Another damned assignment
Fleur muttered furiously. She had her thesis design due in 8 days, and she had no clue what she was doing. She bit into her now not so perfect nails, and wanted to throw fire at everything and everyone around her.
She had an essay on the treatment for long lasting ocular glamours. She’d begun a little bit of the reading but she still had quite a way to go. Not to mention all the pre-reading for her classes. She was going to have to do it on the day it seemed. That is if she even wakes up on time, what with it already being past midnight.
For her thesis she was supposed to submit a plan of what she was going to do for her ritual and how she was going to do it. What exactly she was testing with the ritual, which meant she needed to actually read what other wizards and witches have said in the past about glamour induced magical trauma. And then figure out a subset of hypotheses about what she could possibly test.
It was a headache because it meant she couldn’t just get on with it without having to do reading first. She didn’t hate reading, it’s just she felt like she had zero time whatsoever these days. What with her grandmother having come back to claim the seat after her daughter, one of Fleurs maternal aunts, abdicated from her position.
But yeah after the reading, she’d need to find out what materials she’d need and she had absoloutely no clue, she didn’t even know what her own ritual was meant to do. So how was she supposed to know what materials to use. Well I guess if her team were doing the same base ritual, then they could collaborate on that in terms of material. But what angle was she going to go for? She was also supposed to have a rule for how she would collect her ritual subjects, and at what point she’d stop collecting them, it was weird as there weren’t many students these days willing to volunteer for 5th year ritual theses. But how was she supposed to come up with a rule like that? Could she just make it up? She assumed it had to be grounded in existing workings similar to hers, but she didn’t know how to find it.
She felt like she had no time and like everything was collapsing around her.
Then Lyra came. Fleur wasn’t sure what to make of her new teammate. Lyra had platinum blond hair, and delicate features and a sharp jaw, her ears were a little pointy, and she had similarly obnoxious spectrespecs as the other Lovegood, Luna. Perhaps it was a family thing. She knew damn well her own was the furthest thing from normal so who was she to judge.
Lyra greeted her politely, and informed her of her nargles, which Fleur didn’t have a clue what she meant. But she continued anyway. Lyra looked at all the missing gaps on her worksheet and immediately got to reading. Fleur didn’t understand how someone could make a decision like that so quickly. But Lyra was already there, making notes and referencing different witches across the ages.
She shortly had a good overview of the field and the prominent names. But more importantly she’d determined existing theories (for the hypothesis), patterns and gaps in the literature; and she’d also written down some popular sampling principles and stopping rules in the margins.
There was also a lovely little sub-note right at the bottom with a list of previously used questionnaires which would potentially help determine a screening criteria for the ritual. Or even be a part of it itself.