After sliding from her seat, Doreen padded from her room and down the hallway to the library. She stopped at the entrance, looking over the many shelves. Then, with a shrug, she began exploring.
Her hand trailed along the spines of the books as she read the titles. If there was a system, she couldn't find it; it didn't help that at least one out of every ten books wasn't even written in English.
And then, on the fourth shelf, she found what she was looking for. Or at least, the history section. There weren't really a lot of books about history, but one, a large book with a dark, nearly black cover made out of something that felt like leather caught her attention. It took a bit of tugging, but eventually, Doreen managed to free the book from its brethren, although the weight of it surprised her and only her increased strength allowed her to maintain hold of it instead of dropping it.
Doreen dropped to the floor, sitting with her legs crossed and the book cradled in her lap. If there'd ever been a title on the cover, it'd long since disappeared. Instead, she opened the cover to the first page and stared.
"Goblin Rebellions of Avalon, 592AD to 1357AD."
Shaking her head, Doreen read the title again and then again. Nope, it stayed exactly the same.
With a lurch, she opened the book to a random page somewhere in the middle. To one side, the writing was small, cramped and looked almost hand-written rather than typed. On the other, though, was the most bizarre picture that she'd ever seen. It showed some kind of battle between men holding swords – no, on closer inspection when she bent her head close to the page, she realised that they were actually sticks – and the strangest creatures that she'd ever seen. They were short with long, ears, wickedly sharp looking teeth and the axes that they were wielding looked to be held by the longest fingers she'd ever seen.
"This obviously belongs in the fiction section," she decided.
Not knowing exactly where that was, Doreen decided to simply but the weird book back where she found it.
Trying to squeeze the book back into its slot was only made possible when she took out one of its neighbours.
"Now this looks more like it," Doreen smiled at the book in her hand. "Expansion of the Commonwealth."
A quick flick through proved that it was exactly what she was after. Then, with the book firmly in hand, Doreen made her way back to her room and the dreaded assignment.
ooo00ooo
"Homenum revelio!"
Harry's eyes narrowed as he examined the results. The various red blobs downstairs could be instantly ignored. No, it was the one in his apartment that he was being wary of. And there she was, in her room with the door shut.
A simple nod of satisfaction preceded Harry slipping into the closest and closing the door behind himself.
Originally, the door led to the top of a spiral staircase leading down to the part of Harry's basement dedicated to his magical training. But with the introduction of Doreen to the apartment, he'd been forced to put in a false wall, hidden by magic, of course, and to fill the cupboard with brooms, mops and other cleaning supplies. A series of quick taps of his wand caused the back wall to become transparent and Harry simply walked through.
As he stepped off of the bottom stair, a pair of magical dummies appeared from alternate sides of the room, wands raised in wooden hands. A dodge to the right was enough to avoid the jet of red light; a swish of his wand raised a shield for the dark blue bolt to bounce off of. Three more spells were snapped off from the dummies – two from the one on the left, one from the right. A dodge and a second shield were enough for two of the spells. The third, however was headed straight for Harry and there was nothing that he could do about it.
Instinctively, he snapped up his left hand, the thought of a duelling shield, similar to a buckler, in front of it. The sound of a gong as the spell impacted nearly caused Harry to get hit by the next spell. He'd never managed to do that before.
Feeling the pull on his magic the more he shielded, Harry switched to attack. Swirling to the left, his wand came up in intricate patterns and jets of light – yellow, white, red, white, red – spat out.
One dummy had its wand arm blown off while the second was hit in the midsection, sending it hurtling backwards to crash into the far wall before falling to the ground.
After one last check with narrowed eyes at the downed dummies, he straightened and holstered his wand. Raising his left hand, Harry willed the same duelling shield from before to appear. And it was there, perhaps not as strong as if he'd conjured it using his wand, but it was a shield nonetheless. A wandless shield. He'd been working on this for months and finally, finally …
Letting the shield fade away, Harry danced a jig before nearly skipping across to the small reading section that he'd put in.
A casual wave of his hand summoned the book that he needed, not that that was a great feat – he'd had a bit of an affinity for the summoning charm ever since the TriWiz all those years ago and as a consequence, it'd been the first wandless spell that he'd been capable of. Well, apart from a wandless lumos, but he didn't think that counted.
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