Winifred was so bored. Her mother had brought her to work with her today. Winnie loved muggle everything, and had begged to go... And even though her mother insisted that she would be bored and wouldn't like it, she'd eventually given in. At least if Winnie came with her to work, she wouldn't get her head filled by nonsense by her Aunt Leola. Her mother had, however, forbade her from going to level two to bother her Uncle Archer. Aurors were too busy, she'd said, to be badgered.

But her mother was busy doing paperwork. And Winifred had decided to go and see what else there was to see around Level Three while she was there.

She was distracted by her nosing about when she noticed one of her mother's co-workers doing something that looked very Divination like. Divination was one of Winifred's favorite subjects, and also one of her very best. She approached the woman cautiously, peering at what she was doing with curiosity. "Is that Divination?" she asked. "What exactly are you doing? I'm Winifred Oliver, by the way. I'm Ivy's daughter."

Aisling had just been returning to her desk after finally unearthing a pair of old reports. These were, along with a pile of poetry books and one of her older divination references, carefully balanced in her arms.

A child in Level 3 wasn't quite what she had expected, though with it being break she supposed it wasn't too out of line. There were far worse places to let a young girl wander about. And, while Aisling had enough work that she'd felt compelled to actually visit the office that day, it was not such a workload that she couldn't answer a few questions. "I was just analyzing a few old reports via Divination. Rhapsodomancy, to be precise."  She smiled, and, after adjusting her grip on the pile, decided that a handshake would be rather impractical.

"I'm glad to meet you, Winnifred. I'm Aisling Knight." She had met Ivy, of course, with that many years in Accidents and Catastrophes Aisling knew a reasonable percentage of the employees there. She could not, however, remember hearing too much about the other woman's daughter. 

"Ooh!" Winifred exclaimed. "I quite like Divination! It is one of my best classes at Hogwarts. That and Muggle Studies! I didn't know you could use both for the same job!" This Aisling Knight must have a fascinating job within the committee if she got to use both! Winnie never would have dreamed there was a way to combine her two favorite subjects into one career.

But Winifred could not remember ever hearing about Rhapsodomancy before. But then again, Divination had been much more fun before Professor Cosmos had taken over this year. She was all analytical and serious about it. Divination was supposed to be something special! The inner eye! All of that stuff. Either you had the gift for it or you didn't. And Winifred had always considered herself as a person who had the gift!

"What exactly is Rhapsodomancy, Miss Knight?" Winifred asked. "I've never heard of it before! Is it very difficult to do?" She hoped that the lady wouldn't be offended by her questions... And hopefully Winifred's mother wouldn't come along and drag her away and fuss at her for pestering her colleagues. She'd been instructed to keep to herself. Winifred just wasn't very good at that. She was a very social being, of course.

Ah, such enthusiasm. Aisling found herself grateful that she had managed a bit of sleep, or it would merely have exhausted her. As it was she gave the girl an encouraging smile. "Call me Aisling, please. And Rhapsodomancy uses fragments of poetry chosen at random for predictions. I've been using it to analyze some of our older work, to find those cases which are most likely to become problematic in the future."

An approach she kept intending to write about, but there never really was the time.  So it just kept getting pushed further and further towards the future. Towards that nebulous 'when I get to it'. For now, there were more immediate, and energetic things to deal with. "It's not that difficult. If you would like, I can show you.  I'll just need to set these down."

Her desk wasn't too much of a mess at the moment. She'd spared some time the previous week to make sure all of the cups about were clean and repaired. There was even a new selection of candy. With her favorite jellybeans occupying the place of honor, of course. But good enough to show.

Winifred was surprised when the lady told her to call her by her first name. It wasn't often that grown ups afforded Winifred that luxury. She smiled brightly, feeling quite proud of this fact, and carried a chair over to the other side of Aisling's desk after she offered to teach her how to use this nifty new trick called Rhapsodomancy.

"I would love it very much if you could teach me how to do it!" Winifred said- trying to reign in her excitement, but doing a pretty miserable job of it. She watched as Aisling reorganized her desk to make room to teach her how to do the new kind of divination.

"Do you have to be very good at poetry to get it to work?" Winifred asked. "Do you write your own or do you use someone else's poetry? I'm afraid I'm really not clever enough to write my own poetry." She was barely clever enough to compose decent paragraphs for her homework assignments- something as meaningful and artistic as poetry was certainly out of her grasp.

Aisling busied herself with putting the papers away, and retrieving that small dish of candy, which she motioned Winifred towards, before speaking further. "Oh, no, I'd never have the patience for it were I required to write my own poetry." A small jar, opaque and rustling, was pulled from the desk as well.

"I simply find a lengthy piece of poetry I enjoy, then separate it into sections. Then you incorporate whatever it is you wish for predictions regarding-" With a flick of her wand, a section of paper flew up from the others, wrapped itself around the jar, then slowly melded itself into it. "After shaking the jar, you pull a fragment of paper from it to consider."

