? She had gone to his office three days ago… oh god.

He picked up the phone and quickly began to speak. “I am not yet sure what her reason is. But I will be sure to have her speak with you. Thank you for informing me.”
He hung up the phone just as quickly, and began dialing Aurora’s phone number. The last time he had seen her, she had shaking hands and wet eyes.
She told him that she kept having that same dream for weeks. The one where she was being chased through the woods bleeding, the dream that always ended with her looking at her hands and then screaming.

“It feels like I might be next,” she cried softly. The girl pleaded, asking him to help her.
He told her that the dream meant nothing of the sort. He told Aurora that no one would hurt her.
But now, when he called her, the phone rung out.

When Mr. Dear went to her usual study spots, they were empty. When he went to the refectory, she was not there, in the library, she was not, and when he asked her friends if they had seen her, they had not.

And then he went to her bedroom, bringing his own key to unlock it, and she was not there. Her bathroom was empty, her bed made with no one underneath it. There was still a bottle of lip gloss on her vanity, she must have been in a rush.
A blanket of anger covered him suddenly. It made him burn with the desire to tear her whole room apart looking for a hint of where his daughter might be because he loved her. And beyond that, she was the only person he could confide in. At least about the important things. Was she really right about the dream meaning something? Or did she run away because her soul could not bear any more weight?
The second question ticked him in a way that he knew it should not have, but did anyway.

Later that evening, the headmaster ordered a search party, and put the school on lockdown until further notice.

{ November 25th }

It had been six days since the disappearance of Aurora Dear, and the people at Wyndham College were beginning to lose hope. None of the students had been allowed to leave, and the student body, mentally, had taken a great loss. Some students were not surprised by another disappearance, but Aurora? The headmaster’s daughter? A complete opposite to Miles North? That was something they never could have predicted.

In her honor, and for the purpose of finding knowledge as Quantum was designed to, the school decided against cancellation of the Lunar Eclipse Ritual. Without Aurora, and for Aurora, the Quantum students set up the event as best as they could with the building on lockdown; on the roof of the school, with a wall of shadows set by the Umbra Coven to keep the campus secure. The explorable part of the campus rooftop was about the size of the ball room, all students fitting securely under the dark moon, tucked within the Umbra of the eclipse. Tables were set with candles, bottles of wine, and platters to quietly enjoy after the main event had concluded.
The purpose of the ritual was to create a celestial gateway between patterns of light and reality in silence. With an immense, organic source, students believed they could converge their magical powers to find new, and with any luck, relevant knowledge. Any student who did would be awarded by the headmaster himself.

@NinthHouse

[raviola]

November 19th || Aurora is Declared Missing

In his bedroom, again, Vincenzo had come back from a day of spending time with his Umbra brothers to see an unmade bed, empty bottles on top of his dresser, and a full laundry basket. That was the way he tended to live; a bit disorganized, and usually, purposefully distracted. And he would have made his bed, but he could not bring himself to. It was already into the evening, and he would soon lay in it, anyway.

For this reason, he opted to log onto his computer instead. The man took a seat at his desk chair, and began pressing on his keyboard, bright light shining in his sensitive eyes. He usually went into the tab where he was going for information purposes, but tonight, like some nights that have happened before, Vincenzo felt lonesome. He wanted her company, even if she did not know about it. She was the only person he could access without the taxation of interaction. And apart from that, she was beautiful, so why wouldn’t he stare at her?

He logged in, turned the brightness down, and clicked and clicked into his camera footage.

To his surprise, however, he received a notification that the camera had been turned off.

Vincenzo’s heartbeat began to speed up. Had she found it? Had she found the camera in her room? Had she already asked her father to get to the bottom of who placed it there?
What happened, Aurora?

Searching through his hours of collected footage, Vincenzo skipped to the very last minutes of it, and saw no one. The computer had been turned off by a hidden user, standing outside of the camera’s line of sight. It was smacked… with something hard, and it shut the camera completely off.

