Wordless magic was really very hard, Ambrose had decided. Since returning to school he'd tried his best to put in practise again and again. Some days he thought he was getting somewhere, others he was going backwards again, or so it felt.

He knew it wouldn't be easy, wordless magic was NEWT stuff, and he was a fourth year, and not a particularly good fourth year either. A combination of his magical accidents, slightly slow mind and the way his concentration wandered stacked up quickly each year. However positive his father was about trying wordless magic, and Professor Kesali with all his firewhiskey suggestions and slightly over the top gestures of support, Ambrose couldn't help but feel like he'd taken on a challenge far bigger than he could manage.

Professor Thomas was a Professor from Salem, and from what Ambrose had overheard from a gaggle of Salem students, she seemed to specialise in some niche spellcasting, ritual stuff. It was a long shot, but he wondered if her different approach to magic might give him some alternative method, a solution, something, anything.

So he'd written her a note.

Dear Professor Thomas,

My name is Ambrose Pepper and I'm a Gryffindor Fourth Year. I am not sure if I should ask you this, or whether you can help, but I am trying to learn how to cast spells without words, because I keep causing accidents because I make mistakes when I try to say the spells. Professor Kesali is helping me, but I heard you might be a good person to ask. Since you're not from Britain, I wondered if you did it a different way. Wordless spellcasting, I mean. Would you be able to help me? I know I'm not from Salem.

If not, sorry to have troubled you.

Ambrose Pepper

Now he stood with his fingers crossed in his pocket, lurking around the Salem Dorms in the hope of catching her, though rather looking like he was trying to stalk a Salem girl instead.

Then, he saw her.

"Professor Malin?" He called, incredibly nervous. "Its Ambrose Pepper, Professor. I er... wrote you a note."

It had been a quiet day for Malin, mostly spent in writing letters to her students who were still in the U.S. but wanted to continue her studies. Just how many letters she'd gotten on that topic was nice. Good to know they missed her. Things at Hogwarts were a little quieter, and most of her teaching had been with just one or two of her students. Didn't seem like most of the other schools had interest in her work, just yet.

She was just returning from sending a pile of the letters when she heard the boy's voice.

"Professor Malin? Its Ambrose Pepper, Professor. I er... wrote you a note."

The boy wasn't from Salem, that much was immediately obvious. One of the Hogwarts...Gryffindor, if she was remembering the colors correctly. That sort of distinction seemed more important over here.

"A note, hmm? I can find a minute or two. Want to talk about it in my office?" She motioned towards a doorway just a few feet from where they were standing. A pile of newspapers and what looked to be a very large piece of orange, holey cheese cut into a triangular slice were visible inside it. "Just made a fresh pot of coffee. Trust me, you don't want to try my tea." Tea was one of those things Malin kept intending to learn about. Of course, there were a thousand distractions butting in on that project wherever she went. And it was somewhere below organizing her tiny office on the list of should do eventually oh hello there distractions.

OOC: completely wrote Professor Malin by mistake, whoops

"Okay," Ambrose replied a little timidly, and followed Professor Thomas into her office. If she hadn't yet found or read his note, it would be a bit difficult - if she wasn't the right person to ask, then now he'd waste her time in person too. Merlin…!

"Thanks." His eyes took in the clutter and the coffee was hard to miss.

"Heh, yes, I heard from my uncle that tea isn't very popular in America, at least not as popular as here. I'm still getting used to coffee, its quite bitter." Ambrose admitted, trying to be as pleasant as possible.

"I thought you might have got my note, but you must be busy, I won't take your time if you're the wrong person to ask. Hum," Ambrose's fingers knotted in front of him.

"I'm trying to learn wordless magic, Professor Kesali suggested I try because I tend to trip over saying spells, always have. However many times I repeat it and say it in my head, more often than not it just comes out different. And when I mean different, I mean explosions, accidents, and everyone hates me." He shrugged and blushed.

"The Salem students said you teach them different styles of magic, and I erm… I wondered if you might have any ideas or ways that might work better for me. I'm not having much progress with it so far, you see."

Now that she thought about it, she had gotten a note from an Ambrose Pepper in the pile of letters she was holding. Hadn't had time to open it yet, but from what he was saying it sounded like she could give it a shot.

"I'm not too busy. And there's some cream and sugar there if you want it." She nodded in the direction of the coffee pot, which had managed to escape the mess so far. Any mess that infringed on her coffee had to get cleaned up.

She set the pile of letters down on her desk, then waved a pile off a half-buried chair with her wand. Then she pulled out Ambrose's note, sliced it open, and sat down to read, a process that only took a minute. At least the note was short. "Hmm. Well, most of what I'd teach falls more under wandless magic than wordless, but with what you've said it might help. I'm up for trying." A smile across her desk at the boy. There were worse things than challenges. "It's not like my office can get too much messier."

