Chapter 256: Flight & Gringotts
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A gentle breeze blew in a moorland with rolling hills with low-growing vegetation with clouds flying low in the sky above, drifting carelessly with the wind that rustled the scrubby bushes and the carpet of purple and red flowers of heathers in bloom. In the depth of those lands, away from the grazing animals and the herding shepherds, stood Quinn alone without a sound other than the occasional song of a bird perched on a stunted tree.
This spot had become a routine visiting spot for him in the two weeks Quinn had been visiting the location for the purposes of being alone, away from all peering eyes.
"Let's give this one more try," he said, looking down at the floor. A soft breath of wind blew down, and the grass around Quinn's feet bent away from him. Quinn clenched his feet, and the wind beneath his feet grew stronger. The grass strands were now parallel to the ground they laid their roots in. "Alright, time to puff it up!"
With a burst of magic, the forces of winds, bearing the power of thrust, took Quinn's feet off the grass. He stood still, his back ramrod straight with his feet joined together like a soldier standing at attention.
Quinn kept his chin straight, but his eyes stared down below at the ground, slowly moving away from him. He remembered the first few days when even the initial task of taking his feet off the ground was a toilsome task that he failed for a countless number of times (countless for others, he exactly knew how many times he failed.)
"Okay, this is going good," he muttered, and that's when everything stopped being good. Quinn had mastered the part of lifting up from the ground, but what he hadn't got the manoeuvrability down, he couldn't turn or, in fact, move in any direction other than up. For the nth time, he tried to move, but immediately, the winds went out of control, and his ascending body was thrown into a frenzy.
He sighed — he had screamed in shock a lot in the past two weeks — but now, he couldn't be bothered with it. A blue light covered his body, cutting his momentum, and guided his body gently onto the ground.
With his body flat against the ground, Quinn stared above at the blue sky, his lips pressed into a white line. Ever since in the Architect's Vault's third room, where he had achieved flight in the state of rage, Quinn knew that he could achieve it again, and this time without anger fueling his magic.
He sat up straight and thought back to the last two weeks of continuous failure of achieving flight through wind magic.
According to Quinn's own personal classification, there were two ways to perform a task through magic. The first one was what he called the direct method, while the other one he termed the indirect method. To take an example, cutting an object through a severing charm was the direct method, while cutting via wind blade was the indirect method.
The same went for flight. Quinn's method of flight was the indirect method through wind magic.
'I wonder if Voldemort's method is the direct method or if he's also an indirect method,' he thought. The direct method to flight would be a spell/magic solely crafted for flight, and while Quinn knew from the lore that Voldemort had achieved flight, he didn't know if it was true flight.
"Whatever, not that he will tell me if I ask him," Quinn sat up from the ground, "or, maybe he will if I ask nicely and well. . . join him," he chuckled, "yeah right. . ." Quinn shook his head and got up, stretched his arms, and once got to practice.
The winds contorted under his influence, again picking up power to do his bidding. His body rose in the air like it did every time, and like every time, his control was thrown asunder.
"What am I missing?" he sighed, and just for a change, instead of using Arresto Momentum, he conjured a bubble around himself with his body locked in the center, always staring up. The bubble bounced off the ground, springing across the moors freely, without a course of direction in mind. "Don't tell me it's something so cliché as that, would it?"
Quinn popped the bubble and landed on his feet.
"No harm in trying," he said. "Now, how did it go? The wind is free, the wind is boundless, the wind is without restraint. Yeah, let's see if the jargon works."
Quinn loosened the muscles in his body, changing his stiff posture to the one he was most relaxed. The winds blew, and Quinn furrowed his brows. Keeping his body loose felt conflicting from what he was doing. He stopped the ascent and kept his body hovering only a foot above the ground.
Thomas Edison had once said, 'I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work.' And the man's words did connect with Quinn — he was no stranger to failure; he probably failed more than any individual on a daily basis. But every failure gave Quinn some insight into what he was doing wrong.
He thought back to what was shared in his myriads of failed attempts.
'How do I look at flying?' he thought. 'It wasn't like a bird, no that was a different principle. Planes' flight principle doesn't work either. Jetpack? Well, yes, I have been using thrust to gain altitude, but I have been doing more than a simple jetpack.'
