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Callista laughed and adjusted the hat on her head slightly, though it didn't exactly work with the headdress and hairstyle she already had on. "Destiny hat!" she said, and petted Sabrina some more. "I told you they weren't food," she cooed at the serval. "I told you, but you wouldn't listen..."

She glanced at Blade. "A lot of times," she said, "pets pick you. My sister Fiammetta has a fossa. Tiana's grown and goes with her almost everywhere when she's not among Muggles, because it's illegal for Muggles to have them, but when she was tiny Fiammetta used to go round with Tiana under her sweater and a somebody-else's-problem charm on her all the time. I would recommend that repelling charm though, I'm sure there is something that puff will eat that's not...bogeys."

Callista had a hard time even saying that word. Which was funny, even to her. But.

"And yes, wizards own peacocks. Peacocks are kind of obnoxious. The Malfoys have white ones. I have never understood why nearly all of their pets are white. Even Liane's giant ... dog."

Pooka was a dog. Allegedly. But Callie was still convinced that he was made up of equal parts wolf, Grim, slobber and long white fur that got everywhere.

(dang I missed out on all the action!) Kiara had jumped out of the way of Blade jumping out of the way and was left laughing at the various predicaments everyone had landed in. Maybe she should get her brother a puff? They seemed like endless enough trouble that maybe he'd stay out of trouble chasing after it! It might eat his homework though, and he was always running behind as it was, so maybe she should pick something that wouldn't cause him to flunk a class. She peered around the Weasley's stall, waiting for something to catch her eye.

((ooc - sorry about the past week. I've been having computer problems.))

Millie had gotten lost in her crochet. Her conversation with Blade () had long ended and she had greeted a few other people, including Toru () before getting another mug of tea and working more on the blanket.

She eventually noticed her hand and arm starting to cramp, so she placed her blanket on the table and decided to take a look at the booths. She first stopped at the donation box and dropped a few galleons in. She tried not to bring attention to her family's well off position, mostly because she knew not everyone was in the same position.

She walked to the table from Honeydukes and picked up a box of her favorite treats, chocoballs. She also picked up some chocolate frogs, jelly slugs, fizzing whizzbees, and sugar quills to send to Emmett. She took another look and decided to get another box of chocoballs.

(and all) (sorry couldn't think of more to add.

Zoe was pleased she could invoke the laugh from Callista. She put her hand in petting her bluff puff. “I think I’m gonna name her Korra.” Blade gave Callista a frown. “But a fossa is cooler. I was thinking of putting it in a cage at night, but I guess I could do a repelling charm. They are scavangers so they’ll eat just about anything.”

Zoe giggled as Callista said bogeys. It sounded so wrong from her.

“Peacocks are loud but both the teal and white ones are really nice. I’m guessing they chose white because it’s ostentatious. I mean, it’s a total show stopper,” Zoe said. “So, what are ye gonna call yer puff Blade?”

Blade shrugged the thought he’d have to name it hadn’t yet occurred to him.

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"I'll have to ask Liane when I see her next." Callista told Zoe, "because all of their pets are white, not just the peacocks." Callista wondered what Zoe's experience of peacocks was that she thought they were nice. In her experience, peacocks were kind of mean, though not as mean as geese.

She turned to Blade. "You could put it in a cage at night, with a little bed and all." She didn't know what to say because she wouldn't have wanted a pygmy puff either! The Zabini family tended to keeping more exotic pets, and not tiny harmless ones that couldn't defend themselves and had to be covered in repelling charms.

"Fossas are cool. But Fiammetta had to come home by Floo because she'd taken a plane and she wasn't sure a don't-look-here would fool the X-ray scanners at the airport, and it's illegal to take them out of Madagascar even if a baby one gets into your stuff all the time and follows you home!"

"It seems interesting to have them all white," Zoe replied.

"Yeah that's what I'm thinking," Blade said. "I don't understand what you're saying Callista. Why would she use the floo network if she's on a plain? And what's a x-ray scanner? Some sort of UV from the sun? What's an aeroport?"

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"Oh, right," Callista said, "of course you don't know. That's all Muggle stuff." She scratched her head for a moment. "An aeroplane is like a car, or more like a big bus, but it flies."

Kiara had to hold back her laughter about Blade not knowing muggle terms. Where had this boy been, that he didn't even know what an airplane was? She kept her thoughts to herself though. She knew some pureblooded families lived very sheltered lives. There were probably a lot of muggle terms she didn't know, but her parents, though they held themselves aloof from the muggle world, never tried to hide it from their children. Like when she and her brothers had pointed out the white lines the airplanes slowly spread across the sky, and they'd said, well you see, muggles can't floo, so they have to use more dangerous methods of transportation...

