Bagsy decided if she was going to beat the corvid trials she wasn't going to do it the traditional way.
Sparked with a fresh desire to improve, she got back to her usual busy behaviour. She practised hard for quidditch, using the mag-net bat and ball any chance she got, and returned to quidditch practise. She stayed up late whispering spells and moving her wand as precisely as she could. She tinkered with her broom and the other Hufflepuff brooms, trying to cut down the weight of the parts she used so they had better speed, handling and breaking. Bagsy found that she could cut down weight significantly by testing what the absolute minimum a broom needed to work was. One snowy day sh and Mezrielda were standing outside in the snow, Cora watching curiously, as they tried different combinations of parts.
Eventually, she found that if you had a piece of metal connecting some form of magical energy, ideally a flight modulator, to a piece of non-mundane wood, and then brought it all together with a spell, which was where Mezrielda came in, the circuit would allow for a very rudimentary broom. From there, Bagsy worked to see what needed to be added for safety and comfort without sacrificing too much speed. With time she'd get better, and make better brooms, but she was already pretty pleased with what she'd made, as were the rest of the team.
Before training one evening, Bagsy noticed the modified broom she'd given to Emmeline had a mark on the side.
'What's that?' she asked curiously. Someone had carved cowbird on the side of it.
Emmeline grabbed the broom, placing her hands over the word. 'Nothing,' she snapped, with a sharp glare at Greenda, who'd looked up from tying her shoelaces with an odd look in her eyes. 'It's nothing,' she repeated.
'Who did that?' Greenda asked quietly.
'In a way, you did. I bet you think it's funny, deep down,' Emmeline sneered, storming away from them and taking to the skies. Emmeline picked up her usual mocking of Greenda from then on, with a few renditions of 'Greenda, Greenda' when she got the chance. Greenda ignored it, having decided she didn't care if she'd be mocked, she was going to be friends with Bagsy all the same. Bagsy couldn't help feeling relieved, like drinking a glass of cold water after an age of drought, at the idea that Greenda wasn't ignoring her anymore. That, and preparing for the corvid trials, helped her put the beast, and her inevitable doom, from her mind.
One training session, she saw Ford pulling off one of his tricks – kicking up from his broom and jumping through the goal posts, landing on his broom on the other side.
'Ford?' Bagsy asked, flying over.
'Yeah, Bagsy? Great new brooms, by the way, much lighter.'
'Thanks. Uh... I was wondering... it's only...' She twiddled her thumbs, hovering mid-air.
'You want me to teach you the trick, right?' Ford guessed. Bagsy nodded. 'Alright, watch closely.' He performed the trick. 'Now you do it.'
'What?' Bagsy squeaked.
'It's easy. Kick off from the broom like you're going to dive into a pool. Go through the hoop and, using your hands, grab onto the broom when you come out the other side.' Ford swooped down below the hoop. 'Look, I'll catch you if you fall, it's perfectly safe.'
Bagsy wasn't so sure, but Ford kept encouraging her so she flew back a bit and prepared herself. When she flew towards the hoop, she found her nerve breaking just as she got to it, and she simply flew through them instead of jumping.
After the third try Ford decided to call it there. 'Practice jumping up from your broom closer to the ground,' he recommended, 'once you feel confident let me know and we can try it again.'
Bagsy found herself practising jumping from her broom when she tired of the mag-net bat and ball. She'd leap up and try to land back down. The first forty-three tries she wiped out in the snow or grass, depending on the weather, but it was low enough to the ground she didn't feel too scared. On her forty-fourth try Bagsy just managed to gain her balance and stay on her broom. 'Woooo!' she cried victoriously.
Cora clapped approvingly from below an awning, where she'd been knitting. 'Very good.'
In her personal studies Bagsy and Mezrielda went to the Eagle Club. Bagsy was always paired with Howe which, at first, was perfect. Howe couldn't cast any spells, like her, so she didn't have to worry about countering. However, as the Easter term progressed, Howe started to learn jinxes that he could produce, and that Bagsy couldn't block. Despite her practise and best efforts, she didn't manage to cast any spell in Howe's direction, or block a single jinx.
