บท 35: What's inside the mystery box?
Like a muggle magician yanking a tablecloth out from under the tableware, Professor Lockhart removed the cloth from the cage, allowing its contents to be seen.
"Behold!" he said dramatically. "The Cornish pixie!"
A few of the more knowledgeable students covered their mouths in a futile attempt to stifle their laughter. Cornish pixies were a pest on the level of a garden gnome, after all. Pixies, dangerous? Don't make us laugh!
Professor Lockhart, sensing he was losing respect faster than his hairline was receding, tried to exaggerate their dangerousness. After all, Pixies weren't very menacing, but to him, they certainly were a challenge!
"Devilish tricky little blighters they can be!" he said, tut-tutting. "Maybe you'll get a better sense of their menace with first-hand experience!"
Professor Lockhart opened the cage. The electric blue creatures rushed out through the opening, causing mayhem. In an instant, every corner of the room was filled with the little buggers, pulling hairs, tearing out anything that wasn't nailed down. Poor Longbottom was even pulled up to the chandelier and left to hang there.
Professor Lockhart scoffed derisively at them. His students had underestimated his creatures, and now they were paying the price. After a sufficient amount of time, he estimated the students had learned their lesson, and now the gallant hero could come in and save the day.
Professor Lockhart rolled up his sleeves and yelled, "Peskipiksi Pesternomi!"
Unfortunately for him, this accomplished strictly nothing, and a Pixie grabbed his wand and threw it out the window.
"Finally, a chance to let off some steam," thought Oleandra happily. It was the perfect opportunity to test out her newest idea, too.
As the bell rang, she stood up on her desk and sang, "Dagaz, Isaz! Freeze my foes. Time lock!"
As she pronounced these words, she crossed her arms in front of her Wakanda Forever style, her fingers stretched out in a straight line. Her idea was to combine the stance of Dagaz, the sideways hourglass of time, with the hand sign of Isaz, the freezing rune.
It worked out pretty well, she estimated. While size doesn't necessarily correlate to amount of magic power, Cornish Pixies were indeed on the weaker side of magical beings. Thus, Oleandra was able to freeze them all, and they fell out of the air at once.
The students who had been running out of class stopped in their tracks, amazed.
"Excellent work, and exactly what one ought to do when facing fast moving creatures! I had hoped one of you would rise to the occasion when subjected to a surprise attack," said Professor Lockhart, pretending he hadn't just been hiding under his desk. "Twenty points to Slytherin, for a great, um, Frigorifying Charm. Now, off you go!"
Oleandra was beaming; she nearly skipped out of the class!
At this point, it came as no great surprise to the other students that Oleandra could use an unknown branch of magic. After all, she had used it a few times before in public.
Suddenly, she felt someone tapping her shoulder. Oleandra turned around, and saw a small gang of girls, Hermione Granger at their head.
"What's up?" Oleandra said smugly. "Do you want me to give you an autograph?"
Granger did look like she wanted to ask her some questions instead of asking for a signed picture. A voice behind her piped up.
"Could you please release your spell?" asked Mafalda. "Some of the Pixies are stuck in our hair."
Indeed, at the moment Oleandra had frozen them, a number of the Pixies had been pulling at or hiding in the girls' hair. As they were frozen stiff, their tiny fists were unable to let go, so the girls were stuck with them.
If it had been any other spell, Oleandra would have happily lifted it, but this one affected time itself. The Pixies were effectively in stasis, trapped in an instant of time. No magic in the world could touch them until they rejoined the common flow of time, which also included whatever counter spell Oleandra could come up with.
"Sorry," Oleandra said sheepishly. "It's a new spell I've mastered, I don't know how to lift it. I don't know how long it'll last, too."
And with that, the small group of girls stormed off angrily in search for a teacher to help them lift the spell. They didn't believe for a second someone would learn a spell without learning its counter spell. That Slytherin girl was messing with them on purpose!
Hermione's casts of Finite Incantatem didn't seem to work, so the group found Professor Flitwick, but he didn't manage to lift the spell either. In the end, some of the girls had the professor use the Severing Charm to cut away some of their hair, while some others chose to endure. The Pixies would thaw out, so to speak, hours later in the middle of the night, where they would finish what they had started. No matter the option, the girls would find themselves with uneven hair or bald patches!
Oleandra had made of some of those girls an enemy for life! Two of the girls affected by the Pixie incident had been Muggle-born, so tensions were beginning to run high. Hermione herself didn't think much of this event. She already knew Oleandra and her sister weren't blood supremacists, and they had helped each other in the past. She considered the relationship between the Gryffindor trio and the Slytherin girls as a sort of friendly rivalry, ever since the scramble for the Philosopher's Stone last year.
The only good thing to come out of this was that Oleandra finally convinced Draco of helping her found her club. With his help, they had an easy time convincing Professor Snape of approving the foundation of a seemingly purposeless club, and thus the Starshower Club was born.
Draco saw the Greengrass twins as kindred spirits, who were always inadvertently pulling pranks on his enemies. He had already great respect for Oleandra, since she had won them the Quidditch Cup last year and nearly won them the House Cup. But after her display of magic in Defense Against the Dark Arts, he was also interested in her star magic, which she had promised to teach him when he joined.
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