Author: occluminous	Bella is about to turn thirteen! This is exciting.
Author: pythbox	Feral volunteers to make her a tasty picnic for her birthday.
Author: nobodyelse	Sherlock volunteers to help.
Author: pythbox	They emerge from the kitchen on the big day carrying an enormous picnic basket between them, which neither one could manage on his own. Well, they could levitate it, but Feral is still not keen on pointing his wand at things he'd like to keep and Sherlock assures him that this way is more fun.
Author: occluminous	Bella has found a nice picnic spot on the edge of the grounds, and turned a napkin into a picnic blanket which should last long enough.
Author: sparksflying	Tony provides her charming company!
Author: pythbox	Tony's company is very charming. Sherlock and Feral set the basket down on the edge of the blanket. Feral distributes hugs.
Author: occluminous	Hugs are appreciated! So is the food. Wow, food. Mmmmmmm, food.
Author: pythbox	Feral is proud of the food.
Author: nobodyelse	So is Sherlock.
Author: sparksflying	"You guys are the best," says Tony. "There should be more birthdays around here."
Author: occluminous	"Feral, did you pick one yet?"
Author: pythbox	"Nope," he says. "Do I need one? I could just make picnics whenever. Picnics are fun."
Author: occluminous	"Maybe we should do a picnic on some kind of regular basis. This is California, it's not like it's going to have unpicnicky weather one day."
Author: pythbox	"I'd love that!" says Feral.
Author: nobodyelse	"Hear, hear," says Sherlock.
Author: occluminous	"Once a month maybe," says Bella.
Author: sparksflying	"Hell yes."
Author: occluminous	"Awesome!" Bella flops onto her back on the blanket, looking up at the sky, and pops another strawberry into her mouth.
Author: pythbox	Flopping is a great idea. Feral flops into Tony's lap. It is comfy there.
Author: sparksflying	She ruffles his hair and feeds him a cookie.
Author: occluminous	The picnic food dwindles, and they talk about random topics ranging from Herbology to the Australian exchange students in the twelfth grade. It gets a little chilly. Maybe the sun is just not so high in the sky any more. Maybe there's more cloud cover. (There's not more cloud cover.)
Author: pythbox	Feral shivers.
Author: occluminous	Bella recognizes this cold. She's got her hand on her hazel wand in a moment, and she's on her feet, and she's facing the direction it's coming from. There's nothing visible through the trees, yet. She shakes but doesn't fall.
Author: pythbox	Feral recognizes it, too. His first instinct is to hide in Tony's lap, which is warm and snuggly and contains zero Dementors.
Author: occluminous	The Dementor glides out from behind the trees - distant shadow nearing them. Bella is still standing up. She checks her wand grip. She says, "I don't know if this is going to work." And then she aims at the Dementor and snaps, "Expecto patronum." That's not mist. It's light, pouring out of her wandtip, and forming a very definite shape. It's not an animal. It's a person, two arms and two legs, indeterminate sex, compact enough that it's not even necessarily a human but could be an elf or a goblin or a hag, its shifting glow and fog obscuring where it would have features. It's the idea of a person. Bella keeps her wand raised, biting her lip so hard that she's starting to bleed, and her blindingly silver person warms the air and lifts the oppressive dark - And it darts forward almost too quick to see, and its hand shoots towards the dementor as though to strangle the monster - Which dissolves on contact. Leaving a tattered cloak, falling into a heap at the feet of the glowing Patronus.
Author: pythbox	"...Holy shit," says Feral.
Author: sparksflying	Tony is also staring.
Author: nobodyelse	Sherlock is curled up next to Tony, not doing much of anything at all.
Author: occluminous	Bella unbites her lip, breathing hard. She looks at her glowy person, which turns around and regards them. The glowy person doesn't have discernible eyes, but it crouches by the picnic blanket, and reaches out and puts its hand on Sherlock's forehead.
Author: nobodyelse	Sherlock flinches. Then he uncurls. It feels like sunlight. Like getting a hug from sunlight.
Author: occluminous	The glowy person touches Feral's forehead, too, with its other hand. Bella's breathing normalizes, meanwhile, and she is watching what her Patronus does.
Author: pythbox	Feral emerges from Tony's lap and attempts to give the glowy person a hug, despite the obvious insubstantiality problem.
