- Pronouns
- Male
Do you mean that a spell interprets the information a snake has giving the appearance of sapience? I'm not really sure. Either way it didn't need to be spoilered.
Spells in Silence (Harry Potter)
- Thread starter Silently Watches
- Start date
- Location
- Oslo
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Think about it this way. Snakes are intelligent, they have memories, there might be some limitations and unique perks to their intelligence, but the appearance of sapience on top of that might be not much of a stretch. A perfect emulation of sapience is kind of convenient, but it's not like all of magic in the universe is tailored for the convenience of one particular boy's story, right? =)
If all snakes were sapient all the time, they wouldn't have behaved like real snakes, and on top of it, the enemies of Salazar wouldn't need to use Parseltongue to get a use out of them. They could've learned a different way to communicate with snakes. They might learn to Legilimens into their minds. They might threaten or bribe them to spy on Heirs, all kinds of nasty things. Creator of Perseltongue [if there is one] would definitely foresee such possibilities and eliminate such glaring security risks. If snakes are just snakes until the time is right, they are useful only to a Parselmouth.
I often insert extra thoughts into other sentences and then edit them to be longer and it completely messes up with how the paragraph looks on the screen. And I can't just take it often, as it's more of a fork though, rather than a continuation.
Trust me, it needs to be hidden. Though, maybe I should indicate that it isn't actully a spoiler.
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- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
It probably just mimicks sentience and the sentient part is in the magic, not the snake, because creating sentience at will sounds hard.
So really, you're just talking to yourself
Roth963
If I become inactive with this massage, I died
Portaits and the hat can make passable attempt at it, why not magical language doing so to snakes.
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Those presumably take time and effort to enchant? The hat is pretty legendary, and portraits take a while to paint in presence of the conscience to copy into them.
Ch. 17, Surprises
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
The day was warm today, and Jean Luc and Hazel had moved from his cabin to a table outside to enjoy the sunlight. In a shocking turn of events, Jean Luc had even finished going through the previously never-ending stack of receipts they had been adding to his ledger, so they were not even doing work outside. Instead they had grabbed a couple of books from his small collection and were reading in the daylight.
Or, really, he was reading while she constantly glanced back and forth between the book in her hands and the dictionary that was being helpfully held aloft by her ghost hand so she could flip through it and looked up all the words she did not know. There were a lot of those.
Loud cracks, three or four of them, came from the other side of the commune, and she looked up to find Jean Luc looking that way with his eyes growing wide. "Damn. I forgot. Hazel, I need you to hide. Now."
Rubbing her fingertips together to create her sparkler, she wrote out, 'Why? What wrong?'
"Wizards from the government are here. They normally come around this time of the month, I just got a little distracted this time and actually have something to hide from them. Go hide in the trees until Grégoire or I come to get you." He looked back at her, his expression still one of worry and fear. "If they find you, none of us are going to like the consequences."
She bit her lip. On the one hand, she did not want to cause the werewolves any trouble, not after how kind they had been to her despite their fear and misgivings. On the other hand, anything that had even Jean Luc panicking like this was something she needed to see, if only so she could be on the lookout for it in the future.
Closing her two books with the three hands, she stuffed them both into her satchel and climbed up the side of the tree until she stood on her feet. She gave him a nod and stepped backwards. As soon as he turned around and started walking towards the sounds, she blew out a cloud of smoke and followed along. Not right behind him, but about fifteen feet away. A couple of times that meant she went around the other side of a cabin and broke her line of sight, but it was easy enough to find him again afterwards.
She had never really pushed the limits of what this spell was capable of, she considered as she crept along. She knew people ignored her, which was the entire goal, but what all she could get away with doing in front of people without the spell breaking she was not sure. At some point she really needed to experiment with that, but this was not the time for that. Instead she was going to do her best to stay just far enough away from Jean Luc and whoever these wizards were so she did not risk the spell breaking.
It turned out to be four wizards who had shown up, all of them wearing bright blue robes that came down to their knees with baggy sleeves cinched tight at the wrists. The sleeves themselves were emblazoned with a repeating pattern of the fleur de lis design that the French were so fond of. Another emblem sat over their hearts, but at this distance she could not tell just what it was other than it was something different. More important than their clothing was their expressions; none of them seemed particularly happy to be here, one of them even sneering at the admittedly plain-looking cabins and kicking a rock with the toe of his tall brown leather boots.
If they were not happy and did not want to be here, she wondered, why had they come in the first place?
"Lieutenant Lemaire, we weren't expecting to see you so soon," Jean Luc called out in greeting. Hazel could tell that his voice was tight, and between that, his command to her, and the thoughts she had heard from a few of the werewolves about wizards, it was not hard to tell that he was just as unhappy about their presence as they were. "Normally you show up closer to the full moon, almost as if you like seeing us in pain as the transformation gets nearer and starts gnawing on our bones."
"I want to get this inspection done sooner than later so I can get it out of the way," the wizard in the front of the arrangement said, disgust dripping from every word. "We have lots to do besides checking up on you, and I don't plan to waste my weekend on it. Pounding Marguerite is going to be so much more enjoyable than coming out here to make sure a bunch of monsters are 'comfortable'."
She could feel her hackles rise as her confusion and concern morphed into anger. Almost a month she had spent here, living and interacting with these people. They were not monsters. No one who spent any time whatsoever with them could possibly think something like that. Who did this man think he was to come in to their home and start insulting them?
The man, Lemaire, waved one hand in an almost negligent fashion at the compound, and the other three wizards drew their wands and split away to walk among the buildings. One of them kicked in a door rather than open it, and she could only watch as Jean Luc gritted his teeth but said nothing in response. "It was not even locked. All he had to do was turn the handle. What kind of enjoyment do these bastards get from breaking what little we have?" he thought.
