Liz was pitched out of the floo, her balance off, stumbling — her heel caught awkwardly on the carpet, the momentum of her bag yanking her even further off balance, and she slammed down onto her knees, her palms catching her weight before she could smash her face against the floor. Dizzy and nauseous, she groaned, "Ugh, fuck..."
"Ah, Elizabeth, I was wondering when you would drop in." Was that supposed to be a pun? There was a low, quiet groan of effort, Liz tipped back to sit on her heels, looked up. As the familiar voice had suggested, she'd successfully arrived in Dumbledore's sitting room — the walls all but hidden with packed bookshelves, colourful overstuffed felt furniture ringed around the fire. (She'd thankfully managed to avoid running into anything.) Dumbledore himself — dressed in colourful trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, the hems and the collar decorated with curling knotwork and floral designs, this time missing the housecoat (a warmer season than her previous visit) — had been sitting in one of the armchairs reading a book, but he was up and taking a couple steps closer to her now.
As much as Liz didn't really like Dumbledore much, for various reasons, she did appreciate how colourful and interesting his wardrobe was. But she was about as shite at properly coordinating colours or whatever the fuck as he was, so, take that with a grain of salt.
"Are you quite all right?" he asked, leaning over her a little. "That looked to be a nasty turn, there."
She groaned again. "I'm fine, just a little dizzy. I hate the floo." Severus had said she needed to take the trip in one leg too, straight from his apartments in Slytherin all the way down to Dorchester, with no stops along the way. Since Dumbledore did have enemies, he had security set up on his floo — but since Severus might have urgent news for him, if something related to the Dark Lord came up, travel from his apartments specifically went straight through the security. As badly as her magic interacted with the floo, Severus suspected Liz being suspended while the wards queried Dumbledore for approval would not end well.
It would have been much easier on Liz if Severus could have apparated her down, but unfortunately he was busy today with some of those one-on-one meetings he did. They'd started having Liz practise taking short hops in controlled settings on her own, but he didn't think she was ready to take such a long jump to a half-remembered destination yet. The day when he finally signed off on her apparating independently really could not come soon enough.
(She would say she regretted agreeing not to try it on her own until he agreed she was ready, but she didn't really — it wasn't like she wanted to hurt herself, after all.)
Once she'd teetered up to her feet, feeling dizzy and inexplicably flushed, she let Dumbledore take her cardigan — she hadn't stepped outside to get here, she'd only worn it in the first place because she knew taking people's coat or whatever was a basic polite host thing — kicked off her sandals, and followed Dumbledore over into the kitchen. Puttering over to the stove, he said, "Severus informs me that you prefer coffee over tea."
"Oh, yeah. You have coffee now?" He hadn't the last time she was here.
"I have been hosting friends and colleagues on occasion — a number of them, including Severus, prefer coffee. I'll set the water to boil and leave measuring the grounds and the steeping to you, shall I?"
"That'd be good, thanks."
Dumbledore's coffee setup was less than ideal, which Liz guessed wasn't so much of a surprise, given that he wasn't a coffee drinker himself. He did have one of the press things, which was good, but he'd apparently bought pre-ground coffee from somewhere, which was bad — grounds lost flavour far more quickly than whole beans. When she had everything set up and the water was ready, she had to stop him from pouring the actively boiling water straight into the press, almost unthinkingly touching the hot kettle. No, you weren't supposed to brew coffee with boiling water, it needed to be a little bit cooler than that — Liz didn't know exactly, maybe around 90 degrees? Too hot and it got all bitter and flat, she learned that mistake herself. Get your tea going first, give it a minute before starting the coffee...
Before long they were sitting down to tea. Apparently Dumbledore had remembered that Liz didn't like sweet things this time, pulled out a tray of muggle-style water biscuits with cheese and deli meats instead of the biscuits and tea sandwiches. The meat wasn't great, Seer-wise — bought from the local muggle grocer's, turned out — but the cheese was fine, so. The coffee also wasn't excellent, but she'd done what she could with the brewing, could have been worse.
Dumbledore babbled on about random gossip stuff for a little bit, nothing particularly interesting. There'd finally been a settlement on the matter with McLaggen love-potioning her, which she'd rather not talk about at all — she'd ended up going with what Severus wanted and made a thing of it, but thankfully the bastard's family had agreed to make reparations before the legal process proceeded to a point Liz had to talk to anyone. They had paid damages, which she didn't really care about; more importantly, a confession and apology written by McLaggen had been printed in the Prophet, so everyone knew what had happened and would know to keep an eye on him in the future.
