Office Hours: First you must unlearn what you have learned on Charms

Mab

June 28, 2021 10:30 PM

Office Hours: First you must unlearn what you have learned by Mab

Mab was starting to think forward to her CATS. She was now most of the way through her fourth year and while she could produce results consistently in all of her classes, her practical work was never going to earn an O as it was now. Unlike most Pecaris, she was studious enough that she could maybe pull it up with her written part, but she really felt she could do better than she was doing. She had strong and precise magic. She knew she did because she'd been using it before she even knew she was the one doing it. She'd been casting accio since she was eight, she just hadn't known that was what she was doing.

When they'd worked with accio in class, it had been the most frustrating lesson of her entire life, and the recent counter charm one hadn't been much better, because she'd been calling wallets to her with magic from the other side of four lane city streets, pulling them out of people's pockets, without them noticing, for almost three years with no training and now she was struggling just to get a stupid pillow to come to her from five feet away. It came, of course; she was passing the class with a solid E, and her wand work was at least Acceptable, usually. It just had no finesse, no strength.

And she really thought it should. She was better than this.

When she was alone in her room, when Leonor had Quidditch practice, she'd do it the old way sometimes. She'd ask the fairies. They still did her bidding, the same as they always had. No wand getting in the way. Just the purposeful wish and pull and there it came, with grace and ease and smooth subtle movements that didn't draw the eye. There might be a concealment or disillusionment charm mixed it, too, to help with that, she wasn't sure. It wasn't exactly an accio, really. She didn't use the wand motions, she didn't use the word, and she didn't think accio was intended to have quite as much control over how the item got summoned, it just came, so maybe that was some of it, but it should come better. When she cast it, it just sort of lazily wandered over instead of zooming properly like most of the other students'.

Maybe it was trying to be sneaky for her, but it just looked weak.

Mab didn't like looking weak. She was tired of her wand work being subpar. She'd hoped practice and adjustment to using a wand would just take some time, but she'd given it nearly four years and it was better, it was. She'd hardly gotten anything out of the wand her first year. She'd had to ask the fairies and pretend she was using the wand to get any results at all, at first. But it still wasn't good, and she was no longer convinced time was all that it was going to take to get good.

So here she was at Professor Wright's office hours. She hesitated just a moment, hating the idea of asking for help; her grades weren't bad after all, but she pushed the pride down and knocked.

When she was told to come in, she took another breath to steel her resolve, and pushed the door open. "Hi," she said brusquely, just wanting to get the asking over with and get to the part where he put the fairies into the wand so it worked right for once. "I'm having trouble with my wand." She pulled it out of its holster that Bel had gotten for her, and showed it to him. It was an alder wand, about eleven inches long, and had a wampus cat hair as its core. She didn't think the wand itself was the problem. It had never been damaged and it threw sparks just fine when she'd gotten it. "It's not a new problem. I just . . . don't know how to use it?" Which probably sounded ridiculous. She was four years into a magic curriculum where three of the classes focused pretty heavily on how to use a wand.

"I mean, I can use it," she qualified, because he knew she could use it. He watched her every charms class do the charm of the day. Not spectacularly, admittedly, but well enough. She got results, which was better than some people did on their off days. She never had off days where she couldn't get something to happen. But she never had on days either, when it just worked perfectly. It was just always, always, consistently mediocre.

"But look," she pointed the wand and cast, "Accio portrait!" and a framed portrait came off his wall and meandered its way slowly and reluctantly over to where she was. "But if I don't use the wand." She put it down on his desk, to show she wasn't accidently powering her magic with it just by having it on her person. She held the portrait up and wished for the fairies to put it back, and it zipped right back to the wall and the fairies hung it back up on its nail. If she'd used a banishing charm, she probably could have lightly pushed the portrait back to the wall, with power no better than her summoning charm, and it definitely wouldn't have gone back onto its hook.

"I learned to use magic without the wand first and I still haven't figured out how to unlearn the way I did it before so the wand works right," she said in frustration. The fairies were best at moving things around: cleaning her room, pickpocketing people, stealing food, that kind of thing. Sometimes they helped with hiding, too, if she was really scared. It was a limited field of magic use, but she was good at it, so her magic had to be better than what it had shown for itself using the wand.

