Obderedria had grown up watching enough cartoons and kid shows in her life to recognize the rare plot thread of when characters for whatever contrived reason temporarily switched bodies with someone else. She had never expected to experience it herself, but then before her hair was permanently altered when her magic manifested, she never would have expected being a witch anyways.

Magic could do strange things indeed if it turned your life into a Saturday morning program.

Still, it had given her some ideas of how to accept this weirdness as business as usual. At first she thought she had to replace Juni in the fourth year's classes throughout the day -- but that was unnecessary as given how nearly everyone was swapped, having the wrong bodies in a second year class was acceptable, as Juni had suggested. Obderedria was slightly relieved because those telly episodes about swapped bodies were embarrassing for all the characters. Professors were children, younger years became upperclassmen, and Heliotrope was a scarecrow that didn't have a wand so she couldn't even attempt to perform magic and they had never been able to figure out where her original body had disappeared to.

Of course if Heliotrope was a scarecrow it threw off all of Obderedria's connections of comparing people she knew to Oz characters.[1] True, sometimes it felt like Heliotrope didn't really have a brain but the scarecrow was supposed to have been smart all along. In that case of relabeling everybody who should be the Tinman?

Juni might be it. She had seemed expressive-less if only mildly cross at breakfast. They planned to meet again for lunch to see how each other's day was going. Further adding to the confusion was the mixed students across the whole of the Great Hall. Even if the people inside were sitting where they always were it looked like the house table borders had been demolished altogether. Obderedria had a brain fart on the order of things so maybe they were sitting at Gryffindor, Slytherin or one of the visiting school tables.

"I wonder how much longer this is going to last," Obderedria said after she had swallowed bites of food. She felt hungrier than she usually did at lunch, taking it that an older body needed more sustenance for energy. "I don't know how my mum's going to take it if I need to write that I've become someone else." Although Juni looked a bit more like her mother, Patricia, then Obderedria did. They both shared black hair as opposed to brown spotted with green.

1.

link

All Juni wanted right now was to have her body back. It had only been a few hours, and she already missed her curly hair, her extra inches of height, and even her bespeckled skin. This body of Drea’s. though it was energetic enough, was not Juni’s body. It just felt foreign and strange, and the muscles that were strong in Drea’s body were not strong in Juni’s own, and vice versa. Drea didn’t have the callouses on her fingers that Juni did, so Juni couldn't even play her harp to pass the time without feeling like she was a newcomer to the instrument. Classes weren’t awful, because at least Juni wasn’t the only one whose body got swapped. She had even heard a rumor that there was one student stuck in a scarecrow body.

She picked at her food, though she was hungry. Juni had a small habit of pushing her food around her plate absentmindedly before actually eating. It was a quality that she and her mother both shared, and one that was a mild source of irritation for her father. “I hope it doesn’t last long. I miss my body and I’m sure you miss yours.” Juni pushed some potatoes to the other side of the plate and then took a bite. “I’m sure the professors will figure out something.”  Juni smiled a little when Drea brought up her mother.

“I know my mum would freak out, and probably somehow find a way to blame my father for it.” She laughed, shaking her head incredulously. Her parents were friendly, but sometimes they bickered over the most ridiculous things. “My dad would probably laugh and trust that it’ll be fixed.” She looked down at her potatoes and started mashing some carrots and gravy into it, making a strange, brown paste with orange chunks. Juni took a bite of it and it tasted surprisingly good. “I think though, your mom will love you no matter whose body you’re in. Moms are neat like that. She might be confused though, especially if she’s a muggle. Is she a muggle?”

Obderedria was experiencing a weird feeling, something she couldn't place until she caught sight of her fork holding hand. A patch of goosebumps between the sparse freckles along Juni's arm. Even the tingle of feeling goosebumps was weird for how Juni must feel them.

Her borrowed shoulders briefly shivered. The reason for Obderedria's discomfort was that Juni had so accurately voiced thoughts about her mum. The kinds of thoughts that worried her.

"She is muggle. Paralegal, you know works with lawers. She keeps rather busy--" She contemplated the piece of chicken pierced on her fork, twirling it without eating, a very rare gesture from her. "--an owl home might not help, outside of my usual schedule of letters home. She hasn't gotten used to owls." Then, spoken softly, "If she even remembers about magic during the week."

