The Hufflepuff Cellar, Basement, Common Room, whichever section of the thesaurus you used for naming, kept a strong fragrance of a hearty order.

Today it was fruit.

Homework done with still a couple of hours to do until dinner, Obderedria was sitting at a table covered with fruit. Some early peaches from her tree, extras kept from breakfast and lunch starting to ripen, a bottle of pumpkin juice. And her blender, the most muggle thing in the common room.

"Ice, what about ice?" she mumbled. She didn't know any cooling spells -- the only temperature based one was that one the fried Heliotrope -- though she hadn't tested spell with her replacement wand. Lilly's wand.

Not even the spell to turn on the blender with magic. Obderedria rolled the wand back and forth on the table with her fingers, her other hand gone in a mass of brown and green hair. It was a very special wand. Too special almost and she knew she was just borrowing it. Obderedria performed her best efforts with it in class for Professor Sandusky's sake -- there it was fine but any other time --

She hadn't pulled out the blender since she and Heliotrope had finally settled on a blend of acceptable cat food chunks. Puddin' loved it. She kept it in a sealed box. As for the leftovers -- awkward fish patties were made from it. Obderedria could only taste so much and actually had to give her portion to Heliotrope. With two fish, some greens and 30 seconds of blending would could satisfy the needs of both cat, half-mer and not--half-mer if you were desperate --

Would the spell work with Lily's wand? Where once one of her favorite activities -- making blended concoctions at home -- was leaving her with doubts on whether she could pull it off again.

Figaro arrived through the big round Hufflepuff portal still humming a Three Owl Standard number.  He'd just been outdoors for Creatures class, and still smelled of fresh air and had dirt under his fingernails.  Immediately upon entering the Commonroom, he began shucking off the trappings of a student in order to return to his usual self.  Loose came the tie, off came the robe, down on the floor went the bag of books and quills.

And there was the Second Year with the spotted hair set up with a table of produce and a muggle gadget.  He came over as he was untucking his shirt and rolling up his sleeves.

"What's all this then?"  He picked up the loose, useless electrical cord and fiddled with the plug.  Lots of muggle stuff had them. 

And then, like a Figaro does, he noticed something else.  "Whose is that?"  He pointed with furrowed brow at the wand Drea had.  Whether witches or wizards noticed or not, at a certain point you just got to know what wand went with what person, as real as the nose on their face.  And that, well, that wasn't the wand Fig's brain had matched with the spotty-haired second year.

"What's all this then?"

Interrupted from her train of thought Obderedria bounced in her seat, turning to face the older Hufflepuff. Figgy, wasn't it? "Oh? Sorry. Um, it's a blender." Her track record of describing muggle things to wizards was rather poor. "You can blend things in them. Hence blend-er. Um. Have you ever had a milkshake? Or a smoothie? You can make one in these, I felt like making a smoothie--"

Figgy caught on to the wand. "Oh, Professor Sandusky lent it to me. Mine needed to be fixed though I don't understand why." Obderedria didn't know if she should share whose wand this once was, because it had been such a personal revelation from Professor Sandusky to her alone -- well, and the wandmaker but he didn't seem to care beyond how the wand was crafted. Use it to spread joy, Miss Pienas, is what the Head of House had told her.[1]

"Did you want a smoothie?" Obderedria asked, confidence building slightly as she sensed an opportunity for 'joy.' "I know a spell to turn the blender on I just need ice to make the drink cool and frothy."

1.	The Wand was Weighed...

Figaro hadn't ever heard of a 'blenda' before and looking at it, it didn't entirely make sense to him.  There was a clear chamber set on a little pedastal.  He could only assume the fruit and whatever went inside, but then what?   His curiosity was peaked.  And so was his appetite.

He'd only gave a little shrug when Drea told him the wand was just on loan from their Head of House.  It was peculiar.  Not quite right, borrowing wands, but she was young enough she could probably get away with it.  Figaro would feel very strange indeed handling another person's wand, let alone using it in class like it was his own.   He kept his eye on it a second, skeptical, but Drea - she needed ice.

"Bollocks, I can do that," he said with the pride and experience of a man who'd earned five passable O.W.L.s.  He found his own wand and then reached for the 'blender'.