"Where are the others?" Lemaire asked after a moment. "I only count eight of you freaks, and there should be many more."
"They're at work, just like they were last month you were here Lieutenant," answered Jean Luc through gritted teeth. "You know it's hard for us to get any kind of honest work. None of my people want to lose the opportunities they managed to find."
Another sneer was the only answer his rebuttal earned. "Why would any sane wizard hire a werewolf in the first place? That's my question."
After fifteen or twenty minutes, the other wizards return, and Lemaire demanded, "Find anything? I doubt they would. These beasts are too good at keeping their noses clean, but one of these days we'll find that they're planning something. I just hope I'm around to drag them to the Bastille when we do figure it out. Fine," he added when they all shook their heads. "Then get back to the Ministry. Have a good weekend, werewolf." Lemaire spun on his heel and collapsed in on himself until with another crack, he and his men were gone.
Hazel released the mental hold on her smoke and walked towards Jean Luc, who was still standing in the place as he had while talking to Lemaire. Her hand and sparkler already moving, and she wrote, 'They rude.'
He looked over to her in a little surprise before finding her message. "Thank the Circles she's safe. I thought I told you to hide."
'I hide while they here. They gone now. Who?'
Her admittedly poor sentence structure threw him for a loop for a second, and she rolled her eyes. Yes, she knew she really needed to learn that whole conjugation thing, but it just made no sense. "Those were the Republican Guard. They are a branch of the French Ministry's law enforcement, and among their other duties when they are not harassing us is checking on known 'potential threats', including werewolves." Jean Luc sighed. "They swing by every month or so. Part of it is to make sure that we are here where we're supposed to be, and part of it… Part of it is to make sure there are no non-werewolves hanging around."
Hazel blinked at that, her expression making her confusion plain. They did not want non-werewolves hanging out with werewolves? Why? What purpose did that serve?
"I was not looking forward to this conversation," Jean Luc thought with a grimace as he looked over her face. "We are not the only group of werewolves in the country. We are one of several, and not all of them are as law-abiding as we are. There are even some werewolves who go out of their way to bite and turn as many people as they can for reasons that I will not go into right now and that don't make sense to me outside blind revenge. Because of that, though, part of the inspections is to make sure we are not holding people hostage so we can bite them at the next full moon or something of the like. It is nothing we would ever do, but there are many people in the government who do not trust us even after decades of us doing nothing wrong."
'That why you say hide?'
He nodded. "That is why I told you to hide, yes. Legally, you aren't supposed to be here, and we could get in lots of trouble if they ever find you even if you tell them that you are here of your own free will."
Her eyes went wide. All this time the werewolves had been worried about them being a danger to her on the full moon, but in reality she was a danger to them?! She had not known! After all the kindness they had shown her, her getting them into trouble would be a cruel way to repay them.
She liked them, liked them a lot, but if this was the case it was better if she moved on.
Her fingers moved to starting writing just that, but Jean Luc raised one hand as if he were the one who could read minds. "I know what you are thinking, but that does not mean you should leave, nor do we want you to do so. All of us except the children realize that you just being here could cause trouble, and we are fine with it. We would rather risk the danger than have you leave."
All she could do was stare at him for several seconds. 'Why?'
The simple question startled a laugh out of him. "I suppose I should have expected that question. You've met the children we have here. Claude, Chantal, Serge. None of them are our children, even though there are several couples that have come together over the years. That is because werewolves simply are not capable of having children. The transformations are too violent, and babies are too delicate. None of us will ever have a little one of our own running around, no matter how much some of us would love nothing more." He gave her a crooked smile, and knowing his thoughts she thought she might be able to see the glimmer of a repressed tear in his eyes. "We have been given many young werewolves over the years, but it does not feel the same. Some of it may be because they are not our own blood, or so we thought for a long time, and some of it may be – is – that when we are bitten young, we spend many, many years bitter about how we are victims. It takes time to outgrow that, and by that point we are no longer children.
"But you?" He motioned to her and laughed. "I mean it as no insult or criticism, Hazel, but you have an innocence to you that we have not seen for so long. Even the strangeness of your powers pales in comparison. In just this last month, you brought something to us that some of us had given up on ever seeing. I know several women in the group would love nothing more than to adopt you as their own"—he gave her another grin, brighter than the last—"although with the way you keep popping in and out whenever you want without telling anybody, to me I must say you seem more like a stray cat than a typical child."
Now it was her who had to fight tears. So long, so long she had spent with the Dursleys who wanted nothing to do with her, who had made it clear they hated her and wanted her gone. But here, in the middle of an entirely different country, she had found people who actually truly did want her around. Who cared about her and wanted to keep her safe even if it put an additional burden on themselves.
Was this what people meant when they talked about feeling like a family?
Hazel sniffed and wiped her left eye, knowing full well there was nothing she could do about her right eye without making it obvious she was crying. In an effort to distract herself, she hastily wrote, 'Can I do something to help after this? Fix what they break or something?'
"Yes, I think we can find something for you to do if it makes you feel like you deserve what we will freely give." He turned to give her some privacy and pointed at one of the doors. "We can start there, and maybe between the two of us we will have everything fixed before anybody gets back from work."
The weather continued to warm as summer swelled to its full heat, and as July progressed the energy and excitement in the compound rose. No one told Hazel why that was, and the few times she asked the other person's thoughts and conversation would quickly shift to something else. Whatever it was, they were being very careful not to give her any hints even with their own thoughts.
