So he'd been putting it off. Sue him.

Though Alvis was not one of those reactionaries who pinned Professor Ignan Storm as a Death Eater or a dark wizard or whatever, he also didn't entirely trust the man. Attempting to drown his class for a lesson last semester hadn't helped that, nor had assigning Alvis summer "homework" into his own family history on the assumption that he wanted (needed) the teacher's help in puzzling out his own mind.

So yes. Alvis had been putting off going to see Professor Storm about mind magic. He would've kept doing it too, but Moira's day-mare at the lake and the memory he'd stolen on accident had forced his hand. Alvis needed to get this legilimency thing under control, and Storm was the best available resource to do that. Thus, here he was.

He'd arrived five minutes ahead of their scheduled meeting time  (after dinner, which was apparently standard) to find Storm working on something else. Alvis hadn't wanted to interfere, so he'd taken a seat across from the desk and waited to be addressed. He held his schoolbag in his lap, half as a substitute for a school desk and half hoping he could hide behind it if worse came to worse.

He'd tried to use the intervening time to "clear his mind," the way that every exercise in the mind magic books began; but he'd been at it for barely a minute before he realized that he was catching the Professor's stray thoughts and immediately stopped. He stared at his shoes, hoping that'd be enough to convince Storm (if he'd noticed) that he hadn't done it on purpose. He only looked up again once the work was finished and the teacher's attention turned to him. He cleared his throat.

"Good evening, Professor Storm."

The fifth years had been the final lesson of the day, and ahead of a busy Tuesday morning, the Professor was making some adjustments to the seventh year lesson for first thing in the morning when Norling had appeared. He was a little early, and the Ravenclaw received a cursory glance up at his open office door while Professor Storm continued with the amendments to his intended essay questions for the eldest students.

Eventually he put his quill aside and filed the amended lesson plan inside his mark book for the academic year, ready for the morning.

"Norling." He greeted politely enough, gaze intent all of a sudden on the fifth year. "Enjoying passing thoughts of Ministry legislation?" The fingertips of his right hand were still resting on the mark book before he slid it away from the desktop before him.

"Near two-hundred days since we spoke of your eavesdropping. I expect fine progress." He laced his fingers together on the desk and lowered his chin a little to stare more intently still.

"Do enlighten me on progress. Less bothersome than resorting to treating you to your own methods."

Alvis's head ducked lower at the jab about ministry legislation, then fell nearly to his chest at the reminder of how long he'd been avoiding the issue. Nearly two hundred days...heavens. People really weren't kidding when they said that time flew.

He sighed and straightened in his chair, adjusting his glasses as he reluctantly explained his 'progress.' "Well, sir...I did as you asked, and I can say for certain there are no known seers anywhere in my family tree. Though my great-great grandmother once claimed to have had an affair with the Comte de Saint-Germain.

"I've also, when I could, tried a few of the basic focusing exercises outlined in the library books. The occulemncy practice, mostly. But...it doesn't seem to be working. And if Professor Trelawney taught me anything, it's that clearing my mind is a very bad idea."

And now they came to the elephant in the room...Alvis sighed.

"There was also an...incident. About a month ago." He focused his gaze resolutely on the grain of the desk's wood. If he could avoid the professor's ire for this, he'd hide from it in any way he could. "I happened to stumble upon...someone...who'd taken an expired Daydream Charm on accident. So I actively tried to get into their head, not with a spell, just by...looking them in the eye. It inserted me into their dreams.

Palms damp with nerves, Alvis anxiously rubbed his arm, trying to sooth away the goosebumps that had formed there. The last order Storm had given him at the end of their last meeting was to stay out of people's minds. How would he take Alvis once again deliberately using his ability, and on a fellow student no less?

"I only wanted to snap them out of it, I swear. And it did that, but at the same time, I think I accidentally stole a memory? I keep dreaming about it."