Jetpack's flight method was the closest to his application, but a real-life jetpack was nowhere versatile enough to match its fictional counterparts, and he wanted that versatility.
'Is there a method to achieve that versatility? Hmm. . .'
An idea struck him. It was an inspiration. A strange inspiration — an inspiration from a wrong time, a time he never thought he would draw inspiration from.
The memory of his body leaping from the Astronomy Tower surfaced in his mind. He remembered the sight of Friar's panicked face and what he felt at that moment. There was dormant thought of trusting his magic, but there was another one, standing in the shadow of the first thought.
'Surrender myself to my magic.' At that moment, it was just Quinn and his magic, and in some ways, he had surrendered the control he kept so tight.
"Let's try it," he thought with his intentions evident in his clear eyes.
Quinn loosened his body completely, and instead of using his muscles to control his body, he used wind. His face, which had tucked down because removing strength in his neck, rose up with winds — like a marionette puppet, the winds controlled his body.
In Quinn's terminology, he was currently using the indirect method to control his body. Using his muscles was the direct method while using the wind was the indirect method.
"This is uncomfortable," he said, "but we can work on that." But it was working; he could feel that he would be able to fly freely if he tried right now.
"Let's fly," a smile appeared, and the winds took charge.
With a few grass strands below his being uprooted, Quinn flew — not only did he ascend up, but he began turning in directions. He turned parallel to the ground, and with a thought, he launched himself forward like a flying superhero.
"Woohoo!" he yelled as he twisted and turned in the sky; it was exhilarating and exciting; it was like flying in his animagus form, but a bit different — in his animagus form, flying had come naturally after a while without much effort, but this took an effort to keep flying.
"Yeah, this is uncomfortable," said Quinn, hovering in the air. His movements were choppy, and if he turned too quickly, his body would abruptly bend, and it hurt. "Need to find a method to correct it. How did I do it in the vault?"
He closed his eyes, thought back to the vault, and began a simple three-step thinking process — Observe, Reflect, and Make. He thought back to what he did instinctively during his rage; he had already done this before, but now, he hoped to get additional insight with a breakthrough.
In his memory, he felt the wind against his skin. It was similar to what he was doing now, but it was different. 'It's heavier,' he thought and reflected upon his observation, 'it's like I was displacing the wind inside the sphere.'
In anger, he had formed a sphere of high-velocity spinning wind, but that wasn't feasible in his standard form. That sphere took too much magic and concentration to keep operational and was more of a result of Quinn's desire to be safe, with the wind sphere's primary feature being protection and the flight being a by-product.
His mind then took him to the Great Lake, specifically how he used water magic for swimming. He would cover himself in a teardrop of calm water and manipulate/push the surrounding water to move. Quinn wondered if he could apply that same method here in flight.
"Okay, this is enough for today," said Quinn before turning his sights to the horizon. Now it was time to test it.
He turned himself available invisible and went off. He flew above a distance above the tree, eighty feet above the ground, looking at the scenery as it zoomed past him — the hills, cows, buffalos, sheep, their shepherds, rock mounds, among other things suitable in the moor. Quinn entered the countryside with houses and small communities and flew over people living their lives, leaving behind only a gust of wind on the ground.
As Quinn increased his speed, he started to feel the wind resistance. He couldn't keep his eyes open, and when he tried, they immediately dried up, while the wind hitting his skin started to sting. Quinn decided to apply his swimming method and created a pocket of air around him to solve the problem, which cut the harsh winds with speed from hitting him.
He grinned; with the problem solved, he sped up, flying faster than any helicopter and even faster than some fast-flying birds.
That day, there were gossips around some places that people heard pitched yelling noises from the sky, zooming past them, but when they looked up, there was nothing there. Soon, the gossips from places distant from each other reached each other, and they realized that it wasn't their ears ringing.
It was picked up by a morning show on the cable network and was categorized with a UFO teacher / extra-terrestrial sighting.
Quinn had achieved flight.
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It was a day before Quinn would leave for his two-day trip to Switzerland, and he had something to do before leaving for the trip.