1 Mab Office Hours: First you must unlearn what you have learned 1473 1 5

Grayson Wright

July 01, 2021 12:02 PM

But...but...that's...that's really cool! by Grayson Wright

Mab (formerly formally Mallory Beales, now Mallory Pierce-Beales on the roster, but the girl had insisted on being simply 'Mab' from her first day of roll call) was an...unusual case, as far as students went, quite apart from her preference for a name only loosely related to her real one. Every student had a file, but on the whole, one rarely stood out very much from another, rarely required any special accommodations or handling on a day-to-day basis beyond simply not bringing anything anyone was deathly allergic to into the classroom. Mab's file was one of the exceptions. Even with that in mind, though, Gray was not sure he would have ever guessed at the problem that she had just brought before him. He blinked, confused, wondering if there was a joke going over his head somehow, and looked between Mab and her wand.

"You...don't?" he repeated when she claimed she didn't know how to use her wand.

Then she clarified, and demonstrated what she meant, and he just became even more confused.

He looked over his shoulder at the very startled image of one of his predecessors, and then back at Mab, plainly astonished. His vision was terrible without his glasses, but his glasses were on right now, and he therefore didn't actually doubt what he'd just seen. He could, however, have forgiven himself if he had entertained such doubts. Mab was not the worst student he'd ever seen wield a wand, but she was far from the best. He had never thought much of that; while no one knew why, exactly, and a great deal of equalization could occur through practice or the lack of it, some people did seem to simply be more powerfully magical than others. Clearly, though, unless he really was the subject of a truly elaborate prank, that was far, far from being Mab's problem....

"You...learned? You were taught to use magic consciously, like that, before you came to school? Just to move objects, or was there more?"

He knew he probably sounded almost foolish in his surprise, but this was not something which the books said was supposed to happen. He had his own criticisms and reservations about the books after the past few years of work, but it hadn't occurred to him to doubt that basic of a premise - that any degree of conscious control was rare, and that degrees that went beyond a few simple tricks were rarer still, especially among Muggleborns, who didn't know what they were doing and were conditioned to believe that the source of the ability couldn't be what it was. And yet, there Mab sat, having apparently just done something that he was fairly confident he could not have done himself.

"Fascinating," he muttered, a beat before he realized that this sounded like the sort of thing a stereotypical too-clever-for-his-own-good wizard in a tower, hovering on the brink of allowing hubris to draw him into a spiral downward into the Dark Arts as he sought more information and power than man was meant to possess, would say. He cleared his throat slightly. "Ah - many adult witches and wizards struggle to perform magic even nonverbally," he explained, "though we teach that in sixth and seventh year. Someone who can do it nonverbally and without a wand...that's rare, that's very rare. I've never seen a student do it before. Have you taught yourself to do anything else like that since you came to school?" he asked, curiosity impelling him to do so even though he wasn't sure at all that he was asking the right questions, much less asking the right questions the right way. "Adapted any spells you've learned in classes to your method?"

16 Grayson Wright But...but...that's...that's really cool! 113 0 5

Mab

July 01, 2021 1:50 PM

Well if I can keep this, and still learn the normal wand stuff, that would be the best case by Mab

"I learned, I wasn't taught," she clarified. "The first time was an accident. I was young enough that I thought it was fairies, granting me a wish. So I kept making wishes. And sometimes they came true, and sometimes they didn't. My mom tried to tell me fairies weren't real, but she was wrong, and I proved she was wrong, and she stopped telling me not to believe in fairies, and sometimes asked me to ask the fairies for things for her. They never answered her wishes, but I figured she just didn't believe enough. Peter Pan made it very clear that it was hard for grown-ups to believe enough in fairies."

"By nine years old, I had started to figure out which wishes worked and which didn't and exactly how I need to frame the wish for the fairies to understand it. I'd think the words 'I wish' really hard and do the visualization, same as we do in class, for what I want to happen. By the time I was ten, I could get the wish to go off every time, and that's when I started getting called Mab, queen of the fairies. When I was eleven, I got arrested for using underage magic in front of muggles, which was the first time I learned that there even was a wizarding world, that it might have actually been me doing the magic and not the fairies, and that there were laws against what I was doing." Well, the magic part. Mab had known the stealing part was illegal, but that had clearly been the secondary charge as far as any of the aurors had been concerned, and unimportant for Professor Wright to know.