Instead she tried to be helpful, adding onto Callista's explanation: "And an airport is where the airplanes land and take off, and an x-ray..." here she trailed off. How did one explain an x-ray?

"Yeah, I don't know muggle things," he said. After Callista's explanation he nodded. Blade imagined the Knight Bus in the air.

Kiara's answer made him think the aeroport must be rather small since magic didn't require much space to get aloft for flying. So he imagined a patch of earth approximately the size of a parking space.

"An x-ray," Zoe said, "is like a picture but it takes images of the insides of things. When Muggles travel sometimes they try to hide knifes or drugs or even guns which are kinda like a wand but can kill each other with. So they are required to put their luggage into a little queue where the xray camera takes the picture and shows the contents of the bag. Muggles also have to walk through xrays themselves. On those pictures, it shows ye're skeleton and if there's anything hidden in yer clothing, like the knife."

"Oh," Blade said for want of a better reply. It sounded like a hassle. He preferred flying or the floo network himself.

(OOC: Surgery went well, definitely face is uncomfortable, but wanted to let y'all know. owo)

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Callista nodded along with the explanations. "Sorry, Blade," she said. "Some pureblood families keep themselves very far away from anything even remotely Muggle. The Zabini family isn't like that. We don't marry people who aren't witches or wizards, but we do use technologies that make our lives easier and a lot of us work in jobs where we have to use technologies like that, because we do business with mundane people and companies and governments. A lot of people in Slytherin think we're just a bit shocking, you know, but there's a certain amount of trade that has to be done." She shrugged.

"Anyway, my older sister Fiammetta had taken an aeroplane to Madagascar to meet with some people there, because she needed to go through Customs for business-related reasons. But she went camping afterward and she found Tiana, or rather Tiana found her. Tiana's mother had been killed by poachers, we think, and somebody had to take care of her. She chose my sister. But it's not legal to take them out of the country, and the X-ray machines take pictures of people's bodies and things, so we had to get her out another way. It's difficult to say if a spell would have hidden an animal, even a small one, from the X-ray, so she took the Floo home from a wizarding contact's home, left Tiana with me, and did she ever fuss--then took the Floo back before she got on her plane."

Callista took a deep breath. "I call Tiana the Fussy Little Fossa, even though she isn't little any more, because of the racket she made when Fiammetta went back to get her Customs records properly sorted. She goes with Fia everywhere now, but Fia puts charms on her when she travels by air now, so that Muggles think she's an oversized cat. That wouldn't have worked for the first trip, because Muggles make you do a lot of paperwork when you take an animal out of a country that you don't live in."

"It's not your fault," Blade replied. "My parents are that kind. They don't approve of muggles. How do those things help in business?" He listened to her story. "THat sounds like a lot of hassle. But the fossa sounds nice."

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"I'd gathered your family was one like that." Callista smiled. "Back on the beach when we were sticking our feet in our mouth all morning."

She thought for a moment about how to explain. "I don't think people realise how much business we do with the mundane world. Especially in Europe. But there's trade. And our government sometimes has to discuss things with theirs. So there are people in the Ministry and in other wizarding governments whose job it is to work those things out, and they need to use the technology to do that work."

Callista checked her mobile. There wasn't much charge, but enough that she could show Blade a picture or two.

"And Tiana is awesome. She's fierce now, but when she was a baby she was absolutely adorable. Even if she did fuss because I was not my sister for the day and a half I had to feed her every few hours till Fia got home. This is Fiammetta with Tiana, now."

((OOC: you should totally google "baby fossa" because they are the cutest things ever. The jaguarundi doll is playing the role of Tiana in Fia's HA because the only fossa item on Subeta is a plushie, and they're similar looking animals.

Also I vote we go to Hogsmeade so Callie can take her friends to tea at Mme Puddifoot's among other things. Maybe because of the curfew they'll let some of the younger kids go early...))

"Yeah. My father was furious I wasn't put in Slytherin. He marched down to the castle and demanded my house be changed," Blade said. He'd told Toru this but it had been embarrassing. His father wasn't impressed and Blade had asked the hat to put him in Hufflepuff so he could tick his dad off but now... he wondered if he'd gone too far. When she took out her mobile Blade was very curious. "What is that?" he asked. He liked the pictures. She was pretty. "She favours you."

((Oh I soooo did lol cute -snatches and snuggles- okay, I'll keep that idea in mind XD))

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"Thanks. She really does, although we have totally different personal styles." Callista grinned. "Fiammetta's fearless. If she hadn't told the Hat she wanted to be in Slytherin she'd probably have ended up in Gryffindor."

