Detained PV Detention Closed

Ami defeated the wall. The sword wiggled in place, the tip had broken through the tile wall. The bits of broken porcelain and mortar broken on the floor, revealing a stud through which the weapon had impaled. Solomon let out a displeased sigh, why couldn't these girls keep a blade in their hands? 

Ami would manually murder the imaginary snakes before she recovered a fresh sword from Solomon's desk. Why he left an array of swords in his desk as if it was a cutlery drawer is anyone's guess but the man was certainly an eccentric. Ami would wave her sword like a feather-duster at the massive shower head. The shower-head would be scratched with the tip of the blade and knocked to the left... then the right. The shower-head was left askew and then with either a lucky or a powerful blow the shower-head would be knocked off the pipe. As the shower-head was knocked off, it would fall into the pool of water with a massive splash and a wave that rocked the desks nearby.

Ami, less than a graceful martial artist would tumble off the desk. A swarm of snakes would come for her of course, they did not bite but they coiled around her. Some would get knotted in her hair and give it as tug, it was as if this was a nightmare or a cheesy low-budget horror film. 

Annabelle was having some sort of personal moment, the kind where there was a lot more going on in her head than there was going on in the room with the rest of them. She was just standing there as the waters continued to rise. "SWIM!" Solomon demanded as he trudged in her general direction, stomping on snakes like roaches with a disgusted expression. The feel of crushed snake beneath his heel was unsettling. He tossed the piece of furniture aside, intending to drag Miss Wolfe out of the water by the scruff of her neck. 

He did not have to. Some sort of internal epiphany had changed the young girl as she found her uh... viking snake slayer ancestor or dual personality. She would go about slaying those angry pieces of rope. Wait...  rope. Yes, rope, after her umpteenth (apparently that is a word) Houdini Linguini slaying the snakes became immobile and limp on the water's floor. She would slay yet another nope rope and she would see yarn fibers from the body of yes... a rope would create a cloud of fibers at the site of the kill.
 
 If she were to look around, that would be all she saw in the choppy bathwater: bits of broken rope, string, a scarf, a sock, a broken package of Ramen Noodles. Some floated to the top, others had sunk to the bottom. About one-fifth of the strange, misplaced items were damaged, sliced in half or ripped apart.

Yes, it was a very convincing illusion. Very convincing. Solomon rubbed his backside, he was still bleeding and a bit light-headed but the 'poison' was wearing off. He was in fact bleeding still, these illusions were not without risk. They had a very good chance of drowning if they failed to defeat their fears -- a terrible way to die. 

"Good job Annabelle", Solomon coughed as a mouthful of soapy water found its way into his mouth. Blegh!

The water's had continued to rise, in fact they were getting higher with each passing moment and it felt as if it was getting faster. It was then that he looked up at the place where the shower head once was, it was probably a chandelier at one point... had been cut away and now water poured from the spout faster and harder than before.

They were at risk for drowning. He was taller than the girls, they would have to start swimming soon enough as it reached his ribs and then his collar. "THINK about it Ami, WHY do you dislike these... GAH! Showers so much!" He instructed. Fear was logical, it always had a base, a genesis. In Annabelle's case it was a fear of failure. Of finding strength and resolve in a hopeless situation, even if it was illogical. Logic was about laws and probability, Solomon was more interested in heroics anyways. Being scared was more likely to kill her than the actual threat, a clear head. A lack of fear. That is what she needed to -try- to survive because without that she would be dead.

"Get into the why," he urged her. He could give her the answer as the girl sought the window, that would mechanically deal with the water but what of the fear. [OC hint: Unfamiliarity] 

"THINK about it Ami, WHY do you dislike these... GAH! Showers so much!" Ami froze, halfway through getting the window open. Wait, why did she hate hotel showers? Didn't everyone? As another gush of water came tumbling out of the broken shower head, Ami leaped backward with a yelp, shivering as the mixture of scalding and icy water swept over her.

"What do you mean why, I just do!" Ami screamed back at the professor, her clothes soaked through, chilling her to the bone. Surely there was no logical reasoning behind her fear? It was just a fear, why would there be reasoning...? 