Cocking his head to one side, Alvis knocked against his skull with two knuckles as if that could somehow shake the memory loose. Merlin knows that nothing else had worked so far. "Since it's not my memory I thought it'd fade away eventually, but...it hasn't."

"It won't." The Professor replied bluntly, looking none too impressed with Norling for his exploits with classmates and daydream charms. "It doesn't belong in your head, so it won't have a place. Rather like you have stolen a piece for another jigsaw." He frowned at Norling.

"This was staying out of people's heads, was it?" He asked, somewhat rhetorically and sighed. "I do not profess to know anything in particular about the leaning of divination to your … situation, but there is no great harm to clearing one's consciousness a moment to focus. I suggest you lacked application."

The professor was not at all pleased with Norling, and got to his feet quite abruptly if about to dismiss him. But instead of doing so, he turned away to open one of the locked cabinets in his office which also contained the heavy pensieve. It was a familiar sight on the desk when he met with Casey, but not required at this very moment, just the phials stored with it, that could contain memories.

He locked the cupboard once one had been retrieved and turned back to Norling with his wand in hand.
"Well, one can't leave it in there. It must be returned to the correct owner." The Professor explained to Alvis. "Are you familiar with Extraxi Memoria?" He asked, phial in one hand, wand in the other behind his desk. "A little beyond fifth year studies, you will cover it next year, but not too far ahead."

Alvis continued to trace the wood-grain with his eyes, moving his mouth as little as he needed to mutter, "S'not like I meant to do it..."

In truth, it took a fair bit of concentration to keep the annoyance off his face, and it still managed to sneak on in the form of a scowl. What did Storm want him to do? Leave Moira stuck in a waking nightmare for Merlin knows how long? Just...walk away and pretend he didn't have the ability to help her? It wasn't like he could turn his legilimency off. Why shouldn't he use it for good if the opportunity came?

The professor's sudden movement startled him from the sulking thoughts. Alvis jumped a bit in his chair and finally looked up, turning his head to follow Storm's path to the cabinet. The artificer in him gave a lurch of excitement at the glimpse of the pensieve -- he'd seen them before, even gotten to look at one up-close with his grandmother last summer, but each craftsman of course had their own techniques and it was always so informative to compare. But that last only a moment. His flare of excitement died down as the professor locked the glow away again and returned with a phial.

Alvis eyed the glass as the professor spoke, looking for a hint of its process. It must have been made from particular ingredients if it was meant to hold what that spell created.

"I've heard of it. Never seen it performed. Never done it myself. I think Casey uses it sometimes." He shrugged. "At least, it wouldn't surprise me if he did." His friend and the defense professor were a bit too alike sometimes for Alvis to be entirely comfortable.

"O'Doherty does yes," The Professor confirmed, not mentioning that he also did before meeting Casey, "it makes matters a little less complicated when practising mind magic." He paused, frowned to himself in thought beside his desk and looked back to the cupboard momentarily. Much as he enjoyed Norling's company less than his Slytherin classmate, he was equally bright and capable, if disagreeable.

"On your feet." He requested with a gesture of his wand to Alvis. The Professor returned to the cupboard to retrieve the pensieve in addition to the little rack of tubes. (Sasha might have remarked on how they resembled a rack of test tubes.) Both settled on his desk between them both, and the pensieve's light rippled across the ceiling of his office like a pool of water.

Norling was staring with a great fascination.
"Don't tell me you've not seen one of these either?" He asked, considering if Alvis knew Casey used the spell, they were close enough friends. The pensieve was a smaller one a little bigger than a dinner plate in diameter. It was smaller than the one Minerva held in her office. "Was held in the restricted section of the library. Mister Morgan and I inspected it together but it appeared it had only been placed there for some memories deposited." He glanced up at Alvis, their faces lit by the swirling magic below. "They've been removed safely, dated to about 1840." He didn't want to mention the content[1]

"To extract a memory one must visualise it clearly first. Right at the front of the mind." He gestured with his left hand fingertips as if drawing the memory through from his eyes to before him." He visualised his dinner for the sake of an easy, mundane target. Gammon steak, cauliflower cheese, roast potatoes, wine, the smell, the taste.