She'd kind of wanted to just forget the whole thing, but Severus's argument that making it public would reduce the chances of McLaggen successfully raping some other girl down the line had stuck in her head. The whole thing was vaguely humiliating, but worth it.
Also, fuck McLaggen — that she got to trash his reputation forever helped too.
Dumbledore also brought up the article from like a month ago now about charity and stuff, ugh, she didn't want to talk to him about this either...or about the Tournament, it was fucking annoying that she was in the lead again...
Liz played along with the gossipping for a little while — Dumbledore was helping her with this bloody thing, so she might as well be polite about it. But eventually, after they'd babbled in circles about whatever for long enough for her coffee to be mostly drained, Liz said, "So, about the Task coming up."
"Aha, now Elizabeth, you know better than that," he said, a light amused bounce on his voice and a curl to his moustache. "It would be terribly inappropriate for me to advise you regarding the very Tournament I am meant to judge." Dumbledore took a long, slow sip of his tea. "I understand Severus brought you to the opera over Easter break."
She rolled her eyes, shaking her head a little. Honestly, how tickled Dumbledore seemed with technically following the letter of the Tournament rules but breaking their spirit was very silly. It didn't hurt to play along, just, he was so weird sometimes. "I don't know if I'd call it an opera. More like a musical or something? But I guess I don't really know what the difference between the two is — I've never seen either before, so."
"Regardless, performative magic is quite fascinating. The interaction between a person's aura and the ambient magic surrounding them is quite complex — to oversimplify matters, one could say a person breathes in the magic in the environment just as one does air. There are all manner of effects the quality of the environment can have on a person, but performative magics exploit this to more thoroughly engage the audience. In brief, the environment is coloured such that those who interact with it experience an emotional response which somehow complements the story on stage."
"That's just enthrallment, right?" Tamsyn claimed that when Liz was projecting something through her voice, the first mind magic trick she ever learned, that was technically enthrallment, which was...well, basically what Dumbledore just said. Sometimes she'd use the leverage of an enthrallment taking to immediately ram home a direct compulsion — getting a toe in the door to make it easier for Liz, back when she was younger and weaker, to project the necessary power through someone's mind (while not really consciously aware that was what she was doing) — but the enthrallment itself was its own, far milder form of mind magic. Technically she didn't even need to reach past her own aura to do it — to use Dumbledore's metaphor, it was basically just breathing out instead of in.
There was a funny cool shiver in Dumbledore's mind, but she couldn't make it out, as thoroughly shielded as his thoughts were from view. "Essentially, yes, though a distinction is made in the terminology that doesn't truly reflect reality. 'Enthrallment' is simply what it is called when performed by a mind mage, or in a handful of similar cases — by veela, for example. Though that is maybe too simple, there are differences. Performative magic may cause one to feel in time with the actors or the music, in some cases project an image into one's mind, but it may not carry any form of compulsion — that can only be done through enthrallment."
...He didn't mean like when Liz followed up an enthrallment with a compulsion, did he? Because Tamsyn was pretty clear about those being separate processes. Or, maybe he was referring to how Tamsyn could project thoughts into people's heads with enthrallment — twisting someone's mind into a certain shape like that was normally done with compulsions. (When she talked directly into someone's head, that was actually a compulsion, making them think the thing she wanted to say. Apparently it felt weird, and could be slightly confusing, but that was the only thing that worked.) That hadn't occurred to Liz before. Maybe, if you really knew what you were doing, you could make the magic you were breathing out shaped in a certain way that, once it was breathed in by someone, it triggered the compulsion without needing to make direct contact?
Actually, that would explain what Liz had done in the Gryffindor common room that one time pretty well — that made a lot of sense, when she thought about it. Hadn't even meant to do that, honestly, but it wasn't like she'd noticed the difference between enthrallment and compulsion until Tamsyn had explained it anyway...
"Right, okay. So, basically the difference is just that mind mages can do this stuff without needing a focus of any kind — Severus said the instruments were enchanted to do the spell, sort of like a broom?" A broom was technically a focus, in the same class of enchanted objects as a wand, but unlike a wand was designed to only channel very specific spells. So, she thought, the difference between enthrallment and performative magic would be analogous to the difference between natural mind magic and the charms that tried to imitate it? That sort of made sense, she guessed. "Though, I'm pretty sure the actors were projecting magic too somehow. Did they have something on them somewhere I didn't notice?"