It was a little maddening.
Something shook her awake one morning, and she pushed the sheet off her face to look blearily at the two women standing over her bed. Amorette, the blonde who often helped Elise teach the other kids, and an even younger dark-haired woman she did not often interact with. Jacqueline, that was her name. She was only a few years older than Claude, and no one was willing to tell Hazel what she did or why she was the only werewolf who worked at night.
Readjusting her monocle, Hazel looked out the door to see that it was indeed still the morning. It was actually a surprise that Jacqueline was even up this early, or maybe she just had not gone to bed yet. Reaching out with one hand, she wrote simply, 'What?'
"Good morning, 'Azel! It's time to wake up!" Amorette said in a sing-song. "We have a few things to do, and we need to get you out of here for a couple of hours. Jackie and I are going shopping in Nice, and we figured you might want to tag along and see what magical stores look like."
She just nodded for a bit, then as her brain kept waking up she waved for the two women to leave the room. 'In a minute.'
"Okay, but do not take too long or we will leave without you!"
The door closed behind them, and Hazel pushed herself up to a sitting position and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. It took her a moment to realize what day it was, namely the very last day of July. Her birthday. She was now ten years old.
Was that why Amorette and Jacqueline were acting weird? Amorette did know when her birthday was; that was something that had been asked the day after she showed Amorette and Elise that she could move things with her ghost hand. They had neither said nor thought the word 'birthday' around her, though, and it was possible that Amorette had simply forgotten or was not thinking about it. She was a newcomer to the werewolves' compound, after all, although if they had forgotten about her birthday it still did not explain why they were behaving the way they were.
She eventually pushed the door open once she had cleaned herself and dressed and deposited Morgan on her shoulder, and before she could do anything else both her arms were grabbed. Amorette and Jacqueline immediately started walking away from the compound with her, their path soon becoming clear. It was the same path the other werewolves took when they walked to the road and summoned the carriage to take them to their jobs. After a couple of minutes she was able to pull her arms free and ask a question that had been circling inside her brain since they started walking. 'Why Nice and not Paris?'
"Nice is a little bit safer and smaller," Jacqueline answered. "It's more of a local shopping area where Paris is more centralized, so the other people there do not ask as many questions. There is less law enforcement running around causing problems, too."
The rest of the walk passed in relative silence, even if Amorette and Jacqueline to a lesser extent were both far more excited that could be justified by a simple excursion like this. Something secret was going on. When they arrived at the road, Amorette pulled out a metal coin or disc a little smaller than her palm and held it up.
Much like the time when she followed the werewolves here and from there to Paris, the road down to the right stretched before a large carriage made of dark wood and pulled by eight clockwork horses faded into view and rolled to a stop in front of them. Unlike the last time, today Hazel followed the other women into the carriage. It truly was larger on the inside that it should have been, with many rows of wooden benches stretching backwards for easily a hundred feet. Several of the benches were already filled with other people, all of them wearing robes or other obviously wizard-y outfits.
A man sat in a small chair in the front with leather reins in his hands. "We're headed to Vendretout in Nice," Amorette told the driver as she tapped the metal disc to a golden box bearing a large round opalescent stone on its front face.
The box chimed, and he grunted. "All right. Got a few more stops to make first." He gave the reins a sharp crack, and through the window she could see the mechanical horses rear up as they prepared to resume their run. They managed to grab a bench three rows down before the carriage actually started rolling forwards. Stuffed into the corner, Hazel could only watch as the world outside stretched and roiled for several seconds before resolving into the same cobblestone square with the burning braziers she had seen the first time she rode this conveyance. "Place Cachée!" he shouted over his shoulder.
It took a few more of those strange transitions before the carriage stopped along a little street that bordered a sandy shore. Hazel could not help but stare out over the glistening waters beyond; it was not the very first time she had seen the sea, but this surely beat out the seaside at Tintagel or Dover.
"Vendretout Marketplace!" the carriage driver called out.
"This way, 'Azel," Amorette told her, shaking her out of her reverie. "We still have lots to do."
As they walked away from the carriage, Hazel took a few seconds to look around at the buildings dotting this little stone street. The shopping district in Paris had been absolutely packed with shops, everything side by side with no space between them. The inside walls of one shop were the other side of the walls of another shop, and the exterior just continued on over multiple stores. Here, however, the stores were actual separate buildings with little alleyways between them. They were also, she could not help but notice, more drab and dilapidated than the stores in Paris.
Jacqueline said this place was better and safer, she recalled. It certainly did not look it. She gave a little tug on said woman's sleeve and wrote quickly, 'Here safe? You sure?'
She gave Hazel a small smile and a laugh. "Yes, I'm sure. It is not as fancy as Paris, I will grant you that one, but sometimes that is a plus all on its own. Not to mention, because it is a smaller and poorer shopping area, we will not get as many second looks because of our clothing."
Hazel glanced around again after that comment, and now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see what Jacqueline meant. Her own tunic and trousers looked no worse for wear than they had been when she stole them from the store, but Amorette's own robe was clearly worn and had been repaired multiple times. Jacqueline's deep red and deep cut robe was nicer looking for sure, but it too was obviously not new. That same thing could be said about the clothing of the other people on the street, though, so they should fit right in.
Most of ninety minutes were spent migrating in and out of different shops, Amorette crossing items off the list she carried and the number of bags steadily increasing. When it became clear just how much they really needed to buy, Hazel had volunteered herself as pack mule and started stuffing all the shopping bags into her bottomless satchel. Neither woman complained about having a weightless space to hold all their necessities.
