Through the weeks I've spent stalking Mr. Ipsid, I've come to the solid conclusion that he is up to no good. I've kept this a secret from Raph of course so he doesn't worry. From the notes I've read and his frequent outings from the castle, It's safe to assume he's found a secret passageway. It also must be dangerous since he comes out slightly wounded each time. I'm curious to what is in the passageway but I can't leave the castle.
The Doxy attacks have been getting worse. The whole school is on a lockdown and classes have been shortened since all the teachers a busy trying to find an antidote. Even the headmaster left the school to get in touch with the ministry about the ordeal. Suspicions are mounting further, what's a ministry health official not doing reporting to the ministry? Given the whole ordeal with the attacks the professors are to busy to care and since Mr. Ipsid is helping throughout the whole thing, no one bats an eye to what he's doing in the meantime.
I spend most of my time now either stalking Mr. Ipsid, searching the castle for hidden entrances, and practicing magic. That last bit is pretty standard, with Professor Lyness giving me directions to study. Mostly shaping exercises, like controlling the distance and speed.
Something I found by accident, was that the 4th year spells summoning and banishing is just a command to the levitation charm, or maybe a subsidiary? So they can be used in tandem, in addition to studying the chants I found a third incantation, though it's use is quite similar to what I enchanted to the baseball. Compulsio, is not for hypnosis or mind control as the etnomology might assume. Accio, the current summoning charm, just makes things you can see get drawn to your hand.
Compulsio makes it if you know where it is, not just see it, will draw it in a straight line towards you, but also had the tendencies of the banishing charm, which is a momentum of force that would hit you from the object. The compulsion charm would be like if someone used a banishing charm on themselves.
If you added Leviosa to the front or back it effected how the spell worked, which started to explain why the original incantation had 'wingardium' in the front. Also I found why experimenting with incantations is not the best idea. I used it on a quill and almost impaled myself, if not for my very practiced use of the knockback jinx.
I ended up going down a month long rabbit hole of learning that a lot of spells just had the idea of push/pull to them, and why the difficulty was so varied. It's all in the specifics. Since I was pretty good at the knockback jinx it made all other push based spells much easier for me. The Knockback Jinx, Projectile Jinx, Summoning Charm, Lift Charm, Sink Charm, Banishing Charm, Disarming Spell, etc. etc.
They all have different incantations, but the overall background is the same. Push person, Push object, Pull person, Pull object. So I wanted to make a sort of General push charm, like how there is a General counter charm, and that turned out to be insanely difficult. so I stopped focusing on all that for the moment, outside of studying it when I had time.
So in addition to the huge amount of spells I was studying the backgrounds of, I learned the Revealing charm through studying the counter charms. So I cast that constantly around the castle hoping for some sort of secret entrance to explore or discover treasures like an ancient explorer. I know it's a little childish, but I mean... I have to do something to take my mind off of the whole situation that's happening.
Raph spends most of his time extensively studying potions, especially obscure ones trying to grasp straws. We've come to the conclusion, and we believe the teachers think this too, the only reason normal cures aren't working is that a curse is involved. So then Raph kept trying to look into cures and counter-curses now.
Raph is pretty quiet about it, and while I try to help when I can, I always get antsy that we have to discover the source of the problem first before trying to think of a solution. Though the positive thing we found is, if you take all of the cures extremely early on it does cure them, so Colbolt is recovering, albeit slowly. The potions and antidotes are working, just not enough to make a difference for the most part.