When, for what felt like the hundredth time in her life, her legs locked together and she tumbled backwards, she decided she'd had enough. Angrily hopping from the Eagle Club, she headed straight for the Hufflepuff dormitory.
Cora, waving her wand and freeing Bagsy's legs, looked confused. 'Are you giving up?'
Mezrielda, who'd followed Bagsy out and was walking at her side, scoffed. 'Have you met Bagsy?'
'No, I'm not,' Bagsy grit out, her fists clenched. 'I'm doing things my way.' She grabbed her bottomless tool box from her dorm and stormed back out. 'Mezrielda,' she said, 'where do the elves keep the sponges?'
Mezrielda, looking perplexed, explained the sponges were kept next to the sinks. Bagsy walked to the still painting that hid the entrance to the kitchen and went to open it.
'Woah, Bagsy, be careful,' Mezrielda warned her. 'Elves are powerful.'
'They can't be that powerful if they work in the kitchens,' Bagsy reasoned.
'They can apparate in and out of Hogwarts when no human spellcaster can. They're very powerful. And don't go insulting people who work in kitchens – there's nothing wrong with it. It's a job that requires just as much skill, dedication and focus as any other.'
Bagsy lowered her head. 'Sorry,' she murmured. Mezrielda was right, of course. 'I'm not going to fight the elves, I'm just going to ask if I can take some of their sponges,' she explained, which seemed to placate Mezrielda.
The elves were very polite as Bagsy entered and asked them for a sponge. Before long, she had a handful of yellow sponges in one hand, and her bottomless toolkit in the other. 'I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow,' Bagsy said to Mezrielda and Cora, leaving for her room. 'Night!'
Mezrielda and Cora shared a bewildered look, before Mezrielda remembered that she didn't like Cora and turned away angrily.
Bagsy spent the night working on the sponges. She was still too fearful to use the work bench in her private room, so she spread her potions kit, bottomless toolkit and the sponges around her in the common room which, after midnight, was entirely empty but for the warm fireplace keeping her company.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Bagsy kept referring to the three books she was using; Unseen Connections, the book Fitzsimmons had gifted her, written by Opius Pepsini, Brooms and their Workings, which had the best mechanical information Bagsy had access to, and Beyond the Fundamentals: What Makes Potions.
She stretched the material of the sponge this way and that, poking her wand into it and pushing it about. To her left, five different variations of a potion for absorbing stains were brewing. Bagsy had compared stain absorbing potions with various curse-cures and jinx-repellent potions, attempting to combine the two. When, inevitably, the first five potions would fail, she had a further twenty recipes she was prepared to try out.
With a magnifying glass hovering in front of her eye, and a pair of tweezers in each hand, Bagsy worked on the sponges. For one, she added dragon hide fibres. Another, a mixture of dragon scale dust and giant hair, and so on, each combination with the same goal in mind.
After breakfast finished, Neve, looking rather full, settled herself in an armchair and saw Bagsy huddled over her tools, covered in spots of coloured potions, grease, different fibres and bits of sponge. It was a Friday, and the Hufflepuffs had a free period before a personal study in the morning. Most of them used it for lie ins, so it was odd to see Bagsy had been up all night.
'Bagsy... are you okay?' Neve asked in concern.
'Not now,' Bagsy grumbled, barely noticing the words. Neve ducked her head apologetically and rolled something on wheels over to where she was sitting, working on it instead.
Bagsy, feeling as if she'd just told Neve to 'do not disturb', put the sponge she was working on down, pushed the floating magnifying glass to the side, and looked at her. 'I'm sorry, Neve. What did you need?' she asked as kindly as she could.
'I was wondering if you were okay,' Neve explained, working on something that made Bagsy's jaw drop.
'What is that?' she gasped. Neve was placing an intricately folded length of paper onto a dress that was delicately draped upon a torso mannequin. The dress was made entirely of paper, from the strips overlapping and folding over the chest, to the flowing skirt that moved like ocean waves with sharp corners and gentle curves. 'You'll look great in that!'
