"Lumos."  Nothing.   "Lumos."  Again, nothing.  "Lumos."  The tip of the girl's short wand began to glow, feebly.  Violet reached down and used the quill in her left hand to scratch three hashmarks onto the parchment on the desk next to her, two under a column labeled 'Failure' and one - after a moment of hesitation - under 'Partial Success'.  There were three additional columns, headed 'Success', 'Unexpected Effect', and 'Notes/Impressions'.

The column headed 'Success' had very few hashmarks beneath it.  'Partial Success' had a few more and 'Unexpected Effect' almost none, but 'Failure' sported a small forest.

Violet stood alone in the first empty classroom she'd found after leaving the Ravenclaw Tower.  Since she was practicing endlessly anyway, she'd begun taking some statistical notes.  It bothered her that she hadn't thought to do this earlier...she suspected that managing to come to terms with Hogwarts' complete lack of computers had produced an aversion to ideas which she'd normally have used one for.  But statistics, as a discipline, was much older than computers.

"Nox."  Nothing.  "Nox." The wand went out, and Violet added two more hashmarks.  She switched the wand to her left hand and the quill to her right, and started again.  The length of time she'd been at this already spoke to her determination, but she kept her face neutral and composed, her grip on her wand only as firm as necessary.

"Lumos.  Lumos.  Lumos.  Lumos."

Nine letter word for 'destructive fiery force downplayed by the Ministry to not exist.'

Philo flipped over his paper to check that he was attempting the Fiendishly Difficult Crossword from the Daily Prophet. He was. They had borrowed another page out of The Quibbler again. Philo hated it when he had to cross reference issues to solve one puzzle, they should stick to the lines of one publication.

Usually Philo saved his crossword for breakfast or the common room but sometimes he had better wit teasing out the answers by walking the castle. Sometimes the odd portrait or tapestry held an inspiring clue. Especially when they used obscure historical witches or wizards that never made the chocolate frog cards, such as Delanzo the Mad Alchemist that pestered students with potion tips around the dungeons.

Philo was starting to feel his arm cramp and sore so he ducked into the nearest classroom he figured would be empty. However it wasn't empty, save for a red headed girl repeating wand words and motions.

"Oh, sorry. Ostrander, isn't it?" Philo recognized Violet as one of the first years in the house. He'd never seen anyone repeat a spell so rigidly before. Not even Heliotrope LeJean when the half-mer got stuck in one of those mental loops. "Having difficulty, or...?"

Violet raised a finger on her wand hand in a peremptory gesture as she leaned down to mark four more hashes under 'Failure', then turned to the boy who'd entered.  He wasn't in her year, but she'd seen him in the Tower...he fiddled.  What was his name...?  Violet summoned her mnemonic for him - an imagined scene of the boy with his hands deep in the guts of an old-timey television, scraping at the parts with a metal file.  Television...Farnsworth...filing...ah, Philo.

"Yes...Violet."  She paused for a moment to consider how to answer his second question.  "Yes, in more than one way.  I...can't do spells reliably, which is making certain classes very difficult.  I am trying to practice, but it does not seem to be improving matters.  And I am trying to quantify that problem, but whatever bizarre joke the Universe is playing on me, it apparently thought it'd be even funnier if I couldn't use a computer to figure it out, which makes analysis a jot less efficient."

Violet looked back at the parchment that held her data log, so she wouldn't have to see the pity, condescension or contempt that usually followed someone asking about her problems...they were all about equally unpleasant.

When Violet admitted to what she was doing had an eyebrow raising moment of interest crossed with confusion. Having grown up in the magical world Philo knew that spells could be deceptively difficult. It seemed easy if you did the motions and said the incantation right but the intent to cast was still a big variable of the spell.

"So, you must be trying different wand movements, different pronunciations then? Trying to find a pattern?" Philo stuffed his crossword into his shoulder bag. "What you might need is--"

"rbbbpt, fartknockers."

"Dang it, Arlaug!" On delayed reaction Philo had thought that if his pet swear frog had stowed away in his bag again it would be vocal about being disturbed. Such was the case. Philo lifted the dark green, purple eyed frog out of the bag and placed it gently on a desk, where its throat ballooned and deflated indignantly.

"Sorry." Again. "Um...where was I?"