The hair on the back of his neck stood. He thought that if the girl may have turned off her own camera, she would show her face, given that it would not have mattered if her stalker saw it once more.
But it could have been anyone who broke his camera. It could have been Adrian.
And if he knew what Vincenzo had been doing to his daughter, he would never graduate from Wyndham. He knew that he would be thrown to the streets, never allowed into the school, the summer home, or the headmaster’s time ever again.
He reminded himself to breathe, because he was not yet sure what had happened.
Vincenzo looked for the date of when his camera stopped recording, and it was on November 11th. That was two days prior to him realizing this. The headmaster surely would have said something by now, right?
Enzo took a deep breath.

November 25th || Lunar Eclipse Ceremony

It had been six days since Aurora had been declared missing, and the weight sat heavily on his chest. She was the loneliest girl on campus, and everyone knew her name. They did before, and it was possible that they would never forget it now.
There was a voice in his head that wished to tell him that he was a part of the problem. It wanted to say that he exploited her too. But if that voice ever spoke, Enzo tuned it out. He had too much on his plate to begin accepting guilt.
He needed to find out who knew about the camera. He needed to know where she was. And if someone could tell him who took her, nearly all of his issues would dissolve.

On the roof of the school, he stood at the edge of the group, using his hand to swoosh through the shadow fortress, a ripple following his motion. As much as he would have liked to be in the center of all of the action, he had been instructed by the headmaster to be one of the main students holding up the shadow barrier. Considering the fact that the headmaster might be aware of what he did, and still in the works of taking him down, Vincenzo had no choice but to oblige perfectly.
If he turned around, maybe he would be able to see the moon; interpret it’s shadows, but that was not the intent of the event. The intent of the event was for him to stay in his corner. And no matter how far up he may have looked, the sky remained black.

APPROACHABLE

@Madilfill Inessa

[Kristi]

---

Now, to begin with, Amani did not particularly like Aurora. She didn’t like her fake smile, the way she walked or how childish she seemed to be to Amani. But when she disappeared, Amani began to miss her. Okay, well, let’s not go that far. It wasn’t really a thing of missing, it was more of fear.

Yes, Amani was scared sh*tlessly. A week before Aurora’s disappearance, Amani felt herself growing..she didn’t like this word, in fact she found herself particularly disgusted by it, but…weaker Her weight had dropped, the snake that was bonded to her slowly eating through her. Aurora’s disappearance only made it worst due to the fact she realized this: if the fcking daughter of the headmaster was missing, whose to say any of them was safe? Why wasn’t the headmaster doing much? If he wasn’t going to protect his daughter, why would he protect the rest of them? Whatever it was, Amani did not feel like leaving her dorm for a while.

She was ‘sick’ so she was given permission from the professors to not attend lessons, and she simply studied in her room or at least she was supposed to, but she couldn’t get herself to move, to to do anything beyond existing.

Her body felt like a borrowed thing, something she wore wrong. The sheets tangled around her legs as if even fabric wanted to keep her still. Every time she tried to sit up, a sharp nausea bloomed beneath her ribs, a reminder—quiet but insistent—that the snake was still there, patient, consuming. Hunger came in strange waves. Not the kind that asked to be fed, but the kind that hollowed her out and laughed when she tried.

Amani slept at odd hours. Not real sleep, not the kind that stitched you back together. More like slipping under dark water and resurfacing just long enough to gasp. When she was awake, she stared at the ceiling and counted cracks she’d never noticed before, traced them with her eyes until they began to look like symbols, warnings, prophecies she refused to interpret. She’s had dreams too, a woman calling her name, who the tf was that woman and why did her parents look at her with such anger?

