The Tortoise and the Hair PV Closed

@Katrina Walker

Eleven classes, duelling team, her responsibilities as co-captain, friends, writing home to her family, spending ample time with Sherlock, getting enough sleep. It was a lot to juggle, especially with her overachiever tendencies. The thirteen-year-old had gotten good at prioritizing what she deemed crucial--usually academics and duelling--but what could be considered strong work ethic came at a cost. Most of the time, that meant neglecting herself time to play, to sketch and skip stones on the lake and mess around with her friends. That was why these study sessions with Katrina were so important: she could spend time with one of her favorite people while getting the necessities done.

It also helped that she was spending less and less time searching for an answer to the Slytherin curse. She might have insisted to Flash there had to be a way to try without all the disappointment back in October, but now that sounded like a lie, something completely unattainable. It was pointlessly fight or accept things sucked and spend your time on something worthwhile. Honestly, who was she kidding? If the adults couldn't figure this out, she certainly couldn't. That wasn't to say she didn't feel guilty for giving up. She did. She wanted to keep fighting, not just for herself but for her housemates, for Illowy, but she also wanted the discouragement to stop.

Here, on this weekday after classes in the study room with Katrina, there was no place for such thoughts. They'd been hit with a ton of spells and some borderline philosophical theory today in Transfiguration, so there was a lot to unpack. It helped to have another brain to bounce thought processes off of, and they were pretty focused today. Granted, they tended to be decently on-topic, both too serious about their schoolwork to waste a whole lot of time.

Gamp's Law. Life. Existing versus living. Equilibrium. Rist's Law. Curse Breaker as a note for herself scrawled in the margins. The occupation sounded interesting, and with no real sense of direction for her life post-Hogwarts, why not look further into it? After reviewing their notes and doing their best to puzzle out the parts they didn't quite get, perhaps frying their brains a bit in the process, Katrina expressed the feeling she had it down enough. "Yeah. Gamp's Law isn't broken because it's not really life that an object is transfigured into, just a shell of it without a living thing's complexity. And, anyway, it's not permanent; the transfiguration will wear off eventually, restoring the original state of things." She talked slowly, thinking through each piece of her summary. Hopefully she was understanding correctly, it was time to move onto the spells anyhow.

It registered then that Katrina's posture seemed to indicate a step back from the work. It probably was high time to take a break, not to mention the fact trying new spells with spotty focus was a recipe for disaster. So, she leaned back as well, closing her notebook and setting down her quill. A moment was taken to just stare up at the ceiling and let her thoughts wander away from the class material. Intellectual challenges were fun, but some days she wished she could go climb a tree or something instead of having homework. Then again, if she wasn't so busy she'd just have more time to panic over the state of the school so it was possible such free time would only be spent angsting.

Letting your mind wander was always interesting; where would your thoughts end up? After a moment, she broke the silence. "I keep forgetting to ask, do you dye your hair the Muggle way or use the Hair Color-Changing Charm?" Out-of-the-blue for sure, but with friends it didn't matter so much what was said, if they discussed important things or spouted nonsense or didn't say anything at all. Tilting her head, she added, "Ever tried a different color?" It was more a curiosity question than anything. She thought the teal looked really good on Katrina, was a part of what made her unique. Still, how would purple look? Could a rainbow effect be achieved through Crinus Muto with enough concentration? Her Transfiguration brain was definitely still on.

Katrina stayed leaned back in her seat, physically distancing herself from the classwork, almost as if she got far enough away it might just solve itself and disappear. That was certainly not the case. However, Katrina was feeling steady enough in the work that distancing herself from the problems was what she was trying to do to settle her mind and keep it from spinning. The more she read and tried to take in, the more questions she had, the more she wanted to understand more, this just increased until the point that she wasn’t really reading what was on the page anymore, her eyes were scanning back and forth but her mind wasn't taking it in.

At Katrina's verbalization of thinking she understood it, Bridget agreed, giving her own recap on Gamp's Law. The verbalization of what they had been reading actually made it a fair bit easier to understand. "Transfigured things aren't actually changed in like an essence sense, they just appear different. So like you said, its like a shell of a living thing, it just looks like it, the item isn't any more or less alive," Katrina agreed, adding a bit of her perspective on it.

Bridget thankfully matched Katrina's leaned back posture. She certainly didn't want to pressure Bridget to change topics if she was still trying to understand it all but Katrina knew she hit the point that nothing more she read would help her understand the topic any more. It seemed that the more the two studied together, the more in tune they became. Both were on the same page now, spells time.