Violet looked back at Philo cautiously as he began speaking...unlike most people, he didn't seem to be judging at all, which was a pleasant surprise.  But it sounded like he didn't entirely understand the problem.  She shook her head and was about to interrupt, when something else interrupted first.

Despite herself, Violet laughed.  When the boy removed a small frog from his bag and placed it on a desk, certain remarks she'd overheard about Philo suddenly made a great deal more sense.  Though the fact that frogs existed that swore made a great deal less sense, and brought her mind firmly back to her problems.  Her smile vanished.

"You were going to give me a suggestion based on a partly right presumption," Violet replied.  "I'm actually doing the movements and incantations precisely the same, except for switching hands occasionally so arm tiredness doesn't come into it.  All my professors say I have those parts perfect.  According to Madam Nagde, there are maladies that can affect a witch's magic directly, but I don't show any signs of those, and according to Professor Kesali there's nothing wrong with my wand.  The only thing left is the mental component...which can't be too dependent on every aspect of your mental state, or no one would be able to produce reliable results outside of featureless sealed rooms with constant Memory Charms to 'reset' them each time.  So, I'm trying to note what's different when it works and when it doesn't - but since I don't know for sure which mental states are important, I have to track every random thing I'm thinking or feeling and do it so many times that the important bits should start showing correlations."

Luckily, Arlaug butting into the situation lifted Violet out of her mood. Though Philo's ears still burned he noticed it was a laugh of entertainment, not of mockery to his embarrassment of having foul language randomly spout about his person. Philo wasn't sure if he had seen Violet in good spirits before, her face was usually a mask of concentration as she studied.

Philo's mouth opened and then closed again in similarity to his obscenity croaking pet as Violet explained her reasoning. "Umm..." He was trying not to ask 'aren't you thinking about it too much?' because no Ravenclaw really wants to hear that. It was also the default response Philo got from his parents or siblings that graduated Hufflepuff whenever he tried to explain something he was struggling with.

He at last found something to grasp. "So you're switching from your wand hand? Do most of your blocks come from casting with your non-dominant hand?" Philo was actually ambidextrous, usually writing with whatever hand was closest to the writing utensil, but he kept to one hand with his wand. Although this wasn't saying much, for with the right dedication others could compensate casting with their non-dominant hand through practice.

Even Philo was admittedly thinking that Violet might be over thinking the mental and emotional aspect of wand casting. It sounded like some problems he knew others in his Second Year had. But he wasn't sure how to phrase them to Violet at this moment.

"No, not at all.  There are more failures and unexpected effects with my left hand, but I suspect the increase there is from actual mistakes in gesturing...there are still plenty of failures with my right.  I'm keeping track of that too, of course."

She let out a peculiarly weary sigh, for an eleven-year-old.  "I'm worried that I might be caught on the wrong side of an unstable equilibrium, actually.  If confidence and expectation really matter, then practicing all the time may only be hurting my chances, since the more times I fail, the more I reasonably expect I'm going to fail, which would then produce even more failures, and so on.  I haven't actually noticed an increase in my failure rate yet, but if it's subtle, I might not be able to tell until I have enough data to do a proper time-series..."  Violet trailed off, and her voice became quiet.

"When I do get it to work, it's amazing, it's wonderful - even if it doesn't make any sense, it just feels...it's magic, you know?  But that just makes it so frustrating when I can't do it when I want to!"  Violet felt her throat tightening and took several deep breaths to try to calm down.  Crying would only make him feel uncomfortable and never helped regardless - it only reminded her of feeling helpless.

"Huh," Philo said. As he figured some of her failures came from unfamiliarity with her non wand hand but that wasn't the full answer to what Violet seemed to be looking for.

"Well, you've got time," Philo said when it sounded like Violet was trying to get this figured out today. "We've got our whole lives ahead of us. I mean, as a first year compared to a second year it's only a year difference, that, um..." Where had he been going with this? "Nobody really can figure out everything about magic when they're still starting out with it. There's still stuff to learn in the higher grades."

Philo thought about what kinds of problems he had seen in past magic classes. Expectation was a large part of it. Heliotrope LeJean knew how to cast Aguamenti with barely a utterance unlike anybody else in their year because water manipulation was something merpeople were expected to be able to do. Insofar as Philo had been able to figure out the reasoning from her explanation. Yet expectation was kind of skewed as well, for even if Helio was told that Reparo fixed things she hadn't managed to fix the plate in their first year final[1] because she wasn't used to eating on plates. Or something.

