A Lion and the Birds Prodigal Finished

The 15th of February, 2019
Late Afternoon

Ress left the classroom and disappeared in the waving curtains of her office entrance. And Meenauh was left standing there in front of several matchboxes, caught by surprise by the unexpected solitude.

"Understood!" she managed to say to Ress, while she was still in midway to her office.

Her head was getting heavier and heavier with all the information Ress somehow managed to put into it. So she had to work on her hand movement first. And yes, concentrate. She started to silently draw the infinity symbol in front of her to make it automatic while thinking of the success formula.

The amount of knowledge about the object. She instantly thought of a bird she liked the most — the kingfisher, or halcyon to be precise. Halcyon was the symbol of calmness and peace, which was just the right state to free the mind of any burden and concentrate of the Transfiguration. Kingfishers were small, just probably the size of a matchbox. And she knew a few things about the bird's anatomy, which could probably definitely help.

"Alright, let's get it started," she said out loud to herself and stepped closer to the matchboxes.

She pointed her wand at the first matchbox, closed her eyes and started visualizing the bird: the correct size, the head, the mostly greyish body and the feathery tail, the feathers of sort of teal and lunar blue with parts of black, the longer than the average beak of blood red and black eyes. She kept that picture in her head for several seconds to imprint it better in her imagination to be able to quickly repeat the spell several times. Finally, she opened her eyes, drew the close to perfect infinity symbol and proclaimed:

"AH-vi-fors!"

The stream of magical energy pulled through her arms and into the wand, the sort of blue light left the wand and the matchbox quickly transformed into the imagined bird. She checked the bird and, indeed, one of the wings was just slightly smaller than the other, though the rest of the bird seemed completely normal. The bird looked around and rose into the air. Because of the different size of the wings, the small kingfisher couldn't fly straight and kept circling around her, always dropping to its left.

She silently practised the hand movement again and repeated the procedure for the second matchbox:

"AH-vi-fors!"

The second bird turned out to be of a slightly different tint of teal, sort of darker, which was an interesting change. Did she imagine it differently, or could the tone of the pronunciation matter? Anyway, the hand movement seemed to get steadier and steadier as the second bird's wings were completely normal, though a bit bigger than they should be in comparison to its body.

She repeated the spell for two more matchboxes and there she stood with four pretty birds flying around.

Okay, she did like birds. She did like their voices and how small and pretty they were. No doubt she headed for Ravenclaw all that time, but for some reason, the Hat (which she still considered malfunctioning) sorted her differently. Nevertheless, the sorting didn't matter, not at this point.

She continued to exercise. Changing the colour should be easy because that was kind of external feature of the bird and easy to visualise and no form changing was meant to happen. And it was convenient that there were kingfishers with purple wings. So she tweaked the image she imprinted in her mind to a purple-winged kingfisher and transfigured another matchbox. 

Then she tried something they discussed before: trying to transfigured something that didn't exist. In this case, not the object as a whole, but the trait of the object. There were kingfishers of multiple different colours, almost any of them. There was even a kingfisher that was almost completely black. But there was no kingfisher, which was completely white. That was the exercise she needed to mentally prepare a bit longer. She stood there, silent, only the birds' sweet tweeting, which sounded more like chirring. Finally, she raised her wand again and transformed another matchbox into a completely white small bird, which was just like the others, but white. Not the snow white, though, but with some greyish tint. Meenauh still considered it a success and moved on to the next task.

She wiped the sweat from her forehead as she was getting closer to magical exhaustion, though she didn't quite notice that herself. She was too engaged to notice that. Especially, because she was learning the second year spell beforehand.

Kingfishers were small birds by default. She selected them partially because of their size close to the matchbox size. Making them smaller would mean to make them close to hummingbirds. She sat for a couple of minutes just to rest and collect her thoughts and magic. Tweaking her imprinted image once again she tried to imagine the smaller version of a kingfisher sitting next to the matchbox. Placing two objects next to each other to provide a relative picture of their sizes helped. The smaller kingfisher sat instead of a matchbox, not willing to rise into the air. She felt that the last cast was a bit easier than the other ones, probably because of the size and mass of the transfigured bird. Or she was just getting into it.

Okay, next — different species. She was already thinking of a hummingbird to keep her casting in the flow. Hummingbirds were colourful as well and somehow looked similar to kingfishers. She stored her kingfisher image in a mental drawer and pulled out a mental blank sheet to start visualising a hummingbird: small head coloured separately from the body in gleaming scarlet and gold (the Gryffindor colours subconsciously crawled into her head), the body of grey looking like fish scales. She particularly imagined feathery texture to be looking like scales, not exactly fish scales, not to create a half-fish.

She wanted to raise the wand again, but she found herself sitting again, which was probably a requirement for her body — to rest in between the casting as transfiguration was quite an exhausting activity. She stood up and came to the next matchbox. Drawing of the infinity symbol was pretty much mastered, so was the incantation. Though she was paying more attention to the incantation, not to pronounce it differently because she was growing more and more tired. Several seconds after a small hummingbird was floating nearby.

The next rest took a bit longer and she extracted a chocolate bar from her pouch to get a bit more energy before continuing. It felt like almost an hour has passed since she started, mostly because of the tiredness, though in her mind it all lasted for most likely several minutes.

The last exercise was to transfigure a bird with a different shape of the beak. Her mind was getting foggy as she started to think of partial transfiguration and why Ress allowed her to do partial transfiguration. But then she realised that she just had to transfigure a matchbox into a bird, not to change a real bird's beak. So it was similar to the colour change, though the trait wasn't external in that case. She replaced her image of the hummingbird with a kingfisher again. This time she erased its beak and replaced it with a crossbill's beak. The bird looked strange even in her mind, but she was very determined to transfigure it. Pood bird, though. Would it consciousness be able to deal with the new sort of beak? Or for that exact being the consciousness accepted the new beak by default because it wasn't new for this particular bird?

Meenauh slapped herself to stop the defocusing, drew the gesture and proclaimed another incantation and a strange bird was brought to life by the blue light. It felt quite happy even with the strange kind of beak. Meenauh shrugged and felt how heavy her shoulders were. One matchbox was still resting calmly on the table. Meenauh thought she even heard the matchbox tweeting. She sat and pondered for a while what to do next. She felt like she couldn't speak the incantation anymore as it sounded way too funny in her head. Sometimes it was happening like that, when you write down a word for too many times, you start thinking that word just can't exist because it would be too funny for it to be a real word. Same happened to Avifors. So Meenauh just silently giggled at the word. After five or six minutes she stood up, stepped closer to the last matchbox and pick it up. She studied it closely and thought that she completely didn't pay attention to what she was transfiguring from. Was it because she was too familiar with the concept of a matchbox? She rolled it in her hands and then an idea came to her mind. She closed her eyes, felt the matchbox in her palm, imagined the kingfisher, a regular one with no changes, then opened her eyes and threw the matchbox really really high into the air, raised her wand, drew the infinity symbol almost automatically and shouted:

"AH-vi-fors!"

The blue light emerged from the wand and hit the matchbox in the air, and the small bird started to fall down into Meenauh. Suddenly the bird spread its wings, sort of rolled in the air and joined the flock.