pen and paper

[occluminous]

Bella is picked up from Charlie's house at the end of the summer, her visits with various people and her other parents having concluded a couple of weeks previous. She feels very worldly as she gets on the bus and is inspected by the new sixth-graders. The bus trundles along to the Bay Cauldron, and she does her shopping, and helps one of those sixth-graders pick an owl, and then they all arrive at ACAAM.

She goes to her and Sherlock's room to drop off her belongings and let Euterpe out.

Comments

[occluminous]

"Maybe. I guess if I still don't have any progress before Sherlock and Tony have theirs I can ask teachers."

[pythbox]

"Guess so," Feral agrees.

[occluminous]

Bella goes on trying.

Bella goes on not getting anywhere.

[nobodyelse]

One morning, in the middle of the following week, there is a little silvery owl circling the room when she wakes up.

[occluminous]

"Oh, pretty," she sighs enviously, reaching out for the owl half-consciously.

[nobodyelse]

It perches insubstantially on her finger, gripping with tiny misty talons.

[occluminous]

"Congratulations," says Bella, pretending to pet the owl insofar as she can do so when it has no solidity.

[nobodyelse]

Little swirls of silvery mist eddy off it at the contact.

"Thank you," says Sherlock.

[occluminous]

"What kind of owl is this? It's so cute."

[nobodyelse]

"An elf owl, I think."

[occluminous]

"If you were an animagus you could probably turn into one of these."

[nobodyelse]

"So I've heard."

[occluminous]

"You don't sound that enthusiastic."

[nobodyelse]

"Do I ever?"

[occluminous]

"Well, no," Bella giggles. "I might want to be an Animagus if I could be something cool. I don't think I'd go through all the work to turn into - I don't know, a peccary. But if I could be a bird I might. I just have no idea because I still can't -" She focuses, picks up the nearer of her wands from the nightstand. "Expecto patronum!"

Mist.

[nobodyelse]

"And you still don't know why," says Sherlock.

[occluminous]

"I have no idea. Or why I can get mist from the one memory but nothing from any other nice thing that ever happened to me. I'm not depressed."

[nobodyelse]

"You are not," he agrees. "Have you tried to find out what it is about the book?"

[occluminous]

"I could come up with a pattern if it were the book and something else, but it's not. It's just the one thing, not any other book I've ever gotten, or the other present I've gotten from you, or anything else that happened on my birthday, or anything else to do with Potions."

[nobodyelse]

"This reminds me of a game I play with Tony," he says. "Using pieces stolen from other games, mostly. One of us creates a rule that accepts some arrangements of pieces and rejects the rest - say, 'only green pieces', or 'only a single stack of pieces' - then provides one example of an arrangement that follows the rule and one example of an arrangement that breaks it. The other has to guess what the rule is, submitting as many arrangements as necessary first to see whether they follow or break it. You've gone in thinking that the rule is 'happy thoughts', but that doesn't seem to be true. So perhaps you should start submitting other kinds of arrangements."

[occluminous]

"Why would Patronuses work differently for me than for anybody else?"

[nobodyelse]

"I have no idea, but they clearly do," he says. "Maybe I should get you another book about the Philosopher's Stone."

[occluminous]

"Maybe," giggles Bella.

[nobodyelse]

"I will, then. And I will convince Tony to do the same."

[occluminous]

"Are there that many books about it around?" muses Bella.