Just about everything she had in there was easily replaceable, anyways. "What classes are you taking now? It'll help me know where to start." What classes young Hogwarts students took in their fourth year wasn't really the sort of thing she'd remember.

Ambrose tentatively helped himself to coffee, making it very pale and adding sugar. One day he'd be able to bear its bitter black taste, but not at the moment.

"I take all the normal classes," Ambrose explained, settling in the recently unearthed chair, careful not to spill the coffee. "Charms, transfiguration, defences, astronomy, potions, herbology, history and then care of magical creatures." As he listed them off on the fingers of one hand, his gaze turned to watching those fingers to recall all the lessons.

"I don't much mind creatures, herbology and potions because they're practical but I don't have to use my wand so much, I can just use my hands." He explained, dropping his hand back and sniffing the coffee with trepidation, "Astronomy and history aren't wand-wielding lessons usually, so its more charms, transfiguration and defences that cause me trouble."

He cautiously sipped the coffee, wincing ever so slightly, but more at the heat.

"I don't think I'd ever be able to do wandless magic, Professor, with words and a wand is hard enough, without words harder still. I'm not a Ravenclaw." Ambrose smiled awkwardly, self conscious of his mediocre intelligence which he made up for with bags of effort, persistence and loyalty.

While her relative unfamiliarity with Hogwarts curriculum did mean that some of the details of Ambrose's classes were lost on her, but it did seem like a normal, unambitious selection. It did make her think that she'd need to learn more about their houses, if the children thought they were that important. "There's lots of kinds of wandless magic, and not all of them are just about aping what's done with wands. So don't worry about that."

The piles of paper on her desk were, as always, a little disorganized, and she kept speaking while she dug through them. "Sounds like you just have a little trouble focusing. I should have just the thing...somewhere." Somewhere proved to be at the bottom of a small, unsteady stack topped with a coaster. She pulled several of the papers out and started flipping through them. "There we go. Most of these are heavy on herbology, so they-"

One piece of paper was pulled out and thrust back onto the pile before she resumed paging through them. "Wait. Have you studied anything relating to rituals before? Divination, maybe?"  Seemed like she might have to go read up on the Hogwarts curriculum more to do this right.

"Rituals, Professor?" Ambrose queried nervously, the coffee poised between his fingers.

"No, I don't study Divination, I chose Creatures - I'm better with my hands and nobody in our family has an inner eye. We're practical types not seers." He explained humbly to the American teacher.

"Focusing, yeah, I do have a bit of trouble, but I try really hard, it just doesn't... happen." His shoulders gave a little droop. "But I want to focus - I want to do magic well and cast spells without having to take five minutes getting in incantation to come out of my mouth properly. Would divination help? I could pick it up, but I'd be a year and a half behind everyone..."

"Divination can be helpful, but you don't need to have studied it. Just helps me to know." There wasn't much in her pile of papers that tied into magical creatures, well, not living ones. And the dead ones could raise eyebrows at home, she wasn't sure how that carried over here.

"Have you always had this trouble focusing, or is it a more recent thing?" More rustling noises, and then she looked back up at the boy across her, her brow wrinkled in thought. "There's a lot of ways of focusing magic besides wands, it's just the most common one."

Old reports on runic traditions, a small green and gold football helmet that had somehow gotten flattened by paperwork, and ahh, there, that. "But it's not the only one. We can try a few others, take it slow, see how it goes."  She pulled the helmet out for good measure and turned it in her hands. Might be fixable. "Sure I can find some that are a bit more hands on, if you think that will help." She smiled at Ambrose. "The most common techniques don't always work well for everybody. Don't worry about it too much yet."

"Always." Ambrose replied grimly. "Ever since I started using magic, everyone told me I'd grow out of it, but whatever I hear up here," he gestured to his head, "doesn't come out my mouth."

He watched as Professor Thomas rifled through the paperwork mounted in piles around her desk. She looked like a busy lady, but her face was kind and he liked the way her hair had tight corkscrews that bounced. For a Professor, she was very pretty.

She had clasped a strange sort of hat in both hands a moment, which Ambrose wondered was to do with his question, and the cup of coffee between his fingertips lowered in surprise.

"Worry? I try not to, but when I blow up something it tends to worry the rest of the class." The Gryffindor was still staring at the helmet in Malin's hands.

"Professor, is that something to do with what you're proposing?"

"Think it's time for you to try something new, then."  Malin brushed her hand over the crushed helmet, and it reassembled itself, the plastic smoothing, the colors turning bright and crisp once again. "And I can deal with stuff blowing up. Don't worry about me."

She placed the helmet gently in her right hand, and extended it to Ambrose. "This? I guess it does. Personal items, the things that mean a lot to you because of who or where they're from, can be pretty important for some of this. This here, it's from my hometown. My girlfriend got it for me a couple years back." And it reminded her of just how much she missed Nadira. Letters and pictures weren't nearly the same thing.