"Mostly it was moving objects. Usually small objects. Fairies are small, you know? They can't carry anything too big. That portrait is about as big as I ever tried, and most of the time it was something more like," she cupped her hands around an imaginary sphere that was about the size of a softball. "Sometimes they helped me hide, too, but I had to be pretty scared for them to grant that. It didn't work just playing hide and seek on the school playground. But if I really needed them, they were there for me." The exact circumstances for that, she didn't really want to get into with Professor Wright either, but disillusionment was a charm so the ability at least was relevant.

She blinked in surprise when he told her most people couldn't do magic nonverbally or without wand, nevermind without either. Bel could do both both wandless and nonverbal magic (though admittedly she usually used one or the other rather than both skills together), so she'd figured it wasn't too uncommon for adults to be able to do so. Bel also kept a morning star mounted on a wall, and knew how to use it, so she really shouldn't have made assumptions about what was normal based on Bel.

When he asked about adapting spells to her method, she kind of waggled a hand in a so-so gesture. "I get graded on incantations and wand movements, so mostly I try to do it the right way, but in first year especially, I got frustrated a lot and did it with fairies while pretending to do it with a wand. Again, it worked best with spells that move objects. Wingardium Leviosa, for example. I didn't get that to work with a wand for real until late into second year." Professor Wright, of course, would know she had been testing well on it long before that. It hadn't looked exactly right, but she'd tried to mimic the floating quality she'd seen the other students achieve as best she could. "As far as I can tell, fairies are entirely useless at transfigurations and starting fires, but they're cool with shoving people around like with a knockback jinx or throwing up a protective shield."

1 Mab Well if I can keep this, and still learn the normal wand stuff, that would be the best case 1473 0 5

Grayson Wright

July 08, 2021 5:19 PM

That sounds like an admirable goal. by Grayson Wright

She'd learned it. On her own. Without being taught. She was saying more things, things that didn't make much sense (fairies were...unlikely, at best, to have the brains, powers, or desire to answer wishes; the mention of 'Pan' might have indicated she belonged to one of the classical religions and had attributed her abilities to supernatural entities, but he'd never heard of a Graceo-Roman deity called anything that sounded remotely like 'Peter,' though admittedly, religion in general was not a topic he knew a great deal about....), but to a certain extent, these things didn't seem to matter compared to the first part. She'd learned on her own, without a teacher of any kind, without even the background to know her powers were real, and she had gained a degree of control over her magic advanced enough that she'd been able to convince a Muggle adult that she was neither daydreaming nor going mad.

He could not write a book about his students. He could not make students into characters or elaborate student problems into plot points. That would be unethical. As for studying the students....

...Actually, that part might be possible. Possibly even advisable. He kept running into situations which weren't in line with the general printed wisdom. He was - generally - working through the situations by adapting advice as best he could as they went along, but it felt as though there was very much a space in the market for new research, new data...except for the small problem that he was rather personally involved in his students' cases, more interested in figuring out how to help them than in finding general data and deliberately setting up control groups and whatnot. He also worried how they might take it; he was concerned enough about how they viewed themselves anyway. Plus, difficulties with magic often had...troublesome...pasts. Evelyn sprang to mind, and what Mab was saying about 'hiding' and the 'fairies' being there when she needed them, along with her surname abruptly changing halfway through school...it was hard to imagine there was a story there which anyone would want to live through. Which made him wonder, too, if he ought to be more concerned about Xavier's situation. That, though, was a thought to dwell on later, along with the others.

Hearing about what Mab could do now was just as interesting as the rest of what she'd said. "Interesting," he said. He couldn't deny he was somewhat pleased to hear the fairies couldn't start fires...academically, he knew there were forms of magic which had little to nothing to do with wands, knew from books that there was a school in Africa which specialized in it, but through the lens of ideas he'd been brought up on and lived with his entire life, it was difficult to imagine anyone other than a highly skilled old person using magic without a wand and being truly in control of it. It was true that emotional outbursts could produce a specific effect, and solved the problem, but strong emotion itself felt like a loss of control to him (he briefly recalled the chartreuse moment), so this was going to take some mental adjustment. "So, charms seems to be your forte, at least for this form of magic. Do you have any idea what kind of magic you may have been doing when you were, er, hiding?" There were several ways he could think of to hide behind a charm, admittedly some less noisy and more intuitive than others. "You also kept mentioning the fairies doing it, even when you were talking about events that sounded like they happened after you found out magic was real," he noted. "Would you say that you still make some kind of distinction to yourself between the idea that you're asking something else to do magic for you, compared to thinking that you cause the effects?"

