"Ah, you're all wet, you mermaid!"
Carmilla rolled her eyes and then rung out her skirt before she stepped into the dorm.
It was around ten, and she wasn't any dryer than she was when she left the greenhouses hours before.
It had taken Sirius another good hour to remove most of the stains and burn marks from his side of the room while Carmilla ate the chocolate frogs from his robe pockets and told him when the spider floated in his direction so he could escape it's grasp.
Her dormmates groaned as she trudged across the carpet, her shoes making wet squelching sounds. She sneezed. The curtains were drawn, and the fire was slowly dying out as June packed up paints and Ace muttered something else about merpeople from her bed.
Sass was stretched out in front of the bathroom door, blocking Carmilla's way in.
"Move your cat, June, he hates me." She said. It was Junes turn to roll her eyes as she called Sass over to her bed so Carmilla could take a much-needed shower.
"Why is their soap in your hair?"
"Professor Montgomery made us clean the floor; it was very degrading." Carmilla huffed, putting her shoes in front of the small fire so they would dry for the next day.
"Us?" Ace mumbled. Her blankets were piled high and only a little of her pink hair poked out.
Carmilla was blatantly avoiding the small pieces of rolled up parchment that were continuously hitting the back of her head.
She was seated next to Severus again, who had only side eyed her viciously throughout the lesson, and Charlie sat at the table next to her. Ace was the one pelting her with the scrunched-up paper.
At least three pages out of her Transfiguration book must be on the floor behind Carmilla by now. Besides the fact that she was trying to concentrate on the teacup in front of her, she was only ignoring Ace's pleads for attention because the unceremonious attack was clearly pissing Severus off, and he'd laughed earlier in the lesson when Angela had gotten the answer to one of Professor McGonagall's questions wrong.
Every time another wad of parchment would come their way, he would grit his teeth and perform the spell with an even angrier tone then the last time. Ace must have figured this out as well, because the paper was slowly inching towards him with every throw.
The class was supposed to be turning their little China cups into record players, expanding on the subject of transfiguring smaller things into something much larger, or at least that's what McGonagall said.
A few students were still working on the pillow spell, and only two kids, one from each house had a record player spinning silently on their desk. Charlie had a glass casing over his pink cup, though.
"Good job," she said to him. A screwed-up parchment ball whacked her.
Charlie glanced up and smiled, then shrugged. "I mean, its progress. I think."
"Canticum arca!" Carmilla said for what felt like the millionth time, waving her ivory wand above the teacup in the way you would stir a drink, and the direction the record would spin if the spell worked. Which it did, surprisingly.
Well, it shouldn't have been a surprise, Carmilla had practised the first three spells in her textbook for hours last night.
Her wooden record player still had a small blue China handle on one side, but it wasn't spinning around in a pool of hot tea like another students was. Professor McGonagall turned and headed towards her, so Carmilla quickly swept the pieces of paper off her table and onto the floor, hiding them underneath her school shoes.
"Well done, Ms King. Five points to Gryffindor." She said simply, before telling a Slytherin sitting a few seats in front of Carmilla off for throwing his teacups around.
"So now you get how Quidditch works?" Ace asked Carmilla, bouncing on the balls of her feet with anticipation.
They were out on the pitch. Carmilla had been dragged straight out of the great hall the minute she put her fork down after trying a few of the dumplings June was eating with soy sauce.
The grass was incredibly muddy, already seeping into her to small shoes. The onslaught of rain had left puddles and mudslides across the ground of the school, but it had stopped just as quickly as it had started, so the sky was cloudy but not thundering.
Her main problem was what would happen after she fell off. If she did fall off. She wouldn't get hurt unless the old broom they had 'borrowed' from the storeroom impaled her right in the heart.
The tricky bit would be explaining to Ace how exactly she was still functioning. There was also the thought of freaking out in the air and just turning into a bat.
Ace was spiralling a meter above the muddy grass as she instructed Carmilla to talk to her broom. It was a dark brown, most likely from age. The name had been scratched off years ago, and the twigs at the end were mostly bent out of shape. They had 'borrowed' one of the oldest ones, so if Carmilla managed to break it beyond repair, no one would notice.
