Chapter 2

She was awoken by a silence she felt had lasted too long. During her age in darkness she had heard shouts, murmuring, and exasperated tones, but they had stopped shortly into her nap and she was left with the quiet. Something she didn't entertain long, because it usually meant boredom.

She gasped and sat up fast. Amber sunlight flooded the room from her domed skylight. She could tell it was somewhere around four in the afternoon. She gazed at the round room. The picture of her parents sat on the bedside table. Muggle pop culture took over the rest of the place. The last thing she remembered was that horrible noise and falling from the transfiguration classroom rafters. Her things! She thought, her hands flew to her robe pockets. Notebook, check, invisibility cloak, gone, map, gone too. No! She threw her fists down.

She expected her grandfather to take the invisibility cloak. It didn't belong to her. She had found it in his office with a note about inheritance or something, but the map? She rightfully found it.

"Finally awake, are we?" Her grandfather strolled in. Face composed, hands folded behind his back. His maroon and black robes dragged the ground and his beard almost did too. What Corinne hated about her grandfather most was the way he always seemed to know. It didn't matter what it as. He knew when she snuck out, he knew when she woke up, he knew when she was upset, but he had the uncanny ability to let her learn the hard way and give her the wise owl moral later. At that very moment she was thinking, "cut the chit chat," and she knew it showed slightly on her face, even though she didn't want to be disrespectful.

"What's the damage?" She asked before Albus could launch into another speech. Did she hurt herself? Did Madame Pomfrey want to test her to death? Was she being grounded? Although she couldn't get much more grounded than she was on a normal basis.

"The damage, my dear?" He paced to one of the many bookshelves lining the room and picked up what he had found to be called a Rubix Cube on one of his many adventures to muggle toy stores for his granddaughter. The mix of colors amused him. Most simply he could change the colors of the stickers on particular sides to match, but that would be the easy way out. Certainly there must have been a spell to solve the overrated muggle puzzle without thinking, but at the moment he couldn't name one. He had to admit, there were certain things muggles could do better, even his brilliant granddaughter was still trying to figure it out. He hoped in her training she would combine the two lifestyles and make something truly ultimate, but now she needed structure. Now, she needed blunt, stark reality.

"You know, what are you going to do now that I've disobeyed your orders and fell thirty feet to the castle floor?" She was quite annoyed with his completely unrelated interest in her play things slash experiments. Normal parents would be annoyed and angry and shouty, but Albus Dumbledore was not her parent, and he couldn't replace either one.

Corinne's grandfather set down the small cube and pushed up a wooden chair next to her bedside. "We can talk about that after we determine what your actions have caused." But that was exactly what she was trying to avoid. She knew what pain it caused the people who did know she was alive, but she was tortured every day by her metaphorical muteness to the world.

"You gave poor Professor Mcgonogal a dreadful scare." Of course he hit with the hardest first. He lowered his half-moon glasses. "You know she thinks of you as her own." Corinne looked to the other side of the room. Had the Minerva herself discovered her? Was it one of the students and then she was told afterward? Was it Filch who told the aging woman? God, please let it not be Filch, she begged. Mcgonogal was one of the few who knew a small girl was living, growing, outgrowing inside her little turret of the school.

"How is she?" The nine year old asked, fearing the answer.

"Shaken," Her grandfather admitted, "and unhappy that you would go to such lengths to watch her class when she would have shown you how to turn a beetle into a button herself for when you're old enough." He leaned in, trying to get her to make eye contact. It wasn't about turning beetles into buttons. He knew that. It was about expanding her life from the shell she existed in. "But stealing?" He paused. His face begged her to answer him. "That's not who I thought I raised."

She folded her arms and glanced back at him as if the room had frozen over. "Didn't you see this coming?" She asked without words. Corinne wasn't a thief or crook. She was merely overly curious for the one piece of Earth she was supposed to live on.

"Then again…" He said and settled back into the chair.

"It's just, I'm so stuck here granddad. I can't do what other kids do. I can't even go into public places with you or there will be questions. It's like prison." She slipped her bare feet onto the cold floor. The magnified sun made it too hot for a blanket. Her legs seemed normal, and she didn't hurt anywhere besides the pounding headache that brought back memories of the horrid sound that caused her fall. Either she had been very lucky, or Madam Pomfery or Fawkes patched her up good.

Dumbledore let out a long sigh that an old man really should. "There's only one solution then." Corinne tested weight on her feet, then turned back to face her Grandfather. She noticed he let the granddad thing slide. He usually insisted on Professor Dumbledore so that when she started school she wouldn't mess up.

"What?" The what-should-have-been fourth grade girl asked. He had never suggested a solution for her trappedness until then. He had held on so long, so hard to his little girl, but Corinne came to the conclusion that his ethics took precedence over his wants. She was sincerely curious and slightly worried on what he had in store. The man didn't answer her at first. He returned to his conundrum of the Rubix cube, using an algorithm from one of the twelve uses of dragon's blood he clicked the blocks around until they lined up, not in perfect blocks of color, but patterns where every other little square matched. Corinne stared in disappointment and astonishment. She was supposed to be one knowledgeable of all things muggle.

"You're going to go to China with my friend Nicholas to study and create your own invisibility cloak from scratch."