"Ah," Dumbledore breathed, beard twitching, "that is a far more difficult skill. It is an application of ritual magic of a sort, ancient, primal witchcraft. It is ultimately adapted from the process by which an officiant might come to embody his god for the duration of a religious ceremony. Through a lengthy, sensitive ritual, an actor may deeply anchor himself into the ambient magic, and so dissolve the walls between self and other, allowing the environment to carry an echo of himself. It requires years of practice to learn to maintain the presence of mind necessary to keep one's wits while the ritual is in effect, and the ritual must be repeated immediately before each and every performance. It can also be quite risky — interruptions of or errors made during the ritual itself can have serious consequences for the user's sanity. There are reasons such magics are less common in our country: there are laws on the books restricting such rituals which have been inconsistently enforced over the centuries, professional actors dissuaded by the inherent uncertainty from performing such magics within the borders of Britain."
...Liz was pretty sure there were still Gaelic priests who regularly did a version of that, so yeah, inconsistently was right. "I get it, yeah. So... Let's say, hypothetically," she drawled with a roll of her eyes, Dumbledore's beard twitching again, "I wanted to...to do a solo performance. But to a lot of people, in a big open space — a quidditch stadium, let's say, like the one the World Cup was in. I can't project an enthrallment large enough to fill the whole space, my influence will decay too quickly." The Gryffindor common room had been pushing it, even — her control on the people around the edges had been pretty shaky, and part of why she'd started letting people go was because she simply hadn't been able to hold that for too long without a breather.
"I would expect so. You are quite powerful for your age, but everyone has their limits — the inherent instability of such wandless magic would drastically increase the power necessary to do such a thing, beyond what any mortal mage can summon." He didn't come out and say it, but Liz guessed he was thinking of the Morrigan, who, if the stories she'd heard were true, absolutely could do something like that. Supposedly she could compel people from hundreds of kilometres away, which was absurd — there were reasons some people had once literally worshipped her...and still kind of did, actually. "Enchanted devices, however, can produce spellforms far more regular than flesh and bone.
"I noticed you brought your school bag. Do you have your enchanting supplies with you, by any chance? I'm familiar with the general outline of an enchanting scheme which may be well suited to your particular talents." There was an obvious note of knowing amusement on his voice, light and bouncy, bubbling on the air around them.
Because, of course, Dumbledore had suggested she bring her enchanting supplies, for this very reason — Liz rolled her eyes again.
They relocated back to the sitting room, where Liz had left her bag. While she plopped down onto the sofa, her bag pulled up onto the cushion next to her, Dumbledore walked over to the bookshelves and retrieved a scroll. Holding it out to her, he said, "I do wonder if you'll be able to make sense of this — I suspect it is rather above your current skill level."
She was a bit ahead in enchanting — partly because she'd been working ahead to begin with, but the Continental standard considered the graphic arts a primary subject — so she guessed they'd see about that. "I don't know, let me see..." Unrolling the scroll, she scanned over the contents — not a full enchanting scheme, but more of a general concept, a few different elements outlined and linked together with shorthand. "Um, these are reservoirs, drawn into, ah, it's the content of a spell somehow. And this part is drawing from ambient magic... Hold on, need my book," she said, yanking open her bag to reach for her Egyptian dictionary.
Dumbledore conjured a simple wooden lap-desk for her, and then left her alone to work, returning to whatever he'd been reading when she'd shown up. Liz picked over the outline of the enchantment, paging through her dictionary and occasionally checking her notes from class — describing the 'grammar' of how enchantments usually worked, for lack of a better word — occasionally marking up the scroll or scrawling things out on her own fresh sheet of paper. There were multiple elements here, tied together in funny ways, the shorthand and missing pieces really didn't help, but...
Probably five, ten minutes later, Liz straightened in her seat. "I've got it."
"Oh? What do you believe it does?" At least Dumbledore didn't sound sceptical she'd actually figured it out, just politely curious.
"It takes an image — the enchanting sense of an image, I mean — from one source and an impression from another — me, I'm guessing. The image is projected into the form of an illusion — no definitions, I'd need to define the character and dimensions in this missing spot here — and the impression is channelled outward instead. I can't quite work out the spell that does it, but from the glyphs you used, I'm guessing it propagates the impression out into the ambient environment? Colouring the character, like."
"A sound presumption, yes."
"Right. And this gate here is a gross amplification of some kind — again, undefined, I'd need to fill in the terms myself — the power to do it pulled from ambient magic. Wouldn't that mess it up? I mean, can you push and pull on ambient magic at the same time? I'd think it'd just suck up the spell you're pushing out."
"That question is broaching quite advanced geomancy. In short, no, the enchantment drawing on ambient magic will not interfere with the propagation of the impression. Very well one, Elizabeth, you've interpreted the entirety of the scheme correctly. Frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised — certain critical elements are NEWT-level topics."