Philo figured Heliotrope might be a bad example to use with Violet, as her half-breed nature brought up more questions (like 'How is she half merperson?') of a biological nature as opposed to magical theory. After some nonsensical stammering Philo approached with a different example.

"That reminds me of a friend," Philo began, not mentioning Obderedria by name or hair spots or her other features because he felt awkward about what others would think as he talked about her. "She struggles with magic too, even recently when there was something about her wand needing to be fixed, in the interim of that I mean she still had problems. I think it comes from her thinking she can't do magic. But when she does have that confidence her results are spectacular. She's got an orange Lumos, she knows this weird American sourced heating spell, she's probably the best at Cheering Charms," or Helio was just that emotionally stunted of a target, "and she did pretty well this one time in transfiguration, we had to change the flavor of this gross looking pizza and she managed to change the ingredients of the pizza, not just the taste...though maybe that's a bad example," Philo muttered, "because I swear that pizza was moving afterwards..."

"Point is," Philo said, getting back on track, "that if you think you're bad at magic, well, that's like someone taking stock in a bad daily divination from the Prophet," though Philo's had never looked wonderful, "and making it a self fulfilling prophecy. If you think all this evidence is going to mean you're bad at magic and you try magic with that expectation..."

He paused. "What kind of index are you trying to build when you're trying to map the 'mental component' of spell success?"

1.	First Year Final - June 1st 09

Violet listened carefully to Philo's comments, thinking about what to say.  She ached to interrupt, but she knew that was one of the easiest ways she tended to screw up a conversation, and she was actually starting to warm up to Philo.  When he asked her a question, she started working backwards from the responses she'd thought of already, leaving the trickier bits to percolate while she spoke.

"I'm noting everything I can think of.  Sleepiness, anger, frustration, boredom, irritation, hunger, distracting noises, various smells, music...here, look for yourself."  She pushed the parchments toward him - the "Notes/Impressions" column was decorated with a wide variety of numbers and letters - she'd developed a shorthand for tagging mental phenomena, a key for which was held on a separate page.

"The problem is, self-fulfilling prophecies can work here.  My only defense against that has been to cling to the hope that there's some specific factor I can identify, and change, which would give me a reasonable expectation of success.  Though when I try to think of what's different between me and everyone else,  the obvious things that spring to mind are ones I'm not sure I want to change, even if I get magic out of the deal."

Violet shrugged uncomfortably.  "Before I came here, I got kind of used to being ahead of where I should be, not behind.  It just makes me want to go faster because now I have to catch up..."  Violet thought for a moment about Andi...she'd never seemed to feel bad about falling behind Violet.  How had she managed it?

She shrugged again, looking glum.  "Anyway, maybe I've got time, or maybe I don't...there's no way to tell.  From what I've heard, Divination doesn't seem to actually work when you try to do it on purpose, and Arithmancy only 'predicts' things in the sense that science does, making certain things obvious that aren't unless you - literally - do the math.  So any day now I could get run over by a...well, that's a bad example, they don't seem to have much in the way of running-over-things here, but I could get eaten by a werewolf, or randomly killed by some Dark Wizard - at least once a week, the Prophet has something about someone being killed, and the population of 'wizarding Britain' seems to be pretty low for that kind of murder rate - and then that's it, no more me.  And on top of that, if I could get magic to work properly, I might actually do something about all that, make it less likely for me to die in some stupid random way because I didn't use some perfectly basic protective device-"  Her voice had risen to almost a shout at the end, and she cut off abruptly, her eyes wide, as she realized she'd said 'device' and not 'spell', and what that meant she'd actually been thinking of.

Philo nodded at her list of things that could hinder someone doing magic. They sounded reasonable, a slight common sense behind the causality of some of the factors. Though when he realized the extent of her list it warranted another pause. A pause in which the 'not to sound rude but' was clammed up in his pressed lips, because Philo equally had anxieties about communication, especially if girls were involved.  (Though he and Violet were doing remarkably well in circumstances that, for logically headed Ravenclaws, were equivalent to 'talking shop.')