16 Grayson Wright That sounds like an admirable goal. 113 0 5

Mab

July 15, 2021 10:06 PM

I thought so, too. by Mab

She was apparently 'interesting' and 'fascinating' and she honestly wasn't sure if she was pleased by these words or worried. She was definitely getting that her problem was a rare one and there probably wasn't going to be an easy answer to fix it.

"I guess?" she ventured uncertainly. She wasn't sure that she could really be said to have a 'forte' but if he meant that her wandless magics had pretty exclusively been what would qualify as charms, then there was truth to that. It was why she had come to him rather than Professor Skies or Brooding-Hawthorne (the DADA one) as the contrast between what she could do with the wand and without was the most stark. "The hiding wasn't true invisibility or even camouflaging, because I could still see me, just . . . other people couldn't? Kind of like how my mom can't see wizard things shielded from muggles, I guess?" She didn't know if it was exactly the same, if the inability to see her had been universal or if she'd picked just a subset of people who couldn't, whether they just couldn't notice her or if they literally could not see her. It had always seemed more important that they couldn't find her rather than discovering the technical details of why they couldn't.

Then he made a good point that made her bite her lip and think. "I don't think - not really?" She gestured toward the portrait. "I mean, I knew that me doing that. I've stopped believing there are actually fairies involved. It's just how I visualize it, I guess? It's just easier to imagine tiny invisible fairies carrying things around than it is to just . . . break physics. And it's easier to imagine them when there's not wand involved, making me think about swishing and saying the right word with just the right accent." She wasn't like Hilda or some of the other foreign students at the school, who had an actual language barrier problem, but her Boston accent had tripped her up on multiple occasions, especially if the incantation had a hard R sound.

1 Mab I thought so, too. 1473 0 5

Grayson Wright

July 21, 2021 9:53 PM

As for how to accomplish it.... by Grayson Wright

Not true invisibility or camouflaging, possibly something similar to Muggle-shielding spells. Illusion or diversion, then, but it was unlikely, he thought, that they would be able to to figure it out, at least without breaking either laws or ethics. Or possibly both. Probably both. Worth a note nevertheless.

"Yes, definitely a charm, I'd say," he said. "True invisibility would have probably prevented you from seeing yourself as well - it's possible it was a form of illusion, maybe with something to divert the attention...Probably related to mental magic. How did you find Cheering Charms?" he asked, and then grimaced slightly in apology. "I apologize for all these questions - it's difficult to devise a strategy for addressing these things without them, but you can have one free pass for shouting 'shut up, old man' or similar if it becomes a bit much. Use it wisely," he advised her dryly.

Physics. He knew a definition of that word, but had gathered that it was rather different from the one a Muggleborn student was likely to use. There were witches and wizards who made a career of experimental research and theory involving attempts to create a unified energy theory, but he lacked the kind of proficiency in mathematics and arithmancy needed to know much about that kind of thing. He had been amazed to pass his Potions RATS, many years ago, after bungling a calculation in his measurements, and had to check his lesson plans over and over again when he taught the Advanced students parts of this class that required such things....

The problem here was that there was an Aladren answer he, but he wasn't sure it would be useful here. He could conjure up several fairies right now so that Mab could see that fairies were vain, rather dim creatures who, if they noticed her at all, would either be too busy preening or trying to get her attention in order to have an audience for their preening to even think of taking orders. Mab, though...most blocks of this kind were emotional by default, but from what she had said and not said, it was possibly also tied up with some form of trauma. That was something to walk carefully around, especially with such limited information.

"You know," he said slowly, "fairies - real fairies, that is - are quite small, and have their own weak brand of magic, and they can be conjured up by wizards - usually for ornaments, or soft lights. They're not terribly intelligent, but they can accept direction to stay on Christmas trees or the like - you may have spotted them around the holidays, or at the Midsummer Ball in the past. I don't suppose you could imagine yourself conjuring the fairies you need with your wand? At least as a temporary measure while formulating a better plan.. It's not impossible you could get extra points on your CATS for performing nonverbal spells as a fifth year, but you see yourself that you'll need your wand for the spells you find it difficult to imagine the fairies working. I'm hoping you can gradually transition from needing to imagine them to not needing, so you can become versatile in your methods," he explained.

