บท 116: Quidditch and mindscape

"What he didn't tell you is that most people who try to use the technique end up losing control of their brooms and crashing hard." Tracy said seriously. Nick scoffed "Bah , Harry's a natural on a broom and I'd sooner expect to see Snape in a tutu than him to lose control of his broom over something he did." Nick defended while also secretly implying that someone will need to be attacking Harry if his broom goes postal. No one realized this but didn't argue with him about Harry's talent as they have all seen it , though they did convince Harry to hold off on the technique until he could practice it first.-

Nick split off from the group after an hour or so of hanging out as per his usual habit and headed towards the workshop calmly. He had finally adjusted to the massive amount of magic in the air of Hogwarts already so he basically never turned off his magical senses anymore at this point. He hadn't done the ritual of reflex yet due to the unforeseen problem on the end of his elven transformation. As it turned out a small change to his physical body like with the ritual of night eye was fine since it didn't affect him much.-

The ritual of reflex however was problematic as it optimized his entire reactionary system in his body and that as it turns out was a VERY big change. Nerves , muscles and signal speed was all overhauled by the ritual and if his physical transformation clashed with the rituals effect he could end up in agony at best and dead at worse. Needless to say that was not something he was willing to risk and had as such pushed the ritual back until his transformation was complete.-

Pushing the door to the workshop open Nick saw Helena carefully painting on a canvas with his hammer that had a brush stuck to it. "Evening Helena." he said and she merely waved her free hand at him without looking away from her work. This development had come about as a result of her begging him repeatedly to attach a paint brush to the hammer so she could get back into her old hobby when she was alive. Nick was skeptical of this since it just felt odd to put a paint brush on a hammer in his opinion and she had dead a ghost for close to a thousand years so she may as well be a novice in the art of painting.-

He was proven wrong however when he actually got her some painting supplies thanks to the ever helpful house elves. It was at this point that Nick was informed by her that the reason ghost never go insane if they weren't already was that their minds were effectively locked in the state they were in when they died. That meant that any skills they had when they were still alive simply didn't fade away like one would expect.-

As a bonus though Nick learned the spell to turn pictures into moving versions of themselves since Helena considered her art incomplete if it was stationary. The "living" paintings however were different then the ones brought to life through this spell thanks to the fact that the person who was painted had their memories and personality put into it. Sitting down against the wall cross-legged he closed his eyes and began to work on his mindscape once more. He found it odd how the facets that worked had very little to do with each other and frustrating at the same time as he couldn't just follow a particular scheme.

This time was a bit different than normal as while he was mindlessly going through the various different things and failing back to back one of them suddenly stuck. Nick was so caught off guard that he had almost tried to move on to the next one despite finding the correct environment. It was a strange scene as well as it made no sense at all and he was just going through the list when he found it. The overarching theme of the entire mindscape was disorienting to say the least as it was the very definition of chaos.-

Besides the facets nearby the entire scene was a strange mix of floating islands , inverted trees growing from the sky , liquid fire that behaved like water and slow lightning that was shifting and changing based on rules he simply couldn't understand other than the fact that it was all wrong , illogical. Nick didn't even move on to the next step of occlumency as he was too lost in whatever the fuck it was that he found himself in. Not even gravity seemed to work as he could walk up the sides of the islands and across the fire water like it was solid ground.

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