"So right in there?" he gestured at it with his wand.  "How much?  Like all the way full?"

Drea seemed unsure.  "Too much and the blender won't work right.  But not enough and it'll be all soupy."[1]

Figaro shrugged.  "Alright then.  Medium."

He traced the right pattern in the air over the blender as he incanted with relative practice, "Glaciusicus!"

His wand rattled and shivered and out popped irregularly-shaped chunks of freezing cold ice.  They shot into the blender slowly at first.  POCK!  POCK!  POCK!  But the chamber was smaller than it looked and soon filled up, but the ice kept on coming.

Figaro swore and pulled his wand away with a laugh.  The ice kept on coming, flying all over the common room, until he shook out his wand and stopped the spell.

He looked at the blender.  It was full to the top and there was ice all over the table.

He nodded.  "Yup." 

1.	Dialog okay'd by Will.

Obderedria tried to remember what spell Figgy was using for future reference though her facial features turned waxen when ice pilled up out of the blender and all over the table. "N-No! That's too much!"

She tilted the blender's canister her direction, looking at the irregular ice. A piece was popped into her mouth to test. Okay, the ice didn't appear too strange. "We can't let the ice go to waste," she said around the misshapen cube. "Oh, it could be for the next batch -- is there a bowl or something to store them in until--?"

Her hands herded the ice scattered across the table into one cluster. "It needs to be less ice, because I add a certain amount of juice base, then ice and fruit, which can be left with skin and seeds if we blend it it really good, it adds fiber--" With everything beginning to go crazy without even starting the blender spinning yet, Obderedria kept switching trains of thought to try and make everything 'joyful.'

Drea seemed bothered a bit by the extra ice in the chamber and all over the table and floor, but Fig wasn't at all.  He'd seen worse messes before than ice which would clean up with and bit of magic, no problem.  But likes good brotherly Hufflepuff ought, Fig looked around the commonroom for a something to hold all the extra ice.  There were lots of potted plants around the high windows, and a bucket near the fireplace for wood, but nothing suitable to keep ice in until they'd need it. 

But then he remembered something he'd seen in Old Dusty's office...  "One sec. "

Figaro trotted across the sun-streaked rugs to Professor Sandusky's closed office door.  He turned the handle and peeked in.  No one at home as he suspected.  He lit the lights and went over to the bookcase where before he'd noticed a decorative wooden basin.  It was wide and shallow and the middle of it was darker than the rest of it like it had been burned long ago.  He picked it up and returned to the table with Drea.

"Here we are." Then Figaro helped Drea scoop all the ice into it, including about half of what he'd conjured into the blender.

Following her lead on this blender business, Figaro stood back and crossed his arms.  "So where did you get this thing?"

With less ice in the blender Obderedria could add a measured amount of pumpkin juice to the canister. Normally she would pour the juice then add ice but she also knew what a one cup absence from a bottle of pumpkin juice looked like. Then she started to add fruit as Figgy went off to get a bowl -- why is he going into Professor Sandusky's private room? -- until there was enough for one batch.

She helped him push the last of the ice into the bowl he found then went to secure the lid. "Oh, the blender? Well, you can buy them in stores. Mum got a new one so I was supposed to store the old one away -- this one -- until we could figure out something to do with it. But I must have been distracted because it got put with my school things and I found it at the bottom of my trunk this year."

That caused her face to worry. She could not remember when she would have put the blender in the trunk. She thought she had her trunk all packed before they had to get her new school supplies -- she must have, even if when she and mum had gone shopping was fuzzy -- though there was more rushed packing in the last few days before school even though she had expected to be prepared.

"It's here, so I may as well use it if I can. It works very simple so I don't think magic should adversely affect it." Already she had made two batches of cat food for Puddin' with the recipe nearly set. "The blades at the bottom spin very very fast, it's like it tries to make a tornado or vortex to puree whatever is in it."

Obderedria's fingers fiddled with Professor Sandusky's wife's wand, that both comforting but alien feeling. "Um, would you hold the lid shut?" she asked Fig, even though she had tightly sealed the square lid of black industrial rubber. "You might want a paper towel, there's a little pinprick hole to vent and sometimes things can fly out." The blender was no where near overfull and that rarely happened, anyways.

