Amelia Pond had found her Manual at thirteen. She was volunteering at a church rummage sale at the insistence of her annoying aunt. (It wasn't even their church! They didn't even go to church!) But it was the local fellowship just down the street, and they needed people to volunteer the night beforehand to set out all the hundreds of donated items, and again the next day to help sell those items. Amelia was still obsessed with the Doctor at that point in her life, and having to volunteer at the rummage sale was partially the price of refusing when her aunt tried to get her to sell her old dolls of the Doctor and her ten-year-old self.
So, obviously, she was there under protest.
That fact didn't change after long hours of hanging up clothes—including way too many jackets with hideously enormous shoulder pads—sorting baubles and trinkets out onto tables, gathering up all the junk that shouldn't even have been donated, and sorting books out by genre. If anything, she was more bored, but at least the work kept her hands busy.
(Also, her aunt wasn't there, so Amelia didn't have to worry about resisting the temptation to throw something heavy and breakable at her head.)
There were customers, whom she helped occasionally, but really she figured she'd let the other volunteers handle it. For one, they were adults, and thus more likely to be taken seriously. Also, they probably didn't exude a mild level of irritation whenever they spoke. (The temerity of her aunt. How dare she.)
So instead, Amelia Pond was hiding out amid the tables of books, leaning on the boxes, occasionally sorting, and generally trying to look small and unobtrusive. It was a surprisingly safe place, when it came to avoiding social interaction—for some reason she couldn't fathom, no one wanted to buy books. Almost no one even came and browsed, even though they all cost less than a dollar.
But hey, not her problem. Books made a nice enough safe haven.
Amelia was running her hand absent-mindedly over some boxes of unsorted books, blindly picking them up in large sections to stack upright when her hand unexpectedly bumped into one near the top of the pile. She turned to see the stack of books swaying precariously, improperly balanced, with books jutting too far out, or being too small, to properly support the weight on top of them. The stack stayed upright—barely—leaving Amelia staring at the book on top. She held painfully still, muscles taut as she superstitiously hedged around the stack so as to not knock over the pile of books over half her height.
The book on top had a worn, brown, hard-back cover, and the title read So You Want to Be a Wizard, with the author's name in smaller print. On an impulse, Amelia walked back over, intending to grab it.
After all, the books here were ridiculously cheap. If she could get what looked like an interesting fantasy novel for seventy-five cents, why not? Besides, she would need something to do while she was grounded, and she had already read all of the books on her bookshelf. Especially the fantasy and science fiction ones. Hopefully this would prove just as good—amazing and captivating and weaving stories that took seed in her imagination, there to grow and grow further, as only her favorite stories did.
Although, she mused with a pout and wrinkled brow, even a crappy and cliché novel, one of those ones where the prince has to go save the damsel in distress and then they get married, would be nice to have if she was grounded.
She maintained that the psychiatrist had deserved it. If he hadn't wanted to be bitten, he shouldn't have been such a meanie.
Flipping her hair over her shoulder and out of the way, Amelia stepped carefully forward and leaned in, trying not to so much as breathe on the visibly unbalanced tower of books.
The pile began swaying again as she touched the top one, So You Want to Be a Wizard, but moving quickly, Amelia managed to grab it. And she forever remained convinced that it was the Manual's magic that kept the pile from toppling.
This AU is actually so much fun to write it's ridiculous. :)