Guess Who? Solo Fin.

Location: Petrozavodsk, Russia (Ostrovsky Manor)
Date: Late July 2026
Note: All dialogue are spoken in Russian.

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“FREEEEEDOM!”

Lyudmila grinned, stretching her arms wide towards the skies. Morning sunshine stretched inviting arms beyond the clouds, enveloping her in a bubble of warmth. Warmth was soon joined by a playful breeze, its gentle wind caressing her cheek and weaving through her umber brown locks. She collapsed onto the soft emerald grass with a delighted hum, sprawling lazily to bask in the glow of dawn.

6 months. That was how long the brunette had been in confinement, kept away from civilization and the light of day down with sickness. With spattergroit, of all things! How Lyudmila had contracted the disease was a misfortune in its own right. Things went down like this: It had been the final week of winter break, and all the children in their countryside invited her out to play. To Lyudmila’s excitement, they decided to do a “Test of Courage” game that day. The first one to make it through the forest and return with a piece from the abandoned gardener’s shed would win. The brunette had always been unable to say no in the face of a challenge, much less such a silly one where all she had to do was to walk 1 whole round in a nice patch of forest and get proof of her entering the abandoned gardening shed. Naturally, she accepted it and conquered the forest without hesitation.

To be honest, the challenge hadn’t even been that bad. At most, the forest had been dense around the end, and the thick foliage had blocked much light. Nothing that a bit of extra attention to her footing couldn’t fix. The girl had entered the shed almost boringly, bumping around the place before managing to peel off a ratty glove from a pile of overgrown moss in the corner as her proof of success. Then, she had been on her way to boast her incredible victory to the other children. Except… nobody had been at their starting point when she returned. The only trace that there had even been a group of children in the area were the overlapping footsteps trailing the path out of the forest. Remembering that she hadn’t encountered the other children on her path, Lyudmila had originally thought they must have bailed. At first, she was amused. Hmph, cowards! If only the Lyudmila of the past hadn't been a stupid idiot.

Barely a day after that anticlimactic, dumb test of courage, disaster struck: The worst, most unbearable itching pain erupted under her skin and illness struck her body with a scalding fever. Lyudmila recalled the fiery itch and deafening pounding of her heartbeat in her head that morning with horrific clarity. It was to the despair and misfortune of her dear father, who had come looking for her after she hadn’t bounced into the dining room for breakfast as she usually did, that he found his daughter’s pale skin covered vile, purple pustules and scarlet with fever. The horrific sight would have sent grown men screaming… and according to his grandmother's exhausted retelling, it did. Her father had apparently bolted down to his wife’s underground laboratory with a panicked shout, much to the alarm of Lyudmila’s mother and his mother-in-law. One glance at Lyudmila from the women was all they needed to confirm the sentence for her stupidity: A nasty case of spattergroit.

The next few weeks had bled together into one big, messy blur. The chaos of being jostled around in shaking arms and rushed from facility to facility in suffocating face masks appeared in scattered fragments in her memory. Other flashes of those harrowing months were of the awful treatments that Lyudmila had been subjected to. Quarantined and isolated like a criminal away from her family, the girl had to suffer through bitter potions and persistent fever, lonely and comfortless in a stiff, tiny cot.

Even months after her recovery, Lyudmila still experienced phantom nips of itchiness underneath her skin that pinched her nerves where shrunken, white scars laid. They never failed to make the girl shiver.

However, even after the torture that was recovery, it was not Lyudmila’s body that suffered the greatest; not even close. No, it was the girl's heart. It was so silly. The brunette herself thought so too, but could anyone blame her?

In the 4 months that she spent suffering alone, afflicted with illness, not a single person who had challenged her to the Test of Courage checked up on her. The news of her sickness had undoubtedly spread to the rest of their wizarding district, considering her proximity to the other children, but not a single letter came for her. No “sorry”, no “get well soon”– silence. Radio silence, and that hurt. She spent most of her life craving for the companionship of the other children in the area. Years of enduring muffled snickering and jokes at her expense, wishing every night that she’ll finally be invited for the sleepovers and play dates that the other children gush over, and in the end, she was STILL worth less than a store-bought card.