Ami's breath began to come out ragged and terrified as more and more pairs of hand came to grasp at her head, pulling and playing with her hair. A yelp of pain was heard as Ami's head was yanked one way then the other, and the shower water definitely wasn't helping. "Lear, where is this even coming from?" she screamed, near hysteria. "I don't even know whose hands they are!"

Oh, wait... hang on... the last piece of the puzzle clicked, and Ami stared at Lear in disgust. "You've gotta be kidding me." She was afraid... afraid because... what was it, exactly? "I'm afraid of what I don't know, okay?" she yelled out into the room, shooting Annabelle a brief glance before directing her speech back at the shower head. "I don't like that I can't control it, I afraid that I can't handle whatever's coming to me." 

Glancing at Lear, she added, "Is that enough? Or do I need to go murder a shower head, now?"

The speech had taken a part of her that she didn't use very often, because in general, she didn't really open up to people, especially not near-strangers like the Gryffindor girl. But she felt better about it, and maybe... maybe this detention had a point to it after all.

The scene that appeared when she opened her eyes was quite different than a moment before. The horrid snakes she had been slaying were nothing but mere rope. Her weapon was covered in string, and several objects floated around in the water. This... well, this wasn't scary at all. As Lear congratulated her on her epiphany, she suddenly realized exactly what was going on. Her fear of letting people down had caused her to see these ropes as taunting snakes that held her captive and called her worthless. Why snakes though? She had no particular aversion to the slithery creatures (though she might from now on) and had assumed that the back-haired girl with them was afraid of snakes. But they had vanished at Anna's revelation...

Perhaps it was due to the symbolism of it. Snakes in the Muggle world had come to be known as deceivers. They were toxic and paralyzing... just like her fear. The snakes had held her in place, telling her lies that threatened to consume her. Yet now that she had resisted, they were nothing but harmless strands of rope.

Ami, on the other hand, seemed to still be struggling. The water poured down from the ceiling, and for the first time Annabelle realized that those disembodies hands were still making their way through her hair. Gross. Yet it only took a few moments for the red-headed Hufflepuff to respond to Lear's question. A fear of the unfamiliar... that made a lot more sense than a fear of showers. But how did one overcome such a thing?

"I don't like that I can't control it, I afraid that I can't handle whatever's coming to me... Is that enough? Or do I need to go murder a shower head, now?"

Something told Anna that this would not be enough. Yes, Ami had admitted to what she was afraid of and that was certainly a step in the right direction. She had even spoken openly about it, which did require a tremendous amount of vulnerability. But recognizing what you are afraid of is different from overcoming it. Annabelle herself had known from minute one what she was so terrified over. She had written it word for word in that poem. Yet the rope-snakes had only lost their form when she had proven that her fears were something she could get past. While she doubted her insecurities would ever completely vanish, she knew that in this situation she had fought back against them.

Yet how did one fight a fear of the unfamiliar? Wasn't slapping away the hands or trying to kill the showerhead only feeding into the problem? With Anna's fear, she had needed to make something go away... but for Ami? It seemed the opposite problem. While Anna needed to push back the object of her fears, Ami needed to accept them.

Then a sudden thought struck her. Ami was in unfamiliar territory right now. She was opening up in front of Annabelle- a complete stranger. The girl had no control over what Anna would do with this information, but she was sharing anyway. Surely this would count... surely there was some way to solidify it... Annabelle looked back at the freckled face of the brave Hufflepuff. The girl was already looking at her. Anna cast her sword into the water again, stretching out her arms. This was going to sound strange but... it just might work. "Ami!" She called out. "Give me a hug!"

Ami stared at Annabelle in complete and utter disbelief and horror as she called out her rather insane request. Did she- did she just ask her for a hug? Apparently, she really did, because her arms were stretched out for one, as if she expected Ami to leap into her arms at any moment.

Absolutely not, let's think about this first.

What was her deal? Did she have a plan walking into this? Hopefully, she did, because Ami didn't want someone swinging a sword around her head in order to get rid of those nastily annoying hands. Studying Annabelle closely, Ami tried in vain to follow her logic- her mind just didn't work like that. Unfamiliar space? Protect yourself against all foreign entities, then slowly kill them all off, one by one.