"And that is most of it," Amorette said, striking out yet another item. "Now for the fun part. 'Azel, you're ten years old today – and a happy birthday, by the way. There comes a time in every girl's life where she has the right to start wearing a little jewelry and making herself look pretty. Have you ever thought about whether you would want to wear earrings?"
Fifteen minutes later, she walked out of a magical tattoo parlor in front of her companions, her ears weighted down the tiniest bit thanks to the new earrings sitting within them. According to the tattooist who did the piercing, a Né-Moldus and a friend of Jacqueline's, the mundane method of piercing ears took weeks to heal from; the magical method, on the other hand, still used a scarily big needle to punch the hole in her earlobes but added a potion called Essence of Dittany to make all that healing happen in seconds. It meant she could start wearing earrings immediately.
The wizard had a wide selection of matching pairs, but she had actually gravitated to the single earrings. Part of it was that it looked like these were cheaper than most of the paired sets, and part of it was that she did not necessarily want the same thing in both ears. What she wore now as she exited the store was a small round stud in her left ear that lazily shifted from one color to another through all the colors of the rainbow and a hoop in her right ear that flowed and jiggled as if it were made of mercury.
A number of long, dangly earrings had attracted her attention at first, too. She just was not sure she could trust Morgan not to constantly peck and pull at them. He was already butting his head against the stud enough that she was starting to get worried.
'That all we need?' she wrote.
"That should be everything," answered Amorette with a smile, "and I think we have distracted you long enough the others she be done with their parts. Let's call the carriage and take it back home."
The others? Their parts? Hazel stared at her uncomprehendingly. Had they been planning something? Trying to hide anything from her was difficult; they would have had to not talk or even think about what they were doing… Oh. 'I can take us back,' she replied after a few moments. There was no need for them to wait for the carriage when she could just as easily jump back to the compound. It would also be faster so she could sooner discover just what they were all up to.
"You can take us back? How?" repeated Jacqueline. The women looked at each other before the dark-haired werewolf shrugged. "Okay. I am willing to give you a chance to prove it, whatever it is."
She reached out her hands and made grabbing gestures, her gut churning with rising worry all the same. She had jumped herself and Morgan to different places plenty of times, but that was just the two of them. She had never tried jumping with another person, let alone two more. She hoped it was going to work.
Their hands wrapped around her own. She took a deep breath in, then out, then in again. There was only way to find out if this was possible. She was worrying over nothing, she told herself. Teleporting itself, throwing herself from one place to another and ignoring all the physical distance in between, was obviously the hardest part of what she was doing, and that was old hat by now. Whether it involved one person or two or ten should make no difference whatsoever. Blowing out her held breath, she coiled her knees below her and jumped harder and higher than she ever had before.
Most of the time, she heard nothing when she left or arrived anywhere. This time, the air itself rang with a crash or a clang, and the normal too-tight tube she had to squeeze herself through today was three sizes too small. Instead of just forcing the last dregs of air out of her lungs, it was as if all the bones in her body were being crushed into a powder and her muscles squashed into jelly. If she had a mouth and a voice and breath to use them, she would be screaming in agony.
A split second later, everything explosively reinflated with another crash, and she collapsed onto the ground. Two more thuds quickly followed. "That was a mistake," she heard Jacqueline think. "That was the most painful teleportation I have ever experienced, and I hope never to do so again."
"We should have just used the carriage," Amorette said in unknowing agreement.
Hazel was not planning to argue with either of them. From now on, she was going to do her best to teleport just herself and Morgan. No more passengers.
Footsteps came towards them, and she looked up to find a familiar bald werewolf looking down at them. "Why do I have the feeling I know what happened here?" Jean Luc asked himself, his thoughts and his smile all but screaming his amusement for the world to hear. "Good trip?"
Jacqueline spat a particularly nasty sentence at him that had Hazel blushing. He was supposed to do what with a burning tree branch?!
"Jacqueline! There are young ears around." He reached down and pulled Hazel up to her feet, then did the same for Amorette. Jacqueline he just looked down at until she climbed upright herself. "You are a little early," he continued once they were all vertical. "Elise is still finishing the cake."
Cake? Cake?! She stared at him before reaching up to touch her new earrings. The tattooist had seemed too prepared for this to all be a spur of the moment plan, which meant… that would have been a present. Cake, a present. It was almost as if…
"Oh well," Jean Luc said with a bright beaming smile towards her. "It looks like we kept it mostly a secret for the time we needed. Everyone decided to pitch in with setting up a party once Amorette told us what today was. It will not be much, but it is what we can do to make today a merry one.
"Happy birthday, Hazel."
There are so many details I throw in solely for my own amusement. It's bad. I should stop.
Or, really, he was reading while she constantly glanced back and forth between the book in her hands and the dictionary that was being helpfully held aloft by her ghost hand so she could flip through it and looked up all the words she did not know. There were a lot of those.
Loud cracks, three or four of them, came from the other side of the commune, and she looked up to find Jean Luc looking that way with his eyes growing wide. "Damn. I forgot. Hazel, I need you to hide. Now."
Rubbing her fingertips together to create her sparkler, she wrote out, 'Why? What wrong?'
"Wizards from the government are here. They normally come around this time of the month, I just got a little distracted this time and actually have something to hide from them. Go hide in the trees until Grégoire or I come to get you." He looked back at her, his expression still one of worry and fear. "If they find you, none of us are going to like the consequences."
She bit her lip. On the one hand, she did not want to cause the werewolves any trouble, not after how kind they had been to her despite their fear and misgivings. On the other hand, anything that had even Jean Luc panicking like this was something she needed to see, if only so she could be on the lookout for it in the future.
