After School Special Prodigal

@Pyxis Hellebore
Your RP for 'Mimblewimble' for Prodigal DADA Learner has been accepted and you may now apply to add it to your trunk. Wonderful job, it is not every day that one learns to conquer their fears.

Reducio

Spell Name: Disarming Charm
Incantation: Expelliarmus
Wand Movement:

The blonde woman was gone by Christmas. Whether his parents were fed up with her or saw no use for her since he was staying at Hogwarts for the holidays, Pyxis didn’t know. But he did feel like he was better off without her. Sure, she’d taken the painstaking time to make sure he had the wand movement of the Tongue-Tying Spell committed to memory, but everything she’d said about magic was confusing to him and it would have been that way even if he had all the context. When he started taking classes at the school though, all the pieces started coming together and he agreed with his parents that an external tutor wasn’t needed.

And once he got his hands on some material from the library and saw what the second years were learning in their Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, he was so bemused that the lady had started him off with Mimblewimble rather than what Pyxis considered to be the most important spell a wizard could learn. So his next conquest was obviously the Disarming Charm.

He was honestly starting to hate being in the Duelling Club when a match wasn’t on. Most of the other students in there seemed to be talented duellists and their spells succeeded a high percentage of the time. It made him feel demotivated as he was still waitlised for the Slytherin duelling team. Unfortunately for Pyxis, it was the only place he could think of to learn the charm as those scary dummies had metal wands of their own. Lest he wanted to bother the ever-aloof Kaito, the club room was the only practial choice.

The practice had started off like it always did; he failed to cast most of the time and missed the mark if he managed to succeed. But it was important to him to work hard at this spell, because he could come up with an infinite number of situations where disarming someone would be handy. He was mostly scared of facing some evil wizard, though he knew it was more likely that he would use it in a fight against a student that was picking on him. Both were equally scary, honestly. By the end of his drills with the spell, the dummies were probably sick of losing their wands because of him and he was just as sick of picking the wands up every time he managed to hit them.

When the school year restarted and the teachers returned to the castle, Pyxis immediately sought out Professor Lécuyer to ask the man if he had any tips for improvement. They were in the classroom after a revitalizing first lesson... Actually, Pyxis wouldn’t know as the only things in his head were anxious thoughts about speaking to the professor. The rest of the students had cleared out, leaving just him and the professor in there with a metal dummy. It made him more nervous. But he’d practiced this spell about a hundred times and it was all on his own merit, not the tutor's.

“Expelliarmus!” he yelled with confidence, moving in his wand in the shape of what he liked to call a fancy ladle. Almost immediately, a red flash hurtled from his wand to the dummy’s, knocking it straight upwards so fast that the wand hit the ceiling before it clattered to the floor. Smiling to himself and ecstatic that sacrificing his holiday spirit was worth it, Pyxis waited for what the professor had to say.

Mentioning: @Kaito Foxglove
*Permission obtained to lightly godmod Orion Lécuyer.
[WC: 583]

@Pyxis Hellebore
Your RP for 'Expelliarmus' for Prodigal DADA Learner has been accepted and you may now apply to add it to your trunk. Wonderful job, it is not every day that one learns to conquer their fears.

Reducio

Spell Name: Blindfolding Spell
Incantation: Obscuro
Wand Movement:

On a high from his success with the Disarming Charm, Pyxis jumped straight back into his advanced spell practice after the winter holidays. Quite quickly, he realized that it wasn’t the best idea. The situation was akin to a video game - Pyxis wouldn’t be Pyxis if he didn’t find some way to compare his current predicament to pixels on a screen. It was one in which the ability to do magic was measured in mana points and on this occasion, Pyxis found that his little blue bar of MP was entirely depleted. Every teensy bit that regenerated during the night while he slept was used in its totality during his classes, thus none remained for anything extra that he wanted to give.

At first, his lack of endurance felt like a blessing. He was still wait-listed for the duelling team and those already competing for his house showed such passion and dedication that Pyxis believed it would be some time before he was brought on to participate. Therefore, he felt no rush in getting comfortable with an advanced spell too quickly. Some evenings he walked straight past the fourth floor, eager to spend his time under the covers or lazing near the lake. It was a stark contrast to how he had spent the winter break and the days leading up to it, and while it was difficult to shake the routine of visiting the duelling club at first, his mind and body soon began to thank him for the ease up.