Author: occluminous	The glowy person is, of course, insubstantial, although not quite as much as a typical Patronus. It does not resist the hug attempt. Eventually, it dissipates. Bella sits down, hard, on the picnic blanket.
Author: pythbox	"What the fuck just happened," says Feral, hugging her.
Author: sparksflying	"Yeah. What he said," says Tony, hugging Sherlock.
Author: occluminous	"I killed it," Bella says. "It's gone."
Author: sparksflying	"How, though."
Author: occluminous	"With a - super-Patronus. I wasn't sure if it would work but it worked."
Author: sparksflying	"What did you actually do, is what I'm trying to get at here," says Tony.
Author: occluminous	"I sort of - you know how I got mist when I thought about the right books - I just thought about - I'm not sure how to put it in words."
Author: sparksflying	"...Oookay," says Tony. "Bella has Special Patronus. Got it."
Author: occluminous	"I'm pretty sure I could do it again, now that I know I can."
Author: sparksflying	"...You're gonna want to go around slaughtering Dementors now, aren't you."
Author: occluminous	"Of course!"
Author: pythbox	Feral hugs her some more.
Author: occluminous	Hugs. "I will need to think of a way to go to that British prison without getting arrested. And then I have to find out how to find wild ones. But I'm going to get them all."
Author: pythbox	"...I could fly you places," Feral offers. "Thestrals are good at finding."
Author: occluminous	"That would be great," Bella says.
Author: pythbox	Hug hug hug. "I mean, Dementors are fucking terrifying, I don't wanna go near 'em - but I don't want anybody else to have to go near 'em either. You know?"
Author: occluminous	"I wonder if I can work from far away. Maybe I should try sending my glowy person to Azkaban from here. You know, with a message. For the dementors. 'Goodbye forever'."
Author: pythbox	Feral snorts. "I'm not stopping you."
Author: occluminous	Bella contemplates this, then casts her Patronus again. It waits while she tells it, "Tell the Dementors in Azkaban, 'Goodbye forever.'" The glowy person doesn't do anything. "Well, I guess that won't work." She dismisses the glowy person.
Author: pythbox	"Gotta do it the hard way, then," says Feral.
Author: occluminous	"Suppose so. Summer project, maybe, I will read up on United Kingdom wizarding law. I wonder if it is even technically illegal to destroy their dementors."
Author: pythbox	"I bet they'll find something to charge you with," says Feral. "Or somebody'll just kill you. in the middle of you trying."
Author: occluminous	"Hmmm. I should probably practice on wild ones first, anyway, I'm not sure how well Glowy Person holds up against groups of Dementors or anything."
Author: pythbox	"Yeah," says Feral. "Clear out those first, then hit the big one. Makes sense."
Author: occluminous	"Unless someone notices the wild ones are disappearing and gets nervous about Azkaban."
Author: pythbox	"Who the fuck tracks wild Dementors?"
Author: occluminous	"Well, I don't know, but I bet someone notices when souls start getting sucked out, maybe there's someone keeping statistics who'd notice a drop."
Author: pythbox	"Maybe," says Feral. "But I still don't see them getting nervous unles somebody actually catches you killing one. It's supposed to be impossible."
Author: occluminous	"They might get nervous for other reasons. If they thought the Dementors were, I don't know, collecting somewhere they didn't track and being obvious."
Author: pythbox	"Sure. But they wouldn't, like, tighten security on Azkaban to stop you breaking in."
Author: occluminous	"They might ask the Azkaban Dementors. They have some way I don't understand of communicating with them, I don't know if other Dementors can tell what just happened to this one." She gestures at the cloak. "Speaking of which I don't know how to dispose of that."
Author: pythbox	Feral shrugs. "I could burn it."
Author: occluminous	"Yeah, okay," she says, and she holds her wand ready to put out the fire if it threatens to spread to the trees.
Author: pythbox	"Incendio," says Feral, flicking his wand at the cloak. The cloak burns, quick and bright and tidy without any extraneous damage to grass or weeds.
Author: occluminous	"Thanks."
Author: pythbox	Feral grins. "Anytime."