"Think that you probably have something of that kind laying around somewhere. Anything particular come to mind?" It was something to start with. And here, here she could use another project, another thing to do. Another student to help out in her own obscure way.

Ambrose put down his mug and reached out to receive the proffered helmet, examining it with raised eyebrows.

"Think that you probably have something of that kind laying around somewhere. Anything particular come to mind?"

"Heh," Ambrose thought about it, and a memory came to mind. "Yeah, programme from when we went to the Holyhead Harpies the summer after my first year at Hogwarts. Went with my brother, Tim, and my cousins, Theta, Zeta and Eta, and our parents, well apart from Aunt Catherine, because she's a Muggle… Whole family outing as a treat, our first year finished, Theta's OWLs done."

He turned the helmet slowly in his hands, examining it without taking it in, his mind already back to imagining the roar of the crowd and the sound of the brooms whipping past in the summer wind, his mother getting so excited she hugged Uncle Octavius when the Harpies scored from far back.

"Is this a helmet for quadpot or something?" Ambrose asked, snapping back to the present. "Not much of a helmet if it gets flattened." He thought about it, and turned it in his hands as if he were considering putting it on. "Cool that your, er," Ambrose blushed. He'd never come across a lady with a girlfriend before, and as an awkward teenager it was hard to know how to repeat it back. 

"Sounds just perfect." There was something of a spark in Malin's eyes, as if Ambrose's recollection had spawned one of her own. She'd managed to attend a Packers game or two in her time. Crowds and green and gold and cheese formed out of foam and paint.

She shuffled papers again, knowing just what she was looking for for once. And finding it, among the sheets she'd pulled out earlier. "And the helmet's a model. It's for...American football." That was one of those linguistic oddities that tended to trip her up, over here. Outside the U.S., really.

"The real ones are padded and heavier.  To help keep head injuries down." A little bit of a shrug, didn't seem that they always worked too well. The Vikings, of all the teams.

"It's the Quidditch world cup this year, isn't it? You planning to go?" She leaned forward, evidently curious, and a piece of paper wavered in her hand.

"Oh right, yeah, American football. It's a bit like rugby isn't it?" Ambrose asked. "I er, used to play football - I went to a Muggle primary school like. We heard about it. Seemed a bit stupid if you had to wear like a helmet and pillows round yourself. Football you just wear shin-pads, like."

Ambrose gestured to his own shin in illustration. He'd been the one tearing around with the other boys at breaktime on the school playground in Biggleswade, aged seven, coming home with the odd tear in his jumper, trousers, a grazed knee, grass stains. He very much doubted they'd have played American football at breaktime if you had to wear a helmet.

"I dunno." Ambrose replied honestly. "I'm not sure if my family have bought tickets or anything. They're kind of expensive. Money's been a bit tighter since Mum's been in St Mungo's, so I kind of don't ask. I wish I could though, looks awesome. I'll probably buy the Quidditch magazines and stuff and follow it all in that. Or I'll listen to it on the radio and close my eyes and imagine." He shrugged, not too fussed about making do.

"You going to be here for the Quidditch? What happens when this year is over anyhow? Do you all go home and we never see you again?"

"Helmets are better than too many blows to the head, which tends to happen with American Football." Her impression was that Rugby wouldn't be much better in that respect, but she'd never put that much research into it. In the end, she was mostly a home team sort of girl.

And explaining the risks of sports injuries to the young seemed to fall solidly enough into wasted time, given a certain tendency to to view themselves as if, not invincible, as far less prone to risk than they might actually be.

She wrapped one hand around the edge of her desk when he spoke of his mother. "How long has your mother been in St. Mungo's? And I don't know if I could manage the tickets either, I'd want to bring Nadira over to attend and that's expensive enough."

A bit of a frown slipped into her expression at Ambrose's last question. "We'll go home yes, or at least at the end of summer. I expect some will be back to visit in time, or at least write." It'd be a bit of trouble to get letters sent, unless one partly used Muggle means, at least.

"Since the summer before last." Ambrose explained, "year and half or so." He frowned. He tried not to think too often how long it had been since things fell apart and focused on the future and the hope that his mother would get better instead.

"That's a shame we'll have just got used to you being here before you go again. Perhaps we'll visit you guys next time?" Ambrose asked brightly, excited at such a prospect, despite realising that if it was every 4 years, he'd have left Hogwarts whether he stayed for NEWTs or not.

"My uncle's kind of been in America for… well uhm, actually it's a bit complicated, but he's spent a lot of time over there. So I hope some day I can go too and see America. I've not travelled much." The Gryffindor explained, sipping the coffee again, thoughtfully. "Have you been lots of places?"