Alicia Bauer
January 12, 2013 4:08 PM
I'd say I've still got the edge. by Alicia Bauer
It was a hot day even for September at Sonora, and the sun blazed down on the Labyrinth Gardens as Alicia, deciding she had gone far enough, put her bag down in a courtyard and sat down on the bench facing a fountain within it, turning her feet back under it and crossing her ankles as she turned again to take what she needed out of the bag. The bottoms of her feet burned even against the soft soles of her sandals after the walk, and she could feel the faint beginnings of sweat on her forehead and in the crooks of her elbows and knees, but she liked the comparative privacy that the Gardens could offer sometimes, and just the chance to get out in the fresh air and heat. She loved the library nearly as much as she was capable of loving a place, but a change of location could be a great help when it came to thinking.She had not had many of those over the summer, she thought darkly as she closed her bag again. It had always been her room. Sometimes, when she was very lucky, she’d been able to go to the university library, but most of the time, she had had nowhere to think or work but in her bedroom. She had gotten hugely tired of it by the time she left, though of course, it was still a drastic improvement over the rest of the house. It was only because of school that she could wait at all for the age when she would never have to go there regularly again.
Her preparations done, she looked briefly over a page of notes she had on top of the stack of books and papers on one side of the bench she was sitting in the middle of, then took out her wand, took a deep breath, and pronounced an incantation.
A flash of light later, a beetle was trying to scurry away from the line of buttons it was in. Alicia smiled, the expression more grimly satisfied than joyous, as she raised her wand again and immobilized it.
So, then, she still had it, the skill they had seemed to think she’d need until fifth year to master, even after a summer with very few chances, none of them legal, to practice. The feeling of elation made her momentarily unaware of the sun beating down on the part of her hair, while her veins felt like they were dancing in her arms as something warm buoyed her heart and lungs in her chest. They had told her what she could and couldn’t do, and she had done what she wanted anyway; they had tried to make her lose the skills after she acquired them by forbidding her the regular use of her wand over the summer, and she had kept them anyway. The world seriously needed to learn about the virtues inherent in staying out of her way.
Humming tunelessly to herself, she Transfigured and restrained the rest of the buttons, wondering if she could get something large out of them by the end of the year – perhaps an armadillo from a button? That would be even more impressive than the task the fifth years had had last year which had made her throw herself into Transfiguration more enthusiastically to learn inanimate-to-animate, but she wasn’t sure about pulling that much mass out of nonbeing. She would have to do more research, look more closely into the theory, and of course practice more than ever….
For a moment, she felt something close to perfect contentment, but then the beetles began turning back into buttons and Alicia decided to try, for her next trick, turning two of them into beetles at the same time, just to see if she could. That would be a good start, anyway, to more advanced work if it was even possible; she wasn’t sure, off the top of her head, if it was, and so she was going to do her best, unless something started seriously threatening to blow up halfway through an attempt and even she had to admit more research was needed before she went forward, to find out.
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Alicia Bauer
I'd say I've still got the edge.
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Alicia Bauer
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