He looked at the snowy white building that towered over the other little shops in the Diagon Alley. He stood in front of the burnished bronze doors with a pair of goblins wearing uniforms of scarlet and gold. As he climbed the steps and entered Gringotts, the bank guards bowed in curtsey that he returned.
He walked past the second set of silver doors, not giving the Gringotts warning any attention. He wasn't here to steal anything, so there wasn't necessary to pay head.
Another pair of goblins bowed him through the silver doors. He entered the vast marble halls, and about a hundred more goblins were sitting on high stools behind a long counter, scribbling in large ledgers, weighing coins in brass scales, examining precious stones through eyeglasses. There were too many doors to count leading off the hall, and yet more goblins were showing people in and out of these.
He walked to a free teller and stood in front of the counter, waiting for the bank goblin to speak to him.
"Speak," said the teller goblin after ten seconds of wait, looking at him with his beady and calculative eyes.
"Good morning," Quinn said with a smile, "I'm here because I want to sell something of value today, and I'm hoping that Gringotts would be able to offer me a good deal of coin for it."
The goblin teller, Riphook, looked at the human before him. To their kind, it was difficult to make out humans from other humans if not for some standout feature or if they were someone famous. To Riphook, who was trained in identifying humans because of their jobs, he determined that the human in front of him was a human child. Riphook narrowed his eyes; he was skeptical if this Quinn would have anything of as Quinn stated of value.
"What do you want to sell?" asked Riphook, in a no-nonsense voice.
Quinn smiled and took out a purple palm-sized velvet box from his pockets and placed it on the goblin's counter. Quinn gestured for the goblin to go ahead and take a look at the box. The goblin picked up the box, but when he opened the box, it wasn't a ring as he expected; instead, there was a gold coin sitting on the velvet cushion.
"This. . . " uttered Riphook, looking at the coin in his hand.
Every Gringotts coin ever minted the bank, was enchanted with a special magic for identification purposes. That spell was only cast by goblins — goblins who worked in the minting part of Gringotts, and humans had no knowledge about the spell, just that Gringotts was able to which coins were real. So when Riphook looked at the coin in his hand, which sported a design he didn't recognize, he thought it was a fake, but that chain of thought was squashed when he felt the goblin magic cast on the coin.
Riphook looked up from the coin and asked, "What is this?"
Quinn smiled, "I'm here to sell a Gringotts galleon from a thousand years past."
Riphook sucked in a breath. A thousand-year-old coin! Gringotts held old coin designs in their archives, but he wasn't sure if they had a thousand-year-old galleon in their collection. He looked down at the coin again, and now he looking at an important piece of goblin history — something that should belong with the goblins and not in the hands of a human.
He had to buy this, no matter what the cost. But this was outside his authority, and the coin in question was too important.
"If your claim is true, then Gringotts might think about buying this galleon," said Riphook, playing it cool. "For that, I'll have to call in a goblin scholar who specializes in old coins and would be able to verify your claim," he stood up from his chair, "so if you don't mind, will you accompany me to a waiting room where we will further discuss this mind."
"I don't mind."
"Wonderful," Riphook smiled a toothy grin, "please follow me; I'll lead you to the room." He could have called someone else to escort Quinn, but this was too big of a deal, and he couldn't risk losing recognition of bringing in such a valuable item back to the goblin nation; as such, Riphook decided to stick with Quinn for the whole deal.
"Lead the way," said Quinn smiling. "Though I do have another request."
"Yes, don't be shy, please do tell."
"While waiting, if I could discuss matters with my vault manager, that'd be great."
"That can be arranged. Tell me your manager's name, and I'll need the key to your vault."
"My vault manager's name is Bloodpike." Quinn handed Riphook his key, and the goblin nodded shortly after.
"Everything seems to be in order. I'll have Bloodpike meet you as soon as possible." The goblin looked up at Quinn as they walked through the many gates, "My apologies, I haven't gotten your name yet; how shameful for me."
"My name is West. . . Quinn West."
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Quinn West - MC - Flying & Selling.
Riphook - Looking for a promotion - This will definitely lead to my promotion.
FictionOnlyReader - Author - It's not a meaningless cliff; I have more Gringotts planned. Look forward to tomorrow.
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