Author: occluminous	Bella rummages around in the picnic basket. She finds some chocolate cookies that they didn't get to. She presses one into Sherlock's hand, takes one, offers the others to Feral and Tony.
Author: pythbox	Om nom.
Author: nobodyelse	Nibble nibble.
Author: sparksflying	Tony eats her cookie with one hand and hugs Sherlock with the other.
Author: occluminous	"Are you okay? Should I bring back my glowy person to pet you more?" Bella asks Sherlock.
Author: nobodyelse	"I will be fine," he says, snuggling Tony. "It was much worse last time."
Author: occluminous	"Okay." Bella munches her cookie. "Let's go in."
Author: nobodyelse	"Good plan."
Author: pythbox	Feral unhugs from Bella and packs up the basket to bring it back to the kitchen. It's light enough by now that he can manage it himself.
Author: occluminous	Bella goes to the library to see if she has missed any Dementor or Patronus books (she hasn't) and then to muse on what exactly she did to make her Glowy Person, and then to brainstorm about extermination procedures. (Sherlock could probably use a nap.)
Author: pythbox	After a little while, Feral comes looking for her.
Author: occluminous	Here she is, tapping the end of her pen on her notebook. "Hi, Feral."
Author: pythbox	"Hi," he says, flopping into the nearest chair. "So are we gonna go kill things or what?"
Author: occluminous	"I'm making a list of things I need to find out before we start. And I don't think we'd better do it during school, and can you even find things like 'whatever Dementor is nearest within the continental United States'...?"
Author: pythbox	He shrugs. "I dunno. I know I can find a person, or a place, but not a thing, like a book or something. I don't know if I can find Dementors or not. I don't think I can find you the nearest one, like that, but does it actually matter if you get the exact specific nearest Dementor or not?"
Author: occluminous	"Crossing international borders is complicated and long trips require more packing. There are an estimated fifty wild dementors in the whole world - I think the one I killed must have followed us specifically, or it'd be too weird to find one again so soon - so there's maybe a handful in the States at any given time, and you fly fast but going a couple hundred miles an hour is still a day trip if we have to go to Denver, let alone Boston."
Author: pythbox	"I should figure out how fast I actually am, probably," says Feral. "It didn't take me all that long to get to your place, either time, but I wasn't really paying attention to how long. And I've never seen somebody quote miles per hour on how fast Thestrals fly."
Author: occluminous	"I don't remember what time it was you got to Renée's, but it was a little before dinnertime when you got to Charlie's, when did you leave?"
Author: pythbox	"I don't really remember," he says. "How far is it, anyway?"
Author: occluminous	"It's like eight or nine hundred miles, I think."
Author: pythbox	"Okay, that's far," laughs Feral. "It didn't feel like nine hundred miles. It just felt like - some flying."
Author: occluminous	"But like when you left had you had lunch already?"
Author: pythbox	"Maybe?" he hazards. "I think so. But I don't eat lunch at the same time every day in the summer, so that could've been anytime between ten and four. And I don't know how long after lunch I left."
Author: occluminous	"Well, I'm in the eighth grade now, I can leave campus on weekends, let's see how long it takes to get to - oh, Santa Cruz? We can go over the water so nobody much will see me flying, that's allowed on brooms as long as you have plenty of altitude so it should be allowed on you. And get lunch and time our way back."
Author: pythbox	"Sure!" says Feral. "It'll be fun!"
Author: occluminous	"Although I should probably see if I can learn an invisibility charm of some kind since we'll have to go overland to find Dementors, probably."
Author: pythbox	"Yeah, good plan."
Author: occluminous	"Is the finding the sort of thing you could experiment with without actually going anywhere? Sit in your room, be like 'okay which way would I go if I were about to squeeze out the window and look for Bob The Nearest Dementor, and how far away is it'?"
Author: pythbox	"Yeah, no problem," he says. "Well - I can't tell distance exactly, like, I didn't know it was eight hundred miles to your dad's place. But I can tell whether one thing is closer or farther than another thing."
Author: occluminous	"Okay. We'll time to Santa Cruz and then you can compare Bobs against Santa Cruz."
Author: pythbox	He laughs. "Sure."
Author: occluminous	"And you can check after classes and if there is a nearby Bob we can go kill it and if there is a farther Bob it will have to come closer or wait till a weekend when I know how to turn invisible."