Then the role of Viper Co-Captain fell into his lap and his promotion to the team followed soon after.

Pyxis suddenly found himself sprinting. He was still having trouble with that one fire spell from Herbology and he knew that no amount of practice was going to help him nail it for the final stage of the year. So the most frequented page of his DADA textbook had become the Blindfolding Spell. He didn’t really like it, especially as a replacement for the hard-hitting Incendio, but one more spell added to his repertoire would hopefully show his dedication to the cause and if he and his team ended up facing other first years, then he would have a leg up on them.

He struggled a bit with the spell at first. It was definitely harder than the Tongue-Tying Curse, and Pyxis finally understood why his blonde tutor had started him off with that spell. Working his way up from easy to difficult was logical and he felt bad that he wanted her gone so quickly. But the snake knew that he didn’t need his hand held anymore… at least with learning new spells. He made his return to the duelling club triumphantly and somewhat in a hassle, spending evening after evening pouring over the incantation and wand movement of the spell. For a more naturally gifted magician, this might have only took a few hours. For Pyxis, days were needed.

When he finally had enough confidence in himself to succeed in at least one out of three attempts, he requested a meeting with Professor Lécuyer. He would have preferred perfecting the spell, but with such a time crunch before preparations began for the third stage of the duelling competition, he settled on hearing any pointers the professor had now.

“Obscuro!” He repeated the incantation a few times over until a dark blindfold was conjured over the duelling dummy’s eye holes. It wasn’t flawless - he would have to work on getting that crossed out thought bubble-esque wand movement more committed to memory - but he was willing to take what he got.

*Permission obtained to lightly godmod Orion Lécuyer.
[WC: 605]

@Pyxis Hellebore
Your RP for 'Obscuro' for Prodigal DADA Learner has been accepted and you may now apply to add it to your trunk.

Reducio

Spell Name: Full Body-Bind Curse
Incantation: Petrificus Totalus
Wand Movement:

It had been about a year since Pyxis read ahead in his Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook. With four duelling matches under his belt, the young lad thought that the spells his upperclassmen used weren’t of interest to him in the game of spell slinging. He would much rather reach for the hard-hitting Flipendo and so he did. Over and over again. It was his best spell and he rarely deviated, favoring only the Dancing-Feet Spell as a rare replacement. He generally hated taking the time to disenfranchise his opponents when he could just send them flying backwards instead.

This wasn’t his only problem, though. Over the course of his second year at Hogwarts, Pyxis realized that he was not a fast learner. Every facet of practicing a spell took a toll on him and he’d gotten quite comfortable at relying on what he knew from first year, so giving up was usually his approach to every new spell that he came across in class. Why did he need anything else when what he had was working well? That was the question he asked himself after his first two duels. And duelling was all he cared about, anyways. Life after school? Boring. Six years away. Now was the time to become a secondary school legend.

Then his next two duels happened and it forced Pyxis to go back to the drawing board. Both matches were an abysmal experience and the lad had no idea what to do to improve his chances once he moved up to third year. The opponents and their strategy were bound to become more complicated, but he could barely keep up with his own classmates.

So Pyxis did what he used to do. He flipped ahead in his textbook to some spells that he felt would give him the upper hand and spent an insane amount of hours drilling them in the club room. One of the spells that he saw his upperclassmen use quite frequently was the Full Body-Bind Curse. It took an opponent out of commission for a good chuck of time, preventing them from doing anything at all. There was a rule that duellists affected by the spell couldn’t be attacked, but Pyxis felt like that wasn’t too much of a negative. The spell made up for it by fully incapacitating someone. That meant that Pyxis would have one less opponent to worry about, and that thought was enough for him to add it to his repertoire.

“Petrificus Totalus!” In the presence of the professor, Pyxis displayed the spell. The incantation wasn’t as hard as some of the others, allowing him to dedicate more of his concentration to getting the wand movement right. Hilariously, it resembled a person lying down which is exactly what the spell did to the metal dummy that he had cast it on. Breathing out a sigh of relief, Pyxis waited on the professor’s comments while doing a little mental dance at finally succeeding in his pursuit to learn something new.

*Permission obtained to lightly godmod Orion Lécuyer.
[WC: 503]

@Pyxis Hellebore
Your RP for 'Petrificus Totalus' for Prodigal DADA Learner has been accepted and you may now apply to add it to your trunk.