The upside of not being able to get hurt normally, was that Carmilla could be incredibly reckless with not a lot of consequences, so there was a large chance the broom would be in multiple pieces by in the next few hours.
"Up?" she asked the broom, holding her palm out over it. It just rolled over. She frowned at it. "Up."
It wobbled unsteadily but made its way UP. After multiple tries, it was finally in her hand. It was not Carmilla's preferred way of flight, but she positioned herself on the broom, holding onto it loosely. "Now what?"
"Try and move it around a bit. Not to high though."
Carmilla ignored Ace's instructions. She shot up into the sky quickly, the broom jerking around slightly as she steered it back towards the pink haired girl.
It was very different to flying as a small mammal. When she was in bat form, everything was natural and normal, if a bit unsteady. Now, the wind ruffled her hair, cold rushed past her, and she didn't have to worry about knocking into things up here with her wings.
It was pretty cool.
Ace cheered loudly as Carmilla flew in circles, slowly getting higher. When she had flown to Hagrid's hut to give him the letter, she hadn't nearly gotten this high. Looking down was like examining the crusty map in the library, but it was all in the flesh.
"Catch!" Ace chucked her a large red ball, the Quaffle, once they were close enough in the air. Carmilla only just caught it.
She tossed it back, and they passed it a few more times, until Ace flew away from her slightly, making Carmilla have to calculate where she would throw it to so that Ace could still grab it.
She only missed it a few times but managed to swoop down at grab it before it hit the ground and got too muddy.
"It goes through the hoops, the three chasers on each team have to get it through there. We can't get the bludgers or the snitch out cause we'll probably lose them, but we have tin foil balls and bats!" Ace said, putting the red ball back into the crate they had snuck out, and pulled out two black bats, along with a bucket that she hung on the front of her broom.
"I'm going to go for beater, I have to hit the bludgers away from everyone and towards the other team. There's only one seeker. They have to catch the snitch before the other seeker does. I reckon you'd be good at that. You're fast." She spiralled back into the sky with ease.
"Ok coach," Carmilla chuckled, hefting the heavy bat in her hands. Ace grinned threw one of the little white balls in her direction once she'd flown a little way away.
Carmilla caught it, the shiny metallic ball catching in her eyesight. She threw it back, but it fell short.
Her friend kept pelting her with golf balls, and Carmilla caught nearly all of them. It helped she wasn't scared to lean to far over or swing upside when they went too far below her. She could walk up walls.
Ace caught maybe half of them when she threw them back, since Carmilla's aim wasn't that good the other way around, so they ran out eventually.
"Try and do some tight turns, loop through the hoops. Then we can collect them again." She called over the wind, so they played chasey through the goals, spinning in circles and dropping to the puddles below them, then swooping back up quickly.
Carmilla had to restrain herself multiple times from turning into a bat, as her brain wanted her to do when a gust of wind picked up or her instincts forgot she was on a broom, but she managed.
She flew to the other end of the pitch, floating steadily in the centre of the centre hoop, before flattening herself against the old broom and hurtling forwards. She sped along the length of the pitch.
When she was only a few meters from crashing into the other big hoop, she stood up on her broom, holding her arms out for balance.
She could stand against gravity on anything.
Carmilla was seconds from slamming into the pole, when she hopped up, falling through the golden hoop, before landing back on her broom that she had been hoping would continue flying.
"You are so getting in, just do that in the tryouts and you'll be laughing!" Ace cheered once she had flown back down with the empty bucket.
Carmilla pushed down the guilty feeling that was stirring in her stomach and smiled back as they collected the scattered tinfoil balls from where they had become submerged in the grass and mud.
"Holy shit balls! It's my charms book!" Ace yelled from where she was after a few minutes, pockets full of the little muddy white screwed up bits. She waved the book that was charmed into flying out the window a few days before.
"You never went to find it?!" Carmilla asked. Ace just shrugged helplessly, trying to wipe the mud off the cover onto her sleeves instead.
"Episkey." Carmilla said, pointing the wand at the book when the muddy girl stomped through the puddles to return their 'borrowed' equipment.