As thoughts swirled her mind, she heard a knock at her door. Usually, she would have the door through her shadows, but her powers felt weaker than usual and Amani did not want to risk it, in addition, she knew it already it was Tae, because only he was allowed into her room. No one really has seen her full dorm but him and the headmaster. So, there was no reason to panic, so instead she said, “Come in.” He entered, closing the door, and Amani opened her lips as she said: “…you’re late," ” she murmured, voice thin, fraying at the edges despite the attempt at bite.

It wasn’t an accusation so much as a fact, dropped gently between them like glass that might cut if mishandled.

Amani pushed herself up on her elbows, then thought better of it and sank back into the pillows. The motion alone made her head swim. She hated that he could probably see it—the way her shoulders didn’t quite square anymore, the way her breathing hitched like her body was negotiating with itself. She hated even more that Tae noticed things. Always had.

Her eyes flicked to him, lingering longer than she intended. He looked the same. Of course he did. Solid. Real. Anchored to the world in a way she currently was not.

“I’m not sick, don’t worry. You don’t have to tell my parents the situation.” ,” Amani said finally, gaze drifting to the far wall instead of his face. “But Tae,” She began suddenly, then as if something holding her, she stopped.

---

@Caticorn

[eunoia]

★・・・・・・★ ⊱♥⊱ ★・・・・・・★

★・・・・・・★ ⊱♥⊱ ★・・・・・・★

Ayla had been crushed by guilt only two days ago, before she had forced herself asleep. But Three days was nothing.

Now, Ayla stood just inside the threshold and did not step forward. Above them all, the moon lingered whole, pale, ignorant of what was about to be done to it. She had always been good at thresholds.

She counted the Quantum members without meaning to. An old habit. Faces she recognized only by proximity, not familiarity. People she had studied beside once and then, quietly, ceased to exist in her calendar. They moved easily among one another now, murmuring corrections, trading glances heavy with shared understanding.

They looked like a body that knew where its limbs belonged. And her presence here felt anatomical but wrong. Like a bone set back into place but months too late.

She caught sight of the Umbra Coven boys at the perimeter—dark sleeves, deliberate posture, already working to block and bend the moonlight into submission. They were efficient. Earnest. Performing usefulness like it was a language they spoke fluently. Ayla felt unease bloom sharp and immediate, from both directions.

Quantum held knowledge. Umbra held control.

And Ayla, as always, stood somewhere between information and damage—self inflicted, of course. She folded her hands into her sleeves, hiding how thin her wrists had become. The cold bit sharply through lace and skin alike, but she welcomed it. Cold was honest. Cold did not pretend to care.

I should have been here earlier, a voice in her said. Not accusatory, just factual. I always arrive late to things that matter. She had done this to herself on purpose, once. When she first came to the school, she had made herself smaller.

Not weak—never weak, but unremarkable. She’d shaved down her casting speed, dulled her resonance, let spells collapse halfway through their arc. Enough competence to pass. Enough restraint to be overlooked. A choice. Always a choice.

Like a pitcher holding back velocity, saving the arm, saving the surprise. Let them chart the wrong numbers. Let them underestimate the ceiling. Let improvement look miraculous instead of inevitable. Except that for Ayla, it hadn’t been performance. It had been penance.

She had turned magic off for years. Not ceremonially, nothing that dignified, but through neglect, through refusal, through letting skill decay until it hurt to remember how easy it once was. By the time she arrived here, she wasn’t hiding her strength. She was relearning how to lift her arms.

They’d ranked her low then. Quietly. She’d seen it in the way instructors glanced past her, the way Quantum didn’t bother to extend an invitation until her scores forced them to. And she had forced them. Top five. That had been non-negotiable in her mind. A pity too, because she knew that was low.

Anything less would have meant the years of loss had not been productive, and Ayla could tolerate grief but not waste. If she wasn’t the best, she could reason with herself. years mattered, attrition mattered but she would never forgive herself for failing to climb. Climbing was proof she was still alive. But now, standing among chalk and murmurs and moonlight, that ambition tasted wrong in her mouth.