Another flick sent the jar floating over towards Winifred. "Go on, try it."

Winifred's eyes grew wide when Aisling motioned at the candy. Hesitantly she picked out a few pieces, popping all of them into her mouth at once. The flavors mixed well enough. Of course, it was really hard to go wrong with a mouthful of candy. She loved sweets- so much. Winnie really liked this Aisling woman so far. She was nice and gave her candy and talked to her... And she didn't talk to Winifred like she was a complete idiot, which was unusual for her interactions with adults.

Winifred listened as Aisling explained how it worked. She watched as she flicked her wand, and then took the jar as it floated over toward her. Winnie wasn't sure what she wanted to know about... What kind of thing she needed predictions for. Winifred never knew what to focus on when she was in Divination, either. She was good at the class, but it took her a while to really focus.

She kept a firm grip on the jar as she chewed her lip... Winifred decided to think about Zel as she shook the jar. They'd had a lot of fun at the Yule Ball... And she had a very big crush on him now. Not that it was surprising. Winifred got crushes easily, and Zel was super nice and stuff. Winnie squeezed her eyes shut and shook the jar a few times, then pulled out a scrap of paper.

"But there's nothing so sweet in life as love's young dream,"[1] Winifred blushed furious after she read it out loud and dropped the scrap back into the jar. "How silly!" she protested.

1.	Poem "Love's Young Dream" by Thomas Moore ~ link

Well, that was rather odd. All of Aisling's tools for this had been focused to her work, and yet this girl had managed to tear them away from that so easily. "It's not silly at all." It rather brought back flashes of memory from her own school years, when she'd been a quiet girl trying to sneak gifts to a Slytherin boy. Such things brought the soft smile of nostalgia to her expression.

"And you have quite the talent for this. Go on, try it again." The jar rustled a bit with another flick of her wand. "Focus on something different this time." Her smile shifted back to encouragement from her earlier nostalgia.

"What forms of Divination have you studied so far? There's so many, I find myself having trouble keeping track." There were a few she practiced regularly, but beyond that, she kept only a passing interest in other sorts.

"Of course it is silly," she said. Not rudely, but she didn't want strangers to realize she was a boy crazy little girl. She was trying to do Grown Up divination, she didn't want Miss Knight to think she was just a silly little girl who didn't know what she was doing. (However accurate that thought process might be.)

This time she was told to focus on something different. Winnie wasn't sure what, though. She didn't think about much other than cute boys and whether or not she was going to manage to pass her classes. Instead, as Winifred held the jar, she focused on trying to impress Aisling Knight with her Divination attempt.

Reaching into the jar, she pulled another bit of poetry. "Alive--two-fold--The Birth I had..."[1] Winifred looked at the bit of poetry after she read it out loud, brow furrowed. "No, that's not right," she said quietly, to herself more than to Aisling. This meant something. "Not two..." But she wasn't sure exactly what was wrong with it. She just knew that the number two wasn't the appropriate tally.

She looked back up at Aisling when she asked what Divination she had the chance to study. She shook her head, clearing her mind. It felt foggy. "Just what we've done in class," she said. "Crystal balls, tea leaves, tarot, astrology... Stuff like that. I figure we'll get to do all the fun and different stuff after we take our OWLs. NEWT level stuff has got to be super awesome."

1.	"I am Alive, I guess" by Emily Dickinson

Well, that was an odd reading, and no mistake. Aisling couldn't help but wonder what Winifred had been focusing on it, but it would be far too awkward to ask. Instead she shuffled around in her desk for a bit. The peril of having so many books was that you occasionally wound up with duplicates, and such had happened with books relating to this very subject. "I always struggled with tea leaves, myself. Prefer to have my drinks and my divination separate."

And there was the book. The dark brown of the cover had a few scratches, smudges, and tea stains on it, but was still quite respectable. A useful introduction to the subject of Rhapsodomancy, at least. Aisling set it down on the desk and pushed it towards "Here, I have an extra copy. You're welcome to it."

A bit more fussing with the desk-searching for things did rather make a mess of it. "Would you like some tea as well? I think I could rather use some."

"I did at first," she told Aisling. "But my mum says it's because I'm not very good at focusing, and that divination takes lots of focus. So I try very hard now! I don't get distracted nearly as often as I used to!" Which was true. It helped that Winifred loved the subject and felt like she was actually quite good at it. There weren't many things in the realm of academics that Winifred was good at, so she clung tightly to the few she managed to perform even at a mediocre level in. And now that she was studying extra hard in other stuff, Winnie had hopes she might make it past her fifth year. She'd never before thought herself capable of that.