He placed the tip of his wand to his temple, still visualising and closed his eyes just a moment to mutter the spell. Normally he would cast it non-verbally, but as he was teaching Norling this, he spoke aloud. From his temple he drew back his wand complete with a spidery wisp which he placed into one of the phials.

"I thought of dinner this evening," He clarified to the Ravenclaw dismissively. "If I think of it now I know I have eaten but it's a little vague as if I am trying to recall an unremarkable dinner from a fortnight or further ago. For you, as the memory is not yours I suspect you may have barely any memory of it at all - just that there was a memory, or perhaps a memory of the acquisition." He frowned thoughtfully at Alvis, the phial with the memory in one hand, thumb clamped over the end.

1.	April 2nd 2009 Act Naturally

Alvis stood as ordered, sliding the chair back and out of their way. He lingered at the desk, hands resting on the wood, and glanced from his examination only briefly when the professor spoke.

"Don't tell me you've not seen one of these either?"

"I've seen a few." Hell, he'd copied the runes off one into his sketchbook so he could play at tweaking the formula in his spare time. "There are variations in the designs. Artisanal fingerprints, arithmantic ratio fluctuations, variation in the material components..."

His fingers twitched. He wanted to touch it, to judge how the runes were etched and feel out the quality of the metalwork and guess at how magic and mundane had been woven together, though the shimmering surface of memory warned him against what was likely a bad idea. Whatever their tension, it seemed the teacher in Storm won out with a brief lecture; Alvis kept an ear turned his way and as he attempted to memorize the differences between this pensieve and the ones he'd seen before. 1840...the ones he'd examined with his grandmother dated considerably newer than that. Interesting.

He tore his eyes away the demonstration began and fell into student mode, which normally would have meant taking notes but today was limited to watching intently and trying to picture himself doing the same. "Intently" here meaning that he didn't blink, nor did he look away even after the memory was safe in its phial.

"You 'suspect,'" he parroted at the end, working out the implications as he mimicked Storm's dismissive-thoughtful tone. "Which means...I suppose these sort of conditions aren't well-documented."

A downward dip in an already-low tone betrayed his growing frustration with the lack of concrete knowledge. He wasn't entirely sure he liked how Storm was looking at him either, like he was being studied as much as he was doing the studying. He straightened to break the path of the professor's gaze, slid his wand from his pocket, and began rolling it between his fingers as he considered the memory-extraction process.

"Is there a different spell to put it back?" In truth, he a million more questions, the chorus of which drowned out what little mind-magic feedback he'd been getting from Storm. What would happen to a memory if you didn't store it properly? Could it be used in making potions, or in an alchemical process? Was that the phial's secret, or the pensieve's? Which came first, the spell or the device?

But those would only clutter the conversation, and time with Casey had taught him to clamp down on such an urge. Especially around people like Storm. Instead he limited himself to the first question and, eventually: "Do you suppose removing this memory will also remove the memory of the dreams?"

"You suspect" Norling echoed, receiving a narrow-eyed glare from the Professor. "Which means… I suppose these sorts of conditions aren't well documented."

The Ravenclaw wisely took a route to assume such rather than his professor lacked in the formal study of memory modification. It wasn't one of Ignan's specialist subjects.

"Is there a different spell to put it back?"
"Yes." Professor Storm replied, as if it were very obvious there would be. "Extraxi… the counter being restituo." He looked down into the swirling contents of the pensieve.

"Do you suppose removing this memory will also remove the memory of the dreams?" Norling asked. He was full of questions for a boy who did not want to answer them before. Asking them was a way to avoiding answering them though.

"You'll find out." The Professor replied, not at all friendly. "Think on it clearly, focus, and either extract it yourself, or if you fail I will … oblige." Tear it from your head was more how he felt.


End