“Paralegal.” Juni recognized that word. “So she works with muggle lawyers, right?” She wasn’t sure what exactly that paralegals did, but she also suspected that there were plenty of muggles who had no idea. After all, she was raised by her muggle mother—she was no stranger to technology or muggle behaviors. She picked at her food some before taking a bite of potato. “My mom is a journalist. Before I was born she travelled a lot, wrote about different cultures.” She tapped her mouth with her spoon absentmindedly. “It’s how she met my dad. Now she writes about local issues.”

Juni chewed on the spoon gently, before looking at Drea curiously. Something she said stood out. “Wait what?” Juni thought back to what Drea said and frowned, “Your mom, does she have memory problems or something?”  She asked. Though she intended to sound gentle and caring, her tone was a bit harsh and direct, not at all kind. She didn’t mean to sound that way, but she didn’t think that it was a question that could be viewed as offensive and critical in the wrong tone.

"Yes, with lawyers." The uneaten piece of chicken stayed on the fork. Obderedria brought the fork down and began twisting it in her gravy and potatoes. She wasn't looking directly at it, somewhere just above the corner of her plate--but circles don't have corners!--and her glass.

Her chocolate eyes came up and melted back to the same unfocused view when Juni/her own body asked a question that sounded like a demand--it would have been her own eyes had Juni not been in possession of her body that lunch and Obderedria didn't remember what color Juni's eyes had been.

"I-I don't really know. If she does or not." Even for what Obderedria could remember herself there were too many things that didn't have any answers, like mum knowing she must have known whoever her father was but not knowing who, or forgetting where the entrance to Diagon Alley was--although somewhere she had read or heard that Bedazzling Hexes were very effective against those that couldn't recognize magic, whatever that had to do with it--

Nothing that could easily be explained because Obderedria had no real explanation herself, although she tried anyways. "Well, it's like something Professor Sandusky once told me.[1] Since she doesn't interact with magic every day it's easily possible for her not to notice or think about it unless she did witness a magical event, so maybe she just forgets about it like, something you know you should know but can't place, err, wait, something you know but don't think about until you recall it, then it's not really forgotten but just not thought about frequently--"

The mashed potatoes had been fully whipped by this point as a tongue stuck to her cheek, trying to think about how to say what she wanted to convey. "It's like--I guess she should know about magic because she wasn't too surprised--I mean she was shocked, yes, but not dumbstruck--when we found out I was a witch. Some kind of familiarity. But that familiarity seems to fade when I'm not around her."

1.	Sept 8 - When You Need Someone to Talk To

Juni was not used to hearing her own voice stutter. Is this what she sounded like when she was nervous? She listened to the second year not-so-patiently, tapping her fork at the end of the table rhythmically as she shifted her foot to the same beat. She was trying to be patient, but she really wasn’t. Juni was genuinely not a person who did well waiting, and she was just waiting to get her body back. Waiting for the school staff to figure out where everything went wrong and how to get her body back. Those freckles, that body—it didn’t belnong to Drea. It shouldn’t have Drea inside of it. But it did, and that didn’t help Juni’s patience.

However, as Obderedria actually got to explaining, Juni’s expression softened. It must have been tough; having a mother whose memory was faulty at best. She wondered if sometimes, Drea’s mother couldn’t remember who she was. God, that’d be awful. Juni’s mother drove her crazy, but she was still her mom. If her mother essentially forgot who she was, it’d be heartbreaking. 

Juni doubted she understood the situation correctly, but when it came to the mind, there were some things that were simply difficult to understand. She’d have to ask her father about why someone would be having these kind of memory issues.

“I could ask my father, if you’d like. He’s an obliviator but he’s been working with mind magic his whole life. Maybe he’d be able to help figure out why someone is having memory issues.” Juni took a bite of her food and swallowed, “I mean I am sure Professor Sandusky knows a lot about this sort of thing, but is it his specialty?” She wondered if that one Beauxbatons staff member, Mister Gries, would also be of help in this situation. 

The fork rested on the plate, still staking a piece of gravy cover chicken. Obderedria was slowly tapping the fork with her fingers, letting the utensil rhythmically rock on the edge of her plate.