Liz shrugged. "I've been working ahead. I like enchanting, it's neat. I've actually been enchanting my own scrying foci since last winter, and I've been playing around with little alterations to my things." There was a skip in Dumbledore's mind, she added, "It's fine, I ask Babbling to check my work." Well, not always — some things she'd done, like expanding pockets in some of her clothes, were from the box of spells Lily had left her, she assumed those were all safe and didn't need to be checked over. Severus knew she had them and hadn't said anything, so.
"Ah yes, now that you mention it, I recall Ashe may have said something on the matter at a staff meeting last year — Sibyl was most envious that you did not seek out her assistance instead." Well, that would have been a silly thing to do, Babbling was the enchanting expert, and Trelawney had practically never mentioned scrying. "Severus does say you show prodigious skill with witchcraft, though I have noticed it's rarely remarked upon by anyone else. I suppose it tends to be overshadowed these days by your duelling skills — it is somewhat rare for a mage to be so talented in both witchcraft and wizardry."
Not really that rare, but people did tend to focus on one thing they were particularly good at, yeah. "I'm not great at everything — I'm still shite at transfiguration, and honestly my arithmancy is barely passable. I'm probably not continuing either for– at the NEWT-level." She'd almost said for Proficiencies, oops. Seemed like Dumbledore might be weird about Liz transferring overseas.
Chuckling under his breath a little, Dumbledore said, "Yes, no one can be a natural in every subject. Which is unfortunate — sometimes I lament that there is simply not enough time to study all that there is to learn in this world. Alas."
"Are you sure you weren't a Ravenclaw?"
"Ah, and how might things have been different if I were!" he chirped, light and bubbly, all but grinning across the sitting room at her. "No, no, the Hat deliberated over me for some time, but it never truly considered Ravenclaw."
"What was the other house, then?" Probably Hufflepuff, right? But, that didn't seem right, Liz would definitely guess Ravenclaw above Hufflepuff — supposedly Dumbledore had been an absurd prodigy when he was her age, so...
There was the shortest pause, just a blink, before Dumbledore admitted, "Slytherin, in fact."
...She maybe should have guessed that, actually. He had been super poor, attending Hogwarts on a scholarship programme (which had been discontinued at some point since), and trying to make a name for himself...and then there was the whole thing with his political ambitions, helping Grindelwald formulate early thoughts that would eventually be refined into first-wave communalism...
Yeah, that made a lot of sense, when she thought about it.
From there, Dumbledore suggested she try enchanting a somewhat simplified version of the scheme, in case any obvious problems or questions came up that she needed help with. They were leaving out the elements to draw power from the environment for now — there were standard forms to do that kind of thing, but integrating one made the enchanting far more complex, would extend the time necessary to carve it out by, like, over an hour? — instead Liz would simply power it herself through the same element the thing was taking the impression from. (Which didn't actually require any additional enchanting to set up — the device itself drew power from her to work, it was just the amplification elements that needed ambient magic, and she didn't need those to fill Dumbledore's sitting room.) She started out just sketching the script on a fresh sheet of paper, the different elements done with different coloured pencils, constantly jumping between Dumbledore's outline and her dictionary and notes to make sure she was doing everything correctly.
Though apparently she hadn't gotten it quite right — when Dumbledore checked her work, he said the enchantment to channel and convert the impression wouldn't work correctly. Instead of just giving her the answer, he pulled a book off of the shelf and handed it to her, suggesting she look over a particular chapter. That might seem less than entirely helpful, but honestly Liz preferred figuring it out herself — there was a lot of personal style that went into enchanting, especially when working with Egyptian, which tended to be less literal than runes. After scanning over the chapter he'd pointed her to — very dense and somewhat archaic language, but mostly comprehensible — she came up with a second attempt. It did end up somewhat metaphorical, Dumbledore asked her what her intent was, and how that intent was associated with the glyphs, but after going through it he confirmed that this should work, go ahead and give it a try.
Enchanting could, of course, be terribly slow sometimes, carving each glyph line by line, tracing over each one with the finisher before going on, very tedious. Modern annihilation blades (still the coolest name ever) made the process far quicker than it might have been if she had to physically carve bits out of the clay block she was working with, but still. Dumbledore was being quiet, at least, reading by himself and only rarely even looking up at her, his mind cool and closely-contained, so she could focus on it without too much distraction. After a while, when she was pausing between elements to shake out her wrist, Dumbledore suggested taking a tea break — yeah, sure, why not, she had been at it for a while.