When Aisling pushed a book toward her, all about this Rhapsodomancy stuff, Winnie's eyes grew wide. She reached out, picking up the book as thought it were incredibly fragile. A stranger had never given her a gift before! Especially not something like this! "Wow, really?" she asked quietly before clutching the book tightly to her chest. "Thank you so so so so sooooo much! I promise I'll read every word of it!" And she would practice, too, if it was easy enough to do on her own.

Then Miss Knight offered her some tea, and Winifred nodded enthusiastically. "Yes please! That would be very nice!" She was doing her very best to be at least a little bit polite. It wasn't often adults treated her so nicely, and not like she was a pest or a burden. Even her mother and father got short tempered with her a lot of the time. Her mother especially. "And we don't have to even look at the tea leaves!" she said to Aisling. Even though she Winifred loved it, she wasn't sure she could remember all of the stuff without her book to guide her.

"Is this book very difficult to read?" Winnie asked. Most books she read had lots of pictures, even the ones she used to practice her magic with. Mr. Morgan had helped her find books which had pictures and easy to follow instructions for her wand magic. Hopefully this book would be simple enough that Winnie could understand without having to get too much outside guidance.

"It sounds like you've been making a great deal of progress." Aisling smiled as she started the tea with a few more waves of her wand. "And most of the book is relatively simple. There's some more advanced techniques in the back, but best to start with the basics."

She pulled a folder filled with pale blue sheets of paper out of her desk, and offered it to Winifred. "It doesn't have many samples of poetry, though. You're welcome to start with these, if you wish. Though I've always  found choosing the works yourself to be helpful." It was rather a process she enjoyed, even if it was something else to do as well.

"There isn't that much else that's required. It's quite simple, for how little it seems to be used these days." Then she turned, and fussed over the tea for a moment. It was almost ready. "And I fear the only thing I've read in tea leaves for some time is that I should drink more tea."

Winifred nodded. Yes, start with the basics, she could do that! She'd just start at the front of the book and work her way through it. It might take a while, but it would be a good task for the school year. "I will definitely go through the book and practice! It's so fun!"

She could pick out some poetry of her own eventually. She might have to get some help finding it, though. Because Winifred didn't know anything about poetry. Maybe one of her professors could help her find some. Cy probably knew how to find it. The poetry Winnie was aware of probably wasn't exactly appropriate for this particular brand of divination. And it might be fun, to read some poetry. Not all of it had to be horrible drivel, right?

"Well, I will use it. It seems really fun and different. Sometimes it's nice to do something that isn't so cryptic and depressing." As much as she loved  divination, it tended to be a pretty sad subject. All the omens and bad signs. Winifred wished that people divined happier things more often... rather than death and tragedy.

Winifred was glad for the tea. It was something to occupy her hands. (Which were always fidgeting, she was constantly  needing something to do.) "Do you know any other kinds of divination that aren't used often that would be easy for me to do and learn on my own?" Winnie asked.

"I can't think of anything, though I would expect that the library at Hogwarts might have something. It's rather extensive." Aisling sipped at her own cup of tea, and let herself finally sink into her chair. As much as she hated to admit it, even to herself, she was tired. Especially now.

She beckoned for Winifred to take a seat. The other chair, though small and currently stuffed into a corner, did not currently house any books, stacks of paperwork, or other items. "You'd mentioned enjoying Muggle Studies? It's been a long time since I took that particular class. What are they teaching in it these days?"

A little bit of steam rose off the tea, and Aisling wrapped her hands a bit tighter around the cup. She was much more curious about the state of Hogwarts recently than she had once been.

"All of the good stuff is in the restricted section," Winnie said to Aisling. "At least, that's what everybody says. Maybe I'll ask the Divination professor about it when I get back at Hogwarts! If I get confused I bet she could help me a little bit with the stuff." She was actually super excited about the fact that she would be able to practice some new Divination stuff.

"A few days ago, when I was in the library at Hogwarts and the librarian was helping me get some books to study for winter break and next semester he said that I stated to give a prophecy!" she announced proudly to Aisling. For the most part she'd been trying to not brag about that much. She still wasn't sure if she believed Mr. Morgan or not.

"But I think he just wasn't hearing me right. Cause I mean, prophecies are a big deal and stuff and if I had given one I think the Ministry would have some kind of like alarm that dings. Since they collect them in those little glass ball things. But he says I only said like half a sentence before I came out of the trance." She shrugged a little. "But I don't remember anything of it. And I think that's something I'd notice, if I was having visions and stuff. I'm just really good at Divination, that's all."

"Oooh all kinds of stuff! We talked about where humans come from! And how to use muggle monies and clothes and fitting in AMONGST THE MUGGLES. It's all very exciting! I'm going to stay with my friend Cy over break and she lives in a muggle town! I'll get to see real muggles just living their lives. I'm quite excited!"