Harry Potter and the Boy Who Lived

Chapter 6: Durmstrang Spring Part 3

The Myth of Perfection

Spell Creation Classroom, March 25 th

Gritting his teeth in frustration, Harry tried a clockwise swirl instead of a counter-clockwise twist. "Lumos."

Nothing.

"Lumos," he tried again.

Still nothing.

"LUMOS!"

"So there is something that Harry Potter isn't great at? I'll alert the paper."

Harry fought the urge to send a hex at Calypso. Professor Cherny had no tolerance for spellwork that didn't relate to his class, and Calypso wouldn't ignore being hexed, especially in front of other first years. "What am I doing wrong? I didn't change the fundamentals of the spell, it should be working."

With a sigh, Calypso leaned over to look at Harry's notes. After a moment, she made a tutting sound and looked up at him. "You made far too many assumptions. Regardless of how little you changed the spell, you still changed it. If you're going to stick with this project, you're going to need to completely rework the mechanics from scratch. You're fortunate it's a simple spell, or else I'd say there was no chance that you would be able to make the necessary changes in time."

"This was supposed to be my easy final project," Harry moaned. "A little tweak to an existing spell, just to show I understood the concepts."

Calypso smiled. "Oh, if you manage this, you'll certainly demonstrate that you understand the concepts. You will have essentially made a new spell, not just 'tweaked' an existing one. So, are you going to stick with it or try to come up with something new?"

"Like what?" Harry asked bitterly. "This at least makes a slight bit of sense to me. Can I look at your notes again?"

"Still trying to figure out my project? Really, Potter, it's not that complex."

Muttering an insult under his breath, Harry accepted Calypso's notes and tried again to figure out what she was trying to do, and, more importantly, if anything she did could be used to help his own increasingly more difficult final project. After a solid minute of reading through her notes, Harry pushed the parchment away with a look of disgust on his face.

If there was one thing Harry Potter hated, it was being ignorant about magic. It was therefore very difficult for him to accept that he still couldn't figure out what Calypso's final project was supposed to be. That wasn't to say that her project was necessarily that complex, it was just written in proper spell creation format. Instead of actually explaining what the spell did, proper format required that the mechanics of the spell be explained in nauseating detail. So, instead of just saying that the spell was a curse and giving the wand movement, Harry was struggling to analyze what effect a sixty degree upward vertical twist followed by a downward slash across the body would have..

According to his textbook, slashing movements were designed primarily for curses, but he didn't understand what effect the vertical twist would have, or why sixty degrees was required. At first he thought that it was just a generic number, but then he read the chapter on numerology and angles in his book. Apparently, when designing a spell, the specific degree could drastically affect the spell's final outcome. Unfortunately, the book didn't take the time to specifically explain the effect every different degree would have on each combination of wand movements, mostly because there were literally countless combinations and effects.

"I could just tell you," Calypso offered nonchalantly.

Harry shook his head. "I'll figure it out...eventually."