Closing her two books with the three hands, she stuffed them both into her satchel and climbed up the side of the tree until she stood on her feet. She gave him a nod and stepped backwards. As soon as he turned around and started walking towards the sounds, she blew out a cloud of smoke and followed along. Not right behind him, but about fifteen feet away. A couple of times that meant she went around the other side of a cabin and broke her line of sight, but it was easy enough to find him again afterwards.
She had never really pushed the limits of what this spell was capable of, she considered as she crept along. She knew people ignored her, which was the entire goal, but what all she could get away with doing in front of people without the spell breaking she was not sure. At some point she really needed to experiment with that, but this was not the time for that. Instead she was going to do her best to stay just far enough away from Jean Luc and whoever these wizards were so she did not risk the spell breaking.
It turned out to be four wizards who had shown up, all of them wearing bright blue robes that came down to their knees with baggy sleeves cinched tight at the wrists. The sleeves themselves were emblazoned with a repeating pattern of the fleur de lis design that the French were so fond of. Another emblem sat over their hearts, but at this distance she could not tell just what it was other than it was something different. More important than their clothing was their expressions; none of them seemed particularly happy to be here, one of them even sneering at the admittedly plain-looking cabins and kicking a rock with the toe of his tall brown leather boots.
If they were not happy and did not want to be here, she wondered, why had they come in the first place?
"Lieutenant Lemaire, we weren't expecting to see you so soon," Jean Luc called out in greeting. Hazel could tell that his voice was tight, and between that, his command to her, and the thoughts she had heard from a few of the werewolves about wizards, it was not hard to tell that he was just as unhappy about their presence as they were. "Normally you show up closer to the full moon, almost as if you like seeing us in pain as the transformation gets nearer and starts gnawing on our bones."
"I want to get this inspection done sooner than later so I can get it out of the way," the wizard in the front of the arrangement said, disgust dripping from every word. "We have lots to do besides checking up on you, and I don't plan to waste my weekend on it. Pounding Marguerite is going to be so much more enjoyable than coming out here to make sure a bunch of monsters are 'comfortable'."
She could feel her hackles rise as her confusion and concern morphed into anger. Almost a month she had spent here, living and interacting with these people. They were not monsters. No one who spent any time whatsoever with them could possibly think something like that. Who did this man think he was to come in to their home and start insulting them?
The man, Lemaire, waved one hand in an almost negligent fashion at the compound, and the other three wizards drew their wands and split away to walk among the buildings. One of them kicked in a door rather than open it, and she could only watch as Jean Luc gritted his teeth but said nothing in response. "It was not even locked. All he had to do was turn the handle. What kind of enjoyment do these bastards get from breaking what little we have?" he thought.
"Where are the others?" Lemaire asked after a moment. "I only count eight of you freaks, and there should be many more."
"They're at work, just like they were last month you were here Lieutenant," answered Jean Luc through gritted teeth. "You know it's hard for us to get any kind of honest work. None of my people want to lose the opportunities they managed to find."
Another sneer was the only answer his rebuttal earned. "Why would any sane wizard hire a werewolf in the first place? That's my question."
After fifteen or twenty minutes, the other wizards return, and Lemaire demanded, "Find anything? I doubt they would. These beasts are too good at keeping their noses clean, but one of these days we'll find that they're planning something. I just hope I'm around to drag them to the Bastille when we do figure it out. Fine," he added when they all shook their heads. "Then get back to the Ministry. Have a good weekend, werewolf." Lemaire spun on his heel and collapsed in on himself until with another crack, he and his men were gone.
Hazel released the mental hold on her smoke and walked towards Jean Luc, who was still standing in the place as he had while talking to Lemaire. Her hand and sparkler already moving, and she wrote, 'They rude.'
He looked over to her in a little surprise before finding her message. "Thank the Circles she's safe. I thought I told you to hide."
'I hide while they here. They gone now. Who?'
Her admittedly poor sentence structure threw him for a loop for a second, and she rolled her eyes. Yes, she knew she really needed to learn that whole conjugation thing, but it just made no sense. "Those were the Republican Guard. They are a branch of the French Ministry's law enforcement, and among their other duties when they are not harassing us is checking on known 'potential threats', including werewolves." Jean Luc sighed. "They swing by every month or so. Part of it is to make sure that we are here where we're supposed to be, and part of it… Part of it is to make sure there are no non-werewolves hanging around."
Hazel blinked at that, her expression making her confusion plain. They did not want non-werewolves hanging out with werewolves? Why? What purpose did that serve?
"I was not looking forward to this conversation," Jean Luc thought with a grimace as he looked over her face. "We are not the only group of werewolves in the country. We are one of several, and not all of them are as law-abiding as we are. There are even some werewolves who go out of their way to bite and turn as many people as they can for reasons that I will not go into right now and that don't make sense to me outside blind revenge. Because of that, though, part of the inspections is to make sure we are not holding people hostage so we can bite them at the next full moon or something of the like. It is nothing we would ever do, but there are many people in the government who do not trust us even after decades of us doing nothing wrong."
'That why you say hide?'
He nodded. "That is why I told you to hide, yes. Legally, you aren't supposed to be here, and we could get in lots of trouble if they ever find you even if you tell them that you are here of your own free will."
Her eyes went wide. All this time the werewolves had been worried about them being a danger to her on the full moon, but in reality she was a danger to them?! She had not known! After all the kindness they had shown her, her getting them into trouble would be a cruel way to repay them.
She liked them, liked them a lot, but if this was the case it was better if she moved on.
