tampered | Everyone raise your glasses!

When; Evening of Tuesday, August 13th
Rating; PG-13, at best. Angela's on her best behavior tonight.
Characters; It's Ginny's birthday party and everybody Ginny knows was invited. Let's handwave that and just show up. BTW, IT'S BLACK TIE. PUT ON YOUR SUITS, BOYS.
Summary; There's no legal drinking age in the City, but who says we can't party like there was one anyway?
Log;

This party was four years coming. The restaurant has set aside a large room just for this event and on short notice too. The food is plentiful and of various cuisines, with even a large selection of vegetarian options for those who prefer that. But of course, there is more alcohol than one has ever seen because Angela knows the people she invited and knows quite a few of them have liquor in their veins instead of blood. Rule of thumb: more liquid than solids every time.

Everything's set and ready for the birthday girl to make her appearance, so for the time being, Angela's flitting around the place dressed in more subdued colors than usual, choosing black because no one gets to stand out more than Ginny tonight, and socializing with the few guests that have shown up already.

Sadly, there are no strippers. Ginny nixed that one hard.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Except no, he thinks you're making fun of him, Ginny. People... don't laugh with him, ever, so the logical conclusion is that they're laughing at him.]

I specialised in mathematics and computing, at the Academy.

[Spock, no. :( ]

Yeah? I had nothing like that at home. I mean, there's Arithmancy—that's the study of the magical properties of numbers, sort of a divination thing—but I never took the class. Much preferred Ancient Runes, really interesting stuff. Translating, you know?

I was formerly an instructor in xenolinguistics.

[It's how he met his girlfriend, not like he'll ever tell that story.]

[And by now, he's going to be very, very patient about this magic nonsense.]

Did you know anyone who studied... Arithmancy?

[Here's the great thing about knowing Latin as well as she does: she can pick apart words like xenolinguistics. That, and she knows a man named Xenophilius. It's not too hard.]

Foreign languages? Cool.

[And she sincerely means it.]

I do. It was a subject at school so I had friends taking the class. They seemed to like it well enough. Suppose you ought to, if you choose to take something as complex as that. My brother Bill took it, I think—he did practically every class offered at Hogwarts, he's an overachiever like that.

[But she says it so fondly because she adores her eldest brother to pieces and deeply admires him.]

[The number of people who've called Spock and his interests "cool" is well. Minimal, really. If he could look any more satisfied, he'd actually be smiling. Points for Ginny.]

[Points for Bill too, actually, nothing endears somebody to Spock like being an overachiever, unless they cheat, like Jim did.]

What classes are available, at Hogwarts?

[He pronounces it weirdly, though.]

Hogwarts.

[She's smiling, though, looking thoughtful.]

You know, no one's ever actually asked me that. Let's see—there are your core classes that you take from the beginning, so that's Charms, Transfiguration, Potions, Herbology, History of Magic, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Astronomy... And then, of course, you can pick your electives for Third Year, and that could be—well, I mentioned two of them already, and you can also take Muggle Studies, Care of Magical Creatures, or Divination.

[She laughs.]

And then, in our Fifth Year, we sit our Ordinary Wizarding Levels—O.W.L.s—and our marks from those exams decide what N.E.W.T.-level courses we can take in Sixth Year. Then you start to focus your classes in on what career you want to pursue after graduation for our last year.

[He opens his mouth to say Almost four years, and no one asked you? but shuts it as she speaks. Wow, this delusion persists far deeper than he thought, but he attempts to find analogues.]

Chemistry, botany, history, self-defence, astronomy?

[More like four years and she's said enough over the course of time. No one really wants to talk about school.]

Yeah, more or less. I doubt chemistry involves magical ingredients. Do mixtures get fussy about stirring clockwise twelve times and then once counter-clockwise during a full moon during the solstice? [Watch out, Spock. She knows what you're thinking.] And I'd like to see a self-defense course that can arm you against Dark magic without a wand.

[Spock was a teacher. It comes with the territory.]

Not in the way you have described, but certain procedures must be followed precisely.

[Beat.]

A wand?

A wand.

[Where does she pull it out from? All of a sudden, she's got it in her hand, ten and a half inches of beautiful hazel and a core of dragon heartstring.]

We receive them when we're eleven years old and on our way to school.

[For a moment Spock doesn't even care that it might be magic or whatever. He's just entranced by the craftsmanship.]

Fascinating. What is its function?

We've all got magic in our blood, this helps us focus it to perform more complex spellwork. Wandless magic's possible, but it's really difficult.

[She twirls it in her fingers and it throws harmless gold sparks.]

The wand chooses the witch or wizard. We try a few in the shop and we connect with the one meant for us. This was the seventh wand I tried. [She stops spinning it and holds it between both hands now to show it to him.] Hazel, ten and a half inches, dragon heartstring, resilient.

[He leans in to examine it closely, tilting his head when the sparks fly. Ginny is a complete question mark to him: sometimes she says things he can understand, and sometimes she does things like this, which make zero sense in his system of logic. He takes the wand, studies it, and then hands it back to her, seemingly satisfied that it's made of the wood she says it is, although he's not sure he can believe the dragon part.]

Are you still able to donate blood, in case of emergencies?

[Because he's going with the "weird stuff in the blood" as an analogue to Khan's regenerative blood and. Well. That road doesn't lead anywhere good.]

[If you simply accept it as true, Spock, she'll be a little less confusing. But as it is, she lets him take her wand because it won't go off for anyone else anyway, and she takes it back when he's finished. She doesn't tuck it away, though, just holds it for now because it's nice to have the comforting warmth of her wand's core in her palm.

At his question, she shakes her head.]

We've got Blood-Replenishing Potions in my world. But I've received—transfusions? Is that the word?—in the City before, because obviously I didn't have that potion on hand when I needed it.

[She's been in hospital for more than just a magical plague, in other words. The City is rough and regardless of age (she was seventeen at the time), you will get hurt.]

"Transfusions" is correct.

[It's similar enough to dermal regenerators that he can accept it as plausible. In fact, if he just replaces "magic" with "advanced technology", as Clarke said...]

There were no ill-effects?

[Wryly,]

No, I was a little more bothered by the sling I was stuck in.

It was uncomfortable?

I couldn't fly.

[It means everything to her because even with the memory of it, there's still longing shot through her voice. Then she smiles,]

And I couldn't use my wand. I'm right-handed. [She looks down at it and her wand and back.] But I taught myself to spellcast with my left. You never know when you might need to swap hands.

Everyone raise your glasses!

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