Books and Bonks! PV Alice Wright Closed

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10 Sept 2024

AngelFyre had been spending a lot of time in the Library when she had any spare time. She was a young woman on a mission (she generally was, so that was not anything new for her). This particular mission, however, involved her favorite subject at Hogwarts… one Simon Ezra Kincaid. She was tracking down any information that she could find on witch's marks or devil's marks since she and Simon had learned last spring that one of his Scottish Kincaid ancestors had been a Witch Pricker, and yes, it was exactly as vile as it sounded. However, it was just so macabre that she found herself wanting to know as much as she could about the history of the marks and why and how people thought they meant what they thought they meant.

As Hogwarts' acclaimed wizarding library was not a speedy place in which to do research, compared to the libraries in the Muggle world, her research often took her down rabbit holes. She had nothing against rabbit holes, per se, but a good Google search string could pretty much pinpoint the information sought in a matter of seconds or minutes at most. Still, some rabbit holes were interesting in and of themselves, but most offered little to nothing to her understanding on marks. This, so far, had been one of those less-fruitful-rabbit-hole-exploring sort of sessions. She had been sitting, alone, at one of the tables for about an hour now after the evening meal. Her concentration, like her books, was spread out messily before her and was anything but concentrated.

She and Simon were supposed to be meeting here for a snogging study session, but she knew he was probably caught up in something regarding his healer internship. She tapped her foot impatiently and looked up, scanning the library, hoping to see him making his way to her. No such luck. She was both irritated and disappointed, but not at him; only about their situation. They had not seen each other all summer, and they were not seeing much of each other even here at school. Growing up with growing responsibilities was hard.

She turned her disappointed gaze back to her parchment and the few references she had jotted down, intending to look them up. She rose from her spot, closing the heavy book before her. She gathered the other four up and quietly placed them on a trolley at the end of one the stacks closest to her for the school elves to shelve at their leisure. She looked down at her parchment and headed for the History of Magic section.

She wondered if Professor Lennox would be pleased to know that this section of the Library was getting so much attention lately? She scanned the shelves and determined she was on the wrong side of the stack, so she wandered down the aisle and turned a sharp 180 degrees looking at the books on the same shelf level, but from the other side of the stack. First on the list was Spellbinder's Guide by Mummford Web IV. That title sounded particularly vanilla, at best, but she had learned you could never judge a book by its name. Her long fingers grazed across brittle leather spines, trailing quite a bit behind her eyes which were darting up and down the different level of shelves when she finally spotted it. She took about two hurried steps and was reaching for the book when she sneezed unexpectedly.

As polite societal norms dictated, AngelFyre had turned her head into her arm to sneeze, but the force of the sneeze caused her arm and shoulder to slam into the books on the shelf level next to her. She knew the second contact was made that it was going to be a bit of a domino effect.

She was not wrong.

Her arm had pushed the books inward on the shelf which, in turn, pushed the books behind them violently off the shelf on the other side. It was a little noisy and AngelFyre was not certain, but she thought she heard a cry of pain or surprise (maybe both!) coming from the other side. She hurried back around the end of the stack and saw a young student, surrounded by the books, now on the floor, cupping her hands around a bleeding nose.

The girl was familiar to her as a new first year Hufflepuff, but AngelFyre had not made her acquaintance yet, though she did know her name from the dorm roster. Alice Wright.

"Oh, Heavens to Murgatroyd! I am so sorry. Here, if you will let me, I can stop the bleeding." And she could, but she would need the girl to move her hands away from her face and remain momentarily still.

"Alice. Your name is Alice, right?" she smiled reassuringly at the girl and spoke in as soothing a tone as she could. "Alice, I am AngelFyre, one of your House Prefects. I can cast a spell on your nose and make the pain and bleeding stop almost immediately, if you will permit me, but I will need you to move your hands away from your face so that I can get a clear look at your nose. Can you do that for me?"