Avenging Fire

The next morning found Helena Nyx much improved but still apprehensive, this time because she feared a repeat performance of the previous day when she let herself bottom out and faint. When Madam Pomfrey told her that Smythe had levitated her down four flights and who knows how many students, then Snape carrying her the rest of the way to the infirmary, embarrassment set in. She resolved to not let that happen again.


You’re such a berk, she told herself as she brushed her hair.


“Humor the Healer, Doctor, and take this stomach calming potion.” Pomfrey urged before Helena ate her breakfast of Irish oatmeal, scrambled eggs with mushrooms, toast and jam, bacon, orange juice, and coffee.


Smythe had wanted her to eat a good breakfast. He certainly got his wish, although Pomfrey was still concerned that the trauma to Helena’s abdominal region would interfere with digestion.


Helena actually felt good this morning. The previous day after devouring the food Snape had ordered for her much to Madam Pomfrey’s chagrin, a nap, and a nice roast chicken dinner, Pomfrey allowed her to take a proper shower instead of simply scourgifing her and let her rummage through abandoned clothing collected over the years from graduating Hogwarts students.


“I keep the clothing left behind by students in case we ever have one that’s in need. I’m sure some of the clothes left behind by graduated 7th year girls will fit. It’s all been thoroughly scourgified. The knickers are new, so don’t worry about that.”


Now dressed in jeans, a simple white t-shirt, hot pink hoodie, and trainers, she began to feel human again. She even found a hair scrunchie to control her long blonde mane.


“Hmm, it looks like Mr. Filch isn’t coming to fetch you today. Do you remember where the classroom is?”


“Yes. I’ll see you later.”


“Contact me by the floo if you begin to feel poorly. I’ve just about pieced you back together and I don’t want Mr. Smythe to pull you apart.” Pomfrey chided as Helena walked towards the infirmary’s entrance.

With her pockets full of headache potions and two sandwiches tucked inside the hoodie’s pouch, Helena made her way to her second day of training. When she walked in, she found a smiling Gavin Smythe sitting on a levitating chair.


“Good morning, Helena! I was beginning to think I was going to have to chase you down in the infirmary. Good thing I didn’t have to because I think Madam Pomfrey would dearly love to hex me after yesterday!”


She looked at the floating Smythe with raised eyebrows.


“What? Why should they have all the fun?” he chuckled. “Fair warning; don’t do this in front of magicals you don’t know well. They’re touchy about dark magic and a person who hovers in the air without a broom is suspected of trucking with dark forces.”


But what if you’re godless, she wanted to remark. For the most part, her friends and family were atheists or at the very least agnostic, even the magicals. They didn’t attribute their magical ability to any deity or deities, sentient beings, or the supernatural, therefore any so called ‘dark magic’ was simply the result of the individual’s will or intent. Magic, they said, was amoral. It was without inherent qualities of ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ It was how you used it that made it either ‘light’ or ‘dark.’


“It’s like a tool.” her witch aunt Cynthia explained. “You can use it to make something beautiful, or destroy. It’s your choice as to which you will do. A person is bad, not the magic.”


Obviously the same went for paranormal abilities. If however some magicals considered hovering in the air without a broom to be ‘dark magic,’ then she wouldn’t do it in front of them. Although how that could be considered ‘dark,’ she had no idea. Plus with her, it wouldn’t even be magic.


As added flair, Smythe floated the chair out from under him and lowered himself to the ground.


“Right. Since we only had a half day yesterday, we’re going to try catch up this morning. Be sure to call a break if you need to. Let’s start where we left off. Levitate the chair throughout the room.”


Helena walked over to the chair and pantomimed gripping the back of it. She sighed in exasperation when it didn’t move.


“Take your time. Center yourself; recall how your mind felt when you moved it yesterday. Remember, your hands or your mind, it makes no difference. It will respond to you.”


