Lux wasn't sure he would ever get used to flying on a broom. He was average at it, finally happy he could do something involving magic where he could be just like everyone else, but it definitely wasn't his thing. So when quidditch sign-ups started, he declined for now. They usually go to the upper-class anyways, having years of experience over him.

There wasn't an artifact club to join, the elective class being the equivalent to what the school offered. Dueling club sounded intriguing to him, which a lot of students took, but Lux wanted to figure out how he was going to use his magic without revealing his secret. He still wasn't sure about the whole school knowing about him yet. It would be different if he was wizard-born, but a Sorcerer being a muggle-born? Lux wasn't confident that would go over smoothly.

On the topic of being a Sorcerer, however, Lux began to think about something he had wanted to do for a little while now. He wanted to tell Caleb.

He would like to say he was doing this because of the deep friendship they developed over the last month together. Meals were shared, spells learned together, and most of their free time was spent around each other. However, if he had to admit, there was a strategic point to it as well.

Caleb had no friends really outside of him and Lindsey. His family had simple jobs - maintenance on different artifacts throughout the world, for muggles and wizards alike. They weren't necessarily skilled at it, but just enough to recharge and fix simple tasks. He was a safe person to confide in, and truthfully, he needed a partner. He couldn't practice any defensive spells or try offensive ones on a target that could think.

Lindsey, with her revelation of her family's involvement with UW, was just too much of a risk right now.

Ultimately, what had convinced him, was the previous Sorcerer's notes. Feeling lonely, the torn pages... she had tried to go through with it alone, and it showed. Her thoughts became muddled, her experiments more convoluted. Lux wanted to avoid the same fate. A life without friends and people he could trust is a life he didn't want to live. Being careful was one thing, becoming a recluse is another.

So, after their flying lesson, he asked Caleb to meet him in front of the Room of Requirement that evening. Well, he asked him to wait for him at the blank wall that would turn into the Room of Requirement.

"I'm not sure why he thought he could teach trolls to dance," Caleb said with a deadpanned voice while looking at the tapestry across from them.

Lux looked at Caleb and pointed at the empty wall. "So... I'm gonna need you to watch this empty wall for a second."

Caleb complied without question and looked at the wall. "Stone."

"Uh yeah, keep looking, ignore me walking up and down."

He did the usual three pass by, thinking about the dueling practice room he had been using, but asking for his workshop to be added to it.

The wooden door appeared, and Caleb turned toward Lux with his face scrunched up in confusion, "How did you do that?"

He explained to him the rules of the room, and how he found it as they opened the door and walked in.

"This is..." Caleb said, his voice trailing as he looked at the practice dummies and walked over to the workshop where all the iron rings were scattered throughout the table, the Latin dictionary still open off to the side.

"I know, right?" Lux said, letting Caleb digest and peruse all the information.

"Why would the headmaster tell you of this room?"

Lux sighed and sat on the stool next to the workshop and motioned for Caleb to take a seat.

"We need to discuss a few things, about me." Lux began, having already decided to be direct with his words. "Two things that make me different than everyone else. One, I scored very high on the aptitude test."

Caleb's eyes squinted, "How high?"

"...Over 90."

Silence between the two of them.

"I scored a 52," Caleb responded, awkwardly adding in his own score.

"That's above average," Lux said, waiting to see if he would ask him more questions. He didn't.

"So, you believe me?"

"Why wouldn't I?" Caleb asked, not understanding.

"Well, I kind of suck with magic in classes so far, so I assumed you wouldn't really believe me right away."

"You have never given me a reason to think you would ever lie to me," he responded, the words causing Lux to feel his throat tighten at his reaction. He knew Caleb was being analytical, his social skills not allowing him to make deeper connections as to how or why Lux would deceive him. But it was exactly this, taking things for face value, why Lux appreciated Caleb's friendship so much. He truly was unapologetically himself, and all he expected in return was the exact same.

"Right... I wouldn't lie to you. Well, unless it was for my safety. Which, the next thing I wanted to tell you might be in that category. Because of that, including you in this piece of information might make you a target. So I don't need to tell you if you don't want to know."

Caleb looked around a moment, pondering. "So what you have to say, could indirectly put me in danger?" he asked.

Lux nodded. "Yeah, so if you aren't okay with that, that's fine. I'd understand."

Caleb stood up from the desk and walked around for a minute, digesting the information. He came over and sat back down and looked at Lux, "You're my only friend," he said shortly, looking away from him uncomfortably. Lux waited for him to elaborate, or to go into a greater explanation until he realized he already said everything he wanted to say.

I'm his friend. No explanation was necessary.

Lux walked over to the practice dummy and took out his wand.

"Expelliarmus!"

The wand popped up a meter into the air before falling down right in front of the wooden target, one of the better responses Lux had gotten from a spell but still a feeble attempt. He walked a few steps over toward another fake wizard. He put his wand in his robe and extended his right hand.

"Expelliarmus!"

The difference was very apparent. The fake wand flew from its position clear across the room to over several feet away.

"Accio Wand!"

Before the wooden stick had settled onto the ground it zoomed straight toward Lux's open left hand at an incredible speed. Before it even reached him, with his right hand still extended, he shouted "Stupefy!"