Violent, but effective. If she didn't kill them, she would ally with them instead, right? Friendship, that's essentially how it worked? Of course, she knew she was dramatizing her mindset a little bit, that wasn't always how she thought. Boiled down, however, it was pretty accurate... so, now what?

It couldn't hurt to try, right? Wading over to Annabelle, Ami accepted her offer of a hug, and the girls hugged tightly or a moment before Ami let go, clearly more than a little bit uncomfortable. "Th- thanks? I think?"

Glancing at Lear with a petulant expression on her face, she added, "Please don't tell me I have to hug you, too..."

There was always a reason why. Why you hate something. Why you hate something, be it the fact that it brings back a good memory, that it felt good in some way, that it represented something to them. As odd as a fear of showers might be, even if the fear was not truly paralyzing, it still came to mind as something to fear and there is always a reason. There was something to overcome.

That was the heart of this charm... this curse. To not just face what you fear but to overcome the reason that you are fearful. Fear is logical, necessary in fact to preserve oneself from danger. Fear of venomous snakes, heights where you might fall, avoiding peril. These were all means to keep oneself protected. Safe from harm. Able to live on. But fear can also be paralyzing. Fear was the enemy of a Hufflepuff. The enemy of a hero. Fear might tell someone to run rather than to say, fight by your friend's side. Fear might make you unwilling to fight back at all. If they ran, these children would never outrun anything. They were too young. Too weak. They would never survive. At least this way, they can take their pound of flesh with them.

Ami complained about the disembodied hands that ran through her hair. That was one of the few things that Solomon was actually enjoying. His hair, more a crown of suds that looked like a white fro.

Then it finally clicked for her. Why she feared was that she was terrified of the unknown. Like a monster only seen from the shadows. A hand or a claw of a beast without knowing the fiend to which it was attached. She did not like that she could not control something. She was afraid that she might not be able to handle it.

She acknowledged why she feared, that was a step in the right direction but she did not defeat it. Annabelle had caught on, slaying the peril and facing her fear the terrible and potentially tragic moment that could have been was thwarted. That serpents could turn to rope and string when they are overcome, when they are defeated. Nothing more than phantoms.

It was true, the frenzy that Ami had spiraled into only fed the fear that she felt, making it stronger and her more imperiled. While Anna needed to push back the object of her fears, Ami needed to accept them.

"Ami!"

Annabelle called out to the Hufflepuff.

"Give me a hug!"

A strange request, one that even Solomon was not immediately following but she was not wrong. Amy would make her way through the steadily rising waters topped in a frosting of suds. The water would splash around her as she made her way over to the off little girl.

The soggy girls would embrace, Solomon would look away. He was not sure where things were going but his elderly heart could only take so much. It would take only a moment for the power of that hug to take effect. The stream of water from the magical pipe overhead would reduce to a mere trickle. The standing water would recede through an unseen drain.

Within thirty seconds, the water was gone but the space was still soggy and littered with bits of rope, hose and string. Suds studded the floor and furniture. The hands were gone, a final floof of the wet tresses and they were gone. The pipe and shower-head were revealed to be a now broken chandelier.

Thank god.

"Please don't tell me I have to hug you, too..."

Solomon would look around, there was no other threat now was there. "Nope," Solomon's head shook side to side. "There are laws," and he really was not a fan of being physically touched anyways. His hand in front of him to also say 'no.' "But..." he took a moment to look around and be one-hundred percent certain. He would pick up their assignments, these wet pieces of parchment. He would tear the sheets of paper on half. "You are now fearless, so get out of here." A tender moment? No, not really. He was a bit gruff in fact. His friendly demeanor, the one kids saw earlier in the year had disappeared progressively. Stress does things to a man. A need to prepare them for an unknown and unseen danger compelled him in ways that were unconventional but one could not debate the fact that his attempts were effective.

"Now get out of here, detention is over."

Detention only last 35 minutes but they would remember it for a lifetime.