The First Snow (OPEN)

[yara leila el fayed]

December 15, 2027

Even though she didn't celebrate Christmas herself, Yara had been looking forward to the holiday. It wasn't really Christmas itself that she cared about, but she was looking forward to the break that it provided her from her work at university. Being in her final year of her bachelor's degree, the difficulty of her coursework had ramped up considerably since she had first started, but Yara supposed that that was to be expected.

There was another positive side to the season: Her birthday also happened to be the second of January, and she was almost twenty-one years old. The age milestone didn't really matter because she was neither in the United States nor willing to drink alcohol anyway because of her religious beliefs, but it was another year that she had the chance to celebrate. Like previous years, she wasn't going to go all-out for her birthday, even if she and her sister Yas certainly had the means to throw a decent party. It was the thought that mattered, though.

Taking a break from revising for her last examination before she would have a much more fulfilling break from the stress she had been under, Yara decided to walk down the street from the house in London's Chelsea that she shared with her sister and over to a popular Muggle bakery nearby. It was evening by that point, so it wasn't really the time of day that most people went to go buy cakes and other pastries (and then promptly photograph them to stick them on social media for the world to see), so she was relieved to find that she could walk right in without having to wait in a ridiculous queue.

OOC: OPEN!

[TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY]

With the holidays coming up, Tiernan had some shopping to finish up. He had gotten most of his shopping done with the help of his siblings and friends. But there was something that only he could get. It was a special something for his special someone. He had finished his shopping in London and before he went back home he thought he would get a nice pastry, and perhaps a cake for the next time he was going to be with his boyfriend. Luckily he knew where a good bakery was. It had been quite a long time since he had been there, but he found it with little trouble. Though it was late, he had dark sunglasses on, and his unique wooden walking stick to help him navigate to the counter. As he moved closer, his stick knocked someone Infront. "Is this the line to order?" He said with a thick Scottish accent.

yara leila el fayed

[yara leila el fayed]

December 15, 2027

One of the good things about having been in the United Kingdom for as long as she had been was that Yara had gotten pretty good at understanding most of the different regional accents around. It definitely took her a moment to process them, though, when they were heavier than she was used to or came out of nowhere. Between how people pronounced words and their varying vocabularies, Yara was occasionally left wondering if she had actually learned English at school. (How many different terms did people have just for sandwiches, and why hadn't they come to an agreement about which one was superior?)

Fortunately, Yara didn't have to exercise her brain too much when someone with a heavy Scottish accent asked her if she was in the line to order. It was the feeling of something tapping her leg right before that that had caught her by surprise, though, and she turned to see that the person behind her was apparently a blind man. She wasn't bothered at all; it just wasn't every day that she came across a blind person, even in a city as large as London.

"Yes, this is the queue," Yara replied. Although her being Egyptian was still evident in her voice, her own accent in English was clear enough that she didn't struggle to be understood. She felt bad for the other international students at university with her who didn't speak English as fluently. "I haven't ordered yet, though. You can go ahead of me if you'd like."

TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY

[TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY]

It appeared his walking stick managed to tap on a woman's foot, she sounded not fully native, and younger. She stated that he was in the right place, and that he could go. "Ah, Cheers love," He smiled, as he used his walking stick to find the front and ordered a few small things. Stepping back to wait for them to pack up his order he turned slightly. "So what brings you to London?" He asked, trying to spark up some friendly conversation.

yara leila el fayed

[yara leila el fayed]

December 15, 2027

The blind man who had approached her thanked her for allowing him to go ahead of her. He placed his order and began to wait for it to be ready, and Yara soon did the same for her own order, opting to get one of the bakery's cupcakes and a latte.

"So what brings you to London?" the man then asked her. Obviously, he must have been able to discern her accent, since he couldn't see her to guess that she was foreign by her appearance. Yara wasn't put off by it, given that there really wasn't any way that he could be making too many assumptions about her.

"Oh," she began, "I'm a university student here." It was the quick and easy answer, the one that didn't require much elaboration. Besides, Yara knew that she couldn't give anyone in the non-magical world the full and complete picture of why she was in London. That would involve explaining how her older sister was actually a witch who had gone to a magical school called Hogwarts despite being from Egypt, how she hadn't been able to follow her sister there because she didn't have magical powers, and how pursuing her bachelor's degree in London and living with her sister as a young adult was as close as she would ever get to having that experience of magical boarding school. Revealing all of that would get Yas (and her, probably) into some serious trouble with the authorities in the magical world, so she didn't.

TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY

[TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY]

After ordering, the woman had also stepped up and ordered. London was a fascinating place with a variant of people local, and from all over the world. Everyone having their own reason for being there. To make light conversation he let his curiosity lead the way. Turned out she was hear for university. That brought a smile to his face. "If you don't mind me prying, what might you be studding?" He couldn't help but being curious, being a professor himself. Though he couldn't just announce where he worked. There was no way to tell if he was speaking to a muggle or witch. As such it was impossible to explain that he was a teacher at a magical university teaching an old language that he had studied for years. Him being blind would naturally only be apart of a longer, more in-depth explanation of his life. But there was no reason to go so in depth when having an innocent and light conversation with a complete stranger.

yara leila el fayed

[yara leila el fayed]

December 15, 2027

"If you don't mind me prying, what might you be studying?"

Yara didn't mind the man's question. It wasn't invasive, or at least she didn't find it to be. She had already volunteered the information that she was a university student, and it was a logical follow-up to wonder what it was she was studying. "I study Computing," she told him.

For Yara, she didn't really make a big deal of it. Still, she knew it was the sort of thing that her parents bragged about back home. (And seeing as they couldn't exactly explain it as, "Yasmin is a witch and went to a school for magic, but Yara? She's studying Computing at Imperial College London," they needed something to brag about.)

TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY

[TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY]

To his ears, the woman he was speaking with didn't sound much younger than he was. Thinking of her as a student and him as a professor surely made him feel old. He was always fascinated with learning new things. Everyone had their own reason for doing what they did, and learning what they learned. He smiled. "That's intriguing. I've always been more interested by the old, rather than the new. But there seems to be a lot more growth in computing though." He started to speak to her, but then seemed to dwindle to himself for the last half. Not that he ever regretted his decision. Though he did wonder if his parents wouldn't have wanted him to go into more of a muggle profession like computers.

yara leila el fayed

[yara leila el fayed]

December 15, 2027

The young man mentioned that he had more of an interest in "the old, rather than the new". Yara felt that there was nothing wrong with that. From what he said about progress that had been made in computing, he didn't seem to be against modern technology, and he certainly wasn't arguing that everyone needed to live off the grid in the middle of nowhere because some sort of lizard people who secretly controlled the world would subject them to mind-control procedures otherwise.

Though Yara's interests were more focused on what could be done in the future, she found it interesting to learn about the history of computing, too. It was remarkable how quickly progress had been made. Because her degree was an engineering degree, she had developed a good understanding of how everything worked together. There was a lot of logic to it, yet computing sometimes seemed like one of the closest things to magic that existed in the non-magical world. The infrastructure existed to communicate all over the globe in seconds, through means that had been confined to the imaginations of science fiction authors decades before… minus the lizard people.

"Oh, yes," Yara agreed with the young man's observation about the field she was studying. "There's always progress being made." Sometimes, it was daunting to think about keeping up with all the different developments. "It's great, of course," she acknowledged, "but obviously very different to history."

TIERNAN PHOENIX AINSLEY