Author: pythbox	"Okay," he says agreeably. "How do you kill 'em, anyway? It is a special you thing, or a learnable thing? Because I mean, if I can learn it, I definitely want to."
Author: occluminous	"I... don't know if you can learn it. I am pretty sure it has to do with how I couldn't do the regular kind before. It's a mindset thing. I can try to explain it if you want?"
Author: pythbox	He shrugs. "Sure, okay."
Author: occluminous	"Dementors are a death thing," says Bella. "Obviously people die other ways, almost all of the time, but Dementors are sort of - about death. Almost like how unicorns are about purity - except you aren't in magizoology - I don't know. Does that make sense though, that Dementors are about death, bad in the way death is?"
Author: pythbox	"...Yeah," he says thoughtfully. "Yeah, it does."
Author: occluminous	"I'm not sure what casting a regular Patronus is like so I don't know if my guesses about regular ones are right, but they're all animals except mine, mine's a person, mine is shaped like a kind of thing that can know what death is and that it's coming if it thinks about it. Thestrals and eagles and owls can't do that. I think a regular Patronus is saying 'not yet' - kind of -" She sticks her fingers in her ears, "la la la, I can't comprehend mortality, I am a happy cartoony creature!" - she puts her hands down. "And Dementors aren't death itself, they're just about it. You can stop thinking about one thing if you think about another thing hard enough, you can stop being scared if you think about happy things hard enough, regular Patronuses seem to me like they might be the magic version of that?"
Author: pythbox	"Maybe," says Feral. "I dunno. That part doesn't make as much sense to me."
Author: occluminous	"Well, I don't know," shrugs Bella, "I can't do a regular one, this is me speculating about why mine is person-shaped. I bet you I don't turn into a Generic Humanoid if I learn to be an animagus."
Author: pythbox	"Yeah, probably not," snorts Feral.
Author: occluminous	"So regular ones are, 'la la you can't scare me I am a guardian animal'. And Glowy Person is like, 'I got a good look at you, and you know what, fuck you'."
Author: pythbox	He giggles.
Author: occluminous	"Because seriously," says Bella, "fuck dementors." (Mith, going by with a cart of books, coughs into her hand.) "Sorry," Bella tells Mith, and to Feral, "Let's go hang out in your room."
Author: pythbox	Feral laughs. "Sure," he says, unflopping out of his chair.
Author: occluminous	To Feral's room. Bella re-reads her musings, and says, "So that's most of what I think I'm doing. That and concentrating on how - I'm going to fix it. All of it. The Dementors first since I know how to do that now, but everything else too, I'm going to figure out how to live forever, because why shouldn't I, magic is real, and then I will fix everything else."
Author: pythbox	"...huh," says Feral. "And that does it?"
Author: occluminous	"I concentrate on how I'm going to fix things, most especially Dementors, and I cast the spell and I get a glowy person," confirms Bella.
Author: pythbox	"How'd you figure that out?"
Author: occluminous	"I wasn't sure it was going to work," says Bella. "I thought about the Dementor a lot after we first saw it, though. What it looked like and how it made me feel and how I wanted to kill it. And once I was full up on chocolate - I didn't even eat that much of it - I felt kind of - like - like I was a critter it's a really bad idea to corner, does that make sense? You know how some kinds of animals won't attack you but if you hem them in you are not going to make it home intact - the Dementor sort of had me cornered, or Death did, or something, and that was a bad move. I'm rambling - just - it was the thing I thought of that seemed like might work. Especially based on what thoughts gave me mist when I was trying to do a regular Patronus."
Author: pythbox	"Huh," says Feral. "Yeah, I have no idea how to do that. It kind of makes sense, but it doesn't make sense for me, you know?"
Author: occluminous	"Yeah. I mean, if this was a systematized thing lots of people could do and figure out and teach then probably it would have been done already."
Author: pythbox	"We're both a little weird," says Feral, with an affectionate grin. "You definitely win Most Weird, though. Having an Animagus or a Patronus be a magical creature is rare, but it's happened."
Author: occluminous	"Do I get a prize for winning?"
Author: pythbox	"Sure," he says, and hugs her. "There's your prize."
Author: occluminous	She giggles.
Author: pythbox	He grins.