Jörmungandr

Strawberry Waffles

Missy's Medley of Mischievous Miracles was over three hundred pages and filled to the brim with shite.

Well, the illustrations were nice. There was a cute squirrel-ferret hybrid on page eighty-six.

The content, however.

Hermione was actually impressed with how overwrought the spellwork was. It took a lot of effort to make heating water complicated. One of the first things humanity had learned to do and Townsend spent nearly fourteen pages and thirty-three spells on it. Combining, contorting, and, sometimes, outright contradictory spellwork to link a candle and a cup so that lighting one would heat the other. No need to mention that the charm would take but a second.

Riddle had been wrong. This wasn't for second-years. It was too dense for a twelve-year-old to understand how unnecessary ninety percent of the spellcraft was—well, most twelve-year-olds, Riddle seemed to have picked up on it—This was for snobby rich folks who needed overly-elaborate magic Rube-Goldberg machines to heat their tea. For people with more money and magic than sense. This wasn't just a nouveau riche scam; this was a new age scam.

In a way, it was brilliant.

Those who were interested in the book would have to be people with more time, money, magic than they knew what to do with. The kinds of people who would readily make strange, complicated, incomprehensible self-watering flower pots, not because they need it, but because they wanted to show off. The kinds of people who collected rare artifacts just because they could.

The perfect people to rob.

Self-selection was a beautiful thing.

Hermione suspected that the runes that allowed Townsend to sneak into a place weren't actually in the book. But rather, once one of these grotesque contraptions was made, it shone out like a beacon saying, 'Here I am! I am the fool! Please rob me at your earliest convenience!'

It would take time to find. She couldn't very well make all these things. It would take years! But, it was an interesting thought experiment. A nice visualisation exercise in the morning—

"Mac, where's my shampoo?" Iona Neris shouted from the bathroom.

"I dunno, did you check the cabinet?" came a muffled voice from under covers in the bed next to Hermione. Claudia Macmillan. Though she hadn't been introduced. Or, at least, her introduction hadn't been reciprocated.

"Of course, I checked the cabinet!" Neris shouted again, indecipherably fast, whipping around the door for a second. "I lent it to you yesterday. Where is it?" More shuffling from the bathroom cabinet.

"Accio shampoo," Flint said softly, with a flick of her wand behind her, picking out things from her trunk, "Oop—AHhh!"

Hermione looked up from her book. A dozen bottles of shampoo flew out of the girls' trunks and pelted Flint in the back of the head. Her books and parchment scattered across the floor.

Neris poked her head back out. "Careful, Addy! Oh. There it is," she said, walking over and then pulling out a gold and brown bottle from the pile. She smiled, "Thanks," and returned to the bathroom. The shower turned on.

"You're welcome," Flint mumbled and picked her things up, patting at her skirts.

Despite herself, an amused smile crept up Hermione's face. She had been battered a number of times by a wrongly specified Accio charm. Keys were the worst. You never realise how many you have until a dozen of them are coming at your face. Hermione flicked her wand and the shampoo Riddle had gotten her returned to her truck.