Apparently Dumbledore was a little impressed with the technique she'd developed already. She didn't think anything was that special about it? Most of it wasn't even anything she'd come up with, honestly — sketching out enchantments in different colours was actually something they were taught to do in class. Liz had started out inking the runes on the thing before tracing over them with the blade on her own, worried that she'd fuck it up if she just tried to eyeball it...which was also something they were taught to do in class, she'd just started doing it on her own before they'd gotten that far, working ahead. She'd gotten a multicoloured ink set so the different elements on the thing could also be different colours, she was pretty sure that was the only thing that was special about how she did it. Babbling also thought it was a neat idea, of course, and a few of her classmates had stolen it, but.
Liz got the feeling that Dumbledore wasn't very well-informed about what Babbling actually taught. She guessed that wasn't so weird — he had been very busy, and managing that sort of thing was what he'd hired Babbling for — but it was still vaguely irritating.
What had to be a good couple hours after she'd arrived (would need to get going before too long, friends would worry if she didn't show up for dinner), she'd finally finished the thing. She let out a heavy sigh and leaned back in her seat, grimacing a little at the tense pings of protest in her back — not unusual after a long enchanting session, all tense with concentration and leaning over the thing. Also, she was kind of tired, the focus necessary to enchant properly could be exhausting, mentally. "There, that's the last of it. I think all the glyphs took."
"If I might have a look?" Without opening her eyes, Liz held the block of clay out toward Dumbledore. He took a moment to scan over the glyphs, occasionally humming low and thoughtful — there were a few prickles of magic from his direction now and then, some kind of analysis spells? "Good work, Elizabeth, this seems to be resolving correctly. Go ahead and prime it, and we'll give it a couple minutes to fully cohere before testing it."
Liz fit a reservoir stone into the divot she'd dug into the clay — it would only be held in with gravity, which was obviously less than ideal, but it was fine for a test like this — then forced a little bit of magic into it, as well as a second, empty ring of glyphs nearby, marking a determiner but without the reservoir. Normally these rings were used with reservoirs, but there was no reason you couldn't use the same structure to pull something else into the enchantment — she simply needed to touch a finger to the circle bound by the ring and push the impression she wanted in, easy. Liz set the block aside, giving the enchantment time to pull itself together, a necessary step for most of the more complex projects.
"Reservoirs can only hold a single image," she said, seemingly unprompted.
Dumbledore nodded. "Yes, that is true."
"I don't know what I could possibly do for, ah, this performance of mine with only a single image. I would need to— Like, I'm not really great with music or whatever, so, I was thinking I'd basically be making a magical film, you know?" Or, that was her idea now, at least, she'd really had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to do for this Task. So, thanks Dumbledore, she guessed. "A very short one, obviously. But I definitely can't fit all of that into one reservoir."
"That is a challenge, isn't it," he agreed, light and casual. "I look forward to seeing how you solve it — given the talent you've demonstrated here today, I am certain it will be creative."
...Okay, then. Not a surprise he wasn't being entirely helpful, giving her literally all the answers really would just be cheating. Make it so she could swap out the reservoirs, maybe? But, that would at least take a couple seconds, meaning her projection would have a bunch of jarring silences through it. Maybe design it with two reservoirs, using one at a time so she could switch out the other, keep the projection up constantly...but she had no idea how she'd script that? You couldn't just turn off an element like that, that wasn't how enchanting worked. She didn't know, she'd think about it.
Once Dumbledore said the thing should be ready, Liz was immediately brought short — what the hell should she test it with? She was going to have to come up with something for the actual Task, which was going to be a pain — performance magic wasn't exactly something she had a lot of experience with — but for whatever reason, she was kind of blanking on what to... Just one flash of a thing, something that had intense feeling with it, to see if it worked. After a moment indecisively wavering back and forth, she remembered facing the dragon from the Third Task — perfect.
Liz drew her wand — she could charge a reservoir with an image without it, but the tighter focus provided by a wand would help it form more clearly — and concentrated, remembering facing down that Swedish short-snout with as much detail as she could come up with. What it'd looked like, what it'd smelled like, smoke and charred bacon on the air, the sharp ecstatic overwhelming magic heavy all around. Once she'd built as clear of a mental image as she was going to get, she tapped the reservoir — there was a crackle of the spell taking, the little quartz crystal beginning to faintly glow blueish.
Right, now to actually test it. Sinking into the memory as well as she could, summoning that feeling of breath-taking, shivering, giddy awe, Liz touched her finger to the circle and pushed it through. Once there was actually a useable referent in both circles, the enchantment snapped into activity — an illusion abruptly appeared over the device. The image of the dragon wasn't quite how she'd imagined it, but not really bad either, the colours coming through smeared and almost dream-like, the scales sparkling in the light. Maybe actually copying the memory, like to use in a pensieve, would have made a more realistic result, but it'd be difficult to string together something for the Task just from real memories.
