Arthur Carey
May 14, 2011 11:52 PM
Soon I Will Be...Smarter Than This Room, anyway (Room Two) by Arthur Carey
The sports room having a Quidditch Pitch function had seemed redundant to Arthur when the new suite had first debuted, and it still did. He was, however, making use of it anyway. It was good and proper to practice in bad weather, but he saw no need to venture out into high heat or rain or wind when he wasn’t practicing with a team, but just working strategies on parchment.Or at least, that was his plan. Had been his plan. It wasn’t working quite as well as he’d intended. He was most likely confusing the room, which had been designed with the idea of active participation, but Arthur wasn’t too concerned about its feelings. Anything as flexible as its interior was flexible enough to get over his degree of unorthodoxy. The real question was whether or not he was smart enough to defeat its charming and make it do what he wanted it to do, which was reenact the Quidditch final.
He could, he had discovered, use a Levitation charm to steer his broom around, giving the dummies something to react to, but he hadn’t yet worked out how to control all of them. “He” hadn’t yet managed to hold onto the Quaffle, having no hands, which kept him from seeing how some of the things he had thought of in his head would actually play out on a Pitch. At first, he had been almost laughing when the room continued to do what it wanted after some stratagem of his, but now, it was becoming frustrating. He wasn’t sure how long he had been doing this, but it had been a while, and he was starting to feel as though he were fresh out of ideas for solving the problem.
Impossible, of course. He was not, he was pretty sure, really a genius, but he was very smart and, if he did say so himself, good at looking at things outside the box and coming up with solutions. He and Arnold had been given lessons in problem-solving, and he had been good at those things. He didn’t enjoy it, normally, he preferred for everything to be consistent and as he liked it, but he was good at it, and could, when he was forced to adapt, even derive a kind of grim satisfaction from it.
To a certain point, anyway. After that point, he simply became frustrated as two instincts – the urge to be rational, and acknowledge that if something was happening, maybe it couldn’t be done, and the one to never give up, even in the face of Armageddon, a very Carey part of him that hadn’t been helped by his mother’s blood in the slightest – came into conflict and he could find no way out that didn’t make him want to hit something.
He was approaching that point now, but the only thing there to hit was a small metal bench, and he had no desire to break his hands. Medic Rocamboli was a lovely lady, and he found the infirmary a haven when he could no longer stand living in a room with so many other boys, but saying he’d bruised up the right and, with his luck, broken a finger in the left because he was angry with a magical artifact designed by people much – maybe not smarter, but at least more educated and brain-developed than he was would just be embarrassing. Instead, he sat on the bench and glared up at the dummies, the “Beaters” somehow pathetic with their bats and, since he had no wish to die, no Bludgers in sight.
“This is frustrating,” he said aloud, and indulged himself far enough to hit his leg instead. Then he took out his wand and tried something else.
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Arthur Carey
Soon I Will Be...Smarter Than This Room, anyway (Room Two)
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Arthur Carey
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