Erin always tended to hang around after Quidditch practice, making sure all the equipment was put up, watching the locker room empty - often, continuing to fly until the sky turned dark. So when practice ended today and he didn't immediately go to shuck off his leathers and green Quidditch robe, it wasn't too unusual.

Trundling back from the locker room with a black box tucked under his arm was slightly less usual, as was claiming a bench on the sidelines instead of taking to the sky. His team was in various states of departure, some already gone, some hanging around to chat in small groups of twos and threes, but otherwise there was no one on the pitch and it made a good backdrop to his serious deliberation. Everything Erin did well, he did on this field. Therefore, it stood to reason he'd do his best brainstorming here.

Erin'd put a lot of thought into the Tournament lately, and into unlocking his "prize." This box had cost him an acromantula sting to the leg, which even by the resident brawler's standards was moderately painful. He'd been too angry and embarrassed about his low score for days after the First Task to even touch it, instead shoving the simple wooden box under his bed after a brief preliminary investigation failed to unlock its secrets. The box didn't deserve the way he'd treated it, angry kicks and silent treatment for every taunt he'd gotten about his losing strategy. Punching his way through the maze hadn't worked too great for his scores, and it didn't make the box pop open either. But he couldn't ignore it anymore. Things had changed.

Specifically, an ickle bony batlike horse had appeared over the lock, which Erin took as a clue. He knew what it was, though he'd never seen a thestral himself - it wasn't like there were that many nightmare horses around. So he sat now and he stared at it, and he thought about thestrals. Death. Invisibility. Meat.

Maybe he should rub some steak on the lock and see what happened.

After practice Naomi went to the locker room to pull off some clothes to tend to some blossoming bruises and sores with lotion and ointments and then cover them up with some large band-aids. So Naomi ended up wearing a black tank top and having a few tan patches decorating her shoulder and arms, while her boots were stuffed into her bottomless pit of a bag with her other Quidditch gear, but she let her white trousers hang around her ankles and tied her green sweater around her waist. From there she closed her temperamental bag, threw it over the shoulder, and then walked out onto the field.

The well trimmed grass of the pitch tickled her toes as she was content to head back to the castle and search out Blake before it got too late (else she'd just break curfew with him without much thought), to either recount the Quidditch match earlier that day or cheer him up, if needed. But Naomi's bare feet didn't carry her far until something caught her attention.

She stopped behind the bench where Erin was sitting like a statue and staring at a box like a zombie. Fixated on one of the Tetra-Wizard tournament boxes, to be exact. She hadn't seen one since the match, and she hadn't seen one up close since Tracy lugged her off to do some Care of Magical Creatures assignment while he mused over the box and rambled on about nothing while she gave him a few bruises; so the little picture of a thestral looked out of place to the witch.

So she looked at the box for a few moments before she decided that Erin was daydreaming or falling asleep. Either way he was being completely unproductive. Naomi took a step toward the bench and then leaned over the boy's shoulder, "Maybe if you stare at it like a zombie long enough," she whispered with a curiously serious tone, "you'll turn invisible."

It took every ounce of the witch's being to keep her face as serious as possible, without a hint of a smile, and wait for Erin to respond.