"How can you test those by repeating spells in an empty room? I mean, unless you can go from angry to bored really fast, or shift from frustration, but sleep or hunger need you to be actually sleepy or hungry." And unless he had missed the dungbomb on the way in, foul smells weren't going to happen in the next five minutes. It wasn't like Arlaug had eaten a scarab beetle, which was an unusual experience from the summer Egyptian trip, third on the list behind the escapade with 'Runner the magic carpet' and Philo's measuring tape fusing with a dead snake reanimated by the power of a pyramid.

"Well, it depends which way the self fulfilling prophecies are filled." It was a kinda true thing on Divination, which Philo didn't adhere to. It was like in the wake of the Dark Lord's downfall there was talk that there was a prophecy to how he would be defeated by Potter. And knowing and trying to prevent the prophecy had fulfilled its claims. That, or an oddball thought he'd had once that maybe Seers were only possible by knowledge of significant events trying to work its way backwards through time.

The conversation soon turned, however, unexpectedly dark. Philo could feel his face going numb with disbelief. Viloet was clearly a girl who thought through all types of possibilities, but to head that direction first. It was the being eating by a werewolf comment that had frightened Philo the most, plaguing that childhood fear.

Philo was silent for moment after Violet's exclamation and abrupt end. He felt that there was a huge shadowy thing he wouldn't be able to understand, that Violet might not want to talk about. A multilayered unknown thing, like the exact fear that shaped a boggart or one's personal feeling in the presence of a dementor.

Finally Philo tried to speak, unsure of what he was trying to say. "Well, the w-werewolf attack is unlikely, especially this year." Philo wasn't crying, he wasn't even sad, but his voice was wavering. "The werewolf students here, there are multiple, but every full moon they're taken offsite to transform, where they can't harm anybody even along with their wolfsbane potion that sedates them. I'm not sure what device would protect against that. Maybe if everyone wore silver armor but even that might not work or be possible."

"My dad works at the ministry, though, and he says the Prophet can exaggerate stories as much as The Quibbler." True, the past months had featured some real tragedies but it wasn't at the rate of once a week. "With his job, he sees a lot of things that could be hazardous, but wizards are naturally resilient. Sometimes people may briefly vanish or suffer a transfiguration, something where it looks like they were offed but really they're fine..."

"I'm not testing them explicitly," she said in reply to Philo's question.  "Trying to evoke possibly undesirable mental states deliberately is bound to throw off the results.  I'm only taking data in general, and since even under relatively calm conditions I'm still having failures, it's still useful - every time I fail or succeed is another point with partial information, on the presumption that the causative factor - or factors - is coming and going accordingly.  Assuming, at any rate, that I'm consciously aware of whatever it is...if I'm not...I'm not sure what I can do.  Have an experienced witch review my spellcasting with a pensieve or Legilemency, maybe?  I don't know how taxing or rare those are, maybe they'd be extravagant uses of magical resources just to try to help a muggleborn first year get better marks."

After Violet's outburst, Philo seemed unsettled, but still gamely tried to reassure her, which was rather endearing.  Though she was a bit skeptical that all the deaths she'd read about were 'exaggerated'...but it wasn't impossible that standards of journalism were much lower in the wizarding press in general.  In an unconscious attempt to distract herself from her own words, she followed this train of thought, wondering briefly if there were a Ministry department that actually calculated statistics like the murder rate, or frequency of Dark Wizardry, or even basic population demographics.  She was about to ask, then she decided she should instead actually apologize for her outburst first, when she realized that she'd heard something Philo had said but hadn't immediately processed it.

"There are students who are werewolves!?" the girl gasped in a strangled tone.  "That's...that's..."  Violet recognized she was having an emotional reaction and put on the brakes, her alarmed expression suddenly becoming neutral as she forced herself to think it through.  That's what, exactly?  If they're completely normal when they're not transformed, and the transformation is entirely based on the lunar cycle, then it's trivial to determine precisely when those afflicted would need to be supervised and medicated, which it sounds like is exactly what they do.  Though there were those mentions in the paper about 'daytime transformations'.  They had downplayed them...though you'd expect that if a government agency was covering itself or trying to prevent panic, but you'd also expect that if the original reports had been based on confused eyewitness testimony.  Also, a lot of the Ministry employees must have children attending Hogwarts, and if they were aware of a danger, wouldn't they have taken some action?  Unless they'd been ordered not to, though at least some of them should've been not loyal enough - or more loyal to their family - for that to matter...

"Philo," Violet asked calmly, "do you know of any students with at least one parent in the Ministry who have been pulled out of Hogwarts recently?"