Because Aurora Dear had vanished.
Because brilliance had not prevented absence.

Because power had never been enough to keep people from slipping through the cracks Ayla pretended not to see. She had learned about Aurora three days too late. Three days after she had vanished.

That number repeated in her head with a precision that bordered on ritual. Three days was nothing. Three days was everything. Three days was the difference between concern and elegy.

Ayla’s gaze drifted to the place where Aurora should have been standing—somewhere near the center, confident by inheritance if not by choice. Headmaster’s daughter. Quantum member. Visible. And still gone.

I didn’t push you away, Ayla thought, and hated herself for how easily the justification came. I simply did not make room for you. Her throat tightened, but she did not let it show. Emotion was energy, and energy could be spent better elsewhere.

She had not returned to Quantum after Aurora disappeared. Could not. Running back now, wide-eyed and grieving, felt like theft. Like trying to harvest intimacy after refusing to plant it. They had offered proximity once, and Ayla had declined in favor of solitude sharp enough to cut.

Solitude had been cleaner. More honest. Less likely to ask things of her she could not afford to give.

A ripple of motion drew her attention upward. The Umbra cult was nearly finished shaping the light. The moon’s edge dulled, its brilliance folded inward, obedient. Soon, the Eclipse would begin. Soon, the ritual would demand stillness, unity, submission to a shared silence.

Ayla exhaled slowly. She had spent days starving herself to speak with the dead. Days sacrificing. To bargain. To bleed meaning out of things that no longer breathed. She had forced sleep into her body with spells rather than admit she had forgotten how to rest.

And still, she had not found the right voice. Still, the dead she wanted remained unreachable. Still, the living paid for her fixation. The moon dimmed another fraction.

Ayla straightened, lifting her chin—not in pride, but in habit. Whatever unease twisted through her chest, she wore composure like armor. She always had. If she looked alone, it was because she chose to be. If she looked unafraid, it was because fear had already done its worst. Tonight, she would stand among them. Not with them. Not against them. Just present enough to be counted. Just distant enough to be spared forgiveness.

And when the shadow would finally crossed the moon, Ayla told herself, quietly, precisely, that she deserved to feel every second of the dark.

★・★ APPROACHABLE ★・★

""

[Caticorn]

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: ✦. November 1st .✦ :☆ﾟ. ･ ───

Lenore found herself in the courtyard. She remembered something about a door, and there were other students, but this door was nowhere to be found. Just a tree, standing where it had stood for time immemorial. As Lenore began to actually take in her surroundings, she saw the other students she’d remembered and among them was:

“Nic!” She called his name while running toward him. When she caught up to him, she took his hand. She wanted to do much more than that, but she held back, testing the waters first to get his reaction. “Are you…that was strange, right?” She met his eyes, wondering if he had experienced the room in the same way she had.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: ✦. November 19th .✦ :☆ﾟ. ･ ───

Aurora Dear was not supposed to vanish. She was the headmaster’s daughter. If any student at Wyndham was untouchable, it was her and the revelation that she wasn’t left a heaviness in the atmosphere of the halls. As the lunar eclipse neared and the girl remained missing, Lenore became uncertain that the planned ritual would still take place. Instead, it became a way of showing she still held a place at the school, and that her disappearance was noted.

The eclipse promised knowledge, and after her conversation with her brother the day she disappeared, Lenore yearned for answers. Perhaps she had let her hopes for the event get too high, but she needed something to believe in.

On the rooftop, she made her way to a table in the shadow of the Umbra Coven’s darkness. The surface was adorned with candles and food, but she was focused on something, or rather, someone else. “May I join you?” She asked sweetly, looking at Nic with a smile in her eyes. She would sit next to him regardless of what he said, but she secretly hoped that he would indulge her.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: ✦. ☽ .✦ :☆ﾟ. ･ ───

@viiel.x - Nic