"Obliviator," she repeated. "They're the ones who--" Did what? Had she once known? The name sounded like an advanced spell but what did the spell do. "Professor Sandusky's specialty is Transfiguration." Now she felt silly for saying something so obvious.

The fork came up, ready for a bite this time. "Or maybe there is nothing to it, since I don't know what mum is thinking all the time I'm away. We always have a letter each week, although the owls unnerve her. After all, just because I thought of something doesn't mean it's real."

It looked like Drea’s mom wasn’t the only one who had memory problems. Juni knew that her body didn’t have any memory problems, so it looked like there was some sort of magical influence if their bodies were switched, right? She didn’t think that memory issues would cross over. Juni wondered if someone had performed some sort of memory altering smell on the Hufflepuff, though she certainly hoped that it wasn’t the case. Maybe she was wrong. She’d have to ask her father about this, he knew so much more about mind magics than she did. “Obliviators. You know, the ones who go in and erase Muggle’s memories when they have learned something they weren’t supposed to learn.” She hopd that was a good enough explanation.

“He used to work somewhere else yet. I’m not really sure what exactly his job was but I think he did memory work there too.”  Her dad had never really discussed the specifics of his previous job with her- maybe he had been some sort of spy! That’d be exciting!

Juni smiled slightly when Drea mentioned the owls unnerving her mom. That was understandable. Juni’s first encounter with an owl had been creepy. Before she went to Hogwarts, she woke up in the middle of the night to see an owl trying to get in through her bedroom window.. It was trying to relay message to her father, but being inexperienced with owls at the time, she had freaked out and ran to her dad crying. It was mortifying, and a subject that was laughed about at family parties.

“Were you scared of owls too? When you first saw them?”

"Oh," Obderedria said softly, hand still to hold another morsel of food on her fork, treating the lettuce leaf from her salad as a pretty butterfly that had come down to rest on her finger and to move would be to disturb it. She'd never had that opportunity, to hold a butterfly. In her muggle schooling they had raised caterpillars in a cage by the window but after they had metamorphosed it had been other girls that got to realese them--maybe the magical world had a spell to turn leaves into butterflies.

She didn't look towards Juni, or only glanced for brief moments, because it was odd to see herself sitting across the table, talking strangely and un-mirrored. "That sounds--" Horrible, but she substituted the word with "--difficult." The job existed to it must have purpose, so what was a not even two year witch in training supposed to say, she who didn't even want the bullies in her life like cheese-headed Jerry from primary or Bog-Goyle to meet sticky ends.

"Well, I thought is was unusual, at first." She had known, or that her mother had said, magic existed ever since Obderedria's hair had taken on the spots and the unnatural growth after her horrendous hair cut. She had many months until her birthday owl and letter from the school, times where she tried to figure out what magic was, what she needed to do to turn it on, but never completed any trick, nothing except her forever green blotched hair.

"I mean, I don't know if I could keep an owl, most of them are so big and they have the talons, and all--but some of them are cute. Or mysterious. Or just funny looking, they all have different faces, if even by face it's just a beak and large eyes and different pointing feathers." It fit, little bits of personality that delivered the mail. It seemed much more interesting than a series of trucks and letter bins.

“I don’t really think it’s difficult to him. He really liked it. And he likes his job now, too. He says it’s his retirement.” She brought her thumb to her lip pensively. “I don’t think Dad really knows what to do when he isn’t working.” When she was home, he spent time with her—but otherwise, her dad was such a busybody that he grew bored quickly with typical leisure activities. To Juni, it didn’t seem like a sad life, but she didn’t yet understand how it could possibly be viewed in a negative way.

She listened to herself—err—Drea, talk about owls having faces. It was so weird. Juni wondered if she really sounded this way to other people, her voice was so annoying. Did Drea feel the same way? Was it weird to hear her own voice and see her own body talking to her with body language that was totally different?  “I think I’d rather have a cat, or a dog.” She pondered, “Or a ferret. I don’t like the idea of having a pet that can fly. Dogs need a lot of attention though…” she had heard that ferrets and cats were more low maintenance, but neither one of her parents wanted to have a pet in the house.