She closed her eyes and thought back to yesterday. Even though she imagined the wood in her hands, it was only when she focused her mind that the chair moved. It felt almost as if invisible hands stretched out from her mind and took the place of her physical ones. She opened her eyes and forced herself to focus only on the chair.


Move, she silently commanded, lifting her hands. The chair rose up in the air.


“Good, good. Now, take it on a trip.” Smythe said.


As she walked around the classroom, she paid attention to how the space inside her head felt. Her brain felt…active. Sharp. It felt like low current electricity flowed through her.


“Drop your arms but keep the chair levitated.”


As she lowered her arms, the chair began following suit. She quickly raised them back up.


“It’s time to move past the pantomime. The physical. Keep your focus on the chair and ignore your body.”


Keeping her eyes on the chair, she let her arms drop suddenly and breathed with relief when the chair remained in the air. She slowly brought it down on Smythe’s request.


“Good. How do you feel? Headaches? Shakiness?”


“I’m fine for right now.”

“Good. Now you’re going to start practicing levitating objects without moving your body. I want you completely still. From here on out, you will rely only on your mind. Let’s start with that table.”


The table was rather large and looked solid and heavy. If she had to actually physically move the table, she would only be able to pick one end up at a time. Smythe anticipated her thoughts.


“With psychokinesis, an object’s weight and size has no bearing on your ability to affect it. If you can visualize it in your mind, you can affect it. Look at me, I can pick my car up and have done so.”


Her arms wanted to move in pantomime, so she stuck them in the jeans’ pockets to control them. Taking a breath, she focused on the table and tried to lift it.


Nothing.

Frowning, she tried again.

Nothing.


For the better part of an hour, she tried to affect the table to no avail. The harder she tried, the more the table remained motionless. Smythe called a break when she declared her head was beginning to hurt and that she was getting frustrated.


“A fine Paranormal I’m turning out to be.” she sighed.


“Don’t get discouraged. You’ve spent your entire life up to this point without psychokinesis. This isn’t exactly a normal condition. Rest assured though, one day this will be second nature to you.” Smythe reassured her as she drank some headache potion and nibbled on a sandwich. She didn’t feel hungry but already the satiation from breakfast was slipping away.


“How many of us are there?” Helena asked.


“I estimate anywhere from 600 to 1,000 in Britain. I only have files on 360 of us and those are the ones who have sought me out. In some circles I’m considered a kook, but when a Paranormal manifests, they or their families are usually desperate for answers, so I’m the one they come to. The rest either deny their abilities or consider them evil or demonic and make no effort into exploring them. It can be tragic when the Paranormal is a child and is brought up to believe they are bad or that there is something wrong with them. For that matter, it’s tragic when an adult manifests and doesn’t learn to control and work with their abilities. There have been a few cases of accidental deaths where the Paranormal is convicted of murder and spends the rest of their life in prison.”


“That’s horrible.”


“Yes and what makes it worse is like magic, the existence of true paranormal abilities is denied. Imagine trying to defend yourself to frightened people or a court of law by explaining that what you did came naturally from your brain. That’s why we, like magicals, have to keep our profiles low. Most of us do fine but as I said yesterday, some don’t. That’s why the Ministry of Magic should grant my lobby and offer citizenship to those of use who want it.”


After the break, Helena felt ready to take on the table again. After several minutes of coming to grips with the fact that her mental processes held supremacy over the physical, she looked at the table thoughtfully and willed it to levitate. She felt a little surge inside her head right before the table slowly levitated up in the air.


“See? You did it without budging an inch.”


“I feel something right before I affect an object. Do you feel the same way, Gavin?” she asked as she walked directly underneath the levitating table, peering up at the underside.


“Yes. All psychokinetics do. Now that you’ve identified the sensation, it’ll be easier for you to summon it up at will.”


Helena walked out from under the table and started to lower it.


“No, wait a minute. While keeping it in the air, try levitating the chair and placing it on top of the table.”