Liz felt a faint prickle, could feel the impression crawling across the air around her, feeling more rigid and regular than mind magic normally was — like the difference between random chatter in the Great Hall and a proper song, or a natural forest and a garden, structured. She could immediately tell something was wrong, though. The impression seemed weak, and cracked, the regular structure breaking up here and there, it...
Even as she was wondering about that, Dumbledore spoke, the interruption causing her to lose hold of the feeling, the illusion quickly dissolving away. "Ah yes, I suspect you will need a clearer impression than that. I could feel it, but it was very faint and wavering, like a half-heard echo. Perhaps using your wand would help, or even a reservoir to smoothen the transition — either may work, though the latter may require additional enchanting."
"I'm not sure how much that will help. Maybe the amplification spells will do it, but I'm not sure about that. We're converting through multiple different spellforms, here — isn't that going to cause interference each time? Maybe I'll need to work in a filter or a downtap, but that's above my head, and I don't ha—" An idea abruptly occurred to her, Liz freezing in mid-syllable.
"Elizabeth? What is it?"
She didn't answer. Instead, Liz brought her left pointer finger up to the pad of her right middle finger, carefully focussed on the spell she wanted — and then she slashed across her middle finger, blood quickly welling up. There was a flash of cold shock from Dumbledore, but she ignored him, drew a familiar glyph in the middle of the ring with her own blood, the bar on top of a little pair of legs, once, twice. Once she'd finished the third one, she brought her finger back down on the middle, and forced the impression through — not just magic coloured with it, but as a compulsion, willing the enchantment to carry the feeling through, as though it were a mind she could directly manipulate.
(The compulsion drawn in as part of the impression, she hoped, integrated and propagated out...)
The illusion snapped back on, the same as before, but the impression on the air was far stronger. Still more rigid and ordered than her natural mind magic, but bright and sharp and loud, thick enough she could almost see it sizzling on the air, insistent. Dumbledore drew in a breath, his mind shivering with something, but Liz ignored it, concentrating on holding the impression. One breath, two, the influence spreading across the environment in the room wavering a little with her attention, but staying firm and strong.
That was much better.
After maybe only ten seconds, just long enough to ensure it was working the way she wanted it to, Liz released it — the illusion immediately snapped off, but it took a second for the air to return to normal, a faint edge of cool static left behind, clinging along the edges of Dumbledore's aura. Curious, she followed the feeling, glanced that way.
He'd slumped back into his seat, making him look even thinner and frailer than usual (already more obvious without the usual robes or the housecoat further hiding his frame), his eyes wide and one hand covering his lips. His mind was still at least partially hidden away, warm and swirling and lurching, deep and... Um...
She waited a few seconds for something to happen, but he just kept staring blankly at where the illusion had been a moment ago. "I'm sorry, was that too much?"
"No, it..." Dumbledore dropped his hand, cleared his throat, straightened in his chair again. "Ah that was— Was that from your memory of the Third Task?"
Liz nodded. "Yep. Honestly, I was so distracted I almost lost hold of my compulsion. Getting that close to a dragon was... Well, they're something, aren't they."
"That they are — I've had occasion to approach so near a dragon on a handful of occasions, but I... Well. That was simply beautiful, Elizabeth, thank you for sharing it with me."
...Okay. She just shrugged, didn't think it was that special. (It'd been a hell of a thing at the time, but.) There was something else to that, Dumbledore's thoughts tumbling away back there, but she couldn't tell what the hell that was about without intruding.
"In any case," he said, trying to force a more business-like tone, "that was very solid work. I assume you must have exploited blood magic to create a sort of direct sympathetic resonance between your experience of that memory and that element of the enchantment?" It did sort of sound like a question — if she had to guess, less because Dumbledore didn't already know blood magic well enough to understand it, but more because he was uncertain how much she knew. "Would you like me to heal that, by the way?"
"What? Oh!" Right, her finger was still bleeding, oops. Liz picked up her wand with her left hand, somewhat awkwardly cast the healing charm to close up her finger, vanished away the blood with a couple cleaning charms. "Sorry, forgot."
"No matter. To allow myself a moment of humility, this addition of yours transforms the output of this device into something far more...emphatic than I had anticipated. More than I would suspect possible, even — did you include some manner of compulsion in the impression, by any chance?"
"Yeah, I wanted to make sure it would take. Since it was so shaky the first time, you know."