Figaro listened with distant interest as Drea described where she'd gotten the strange muggle contraption.  There weren't things like that floating around his home, and the only place you could find wierd things like this was probably Professor Fraiser's classroom. 

How the tiny little blades in the bottom (he couldn't even see them) were going to do anything, he couldn't really tell, but he'd just go with the flow.

When Drea had him hold the lid on, he obediently laid his hand over the top of the plastic top and pressed down.  But as soon as Drea picked up the wand and made aim on the machine, Figaro pulled his hand away.

"Wait, you're going to cast?  You really know what you're doing?"he scoffed.  Figaro had seen how first years fared in their early days at Hogwarts, and Drea was using a wand that didn't choose her on a muggle device.  He did not have much confidence that his hand would come out of this intact.

"Yea right."

Figgy's sudden reluctance shattered what self confidence she had mustered about the task. Obderedria's face fell into confused worrying. He was right, it had been a while since she had done it and she had never tried it before with Sandusky's wife's wand and she wanted to say things with the wand had been going well since she had gotten the replacement but -- it just wasn't the same.

"Yea right."

Her unparalleled unease increased to indignation with the tone Figgy was using. What did he really know, he was an older student but he was such a goof off and got poor grades, and he played those mean jokes and he called people names like 'Soggy Bottom' which wasn't very nice even if Heliotrope didn't always catch it -- but she did know how to use the toilet --

"I-I-I've d-done it b-before!"[1] Obderedria tried to sound cross but she stammered all the same. "I know I have! And I wasn't dreaming that time!"

--like the dream where she was in potions class only she was using the blender instead of her cauldron -- and all the workstations were those quiz show podiums Professor Sandusky used in Transfiguration -- and the glowing bats watching from the ceiling as the class was working on making Swelling Solution -- and that dream always ended nightmarish when the solution spilled--

"I'll show you!" Obderedria rose the wand to cast the spell then paused, sticking her free hand on the lid just to be safe. "Inanimatus Locomotor!"

It started fine, the motor spun the little blades and the rusty brown pumpkin juice erupted to swallow the ice and fruit that left solid form -- there was a horrible crunching of the ice and something like a harsh cry over the WHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!


And thats when Obderedria felt that the blender was shaking too much and it happened all at once. The canister launched off the base like a rocket but since her hand was on it she was able to deflect its path to land sideways on the table -- luckily the sides were square rectangular so it didn't go anywhere -- but the base which held the motor was vibrating and spinning and buzzing and it hopped off the table!

It skittered across the floor in an erratic path, useless cord trailing behind it, so the whole thing looked like an oversized cubic mechanical rat jittering here and there, back and forth, approaching one of the couches.

Obderedria's mouth opened and then closed because she didn't know what to do.

But at least the smoothie was safe.

1.

snapshot

Figaro kept on looking skeptical even as the First Year seemed rattled.  And it turned out he was right to doubt this scenario, because she clamped her own hand down on the lid and proceeded anyway! 

At first it seemed to be working, but he couldn't be sure.  The blender machine made an incredibly horrible noise, raucaus and loud in the Commonroom.  It was rattling and shaking, but inside the canister, juice, fruit and ice were ... well...'blending'.

But if things had been going right, they went wrong quickly.  The canister launched from the stand, and the stand was on the loose.  It was still making a whirring noise, and he could see it's moving parts now, but it was tearing around the common room, bashing into things, and whipping it's cord 'tail' about.  It zipped between their feet, and the hard plug snapped Fig painfully on the calf.

"Oi!" 

Figaro got out his own wand and took aim, but it wasn't and easy target to hit!  "Crackiticus! Crackiticus! Crackiticus!  It was a snappy little spell that was good for stunning lawn gnomes or swatting flies, and each mis-aimed spell had a bright popping flash of light to go with.  Fig's spells threw up a rug, dislodged two couch cushions, and exploded a pillow into a cloud murder scene.

At long last, Figaro managed to get close, and then gave it a mighty swift kick.  It flew and smashed against the big Hufflepuff notice board, leafy with papers and pins.  Then the rogue blender fell to the stone floor with an audible crack.  And finally it was quiet.