“Uh…”


“You can do it. You may only have two arms, but your mind has an infinite amount of appendages. Give it a go, Helena.”


Fortunately the chair was within her vision. She concentrated and visualized invisible arms, tentacles even, stretching out from her mind. One kept the table aloft while the other gripped the chair. This however was much more difficult to her than lifting one object at a time and both table and chair came crashing down when the chair began to lift.


“Damn.”


“Harder than it sounds, eh? Kind of like juggling. We’ll work on this until lunch.”


For the two hours, Smythe had Helena levitate multiple objects at once. She found it easier to lift two objects off the floor at the same time than to lift one, then another. By the time lunch came round, she was ready to stop. Smythe assured her that it was more resistance to the idea than it was her ability to affect the objects. To demonstrate, Smythe levitated the table and three chairs effortlessly. Then, he levitated his attaché case and set it on top of the floating table.


He dismissed her for an hour as he returned the objects to the ground and fished his lunch and some unopened mail out of his attaché case.


Helena briefly thought about skipping lunch since her face was still all bruised up and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself in the Great Hall, but considering what had happened the day before, she thought it wise to just swallow her pride.



“Ah, Doctor. Joining us for lunch today?”


Helena was standing at the doors to the Great Hall when she heard Dumbledore’s voice behind her.


“Yes, I suppose. I really didn’t want to show myself until my face healed though.” she sighed.


“I think we can do something about that.” Dumbledore smiled. He subtly waved his hand then gestured down the hallway towards the faculty entrance.


Helena felt something akin to a light breeze touch her face which she recognized as magic.


“What did you do?” she asked, trying not to make her voice sound suspicious. When any of the magicals that she knew did any magic that might affect her, they always warned her beforehand. It was only polite. She had no idea what Dumbledore had just done however.


“Just a simple glamour. Shall we?” he said, still smiling.


The Great Hall was awash with the noise of students talking, laughing, and arguing. From the vantage point of the faculty table, she could easily see her niece and nephew. Christopher was completely oblivious to her entry; too busy chatting with all his Gryffindor friends. Alex however had noticed. She caught her aunt’s eye and gave a nervous smile then quickly turning around before she drew the scorn of her Slytherin housemates.


Helena sighed and shook her head. At least she was sitting next to her new friend Sage Durand. Sage whispered something that appeared to make Alex feel more at ease and the two girls began giggling. At least she has Sage, Helena thought as she looked for an empty seat at the faculty table.


The rest of Hogwarts staff politely nodded to her and went back to their meals. She sat down and served herself some tomato soup from a soup tureen. As she stirred, waiting for it to cool, she noticed Professor Snape picking at his lunch, engrossed in his own thoughts. Every so often, he would glance up at the student body frowning.


Helena quickly ate a light lunch and excused herself. As she made her way back towards the faculty entrance, she leaned down slightly when she passed behind Snape.


“I want to thank you for what you did yesterday.” she said quietly, as if she instinctively knew that expressed gratitude overheard by others made him uncomfortable.


The only acknowledgement she received was a slight turning of his head to reveal a partial profile.




When Helena returned from lunch, Smythe continued having her move and levitate multiple objects. She was getting better at it but it still required intense concentration on her part. She knew that she would have to practice extensively to reach the point of casualness that Smythe possessed.


For the last exercise of the day, Smythe introduced the concept of psychokinetic force magnitude. To illustrate, he sent the table rocketing towards the ceiling. Helena cringed expecting it to crash against the vaulted ceiling, but he stopped it a few inches before contact. He then plummeted it down towards the floor and Helena involuntarily jumped back, only to watch as it peacefully settled without so much as a sound.


“Psychokinesis responds to the individual’s will, so a person can either gently move objects, or fling them with a great deal of force. More force than a person without the ability could, no matter how strong they are.” he explained.