Her fingers moved to starting writing just that, but Jean Luc raised one hand as if he were the one who could read minds. "I know what you are thinking, but that does not mean you should leave, nor do we want you to do so. All of us except the children realize that you just being here could cause trouble, and we are fine with it. We would rather risk the danger than have you leave."
All she could do was stare at him for several seconds. 'Why?'
The simple question startled a laugh out of him. "I suppose I should have expected that question. You've met the children we have here. Claude, Chantal, Serge. None of them are our children, even though there are several couples that have come together over the years. That is because werewolves simply are not capable of having children. The transformations are too violent, and babies are too delicate. None of us will ever have a little one of our own running around, no matter how much some of us would love nothing more." He gave her a crooked smile, and knowing his thoughts she thought she might be able to see the glimmer of a repressed tear in his eyes. "We have been given many young werewolves over the years, but it does not feel the same. Some of it may be because they are not our own blood, or so we thought for a long time, and some of it may be – is – that when we are bitten young, we spend many, many years bitter about how we are victims. It takes time to outgrow that, and by that point we are no longer children.
"But you?" He motioned to her and laughed. "I mean it as no insult or criticism, Hazel, but you have an innocence to you that we have not seen for so long. Even the strangeness of your powers pales in comparison. In just this last month, you brought something to us that some of us had given up on ever seeing. I know several women in the group would love nothing more than to adopt you as their own"—he gave her another grin, brighter than the last—"although with the way you keep popping in and out whenever you want without telling anybody, to me I must say you seem more like a stray cat than a typical child."
Now it was her who had to fight tears. So long, so long she had spent with the Dursleys who wanted nothing to do with her, who had made it clear they hated her and wanted her gone. But here, in the middle of an entirely different country, she had found people who actually truly did want her around. Who cared about her and wanted to keep her safe even if it put an additional burden on themselves.
Was this what people meant when they talked about feeling like a family?
Hazel sniffed and wiped her left eye, knowing full well there was nothing she could do about her right eye without making it obvious she was crying. In an effort to distract herself, she hastily wrote, 'Can I do something to help after this? Fix what they break or something?'
"Yes, I think we can find something for you to do if it makes you feel like you deserve what we will freely give." He turned to give her some privacy and pointed at one of the doors. "We can start there, and maybe between the two of us we will have everything fixed before anybody gets back from work."
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The weather continued to warm as summer swelled to its full heat, and as July progressed the energy and excitement in the compound rose. No one told Hazel why that was, and the few times she asked the other person's thoughts and conversation would quickly shift to something else. Whatever it was, they were being very careful not to give her any hints even with their own thoughts.
It was a little maddening.
Something shook her awake one morning, and she pushed the sheet off her face to look blearily at the two women standing over her bed. Amorette, the blonde who often helped Elise teach the other kids, and an even younger dark-haired woman she did not often interact with. Jacqueline, that was her name. She was only a few years older than Claude, and no one was willing to tell Hazel what she did or why she was the only werewolf who worked at night.
Readjusting her monocle, Hazel looked out the door to see that it was indeed still the morning. It was actually a surprise that Jacqueline was even up this early, or maybe she just had not gone to bed yet. Reaching out with one hand, she wrote simply, 'What?'
"Good morning, 'Azel! It's time to wake up!" Amorette said in a sing-song. "We have a few things to do, and we need to get you out of here for a couple of hours. Jackie and I are going shopping in Nice, and we figured you might want to tag along and see what magical stores look like."
She just nodded for a bit, then as her brain kept waking up she waved for the two women to leave the room. 'In a minute.'
"Okay, but do not take too long or we will leave without you!"
The door closed behind them, and Hazel pushed herself up to a sitting position and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. It took her a moment to realize what day it was, namely the very last day of July. Her birthday. She was now ten years old.
Was that why Amorette and Jacqueline were acting weird? Amorette did know when her birthday was; that was something that had been asked the day after she showed Amorette and Elise that she could move things with her ghost hand. They had neither said nor thought the word 'birthday' around her, though, and it was possible that Amorette had simply forgotten or was not thinking about it. She was a newcomer to the werewolves' compound, after all, although if they had forgotten about her birthday it still did not explain why they were behaving the way they were.
She eventually pushed the door open once she had cleaned herself and dressed and deposited Morgan on her shoulder, and before she could do anything else both her arms were grabbed. Amorette and Jacqueline immediately started walking away from the compound with her, their path soon becoming clear. It was the same path the other werewolves took when they walked to the road and summoned the carriage to take them to their jobs. After a couple of minutes she was able to pull her arms free and ask a question that had been circling inside her brain since they started walking. 'Why Nice and not Paris?'
"Nice is a little bit safer and smaller," Jacqueline answered. "It's more of a local shopping area where Paris is more centralized, so the other people there do not ask as many questions. There is less law enforcement running around causing problems, too."
The rest of the walk passed in relative silence, even if Amorette and Jacqueline to a lesser extent were both far more excited that could be justified by a simple excursion like this. Something secret was going on. When they arrived at the road, Amorette pulled out a metal coin or disc a little smaller than her palm and held it up.
Much like the time when she followed the werewolves here and from there to Paris, the road down to the right stretched before a large carriage made of dark wood and pulled by eight clockwork horses faded into view and rolled to a stop in front of them. Unlike the last time, today Hazel followed the other women into the carriage. It truly was larger on the inside that it should have been, with many rows of wooden benches stretching backwards for easily a hundred feet. Several of the benches were already filled with other people, all of them wearing robes or other obviously wizard-y outfits.
A man sat in a small chair in the front with leather reins in his hands. "We're headed to Vendretout in Nice," Amorette told the driver as she tapped the metal disc to a golden box bearing a large round opalescent stone on its front face.