He turned back to Drea across the room.  "Well done, dummy," he said with a smile.  "Did it work...?"

"Wait, please be careful!!" Obderedria pleaded. She didn't know what was wrong, she usually just had to end the spell and the blender would stop moving but now it had sent it scurrying off as some perpetual motion machine. Wasn't there some kind of spell that ended other spells, hopefully Fig at least knew that one. But his spells banging at the blender didn't sound like nice ones.

"Don't break it!!" And then he kicked it. And it flew. And it snapped, landing motionless with a loud crack.

And-And-And he was smiling there? "Well done, dummy. Did it work...?" And he was smiling??

"FIGGY!!! Why did you have to break it?? That's mine!!" This had to be the angriest Obderedria had even been in her life. Her thick skin had slowly developed to the people that teased her in her muggle school years, teased because she was chubby and she had the green spotted hair and odd things happened around her as her magic came to the surface. But never had she tried to do something nice for someone and they insulted her in her face for it, and that made Fig the worse kind of bully she'd ever faced because while some things hadn't changed with coming to Hogwarts Obderedria had though that in her own house that valued friendship and support that she wouldn't have to face this -- this -- from a housemate, and with rage she never knew she had pent up--

"You're a meanie jerk!!" She could spit acid at him. She couldn't really spit acid at him but she could grab a leftover squashy pear and throw it at Fig. Head, body, she didn't care how it hit him but the projectile fruit whizzed at him in an almost unseen blur.

But anger was not becoming of Obderedria and as soon as she was fired up to do -- something bad! -- to Fig, the rage drained away from her leaving her exhausted. She collapsed into a chair and started sobbing over the table.

"I-I-I didn't mean that to happen!! I try the spells and they work sometimes, and sometimes they don't, and people tell me there's something wrong with my magic and I don't know what that means or what's wrong. And my wand isn't a proper wand, and Professor Sandusky sends it off to get fixed and I don't really know why and he gives me his wife's wand--" The beautiful wand was not flung, but moodily laid gently on the table away from her, "--it's his most treasured possession since his wife died and he loaned to me and he wants me to spread joy with it but I can't!! I've failed him and I'll be such a disappointment if I can't get the wand to work!! And magic does scary things, scary things have happened when I use my magic and there must be something wrong with me--"

"What if I can't be a witch?"

That final thought caused her voice to break. If it was true she wasn't special, she was a useless nobody. Obderedria's face hit the table and she cried under a bushy mound of brown and green hair.

No no no no...  Figaro had broken the first year...! (As well as the blender.)  And immediately she was angry, upset, yelling, throwing a pear at him, and now broken down sobbing on the table.  He turned away so that the squishy pear only hit him in the shoulder.

"No no! I'm sorry!" he said quickly.  "Don't - okay...It's fixable!."  He picked it up.   It was not fixable. 

She was saying a lot of things and Figaro couldn't ken where this explosion of tears and Second Year angst had come from - had he caused it? He'd only bee taking the piss.  Had he really hurt her feelings about the wand thing?  Figaro looked around the room.  There was some minor furniture carnage, and some mess on the table, but none of that was her fault and nothing a Scourgify and a couple Reparo's couldn't fix. 

He approached her at the table, and the girl was shaking with sobs and Figaro felt like genuine crap - he'd thought they were having a laugh.  But she seemed really upset and not about the piece of muggle machinery in his hands.

"You are a witch.  A good witch," he said, trying.  He sat down in the chair next to her, but keeping his elbows in.  Was he supposed to give her a hug?  What would make her feel better and stop crying?

He set the broken blender base on the table, and scratched the back of his neck.

"I'll get you a new blender.  I'm sorry for making fun at your casting.  It's not a big deal."  He lifted his hand and lightly patted her on her shoulder exactly twice. 

If only the world could always be this cozy, as cozy as a wet wooden table under a muffling mound of hair seemed. Maybe this was why Heliotrope would lie on a table when there wasn't anything else for her to do with it. Obderedria didn't even want to think about Fig or anything he would try to do to appease her. Maybe rotten Fig could rot like a rotten fig if she didn't do anything.

"You are a witch," it came through a layer of hair. "A good witch."