16 Grayson Wright As for how to accomplish it.... 113 0 5

Mab

July 23, 2021 10:03 PM

Exactly the sticking point by Mab

Mab nodded in agreement to his assessment of her hiding charm, and she had already started to waggle a hand in a non-committal gesture with a grimace to indicated Cheering Charms were no better than anything else she'd attempted with or without a wand that wasn't in her fairies' bag of tricks when Professor Wright offered her a free pass to tell him to mind his own business, but only once. This wasn't the time she was going to use it though, so she continued with what she'd been about to say. "Didn't especially like Cheering Charms," she admitted, which applied to both her ability to cast them as well as their affects, and she suspected the dual distaste showed in her tone.

"I do understand the necessity of information gathering, Professor. Pretty sure I could have been an Aladren by nature if I wasn't a Pecari through experience first." Instinct and survival, her house was known for, though she doubted many of the others had actually depended on their instincts to literally stay alive as much as she had. Those weren't the primary House traits, but she was sure that was what earned Mab membership. She certainly didn't have much in common with the stereotypical Pecari.

She wasn't quite sure why he was telling her about the creatures wizards called fairies. She had gradually come to understand that her mental understanding of the fey was founded far more on muggle folklore and fiction, rather than reality (and, in truth, her wand work had improved the more she accepted that, at least to the point where it was at now), but she could not see a connection between real life fairies and her wandwork deficiency. She dismissed his suggestion of imagining the Christmas light fairies (she had crowed in triumph the first time she had seen those - proof that there really were little winged fairies! - though even then it had been obvious that they were nowhere near the dominant species of magic creature in the real world, but of course little sprite like creatures very rarely were) as unhelpful. She'd tried that already, though not with the real life fairies, but rather with the invisible Tinkerbell fairies she'd imagined all along.

"Tried that," she verbalized with a faint grimace, though it was edifying to know that she had already come up with some of the potential solutions even experienced adult wizards like Professor Wright would suggest. "I've tried imagining the fairies performing the spell directly. I've tried to imagine the fairies living inside the wand doing the spell for me. There's just . . . too much too think about all at once when there's a wand involved. When I do the wish, all I have to do is wish. It's very simple. Using a wand is complicated. You need to say a complex word, you need to make an intricate motion with your fingers, and you need to think about what you want to happen. There's too much happening, it doesn't work, it's frustrating, it doesn't follow the rules I already figured out, and - oh."

She blinked.

"And I don't believe it will work for me."

That was the trick, wasn't it? That was always the trick. In every magic system in every book she'd ever read, in the beginner lessons here, that was always the key: belief. Even Peter Pan said so. Mab had, over time, grown to trust that her wishes would do as she wished them to do, but she'd never learned to trust her wand. She'd just always disregarded those admonishments to believe as non-applicable because she did believe. Of course she believed. She'd believed in magic for as long as she could remember. She'd known magic responded to her since before she'd known it was her doing the magic.

But she didn't believe enough in the wand. She'd never needed it before, why did she need it now? It was extraneous and unnecessary and didn't fit into how she viewed magical theory.

She picked up her wand from where it had been lying useless and abandoned on the Professor's desk. She grimaced at it. She'd never liked it. It had cost so much more than all of her other school supplies (which given her upbringing was an automatic mark against it even if Bel was rich) and then it hadn't even worked during most of her first year. "I trust my magic but I don't trust my wand to do the magic. I don't believe it will do what it's supposed to do."

She looked up at Professor Wright with an intense look. "Do you have books that explain how wands work? I mean, the magical theory behind them?"

1 Mab Exactly the sticking point 1473 0 5

Grayson Wright

August 04, 2021 4:51 PM

Fear not, I have books! by Grayson Wright

Didn't especially like cheering charms. Of course, thinking again of what she had said about her own style of magic, that did make sense. Even if a spell was designed to affect the thoughts and perceptions of someone else, it was still, in this context, centered on a visible object - herself. A mood was something far more...ephemeral, and even the brain was a bit abstract, in that one couldn't watch its working.

