#justanothertwstAu Lore Breakdown Pt 2.
This one’s a doozy so buckle up...(I got a bit carried away with the writing here)
The Catalyst
The big push happens after another young girl, (One of the ocs I’ve created, not sure which one yet) publishes an essay detailing her attempt at applying to the school. Initially a joke, she and her friends got together and decided to create an application since she had just got the highest marks in their supplementary magic class.
To their surprise, it actually goes through, and she receives a letter of acceptance. The applicants’ family and friends were overjoyed, and thought that perhaps the school had plans to integrate the school in secret so they didn't mention it to anyone.
On the day the carriage arrives, everyone is there to see her off, wishing her luck, etc. but as she moves towards the carriage the horses shy away. She tries to enter the carriage again, thinking that maybe the horses are just timid, and is shocked when they break into a run, completely leaving her behind.
Understandably frustrated and confused, she and the family send numerous emails and letters to the school to find out what happened. Whenever they got through to someone, they were all met with the same reply “ we regret to inform you that our college is a boys’ campus. If you wish to visit the school please sign up for a tour or one of our public events.”
Not getting a proper explanation from the school, she takes to the internet and starts creating a thread about her experience. Her first post of this situation is initially met with general disbelief and harassment, until she makes an update responding to viewers' questions with photographic evidence.
This gains more traction, and while there are still lots of doubters, her story, much to her surprise, reaches other girls with similar experiences, who start talking about their own stories.
Some are obviously fake, mocking the initial post, treating the influx of stories as a trend to capitalize off of, but others still rise to the surface, and while they all have their own particular details, they have three key traits in common. 1: the official acceptance letter from the school. 2: The official carriage arriving at their homes 3: Rejection of the horses, carriage, or coffin when attempting to board and being left behind. Some even have 4: Where a magic teen was taken, but instead of the girls it would be a random male counterpart. A solid handful of the girls that were retelling honest experiences had the incident where they got into their carriage only to be forcefully rejected and replaced with a boy their age who just happened to share proximity to the carriage.
These stories crescendoed the summer before the canon “first year”, and throughout the first semester as young girls began talking about their experiences of being rejected from the school online. Various videos, blog posts and essays detailing all the ways their applications and even acceptances were sabotaged.
The Impact
Understandably, this causes quite a bit of unrest in the public, and soon the school starts receiving questions about these girls, ‘are they telling the truth?’ ‘what does the school think about these claims?’ etc.
The school manages to quell these accusations and puts out a public statement claiming that the stories were under investigation, and that this issue would be resolved.
Any protests for the girls’ cases were quickly overwritten by new upcoming trends, and fell to the wayside in favor of celebrity gossip and other media drama.
At first, Crowley only sends out ghosts to investigate these claims so that he could report that all was well, not believing that the stories were true. To his surprise, he slowly uncovers that these things did happen, which baffles him.
He grills the ghosts if they made any mistakes, but they only tell him that they were fulfilling their tasks, leading him around in a circle of blame and confusion. It seemed as if these girls applications had been processed without any suspicion.
One of the main pieces of evidence for this is the log file for acceptance documents sent out in the past year, and there are several that don’t check out with the amount of students currently attending the school.
Other bits of evidence are related to the carriages and coffins themselves, various damages or things left behind that check out with the stories, and reports of empty carriages returning to campus.
This goes against everything that he knows about the school, and sends him on a frantic chase around campus checking every document he can find about enrollment rules and requirements.
Everything he finds disproves what the girls of claiming, but after contacting several of the families he has confirmed that they indeed possess official documents, impossible to own unless invited to attend the school.
(BTW this is going to be part of my explanation to Crowley’s negligence in getting Yuu back home, that he was so wrapped up in this that he got sidetracked with returning them to earth)
After this enormous revelation Crowley takes some time to mull the situation over. Even though these children had been invited to learn at Night Raven College, keeping the school for boys only was an ancient tradition, and it he still didn’t understand why this had happened.
Were they just mistakes? Had someone from the inside interfered in hopes of creating public drama for the school?
At some point in this spiral, Crowley remembers the letter from the young girl, and pauses, wondering if it would really be so bad for the school to accept the girls. Sure it would be difficult to make such a change what with changing rooms and uniforms and of course he would have to inform the dorm heads and staff ahead of time...but the school had been following the rules for so long now, and perhaps the change would benefit them from becoming extinct in the future. Other schools had made similar changes and been received strongly by the public...Economically it would be a sound investment! All of the sponsors that flock to them in attempt to seem kind and benevolent would be a great help to Night Raven... and the seven know the school needed the financial support. Beyond that, if Crowley made his move now he could rub it in Ambrose’s face that Night Raven was more inclusive! That’s it! It’s decided that Night Raven will shed it’s old shell for a better and brighter future!
Upon finishing his epiphany, Crowley begins making moves to open up enrollment to Night Raven. However, a few things needed to be done before making it official...so he begins his work in secret....
Okay we’re almost done! keeping hanging in there!
The Arrival
To test the water, Crowley decided to try a soft-attendance try-out with a handful of the girls that were rejected from the school. He implements this by inviting them for the second semester of the school year, and tells them to arrive a week ahead so that they can get situated.
Of course, this all sounds great but Crowley, being headmaster and himself, gets a few things wrong about the information he needed to tell them, instead giving them the day RIGHT BEFORE the spring semester starts.
He only realizes that he messed up the SAME DAY the girls arrive
Which is incidentally 3:00 in the morning because He also messed up the arrival time.
They arrive; exhausted and confused. He gives them a rushed induction ceremony and they quickly get sorted by the mirror into their respective dorms.
He also completely forgot didn’t make the accommodations necessary for the extra students so they don’t even have their uniforms or rooms in the dorms they were placed into; so he goes with the next best thing and places them “temporarily” in Ramshackle House with Yuu and Grim.
ALSO to help the girls feel welcome and to diversify the staff he hired a female teacher who is also invited to campus, who arrives with the students. Unfortunately, she was also an oversight by Crowley, and is forced to live with the girls because nothing was arranged for her either.
(She's a magical literacy teacher, so she deals with magical terminology from spells to potions and more.)
UNSURPRISINGLY, it’s a big shock for everyone when they suddenly have female students walking around the school with no explanation.
Crowley also forgot to tell the dorm heads and the staff so everybody’s super mad at him, hijinks ensue, etc.
Eventually everyone is called for an emergency meeting in the mirror hall, where Crowley attempts to calm them down and explain what’s happening.
After this, he summons the girls to his office and introduces them to their respective dorm leaders.
Holy crap it’s done!!!!
If you’ve held on to now congrats! I’m just as tired as you are.
There’s still more to be told, but this was the important bit. In the future I’ll discuss more about the girls and the dorms they were sorted into, and their relationships with each other and their new classmates!