That didn't really make her feel any better but make her think reading Oz books that her mother kept from when she was a girl. She couldn't be a Good Witch like Glenda, she didn't have a fru-fru dress and knew how to travel in a bubble -- maybe that made her Dorothy; but she had a kitten instead of a dog and she didn't want to go home -- though she got homesick -- maybe that made her the Cowardly Lion because she wanted to stand up for herself sometimes -- wait, did that make Heliotrope the Tinman because she didn't have a heart? She would get all rusty. Maybe she was Tik Tok because she didn't have an 'Emotion' wind up key. But in both cases that was still a metal something when Helio was a swimmer -- but then who should be the Scarecrow, Dahlia or Philo? They were both smart, though Philo was wobbly and could be the Cowardly Lion -- but then what did that make her, the Wizard of Oz because he wasn't really a wizard just like how she might not be a witch -- not a Wicked Witch, it was her hair and not skin that was green -- though that meant she would have usurped Princess Ozma's right to rule. Did she know any girl that had been raised as a boy, because Princess Ozma was raised as a boy named Tip? -- wait, hadn't Moira McBoid been screaming something about Flying Monkeys the other day?

Her imagination was exhausting her further trying to match everyone she knew with a character from her books. She finally registered Fig's voice again. "I'll get you a new blender.  I'm sorry for making fun at your casting.  It's not a big deal." She felt him pat her shoulder.

Obderedria tiled her head just enough for her brown and green strands to fall away from her bleary eyed tear moistened face. She could forgive Fig -- (mostly forgive him) -- but that blender had been expensive when it was new, couldn't they--?

"But what about Reparo? That was on the test last year. I could mend the plate, I got the secret message from--" Her mind was fuzzy again. "Can't we fix it?"

She looked up at him tear-streaked and pouting.  At least she wasn't sobbing.  Figaro felt horrible having made her cry like that - he wasn't a monster.  Maybe the patting had helped.  He couldn't remember if she was muggle-born or not, but from how she was talking it seemed like it.  Figaro couldn't relate.  Of course he was a wizard, and not often very skilled with a wand, but he was a wizard all the same.  He guessed that probably muggle-borns had a harder time of knowing that? If she even was muggle-born. 

"Erm, I don't know..." he said, looking at the banjaxed blender base.  It was a sad sight - he'd kicked it well properly against a solid stone wall.  He couldn't think why he'd done that; just to stop it's rampage.  It's...harmless ... rampage... 

"It's got a cord and muggle stuff inside there.  Magic doesn't work too well on stuff like that," he said.  Does it? Right?  He didn't take Muggle Studies, but he knew that the cord meant it used 'electronicity' and that nothing like that worked at Hogwarts.  Some kids from muggle families tried bringing in eye-pods, little tiny boxes that made music, or computers, and they mostly just sparked and died, or didn't work at all.

"I mean, we can try," he said, hoping not to disappoint her too much.  "Can't hurt it..."

Then, "D'you want to have a go... or... maybe I should...?"

She knew it had to have worked, despite what Fig said about it being a muggle thing. She knew, it had worked those times she made fish paste for her cat in it. Whenever she had tried the spell before she just focused on the motor, the spinning part because she knew of the the pre-programmed buttons would work -- smoothie, juicer, ice cream/milkshake, puree -- because that was the computerized part. If she could fix that--

--but then Obderedria didn't know how the motor worked, fully, or if it was damaged and how it could be fixed. The wand, raised briefly in hope, was lowered again.

"I don't think I can right now," she said barely above a whisper. She wrapped the cord around the cubic blender base, to keep everything together until when she could figure out how to fix it.

Figgy had offered to find another blender, though he didn't know what they were, and she was sorely tempted to make him pay up. But even that would be mean. Come to think of it, how much was the blender going to be since Fig probably didn't know about muggle money.

"Um, if you can find a replacement blender, when this was new it cost..." She took a spare bit of parchment and worked on some long division. If this was the price and this was the going rate of wizard gold to pounds, that made it--

After a bit of figuring: "That was worth 44 galleons. If I round up the decimal, because I don't want to figure the sickles."

She looked at the smoothie in the canister. Well, at least that had survived.