At least she understood about collecting information. He nodded thoughtfully when she said she might have been an Aladren under other circumstances. "Yes - there's less difference between the two than I think many realize. Or between any of the Houses, really - Crotali plan, Teppenpaws negotiate, Pecaris survive, Aladrens...." What, exactly, did they do? Deal with the abstract problems the other three were too practical to bother with? He couldn't think of a way to phrase that which didn't insult someone "I suppose we solve whatever other problems come up. Pecari and Aladren both have...more flexibility, though, than the other two when it comes to response type."

It occurred to him that the four elements of problem-solving plus the frequent, though not universal, tendency of Aladrens to learn things just for the sake of learning them didn't make for a half-bad system, if it was all put together properly. Aladrens found knowledge. Pecaris figured out how to apply it practically. Crotali planned how to safely deploy those applications, and Teppenpaws kept the other three from killing each other at various points. He thought this might have interesting applications for group work sometime, or the next time the school decided to organize the children into involuntary associations to compete for things. And, as the one who'd thought of it, he could work now on suggestions to make them, which would result in him both looking like an Engaged Employee and allow him to do stealthy sociological research on...

...iIt was probably not ideal to think of doing experiments on children, however non-seriously he meant it, with so much maniacal glee. Normally he gave himself some leeway as far as overly maniacal thoughts went, since those were generally deliberately over-dramatized for his own amusement, but that one might have been a bit much. Especially when there was, after all, serious business to hand.

Her rationale for why the stop-gap hadn't worked was perfectly reasonable - other than being under her control, the way she was using magic was reasonably in line with how children often did it: directly, without intermediate steps, focused on objects and immediate, well-defined problems. She could move objects around at will, yes, but had probably first learned to do so as a matter of necessity of some kind. And -

His line of thought stopped when she suddenly cut herself off and then resumed with her own theory. It made sense, he had to admit. It also flew in the face of most of what he'd read about how magical development worked, but it made sense. How, for instance, could one possibly have the amount of will needed for magic if half-convinced it could never work the way one was doing it?

And her instinctive reaction to this inference was to immediately ask for books. Yes, she probably could have been an Aladren under other circumstances. "I should have a few here...I've helped out a couple of others before he thought they might have wand-related difficulties," he explained as he stood and turned to face the set of shelves extending across most of the wall behind him. He had never been very good at keeping orderly shelves, and had to look for a moment for the ones he wanted, continuing to speak absent-mindedly as he did so. "Wandmakers keep a lot of their secrets among themselves, you still find ones who only pass on their personal tricks and discoveries to one apprentice, but they have lost control of some information over the centuries. Professor Xavier can probably tell you more about wand-woods, and Professor Marsh might have insight into the core materials, if you decide to follow the idea that far, but the theory of why wands work in general is more, well, general."

He picked up two books, and then a third, which he frowned at for a moment before replacing it on the shelf. "That was about issues with inherited wands, and it's a bit technical, though if you're curious you're welcome to it," he explained, putting the other two books in front of Mab. Another thought occurred to him, and he went back and grabbed another one.

"Guide to standard wand movements and components," he explained, adding that one. "In theory, wand movements are supposed to help set paths in your mind - " it was a bit more complicated than that, he knew there was a good deal of arithmancy that went into determining how many loops one should make for a given spell and whatnot, but he doubted Mab was interested in picking up an entire extra class just to explore that avenue that seemed unlikely to apply to her case; he certainly couldn't help much with understanding it in tutoring, as he had no head for numbers whatsoever. "That one goes into explanations of what those paths are supposed to be for some of the more common elements. More experienced wizards can make spells work with less precise movements, but others find that if they don't follow the logic of the movements they've learned, the spell won't work, even though the first group make it seem possible they're not really part of the spell. You don't seem to need them to make spells work, but the CATS examiners will expect to see them, if you can master them. It's possible it could be useful for you with more...abstract spells, if you understand what they're supposed to represent."

He blinked, vaguely owlishly, from behind his glasses. "Your idea makes sense, and you know your own magic best," he said. "So it's worth a try to look into it, definitely. Happy to help if you run across anything you don't understand in those - " he nodded to the books - "of course, and Mr. Fox-Reynolds might know if there's anything else in the library that might be useful. Let me know if you think those help, or if you plan any experiments that could turn explosive." He thought he should possibly be less nonchalant about that possibility, but he'd been working with teenagers for nine years. There was a certain degree of desensitization he suspected would have kicked in at some point even had he not somehow become the go-to person for magical control problems.

16 Grayson Wright Fear not, I have books! 113 0 5