The box chimed, and he grunted. "All right. Got a few more stops to make first." He gave the reins a sharp crack, and through the window she could see the mechanical horses rear up as they prepared to resume their run. They managed to grab a bench three rows down before the carriage actually started rolling forwards. Stuffed into the corner, Hazel could only watch as the world outside stretched and roiled for several seconds before resolving into the same cobblestone square with the burning braziers she had seen the first time she rode this conveyance. "Place Cachée!" he shouted over his shoulder.
It took a few more of those strange transitions before the carriage stopped along a little street that bordered a sandy shore. Hazel could not help but stare out over the glistening waters beyond; it was not the very first time she had seen the sea, but this surely beat out the seaside at Tintagel or Dover.
"Vendretout Marketplace!" the carriage driver called out.
"This way, 'Azel," Amorette told her, shaking her out of her reverie. "We still have lots to do."
As they walked away from the carriage, Hazel took a few seconds to look around at the buildings dotting this little stone street. The shopping district in Paris had been absolutely packed with shops, everything side by side with no space between them. The inside walls of one shop were the other side of the walls of another shop, and the exterior just continued on over multiple stores. Here, however, the stores were actual separate buildings with little alleyways between them. They were also, she could not help but notice, more drab and dilapidated than the stores in Paris.
Jacqueline said this place was better and safer, she recalled. It certainly did not look it. She gave a little tug on said woman's sleeve and wrote quickly, 'Here safe? You sure?'
She gave Hazel a small smile and a laugh. "Yes, I'm sure. It is not as fancy as Paris, I will grant you that one, but sometimes that is a plus all on its own. Not to mention, because it is a smaller and poorer shopping area, we will not get as many second looks because of our clothing."
Hazel glanced around again after that comment, and now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see what Jacqueline meant. Her own tunic and trousers looked no worse for wear than they had been when she stole them from the store, but Amorette's own robe was clearly worn and had been repaired multiple times. Jacqueline's deep red and deep cut robe was nicer looking for sure, but it too was obviously not new. That same thing could be said about the clothing of the other people on the street, though, so they should fit right in.
Most of ninety minutes were spent migrating in and out of different shops, Amorette crossing items off the list she carried and the number of bags steadily increasing. When it became clear just how much they really needed to buy, Hazel had volunteered herself as pack mule and started stuffing all the shopping bags into her bottomless satchel. Neither woman complained about having a weightless space to hold all their necessities.
"And that is most of it," Amorette said, striking out yet another item. "Now for the fun part. 'Azel, you're ten years old today – and a happy birthday, by the way. There comes a time in every girl's life where she has the right to start wearing a little jewelry and making herself look pretty. Have you ever thought about whether you would want to wear earrings?"
Fifteen minutes later, she walked out of a magical tattoo parlor in front of her companions, her ears weighted down the tiniest bit thanks to the new earrings sitting within them. According to the tattooist who did the piercing, a Né-Moldus and a friend of Jacqueline's, the mundane method of piercing ears took weeks to heal from; the magical method, on the other hand, still used a scarily big needle to punch the hole in her earlobes but added a potion called Essence of Dittany to make all that healing happen in seconds. It meant she could start wearing earrings immediately.
The wizard had a wide selection of matching pairs, but she had actually gravitated to the single earrings. Part of it was that it looked like these were cheaper than most of the paired sets, and part of it was that she did not necessarily want the same thing in both ears. What she wore now as she exited the store was a small round stud in her left ear that lazily shifted from one color to another through all the colors of the rainbow and a hoop in her right ear that flowed and jiggled as if it were made of mercury.
A number of long, dangly earrings had attracted her attention at first, too. She just was not sure she could trust Morgan not to constantly peck and pull at them. He was already butting his head against the stud enough that she was starting to get worried.
'That all we need?' she wrote.
"That should be everything," answered Amorette with a smile, "and I think we have distracted you long enough the others she be done with their parts. Let's call the carriage and take it back home."
The others? Their parts? Hazel stared at her uncomprehendingly. Had they been planning something? Trying to hide anything from her was difficult; they would have had to not talk or even think about what they were doing… Oh. 'I can take us back,' she replied after a few moments. There was no need for them to wait for the carriage when she could just as easily jump back to the compound. It would also be faster so she could sooner discover just what they were all up to.
"You can take us back? How?" repeated Jacqueline. The women looked at each other before the dark-haired werewolf shrugged. "Okay. I am willing to give you a chance to prove it, whatever it is."
She reached out her hands and made grabbing gestures, her gut churning with rising worry all the same. She had jumped herself and Morgan to different places plenty of times, but that was just the two of them. She had never tried jumping with another person, let alone two more. She hoped it was going to work.
Their hands wrapped around her own. She took a deep breath in, then out, then in again. There was only way to find out if this was possible. She was worrying over nothing, she told herself. Teleporting itself, throwing herself from one place to another and ignoring all the physical distance in between, was obviously the hardest part of what she was doing, and that was old hat by now. Whether it involved one person or two or ten should make no difference whatsoever. Blowing out her held breath, she coiled her knees below her and jumped harder and higher than she ever had before.
Most of the time, she heard nothing when she left or arrived anywhere. This time, the air itself rang with a crash or a clang, and the normal too-tight tube she had to squeeze herself through today was three sizes too small. Instead of just forcing the last dregs of air out of her lungs, it was as if all the bones in her body were being crushed into a powder and her muscles squashed into jelly. If she had a mouth and a voice and breath to use them, she would be screaming in agony.