Following the realisation was weeks of tearful, angry screams into her pillow and random bouts of sobbing at her family, who were frankly at a loss. For all Lyudmila was spoiled with love and attention at home, unbeknownst to them, she had been strong in enduring and hiding the cracks in her heart from the other children's treatment of her. She had never wanted them to know how others saw her, how they treated their precious little lioness beyond their manor. Faced with the startling absence of her bright smile and confident laugh, they had no idea how to fix a problem that they never knew existed.

Burying her face in the soft cotton collar of her sweater, Lyudmila rolled around in the warm grass. The memory of her weeks of depression were now a distant memory. She had reconciled with the tearful, lonely kid inside her heart, putting that side to rest in her resolve to return stronger than before. She would not allow peer validation to rule her and her life anymore! Real friends would never expect her to demean and submit to those bullies anyway. Let the others hate and laugh; she was an Ostrovsky, and if they thought they could beat her down for it, they had another thing coming!

She let out a trill of utter relief. All those horrible days were one-hundred-percent over. Fresh air and the outdoors were the absolute best!

“Lyudmila!” The voice of her mother made her shoot up from her comfortable position on the grass. Oh, shoot! She nervously peeked behind her down the side of the hill, only to be met with the stern, questioning expression of her mother in all of her maternal glory.

“Mila, what’s this I’ve been hearing about you running away from your poor Dedushka Vyacheslav?” Serafina rested her hand on her hips. Lyudmila paused.

For the duration of her recovery, Lyudmila's studies had been thrown to the back of everyone’s minds. After all, their beloved little lion had been practically on death's door, so to cure her in both body and mind had been the frantic priority. However, now that she was due to return to school after the summer, it was painfully clear that she was... Behind. Behind as in 'forgot the wand movement for the umbrella spell' , and 'almost made the cauldron explode'.

In light of this discovery, her family made an attempt to help her catch up with her peers at Koldovstoretz. Lyudmila’s paternal grandfather had volunteered to tutor her himself. Normally, a tutor trained in education would have been far more qualified and fit for this job. Her grandfather was a business man and scholar, not a teacher. That being said, Lyudmila knew why she didn’t get one though. It was her.

Even if her family had tried to keep it far away from her eyes and ears, she knew that money had become tight. The hospital’s inpatient care and treatment bills couldn’t have possibly been easy on the family’s finances. It had likely eaten away whatever little profits her mother’s potion business and the Ostrovskys’ surviving observatories generated. Maybe it even sank into their savings vault. With most of the qualified tutors in the country going after the wealthiest wizarding households and seeking wages that only increased by the year, to hire one was a distant dream.

Lyudmila flopped onto the ground and buried her face in her arms, kicking her feet with a groan. It was not that she did not understand all this and the sacrifices of her family– of course she understood! It was just that her grandfather was just too much sometimes. She loved her dedushka, but who could stand to listen to that husky, posh voice ramble on and on about magical theory and spell-casting methodology for more than 15 minutes? She would have withered away if she had stayed there any longer! She had run to spare her grandfather the sight of his granddaughter exploding.

“Noooo,” Lyudmila whined. Her mother let out an exasperated sigh. She pointed up at her daughter and back onto the ground, “You get yourself down from that hill and back here if you know what’s good for you. Do you not want to continue school? Is staying at home and being a sleeping rock what you want to do?”

Sufficiently reprimanded and honestly embarrassed by being compared to some common rock, Lyudmila petulantly dragged herself up from the grass and swivelled her legs around. She slid down from the hill with a practiced ease, huffing as her mother wrapped a steady arm around her and fondly brushed the blades of grass and dirt off her daughter’s pants. “Tsk, look at you.” Her mother patted her arm affectionately as she steered the pouting girl back to the manor. “Come now, you’ll be back to school in no time. You’ve got plenty to show the world, mio tesoro.”