Either Philo couldn't comprehend what Violet was testing, or maybe she didn't know what she was testing. It seemed that she was trying to see if thinking about negative stimuli would effect her success at casting spells. And trying to track every little thing you were thinking off seemed impossible and unlikely to find a pattern as to what made Violet fail, save being untrained with casting in her non dominant hand. If she already considered negative experiences would throw off her results, when he thought that was what she was testing, then what...?

"I don't think a pensieve works like that, in regards to what happened in your mind. It's all about reviewing memory, external experiences."

Philo about jumped. Apparently Violet hadn't known that there really were werewolves, or she wasn't thinking about them when she talked about the chances of being eaten.

"Recently?" Philo asked, struggling to keep up with what new thing she was talking about. "Like, didn't return from the winter holiday? I can't think of anyone personally." His dad had once mentioned another in the department withdrawing their Hufflepuff daughter from school, but Philo had not known the name.

In trying to bridge the change of topic with the question Philo guessed what Violet was aiming at. "If it's in response to the werewolf students attending, there hasn't actually been any parents withdrawing children from Hogwarts I can think of. There were tons of letters of outrage at the start of the year, school year. Eventually people settled down once they knew what precautions would be in place." Philo blinked in thought. "There was one girl who withdrew, a werewolf. She was kind of made an example of last year under a different Headmistress. I guess, even if she had to be homeschooled it was better than...what's her name? I want to say Foley. Olive? Olivia Foley."

Violet nodded thoughtfully.  "I guess that's reassuring.  Though wizarding society seems to be a lot less risk-averse than the muggle equivalent.  Maybe it's just, as you say, wizards being a bit more durable, and having good emergency medicine?  Or just a system justification bias...it's not as if riding in cars isn't objectively quite dangerous, after all...per capita it might well be more of a threat than preventable magical creature attacks are here.  Oh, that reminds me, I was going to ask - is there anyone in the Ministry whose job it is to keep track of  things like that, how often various things happen, whether they're happening more often or less than last year, that sort of thing?"

Philo was starting to loose track of Violet's many thoughts again as she talked about things. A few muggle things, like cars and stuff his dad would talk about.

"Um...Magical Maintenance?" Philo didn't know that much about the Ministry outside of where his father worked. "Though I think most departments have their own records. The Auror Office tracks crime, the WCU on werewolf attacks, St. Mungo's on health."

Violet nodded.  It'd be better if there were a central repository for collection and analysis - more chance of spotting actionable patterns that way - but that was something even muggle governments had trouble with.  At least it implied that there were some people in Wizarding Britain who had something approaching modern problem-solving skills, despite their society managing to side-step most of the Enlightenment.  Nevertheless, she wasn't very impressed with their level of diligence.  There'd been a Prophet article about werewolves not taking the proper precautions and getting off with a simple fine.

Thinking of diligence and precautions, Violet was reminded that she'd received new information - there were students afflicted with Lycanthropy actively attending Hogwarts - and needed to ask herself the proper question, Does this information change any assumptions I've made, or require any different behavior?  Even if the condition was manageable with proper diligence, there was still some small risk that wouldn't be the case, so were there any simple things that could be done to mitigate that risk personally?  There seemed to be only two permanent risks to a werewolf attack.  One, of being killed.  There didn't seem to be a lot to do there - from what she'd read in the Prophet, engaging an active werewolf was a dangerous challenge even for a specifically trained adult specialist witch.  She should see if there were magical first-aid kits available for sale, perhaps.

The other risk was infection, the chance that if she was attacked and did not die, Violet would effectively lose between two and twenty-four useful hours each month, for the rest of her life (subtracting sleep as not strictly useful, and accounting for the variance in day/night at their current latitude, along with her current uncertainty about how 'full' the moon needed to be, given that it was based on a day/night cycle at all and not simply when the moon was visible in the sky).  That risk might be mitigated somewhat...she'd have to find the proper books to read, but it wouldn't hurt to see if Philo already knew.

"Do you know of anything you can do, or some potion or herb or something you can take prophylactically to prevent catching Lycanthropy, in the event you were attacked non-fatally?  I'm not expecting it, mind you, but given I know that's a possibility, if there's some daily supplement I can take with breakfast, it'd be silly not to."  After a moment, she added, "Unless it's prohibitively expensive or has side effects, of course."