"I must say, you certainly solved that problem," said with an edge to it Liz didn't quite know how to read. "Though you may have overcompensated somewhat. It is..." He hesitated, his eyes flicking to the side for a moment. "I am not telling you to find another solution, Elizabeth — this is your trial, and you may face in whatever manner you feel best. But the effects generated through this method are going to be very intense, especially so with the integrated compulsion. Your audience is likely to find the experience quite disorienting, and some of the judges may penalise you for such...intrusiveness."
He didn't explicitly say that he would himself mark her down for it, but she got the message anyway: he didn't approve. She couldn't tell if it was the magic itself he didn't like, or just the idea of doing it in public, on how many hundreds of people — magics that were okay in a private setting, with people you knew, weren't necessarily acceptable at scale.
But honestly, Liz didn't give a damn. This trick had firmed up the impression, and obviously even gotten it into Dumbledore — and his occlumency was pretty damn good, so it should work the way she wanted it to on pretty much everyone. (Though, they were testing it, it was possible he hadn't been trying to block it at all. Whatever.) Off the top of her head, she couldn't think of any other way of fixing the issue with the impression getting scrambled like that, this was literally the only idea she had. And, sure, maybe she'd be marked down for it, but she didn't care about that either. She wasn't even supposed to be in this fucking thing, and the quidditch Task had put her in the lead, again — tied with Fleur, but still — so if enough of the judges got prissy enough about it to take her down a spot or two, so much the better, as far as she was concerned. As long as she didn't humiliate herself too badly, she really didn't care.
Also, so what if he disapproved? She didn't even like him, he could just fuck off he didn't like it.
There would be no point in saying any of that, though. "Is that effect going to get through the amplification spells?"
Dumbledore paused for a moment, before saying, "I can't imagine why it shouldn't."
"Good. I guess I've got my idea, then. Thanks for the help." Legitimately, she did mean that — she wasn't exactly happy to hang around Dumbledore's house for a few hours on her day off, but she really hadn't had any fucking clue what to do for the Task...
There was a shiver of dark amusement from Dumbledore's head, leaking through his occlumency. Liz was vaguely curious what the hell that was about, but it wasn't worth trying to peek. "It was my pleasure, Elizabeth. I do enjoy teaching a talented student — I haven't had many opportunities to do so in quite some time."
...Oddly, she didn't feel a lie at all — a little bit bit of an ambivalent waver at first, but. Huh. "You know, you could probably do some private tutoring, or even volunteer at a primary or craft school. Your name has been dragged through the mud a bit — still not sorry about my part in it, to be clear—" Dumbledore did find Liz making the clarification a little funny, but he was also exasperated, twisting the knife and all that. "—but you're still Albus bloody Dumbledore, you know. I bet you'd get enough offers you could pick and choose the students you liked best."
"Now that is a thought! I confess, I've been occupied enough with other matters that it hadn't come to mind. Now that I've better settled in here, perhaps I will — thank you, Elizabeth."
She shrugged. "Sure." Seemed like an obvious suggestion to her, but sometimes you needed someone else to point out the obvious for you. She knew how that could go, it'd never even crossed her mind she might be able to arrange Seer-friendly food at school before Tamsyn nagged her about it...
It was starting to get somewhat late in the afternoon, so from there they moved straight into Liz packing up to go. She folded up her books, wrapped her notes around the block of clay, the reservoir stone cleared and tucked back into their little bag with the rest. While she was at it, Dumbledore gave her a quick update on the Dark Lord — part of their agreement they came to around their last meeting, she was supposed to be kept informed about stuff now. Not that there was really much to say? Dumbledore and some associate of his — their identity was to be kept secret for now, for their safety — had investigated the abandoned family home of Voldemort's father — a muggle, interestingly — and found obvious physical and magical signs that he and at least one follower had been there, recently. Unfortunately they hadn't left behind anything that could be used to track them, but it was certain now that the Dark Lord was active in Britain, and was definitely up to something.
That wasn't news, of course — the Ministry had already confirmed the same thing, during the investigations triggered by the World Cup riots. Dumbledore did have some more information, but not really anything actionable. Enough had been left behind to suggest that the Dark Lord had managed to embody himself in some sort of temporary vessel. His assumption had been that Voldemort would use a homunculus — he didn't use the word himself, seemed rather grave when Liz immediately put together why he'd been looking out for reports of missing muggle women — but after picking over the scene and discussing the details with his associate, they suspected the Dark Lord was bound to an automaton instead.
Liz actually wasn't familiar with this one, and oh, that was so cool! The enchanting necessary to make such a thing work was absurd, yeah, and the ritual seemed freaky as hell (as far as she could tell from the broad strokes Dumbledore gave her), but making a... She guessed it was kind of like a focus, but one you lived in, your intent to move channelled through the elements of the enchantment, and— That was just very cool, that was all — and also much less gross and evil than a homunculus.