Typically, at this point they might head down to the Duelling Club and get some extra practice in, or maybe work on some of Bridget's year ahead in DADA, or maybe just practice some of the spells from class, maybe from the lesson on Transfig they were just working on. Katrina let her mind stray from the Transfig lesson, thinking about nothing really, what Liam was up to, where Boomerang was, that she still needed to apologize to her Guardians. Before Katrina's mind had a chance to get stuck on an individual topic, Bridget broke the silence with an unexpected question.

Hair dye. "Oh, I do it the muggle way," At the mention of her hair, Katrina ran her fingers through the streak in her hair, pulling it in front of her eyes a bit so she could look at it better. "I'm sure the charm would be an easier way to go, but there's just something fun about going through the whole process. Besides, I already have the dyes," Katrina's voice faded off, wondering why Bridget had brought it up in the first place.

Bridget's face was thoughtful, she was puzzling through something. She asked if Katrina had ever tried a different color."Oh actually, fun fact, I had intended to change the color like every few weeks or something, but then some people started to identify me by the teal streak and it just stuck.

But yeah, I've messed around with the Hair Color-Changing Charm a little, but never kept it that way. Usually it’s a late-night endeavor when I can't quite get to sleep," Katrina wondered what would have happened if she'd kept changing the color, maybe just by a small bti of a shade every day, letting the teal fade to blue, then richen to purple, but the smallest bit of a shade per day so you didn't see a change day to day, but if you took pictures it would be completely different after a few weeks. But that also seemed like a lot of effort.

@Bridget Collins don't you feel special? Two posts in one day

@Katrina Walker

Her summary was added onto, Katrina mostly rephrasing. Hearing the same thing in different words was surprisingly helpful for looking deeper into the accuracy of what she'd stated. For instance, it occurred to her there was an additional layer of complexity. It had to be more than an appearance change, the issue of something being animate or inanimate also brought into question. Sure, an object changed into an animal wasn't the same as the real thing, but it was an approximation in more than just looks. What made the transfigured muscles move? What happened to a creature's brain while they were stuck as a teapot? Did that affect memories at all?

A bit of a headache was forming, making it plenty clear she needed to stop. There would be no more progress made right now, just walls rammed into again and again. Her best hope was to return with fresh eyes and have something fall into place. The silence that stretched between them was rather nice. She recalled the early days of their relationship, back when she was a very shy first year. Then, such silence was painful, though exchanging words was no less awkward. She was only grateful time had blocked out the likely embarrassing specifics. And she was glad for this, too. For persevering back then and ending up with such a good friend.

In those days, she might have died if she'd asked such a question. It wasn't even a big deal, but that was the thing: inquiring about Katrina's hair was random and irrelevant. Such discomfort couldn't touch her now, not here. A look of surprise crossed her features as the answer came. The Muggle way? "But wouldn't the spell be so much easier?" She had included it as an option, so she registered it as a possibility, but it was still unexpected. Once Katrina explained her reasoning, she supposed it made a bit more sense. More often than not, she loved the simplicity of tasks thanks to magic, but there were things that felt better when the work was put in. On the rare occasion, she preferred to clean things by hand, for example. Beyond not wanting to entirely lose those skills for when she went home during breaks, she liked the methodical work. There was something grounding to fix things by yourself when it seemed you were stuck everywhere else.

It turned out fortuitous she'd asked her color question, drawing out new knowledge. Different colors would have been cool, but Katrina had indeed become defined by that streak of teal. Hogwarts seemed to have ever so many redheads, so it was the pop of color that allowed her to identify her friend quickly in a crowd. Besides, how many colors actually went well with red hair? Maybe it was more than she'd anticipate; still, the teal suited her.

"Would you say you've gotten good at it?" Late night anything wasn't guaranteed to be the most productive, but who knew. Bridget doubted she could do a very good job at the spell. It wasn't one she had much practiced, see, doing the bare minimum for class. Truthfully, if she didn't have use for a spell, she tended to ignore it. A system of prioritizing, much like the rest of her life balancing act, as she put all her energy into the ones that counted--duelling spells, defensive and healing magic, and the occasional functional spell like Reparo--and neglected the rest.

But now that she was really thinking about it, perhaps it wasn't so useless. "I bet it would be good for a quick disguise." Especially in Katrina's case, the disappearance of her vibrant hair color could shake off anyone looking for her. What else? "Would it work on animal hair too, do you think? Or not since it's fur?" Not that she was thinking of trying it on Sherlock, she wouldn't put her lovely rat through that. There wasn't much point to her questions. She just never really let whatever came to mind come out her mouth, and she was finding this fun.