Sample Platter - AIM Example - Orin Dorny/Tristan Summerby (Harry Potter)
ME: From his perch in one of the furthest back corners of the library, Orin flipped through his Muggle Studies textbook with the feathery end of his quill. There was a test on Monday and the concept of an escalator was still escaping him. Never mind the section on lifts. It was all review, things he had seen in years before this, but his brain still couldn't wrap around moving stairs, much less what he ought to avoid doing on them in 'department stores' or 'airports'. Dammit. It was his only barely-passing class, an embarrassment. But the closest he'd ever been to the culture was on the muggle side of his mum's shop. Where sidewalks that moved for you never came up in a conversation about herbs or what "medicine" to buy.

He sighed, disgusted with himself and fell forward, knocking his head into the crease of his book. Professor Canning promised him a tutor. If he had to have one at all, a timely one would have been preferable to whoever ought to have showed up seven minutes ago.

sailed: To be fair, Orin was well hidden. His tutor, Tristan, had only been...maybe five minutes late. By the time he happened across his pupil-for-lack-of-a-better-word, his overtime had slipped into the ten minute zone. This could have been avoided, of course, if Tristan had deemed the situation worthy of asking Mme. Pince where the unfortunate who needed his help might be. But Tristan didn't like asking people for their assistance, nor did he really believe any fellow teenager would acknowledge a ten-minute time lapse.

Stepping into Orin's little stretch of the rack, Tristan plucked his muggle headphones from his ears, and hung them around his neck, a faint tune still throbbing from them. The cord led down into his book satchel, hung over one shoulder. "You're Dorny, right?"

ME: Orin's brow creased into his book, then up at his present company. Before answering, he glanced around for a wall clock, but nothing made itself immediately visible in his surroundings. "Yes," he answered, raising his eyebrows first to relax his forehead. "Dr. Summerby, I presume?" Of course, who else would come looking for him, this far back in the library? ...Correction, whom, who he didn't know already, who wasn't looking for pointers on a Herbology essay. "Make yourself --" Comfortable would have been the key word, if a had-to-be-second-or-third year Hufflepuff girl dashed up and stole the chair he was going to push out for his tutor, with a speedy "Areyouborrowingthisno?okaythanksineeditbye." Another displeased face and he swiveled towards the empty chair on his other side. "Here, quick. Before another one comes back."

sailed: Tristan did take the other seat. The whirlwind that had just accosted them wasn't entirely unfamiliar. Whoever she was, she was always too skittish and fast-talking for him to figure out who she was, but she had done a fine job of throwing his homework all over the common room, on a number of occasions. Usually, because she felt the need to take a running leap at one of her friends, and tripped over the low table in front of the fireplace.

Tristan reached into his bookbag and turned off the CD player he was presumably hiding. The thrum around his neck was cut off. He did nothing in the way of taking out a textbook, or notes. Instead, he slouched down in the chair, with one ankle crossed on his knee, and asked, "So, what's the matter? Canning didn't say what you were having trouble with."

ME: Taking a cue from the other boy to get a little more comfortable, Orin pulled both of his legs up and crossed them in his chair. Leaning forward he tapped Tristan's bag, to indicate the CD player. "I understand things like that," he explained. "I haven't got one, but I see what they do, it makes sense. Most of it's like that. When we did transportation in fourth year, that's what I had trouble with. Like all this short distance stuff. Why can't they just apparate up, instead of climbing into a closet that goes up? Don't they get nauseous?" His body was still leaned towards the boy, but he tapped his notes which rested on the other side of his textbook on the table. "I hardly understand what they're for, I'm not going to be able to create a list of do's and don'ts on the test."

sailed: Getting comfortable was all well and good, but Tristan was, perhaps, taking it a little too far. He had shut his eyes, and plucked the CD player up from his bag, by its dangling cord; it now rested on his stomach, one of his hands over it, as if threatening to start the music again at any moment, if this conversation became too boring. All in all, he looked nothing like a tutor, and more like he came to be sitting next to Orin entirely by chance, and was probably going to take a nap soon, as most were wont to do in the back of the library. "What do you mean, 'why don't they apparate'? They're muggles, they can't apparate."

ME: This was distressing. "Well..." Although there was never telling with Professor Canning, Orin had been hoping to be assigned to...well, someone who wasn't going to sit around and insult him. That's not how you taught people. That's not how he taught people. Maybe that's why they kept coming back to him for help. If he treated anyone like this kid did, he'd probably be socked right out of the common room. "Muggles like technology, right?" Their professor had done a particularly large unit on that in both forth and sixth year, it'd be a hard thing to forget, even if you didn't know what he meant. "There's no 'technological' equivalent? They can't move themselves? They have to have other things move for them?"

sailed: "They can move, it's just easier this way." Luckily for Orin, Tristan liked being right about things. If he had to be here at all, he was going to spout out information at some point. Otherwise, even Professor Canning wouldn't still be allowing him to work as a tutor. "If you're in a crowd, in a store, you don't want everybody and their mum stopping in front of you. So the stairs move."

ME: "It just sounds so lazy, though," Orin said, shaking his head. "Who, in his or her right mind, stops when they come across stairs? The logical follow-through would be to walk up them, if that's where you want to go." It seemed to him that an arguement was brewing. Quite unfortunately for Tristan, Orin also enjoyed being right. Or rather, did not enjoy being told he was wrong. Even when he knew he was. Now, however, he was not. "All the pictures in the books, no one's walking up the moving stairs, they're stopping and letting the stairs move instead. That's less convenient."

sailed: Tristan's fingers drummed dangerously across the buttons on his CD player, but he looked over at Orin. Or up, from his slouched vantage point. "People do it here all the time. How many times a day do you have to yell at half a dozen birds to get out of the way? Or whatever you do." He couldn't see Orin demanding his way past anyone. As far as Tristan could observe, the boy had the features of a pushover.

ME: Another wrinkle settled in Orin's forehead. Tristan was right, he wasn't much for yelling. He felt a little cornered, but the other boy didn't have to know anything about what he did or didn't do while making his way around the school. "So you ask them to move or you push through them," he insisted, straightening up as his tutor, his opponent, slouched further down. "You'd come across the same trouble on an esca...thing, if you were trying to move along it, and someone was stopped in your path. It doesn't solve anything."

sailed: "If the stairs are moving, you're going to get to the top eventually, whether or not the people in front of you move," Tristan decided, indicating that this was a discussion that should be ended on that principle. "What do you need my help for, anyway? You're a Ravenclaw." He pointed in the direction of Orin's tie, the stripes at the neck of his sweater, as though, in light of new evidence, they might be a fabrication of some sort. "Can't you figure it out?"

ME: Not a satisfying end to come to, but the conversation had gone from slightly unpleasant to beating a horse who was clearly demised. "Oh, this was help? Hm." Orin snorted and shut his textbook with a resounding "whumph". "If any of this," he tapped the book, "made sense, I wouldn't have needed to ask. But it doesn't, so I'm stuck." He had never been one to make bold assumptions about house stereotypes, but he found himself wishing more and more that Professor Canning had pawned him off to one of his own, not some Hufflepuff with an attitude.