A split second later, everything explosively reinflated with another crash, and she collapsed onto the ground. Two more thuds quickly followed. "That was a mistake," she heard Jacqueline think. "That was the most painful teleportation I have ever experienced, and I hope never to do so again."
"We should have just used the carriage," Amorette said in unknowing agreement.
Hazel was not planning to argue with either of them. From now on, she was going to do her best to teleport just herself and Morgan. No more passengers.
Footsteps came towards them, and she looked up to find a familiar bald werewolf looking down at them. "Why do I have the feeling I know what happened here?" Jean Luc asked himself, his thoughts and his smile all but screaming his amusement for the world to hear. "Good trip?"
Jacqueline spat a particularly nasty sentence at him that had Hazel blushing. He was supposed to do what with a burning tree branch?!
"Jacqueline! There are young ears around." He reached down and pulled Hazel up to her feet, then did the same for Amorette. Jacqueline he just looked down at until she climbed upright herself. "You are a little early," he continued once they were all vertical. "Elise is still finishing the cake."
Cake? Cake?! She stared at him before reaching up to touch her new earrings. The tattooist had seemed too prepared for this to all be a spur of the moment plan, which meant… that would have been a present. Cake, a present. It was almost as if…
"Oh well," Jean Luc said with a bright beaming smile towards her. "It looks like we kept it mostly a secret for the time we needed. Everyone decided to pitch in with setting up a party once Amorette told us what today was. It will not be much, but it is what we can do to make today a merry one.
"Happy birthday, Hazel."
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There are so many details I throw in solely for my own amusement. It's bad. I should stop.
- Pronouns
- They
There are many words, but not all of them are as interesting as yours, @Silently Watches ! I am fully agreed with andoxor an i hope you are enjoying your writing and i wish you, have a good one.
- Location
- Space, the final frontier.
Hazel already communicated with them that she could read minds I think.
With Legimens around, even accidental ones, that might not even be anything new for their world.
They have a trainable defence, (occlumancy) that they probably used to not think of certain stuff, they want to keep hidden.
This training might even be something they've done before Hazel, against those cops that come along.
They just might not bother with that defence in cases where they don't need to. (Could be extra effort, like wearing a weighted steel toed shoe.)
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
Hazel has NOT told them that she can read minds; she was very explicit about that during her "conversation" with the statue of Merlin. It was more that they were doing their best to distract her and pull her away from anywhere they were making their plans, and in the process of distracting HER they also wound up distracting THEMSELVES.
- Location
- Canada
In a lot of ways, you enjoyment is the only one that matters.
Edit: So as not to double post
I will say, in canon Legimens and Occlomency were NOT common things. In fanon they play a much bigger role, but in canon they aren't really expanded on all that much, and the contextual hints point towards the "Mind Arts" being an esoteric discipline. That said, who knows how SilentlyWatches is going to implement them. He can make them rare, common, or anywhere in between
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... I found it depressing. You could tell Hazel suspected what was going on, but all of her experiences prevented her from making that final jump of logic.
You know, since she's literally never had anyone celebrate her birthday before.
Thankfully the end was uplifting.
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
I briefly talked about this somewhere, but maybe only as a reply on FFN. Since werewolves are almost always wizard-born, none of them have any kind of Muggle documentation (like you implied). would therefore be treated as illegal aliens and prohibited from any worthwhile jobs. That's BEFORE you get into the issues they would run into simply from not knowing all three little things someone who grew up in a modern society would be expected to know.
- Location
- Oslo
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Plus probably some draconian wizard laws about werewolves "endangering" the Statutes of Secrecy, that would stop a wherewolf from going 'native' by claimimg they lost all their memories of the previous life and getting new set of documents or other "nefarious" muggle exploitation schemes like this.
Silently Watches
Professional Stalker
- Location
- Right behind you
Well, French werewolves DID endanger and almost shattered the Statute of Secrecy, so that isn't unlikely either.
- Location
- Hell
You kinda touched on it in-story
They tried, but cannot get the documents, legally, or through forgery(no magic and no contacts).
Point in case, the fact that Harry could look through Voldemort's mind was signifigant enough of a fact that Dumbledore explictly had Harry take personal lessons from Snape for Occlomency suggests that the ability to read minds and block mind reading is not common or easily learned at all. Else Harry would have been directed to a class for it.
- Location
- USA
It would have been better had he simply given Hermione Guide to Advanced Occlumency by Maxwell Barnett. She would have devoured the book and taught Harry anything he needed. Of course there is also Protection Charm Your Mind: A Practical Guide to Counter Legilimency by Franciscus Fieldwake and Living With Legilimens: Choose Your Minds Wisely By The American Society of Legilimens. Both books feature in the FBAWTFT films. Since both were published before 1926, Dumbledore has a good chance of having either or both of them.
LostArchivist
Sane, unfortunately.
- Location
- The State of Confusion
...Well, I feel bad for Jacqueline.
That aside, it was heartbreaking how much they care for her and how badly they're treated by the wizard lawkeepers. These are clearly good people, so I hope that she can find a way to help them out.
I mean, she can't duplicate money (probably?) but maybe she could find or craft valuable items or tourist bait or something...
It's a bit depressing to see people that downtrodden still trying to help and welcome another person, nevermind that they can barely support themselves.
That aside, it was heartbreaking how much they care for her and how badly they're treated by the wizard lawkeepers. These are clearly good people, so I hope that she can find a way to help them out.
I mean, she can't duplicate money (probably?) but maybe she could find or craft valuable items or tourist bait or something...
It's a bit depressing to see people that downtrodden still trying to help and welcome another person, nevermind that they can barely support themselves.