She showed him a few more pictures--pictures of herself and her friend Juliana Malfoy, and of Sabrina when she was a tiny kitten.

"This is a mobile phone. It doesn't work very well here at school. The charge runs out and I have to use a solar charger. A lot of times when I'm in the greenhouse doing Herbology stuff I put it under the windows that magnify the sunlight to make it work. All I can really do with it here is take and look at pictures and listen to music that's already stored in here. But in areas where there aren't so many high-energy spells all over the place, I can call people and talk to them, like you'd do in a fireplace, or send them written messages, and even get in touch with shops and buy things from them."

She sighed. "And this is the sort of thing they ought to be telling us about in Muggle Studies. Not yoga," she said under her breath, leaning in toward him and the other kids. "The Muggle-born kids must absolutely lose their minds in those classes."

"How old is she now?" Blade asked curiously. "Why don't the pictures move?" A mobile phone? Solar charger? "Wait, it can play music? How?" He plucked the phone out of her hand and was turning it over trying to find out how it played music. "Can it play the clarinet or piano? Is it bigger on the inside like magical extension charm?" He looked quite suprised. "You can do all that on your mobile tone? How? I thought muggles didn't have magic." He looked rather nervous about the muggle studies talk. "I'm not allowed to take it."

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"Hey, be careful with that!" Callista laughed softly, and took her phone back. She showed him the screen with all the little icons. "Most of these won't do anything here, but this is the one for pictures. The others do other things. I'll play some music, but it runs the battery down so just one song, okay?"

She played a cheery Japanese pop song. "The pictures don't move because they're still pictures--they're pictures of just one second in time. You can take pictures that move, pictures of several minutes, but I don't do that in school because it wears the battery down too. The music is a recording, like what they play on the Wizarding Wireless? It's not a live performance. And hey, one or two questions at a time, okay?"

She smiled, to show she wasn't upset. "Fiammetta's twenty-one. Our oldest sister is Camilla, she's twenty-three. This is her. She lives in Africa and does magical wildlife conservation. The hyena is her familiar, Nzingha. My Patronus is a hyena too. I've always thought that's probably because when we were all little, Camilla would beat anyone up who messed with Fia and me. Do you have brothers or sisters?"

Kiara made a face when Callista mentioned yoga class. "Hey, I like yoga!" she interjected. "It's good for you body." Whenever she was feeling stressed about homework, or just found she'd been sitting in one place studying too long, Kiara liked to do some yoga, though she'd known about it before muggle studies. It wasn't like muggles were the only people that did it.

"Ooh your parents let you have a phone?" she said, peering at Callista's while she was showing it to Blade. "Mine don't see the point. I do at least have an iPod, so I can play music and use instagram when I have internet, but I don't post much because my parents can't know I have one because they don't want me to have social media because they're afraid I'll break some code of secrecy or something."

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Callista laughed. "Parents, right? Actually I'm pretty sure my parents just regard this as another way to keep track of me when I'm not at school."

She took a deep breath and then thought better of it. Kiara reeked. "There's nothing wrong with yoga but it's not unique to the Muggle world, is it? A lot of Indian magic is at least related to yoga, and doing yoga will definitely help you channel your energies through your body and wand. But I feel that Muggle Studies ought to focus on the unique and potentially useful aspects of the Muggle world that a lot of us, especially a lot of purebloods, don't know much about. Including the problems of the Muggle world that could affect us, too, someday, like what they are doing to the climate."

She wanted to go on about how much more evil Voldemort could have instigated if he had told everyone about the Cold War, about what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or even about global warming, which had definitely already been a thing in the 1990s. If he had appealed to their fears instead of their hatred, and promised to protect rather than prey upon them, he could have had real support instead of just terror on his side, and much more rational followers.

But she stopped herself. This was advanced stuff that Blade was definitely not ready to hear, and a lot of her housemates weren't either. And she probably ought not to reveal it until she knew why Hogwarts and the Ministry were keeping these secrets from their own people. Muggles weren't the only ones being kept in the dark about things. Cousin Blaise had told her how appalling it was that someone like Arthur Weasley was in charge of "Misuse of Muggle Artifacts" when he didn't seem to know what most of them did--things any Muggle-born first-year could tell him. Unless, of course, he was faking his ignorance. Either he and the rest of the Weasleys were dupes, or they were duping the rest of Wizarding Britain, and that was the reason she didn't care for them.

Well, that and the love potions. As far as Callista was concerned, the difference between love potions and roofies was that love potions did more psychological damage.