Having finished their lunch, Almira joined her mother in the laboratory to help her tweak the runes on the flying boots. Her mother had been having a hard time with them, as she wasn’t able to keep herself upright while testing them herself, and while she theoretically knew how the runes will interact, it’s completely different to see them actually work with her own eyes.

Enchanting using runes is something few people do nowadays, as it’s a lot simpler to use charms for the job, you decide on a charm and then wave your wand to place it onto an object. Using the artifacts made with charms is also easier as they usually react to just the intent of the user, only complex artifacts needing commands from the user. With runes, you have to place them on the material by hand and literally write what you want the enchantment to do in each separate situation, making also using them a lot less natural. They are also a complete opposite to charms in the fact that only powerful artifacts made with runes react to the user’s intent. Of course, this also comes with its own perks.

Enchantments made with charms count as outside magic, which is the reason they can easily react to user’s intent, but this also means it’s possible for a skilled enough magic-user to mess with them from afar, though professional artifact-makers use powerful enchantments to counter this. Enchanting with runes on the other hand creates a closed circuit inside the object itself, making it impossible to manipulate them without actually having the artifact in their hands and changing the runes by hand.

The reason Almira and her mother decided to use runes is that, while using a broom to fly in the off change that someone tries to mess with your broom, you can jump off and use either feather-light or cushioning charm to land safely, but with the boots being on your feet there really isn’t such an option. Knowing this, despite using runes making their project a lot harder, they decided to not take the risk.

Strictly speaking, their model wasn’t what you would call practical. The boots have to be over the knee, so that they have enough moving points to link to the different functions of the runes. This however also makes it so that using the boots takes a lot of skill from the wearer to be able to use them to move in the wanted direction without flipping over, a point they were working hard to fix, as that skill was something Almira’s mother didn’t have.

And so, they spent the whole day from lunch to dinner by Almira using the boots to do every type of maneuver she could think, while her mother observed the runes with enchanted measuring tools, that allowed her to see and measure the magic flowing in the runes.

During the dinner, Almira told her mother all about her life in Hogwarts, about how she got to know her new friends and what they were all like, what the Hufflepuff’s common room was like and how they had to crawl in tunnels to get to their room. She also told her mother about what new spells and potion-recipes she has learned, and of course about how she found out that Hagrid had this cute dog that was really big, but was actually just a softie inside and that it let her lay on its back. Her mother listened through it all with a smile on her face and told Almira how Professor Binns had been teaching at Hogwarts also when she was there, laughing when she heard that Almira couldn’t stay awake listening to his lectures, that seemingly haven’t changed from the time she was there. Her smile grew strained however as Almira told her more about Hagrid's dog. The traits ‘three headed’, ‘big’ and ‘dog’, these being the words Almira used to describe this Hagrid’s ‘big softie’, coming together in her head and forming an XXXXX rated beast, well known for its aggressiveness and physical powers, but decided against trying to correct Almira as, to her, this Fluffy was clearly ‘just a big softie’.

After dinner, Almira was sitting on a stool and humming happily as her mother was washing her hair, with a gentle smile on her face. It would’ve been easy for them to clean themselves using the cleaning charm, but Almira felt that a proper bath was a lot more than just getting clean, and she really couldn’t think of anything that felt better than her mother washing her hair.

After rinsing the shampoo out of Almira’s hair, she and her mother moved into the bath, with her mother getting in first and Almira then getting in and leaning her back against her mother’s chest. Almira then slowly turned herself back into her original form, with dark violet fur covering her limbs, her ears moving upwards on her head and changing into feline ones, and a dragon-tail growing from the small of her back, going around her right side and coming to rest against the end of the tub. She however left out the hooves and claws, as combining those with taking a bath is an accident waiting to happen. The tub was spacious enough for both of them to be comfortably in, so they could spend their bath with neither of them speaking a word, just enjoying the comfort of the warm water and each other’s presence.