Neve looked a tad disgusted. 'It's not for me. I don't wear dresses.'
Bagsy said, 'Still, Neve, that's amazing. It looks amazing. It's... amazing!'
Neve flushed. 'It's okay...' She shrugged in embarrassment. 'It's a wedding dress for my sister-in-law. Well, my to-be sister-in-law,' Neve corrected herself, carefully adding the most recent strip of paper she'd been working on to the top of the dress, forming a graceful strap. Neve nodded at Bagsy's sponges. 'What have you been working on?'
'You really want to know?' Bagsy asked, picking the sponges back up. Neve nodded. 'I'm making thin layers of different material inside of a sponge. Hopefully, when a spell hits it, it will compress and absorb the spell.'
Neve turned from her dress to look at her, gaping as Bagsy had done only moments before. 'But that's brilliant!'
Bagsy shrugged. 'It's alright... if it even works.'
Bagsy and Neve worked in companionable silence until the bell rang for personal study. Neve left for the library and Bagsy stayed where she was.
Just as personal study was approaching its end, Bagsy decided she'd made more sponges that she thought she might need, and collected them into a bag, heading for the Eagle Club.
She burst into the room – Cora was sitting in the corner, Mezrielda and Winifred looked like they'd just finished a particularly draining duel.
Howe rushed over to her. 'Bagsy! You're here! Quick, we've got a bit of time to practise before lunch.'
'Give it everything you've got, Howe,' Bagsy encouraged him, picking one of the sponges out of her bag; dragon scale dust and crushed giant toenails layered with a few coats of spotless-solution mixed with a paralysis cure. Bagsy held the sponge tightly in one hand, envisioning the spell Howe was about to shoot towards her as a bludger.
'Locomotor mortis!' Howe cried. A few onlookers turned, their own duels ending, to see what would happen.
Bagsy swung her arm across, swiping at the jet of magic headed her way, and saw the spell pass through the sponge and hit her hand. Her legs locked together.
Mezrielda cast the counter-curse, sparing Bagsy from falling.
Winifred folded her arms. 'What are you doing?' she asked curiously as Bagsy discarded the sponge and reached into her bag, pulling another one out. Graphorn horn-flakes, troll dandruff, with two ladles of dirt-away and repulsion tonic absorbed and fixed within the fibres of the sponge.
'And again, Howe,' Bagsy said in a firm voice, bracing herself.
'Locomotor mortis!' Howe incanted. Bagsy caught the spell with an upper cut, but felt her legs locking again.
Soon, Bagsy was down to her last sponge. It was the sponge she had spent the longest on, and the one she expected to work the most. Lunch had begun and Howe, along with the other Eagle Club members, had left. Except for Winifred and Robin, and Mezrielda and Cora, there was only Bagsy left.
Mezrielda stepped forward and held out her hand. 'Give me that sponge,' she said. Bagsy did so. 'What's in here?'
'Everything...' Bagsy breathed, starting to feel tiredness claw at her limbs. 'Dragon scales, giant toenails, horn flakes from Graphorns, a horde of different absorption and repellent potions, troll dandruff, strips of wipe-away magic cleaner, you name it. It's all in there, layer upon layer entwined with the fibres of the sponges, coated in stay-put glue.'
Mezrielda tapped her wand to the sponge. 'Is there any spell that would help make it work?' she asked, waiting for Bagsy's command. Bagsy thought hard.
'Could you animate all the different components to slot together better? Force them to be really tangled and stuck with each other? Make it like one, big, squishy net?'
Mezrielda smirked. 'You got it. Implexio!' A ball of yellow light hit the sponge and, like static, dispersed along it. Bagsy watched as the sponge shifted, all the different components within twining around each other to make a strong fabric that layered over and over again within the cleaning instrument. Mezrielda handed Bagsy the sponge.
'Let's try this one more time,' Bagsy said, sucking in a nervous breath and placing her feet.