It made sense. The human mind was nearly infinite in its capacity to imagine and visualize. Therefore, if the mind was so vast and unhampered by physical reality, so too should the force that now resided in her brain.


At first, Helena only managed to lift objects slowly as she had been doing.


“Fling them up there! Accept that the will of your mind is stronger than your body.” Smythe encouraged.


Helena was beginning to get frustrated and tired. She stood scowling at the large table. She narrowed her eyes and focused on it.


UP! she shouted in her mind and envisioned the table rocketing up towards the ceiling. Obediently, it blasted up and shattered against the vaulted ceiling from the considerable force in which Helena had applied to it.


“OH!” she screamed and put her hands over her mouth.


Pieces of the broken table rained down on Helena and Smythe, clattering to the floor.

Helena stood in shocked silence as she regarded the pieces of the smashed furniture spread out on the classroom floor. Smythe was busy brushing himself off. Suddenly the complete absurdity of the situation presented itself. Less than a week ago she was simply Helena Nyx, a 35 year old psychologist living her life. Now, through a series of bizarre and unfortunate circumstances, she was Helena Nyx, a 35 year old psychologist and heretofore unknown Paranormal who had just destroyed a rather heavy and antique table belonging to an institution of magical learning by the clumsy use of her newly awakened abilities while her mentor plucked wood fragments off of his clothes.


If he could see her now, she was certain that this would be among the very few times Steffen would be rendered absolutely speechless.


Helena then began to laugh. It was the kind of uncontrollable, body shaking, hysterical laughter that people sometimes get when they’re mentally fatigued and stressed. Her sides began to hurt and her eyes teared, but she couldn’t help it. The sight of dozens of table pieces scattered about and Smythe dusting fragments off his clothes as if it was the most natural thing in the world struck her as hilarious.


“Helena?” Smythe asked, curious at her reaction. This made her laugh even harder.


It must have been infectious, because Smythe began laughing too, chuckling at first then heartily from the belly. He told her of the time when as a newly manifested Paranormal, he put a hole through his ceiling with a hard ball. His wife had been furious as they were having a dinner party later that evening. Helena envisioned a sheepish Gavin receiving a tongue lashing from his wife beneath a hole in the ceiling that went straight through the roof.


The noise of their loud, boisterous laughter drew the attention of passing students. The doors to the unused classroom swung open and curious students watched bemused as woman and midget dabbed at their eyes, surrounded by pieces destroyed furniture.


“What is going on here?! What are you all looking at?!” Professor Minerva McGonagall demanded as she pushed her way through the students.


Helena was mortified even though she was still in the grips of uncontrollable laughter.


“I’m so sorry, Professor! I’ll pay for the table.”

Professor McGonagall tisked once with disapproval at the two laughing Paranormals then shooed the students back out of the room.


“Off to your next classes, everyone.”


She stepped back into the room and flicked her wand. The table instantly reassembled.


“Just try to be more careful, Doctor. And please be mindful of the noise.” With that, she bustled back out of the classroom, shutting the doors sharply as she went.


They decided to call it an early. Smythe took his leave, advising Helena to get a good night’s sleep as tomorrow they would start in on training her pyrokinesis. Upon hearing that, any leftover amusement vanished and Helena paled.


“I’m not ready for that.” she said as memories of being engulfed in fire flooded her mind.


“Yes you are. Trust me, Helena. It’ll be fine.”



Later on at dinner she was distant, engrossed in worrisome thoughts as she ate. Her ruminations continued on well into the night when Pomfrey finally brought her a vial of potion.

“You really ought to sleep. Here, this will help.”

“What is it? Calming potion?”

“Just a sleeping draught.”


A few minutes after taking Pomfrey’s potion, she slipped into dreamless void.


~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: Sorry for the long time between chapters. I've been sicker than sick. I'm terribly allergic to mold and we've had a week of damp weather which sent the mold count skyrocketing.

Amazing the amount of gross the human body can produce, no?