Auntie Andromeda could be so boring; Heri had taken to keeping herself occupied with whatever she could get her hands on, 'appropriate' needlework or not. Instead of the weapon practice and monster slaying she usually did during her summers, she was sewing away at the drapes, napkins, and table-clothes; poking at the artefacts lying around; drawing on any flat surface that Sirius didn't stop her from marking all over.
Quite honestly, she had never had the chance to just mess about with odds and ends before, not with the Dursleys being the way they were. It wasn't until she had gotten away from their direct area of influence that she discovered the slew of things that interested her: flying; divination; Ghoul Studies; runes; magical creatures.
It was odd to realise that she had lived most of her life without any real interest in anything; it made her wonder if that made her personality shallow. Or maybe 'shallow' wasn't the right word. Vague? Faint? Whatever the proper word was, she certainly wasn't a well-adjusted human being. She still wasn't exactly a well-adjusted human being, but at least she could acknowledge the fact.
(She also accepted that she would never be so, no matter how well-adjusted she might become in the future, because demigods weren't human, much like in the way that hippogriffs were neither gryphon nor horse.)
In any case, it was great fun finding out that she found tinkering with things great fun. Beyond the frippery that kept her fussy older cousin from nagging, it was fascinating to discover how the knick-knacks in the house actually worked, and it was endlessly amusing to watch how the furniture reacted to the different rune sequences she drew on them.
There wasn't a thing in her room that hadn't been all but transmuted during her experimentations, so much that a good half didn't even resemble their original forms any longer. On that particular day, Heri was messing about with Iolanthe. It was the last fortnight of summer before school started again, and she was spending a rare day by herself.
All the shopping had already been taken care of and there was nothing scheduled. She was taking advantage of the lazy day to act upon an idea she had been tossing around in her mind for a while now. With a fine-tipped calligraphy pen, Heri very carefully traced over the chalked bind-rune she had drawn on the space between Iolanthe's shoulders. She was using an ink she had made specifically for the task at hand.
The recipe for the ink had been in one of the less-dangerous books in the house: it called for grounded black walnut, the shavings from a Kaffir lime, and soot from the burned remains of freshly killed doxies. She kept her hand steady, taking care to never pull her pen away. Slowly, a symbol made from combining Ansuz and Berkana stood out in stark contrast of the whiteness of the doll's back. The wet ink glistened as Heri finally pulled her pen back to admire the rune.
Holding Iolanthe carefully to keep the shape from running, Heri leaned in, drew in a slow breath, and breathed out a wisp of flame that dried the ink immediately. Being a fire created by magic, it also acted as an activation trigger. Iolanthe twitched in Heri's hands. Her feet kicked out and her torso jerked like a person that had been prodded in the side. Holding her breath, Heri placed the doll on the table in front of her and observed avidly. Iolanthe had been placed on the table on her side, but her little hands soon pushed herself up into a propped up position. Her little legs then bent at the knees briefly before she pulled herself up to stand wobbly on her feet.
There was the most befuddled look on the doll's face as she inspected her suddenly autonomous limbs while also wrapping her mind around the fact that she now had a mind. After a moment of complete fascination with her hands, Iolanthe looked up at Heri adoringly. Heri breathed out gustily and grinned. She extended her forefinger for Iolanthe to grip, which the doll did happily, much like how babies did.
"Do you understand me?" Heri asked, stroking Iolanthe's hair with her other hand. Iolanthe smiled dopily and nodded. "Mmm . . ." Heri's fingers traced down to Iolanthe's neck. "Can't talk?" The dopey expression fell a bit and the doll cast her eyes down abashedly. "Ah, it's alright," said Heri, waving off the concern. "That's just something we'll have to look into for later. As it is, I think the animation rune was a complete success."
It amused Heri that she had apparently succeeded at breathing life into a creation. Sirius had somehow rustled up Top Box tickets for the Quidditch World Cup.
The tickets cost a glossy Galleon considering the Top Box was where the Minister and foreign dignitaries sat, but Heri figured it had something to do with the recompense the Ministry owed Sirius for a decade of illegal incarceration. In any case, Sirius had come home with a cat-that-got-the-canary grin with the tickets waving in his hand like a fan. In his generous mood, Sirius told Heri that she could invite along a couple of friends as well. Heri would've invited Hannah, but the other girl already had plans with her extended family.
She had considered inviting along Wayne since he had bemoaned on the train that his mother thought going would be a waste of money, but then she remembered that Ernie had invited Wayne to come along with him and Zacharias, so she figured that Megan would enjoy prime seats as opposed to somewhere else in the crowd.
The game was less than a week off when Sirius got the tickets, so Heri had been worried that Megan's family had already bought their own tickets, but she worried for nothing — Megan's mother all but shoved Megan through the floo when she heard that Heri was inviting her daughter to the Top Box. After Sally-Anne's grateful but nonchalant acceptance, the enthusiasm was amusing.
The day before the World Cup, Sally-Anne and Megan arrived by floo before the five of them caught a portkey to the camping grounds.
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