She wasn't looking at Dumbledore, focussed on the straps of her sandals — she could feel his attention on her though, murky and mixed, soft and sharp and warm and cold. It was starting to dug at her, once she had her shoes properly on she turned up to frown at him. "What is it?"
There was a slight flinch in his head, a sheepish little smile. Didn't expect to be caught out, she'd guess, which was very silly — that she could feel people's attention on her wasn't a secret anymore, it'd been in the papers and everything. "Excuse me, Elizabeth, I was simply having a...nostalgic moment, I suppose you could say. You remind me of your mother sometimes."
...Something about the way he said it, the context he was bringing it up in, Liz was pretty sure he didn't mean that in a good way. Drawling a little, she said, "I'm going to choose to take that as a compliment."
He didn't expect to be called out on that one either, apparently, a sudden lurch like missing a step. "I meant no offence, of course. Lily had a similar talent for witchcraft, and even greater curiosity for certain magics perhaps best left unexplored."
Liz wondered how true that was — it seemed more likely to her that Dumbledore had just been better informed about what Lily had studied, especially toward the end. But who knew, maybe Lily had been a huge Dark Arts nerd, Liz had no way of knowing...besides asking Severus, she guessed. "You're not going to convince me she would have been better off not looking into the Dark Arts. If she'd been the sort of good, ignorant little muggleborn you'd approve of, she would never have been able to pull off that ritual on Hallowe'en — I'd be dead, and the Dark Lord would probably have been ruling Britain for the last decade."
Dumbledore had absolutely no response to that, or at least not one he thought she might actually listen to. Liz was right, and he knew it.
A minute later, they'd said their goodbyes — Liz again thanking him for his help, just to be polite (he really hadn't needed to) — and she was stepping back out through the floo. The trip was, of course, fucking miserable, spinny and harsh and loud, magic crawling hot and prickly over her skin, random jerks and jolts thrumming through her as she was bounced between nodes, her head—
The trip ended abruptly, pitching Liz out into Severus's sitting room — her heel caught, again, her bag lurching her around, she stumbled a few steps before her leg hit the coffee table, she slammed down onto it sideways, banging her elbow. Ow, fuck...
It wasn't until she was lying there on the table — catching her breath, fresh bruises smarting — that it occurred to her that she could have broken the return trip down into multiple legs no problem. She might have needed to come in through Hogsmeade and walk up, but, ugh, for fuck's sake, stupid. Severus really could not sign off on her apparating independently soon enough.
The door out to Severus's office clicked open, the wards isolating his apartments broke — Liz immediately felt his mind, scrambled to pop up to her feet, brushing her skirt back down. "Elizabeth? Are you all right?"
"Yeah, just, took a tumble out of the floo like an idiot." She glanced over the coffee table, but there hadn't been anything breakable on it, just a few journals here and there. "Have I ever mentioned I hate the floo?"
"Intermittently," Severus drawled, his mind shivering with cool amusement.
"It bears repeating." Straightening the strap of her bag on her shoulder, she started circling around the sofa toward the door.
"Was your meeting productive?"
"Yep, got a plan. Still has a few kinks to work out, but I should have it ready in time for the Task."
"Good. May I ask what you have in mind?" She didn't see why not — approaching the door, she dug the block of clay out of her bag, handed it over to him. It only took him a moment looking over the glyphs to get the general idea. "Ah, how clever. I suppose you'll compose a series of images to construct some manner of narrative."
"That's the idea, yeah." He handed the block back, she tucked it away again, continued on into his office. Walking backward so she could keep facing him, she said, "The biggest technical problem I still have is swapping images — it'll take a bunch to make anything, the breaks between them would be really jarring, but I'm not sure how to fix that. I can't have two reservoirs in it, the enchantment won't work with an empty referent..."
"You may simply construct a second device, and alternate between one and the other."
She froze. "Oh! Fuck, that didn't even occur to me, that's a great idea." It'd take a bit of practice to get the hang of dividing her attention between keeping up the impression and swapping out the reservoirs, but it should be doable. "Just need to figure out what I'm putting in them now, I guess. Thanks, Severus."
A funny cool glow in his head, Severus gave her a narrow smirk. "Of course."
"Anyway, I have to get to dinner before my friends start wondering where I am, and Nilanse nags me about not eating. See you later."
"Good night, Elizabeth."
What's this a sub-10k chapter? Blasphemy.
Gonna jump to First Contact for one scene before coming back to finish through the Task. 15 more scenes in year four to go.