Mezrielda pointed her wand at Bagsy. 'Locomotor mortis!' she hissed. With a swift jab, Bagsy caught the spell with the sponge clamped in her hand.
She felt a push on her palm, like a localized gust of wind, strong enough to push her a few feet back, but her legs didn't lock up. The spell was caught, and dissipated, by the sponge.
'Yes!' Bagsy cried, throwing the sponge into the air and spinning around. 'It worked! It worked!' Mezrielda rushed over to Bagsy and held up her hand. Bagsy high-fived her and beamed, feeling happier than she had in a while. 'I blocked it, Mezrielda, I blocked it!'
'You sure did.' Mezrielda smiled for once. Bagsy, picking the sponges up from the floor, keeping the one that worked in her hands, decided she didn't need lunch, and headed back to the Hufflepuff common room to fit the new sponge material into something more practical. By the time Bagsy arrived at Herbology that evening, she was wearing a new pair of gloves.
Teresa, as they worked on their patch, looked at them curiously. 'Those look kind of like my dad's motorcycle gloves...'
Bagsy smiled. 'They're nothing like them, I can assure you. These–' She held her hands up, wriggling her fingers to show off the new material she'd created. She'd stained the bright yellow material a darker beige, so it wasn't as garish, and added black fabric patterns for decoration. '–Are spell-sponge gloves.'
'Spell what now?' Teresa blinked in confusion as she smeared red goop over the dirt for the sprouting trees to grow on.
'Spell-sponge gloves. They absorb spells like sponges absorb liquid. Once they fill up you give them a twist and wash the spells away, and they're ready for use again,' Bagsy explained, digging the soil from around a young tree out so she could place fertilizer in its place. 'Or, at least, that's what I think – hope – will happen when they fill up with magic. I haven't actually tested it yet.'
'Where did you get them?
'I made them.'
'You made them?' Teresa sounded disbelieving.
Bagsy nodded. 'Sure did. Look, my stitching is terrible. You can tell a second-year made them.' She held her hand out so Teresa could inspect it.
As over joyed as Bagsy was about her latest invention, carrying the gloves everywhere she went, stopping short of always wearing them for fear of being teased or nicknamed "glove-girl", it wasn't long before she noticed how much her studies were suffering because of all her extra-curricular activities.
Potions and Herbology were going well, and her History of Magic homework was just scraping by, but without her usual dedication to practising spells and wand movements any spell casting lessons went from her trying her best and failing, to not even being sure what words to say.
'Do you need me to teach you English?' Professor Starrett snarled when Bagsy couldn't pronounce the cheering charm correctly.
'Spells are based in Latin, professor,' Mezrielda pointed out.
Both Slytherin and Hufflepuff lost ten points each that lesson, but at least Mezrielda and Bagsy had giggled their way out of the classroom.
The Eagle Club absorbed all of Bagsy's personal studies as she and Mezrielda prepared for the corvid trials, and the evenings when Bagsy would usually pour over her studies were instead spent practising quidditch or tinkering with the Hufflepuff brooms. She rushed her homework, did half the amount of spell practise she usually did, if that, and had dropped the usual extra reading she engaged in. Slowly, she felt more and more guilty about how she was treating her studies. She told herself she had an evil monster out to kill her, so it was okay if she changed her priorities a little.
When Bagsy saw worms whilst she was outside practising her quidditch, she waited patiently for a crow to appear and take it away, no longer trusting the worms' messages. She wondered if the boy she'd met at Christmas had been similarly tricked, or if he was in on it with the worms as well.
When Bagsy caught glimpses of fresh injuries on Fitzsimmons, however, she found she couldn't put her mind as easily from it as she could the worms. What was Fitzsimmons doing to get deep wounds like that? When Bagsy noticed Starrett was also gaining unexplained injuries and hiding them beneath her robes, too, she felt more worried, wondering how correct Mezrielda had been when she'd said they couldn't trust Professor Fitzsimmons, and if that mean they couldn't trust any of the other professors, either.