The dummy shot backward several meters, the force enough to slowly tip it backward as it fell with a loud thump onto the floor.

This was Lux's routine he had been practicing, try to perfect the art of using two hands while casting. He started with these two because once he cast accio, he didn't feel like the magic that tethered itself to the wand was anything other than an automatic process; it didn't require any concentration, other than to catch it as it flew back toward him. The one-two of accio and stupefy was a great starting point for this, as previously noted in the old Sorcerer's notes.

He turned toward Caleb whose face was priceless.

"Wha-"

"I know."

"You jus-"

"Yup."

"Without a-"

"Without a wand, also yeah."

"No, Lux, not just without a wand. Better than."

Lux sighed, "Yeah, I know. Ever heard of Sorcerers?"

Lindsey sat inside a cozy office in the UW headquarters, her dad's office, to be more specific. He had sent a letter requesting her presence via Floo Network that evening and she, unfortunately, obliged.

Henry Jones was the head of the Magical Genetics department, a job Lindsey found awfully boring and morally questionable. She of course had heard rumors he was a Purist, it made sense given his job. Admittedly there were a few dinners where he seemed to talk down on muggle-born, citing the latest research, but nothing that ever seemed overtly evil in Lindsey's eyes. Many looked up to him as one of the key components in stopping The Fall, and with her mother being in charge of the very lucrative job of the Auror and Bodyguard department, they were quite the dynamic duo. Not to mention her grandfather who basically ran the whole damn show, and was an incredibly powerful wizard too.

Besides the fireplace, the office was littered in a hoarder's paradise. Half-filled potions lined several tables, scrolls of parchment with scattered inkblots showed an intense passion with his research, albeit a poorly organized one. No artwork lined the walls as bookshelves ordained almost every corner with every magical topic you could possibly think of.

"Enjoying school?" He asked curtly.

Not sure where the attitude is coming from.

"Yup. Same stuff I have said in my previous letters."

Henry hummed in acceptance. "You mentioned two friends," he grabbed the latest letter she wrote, "Caleb and Lux, correct?"

"Uh, yeah, Dad."

"Romantic interest?" he asked.

She let out a laugh in disbelief. "Them two? Dad come on, I have taste ya know. Caleb's definitely not my type. Lux is too reserved. They're friends." He stared in response, "I'm serious."

He nodded, "As you say. So what do you know about this Lux?"

She stared at him. This wasn't the first time she had seen her dad do this kind of dance before.

"Well, he sucks in classes so far, at least the application of spells. He gets good grades on his reports and stuff, and the teachers like him, like a lot, but he can't cast spells worth a shit."

Her dad cringed slightly at her crudeness, a fight he had long given up on trying to correct.

"Hmm, interesting. Anything else? How's his family?"

"Dad why are we talking about this like you don't know?" she said, already growing tired of the game, "You work in genetics at the UW, I know you have access to all that stuff."

"And you aren't curious?" he asked, confused. She always liked to know who scored the highest, the lowest. She had always been curious and nosy, so not writing him asking about her own class was unlike her.

Of course, Lindsey was curious, but, Lux had messed with her head. He truly didn't care who she was or where she had come from... and that confused her. Even Caleb, who did know, couldn't care less. They just wanted her around, seemingly more now that she had stopped being a complete pain in their ass. The respect Lux gave her, well, it felt wrong to do something behind his back, which was definitely not who she thought she would turn into.

"Nah, Dad. I don't really care anymore, it's his business to tell me if he wants to."

Henry moved on from the conversation fairly quickly, remembering what his... boss, had told him about taking it slow with this new Sorcerer, but he was now sufficiently intrigued by the young man. No one changes his daughter's mind about anything.

The Floo Network was in use for centuries. The most notorious instance of accidental misdirection regarding the Floo Network happened in 1855 when, after a particularly nasty row with her husband, witch Violet Tillyman leapt into the living room fire and cried, between sobs and hiccups, that she wanted to go to her mother’s house.

Several weeks later, with no clean pots in the house and his socks in urgent need of washing, her husband Albert decided that it was time she came home, and took the Floo Network to his mother-in-law’s. To his surprise, she claimed that Violet had never arrived. Albert, a suspicious man and a bit of a bully, raged, stormed and searched the house, but his mother-in-law appeared to be telling the truth. A poster campaign and a series of articles in the Daily Prophet later, Violet had still not been found. Nobody seemed to know where she was and nobody had seen her come out of any other fireplace. For several months after her disappearance, people were afraid to take the Floo Network, in case it simply vanished them into thin air. However, time passed, memories of Violet faded, and nobody else disappeared, so the wizarding community continued as usual. Albert Tillyman returned grumpily to his house, learned cleaning and darning spells, and never used the Floo Network again for fear of what it had done to his wife.

It was not until twenty years later, after Albert’s death, that Violet Tillyman resurfaced. Due to the incoherent way she had spoken when she had entered the Floo Network, she had not emerged from her mother’s fireplace, but that of Myron Otherhaus, a handsome wizard who lived in Bury St Edmonds. In spite of Violet’s tear-stained, ash-covered and blotchy appearance, it had been love at first sight when she toppled out of his fire, and Myron, Violet, and their seven children lived happily ever after.

- Bathilda Bagshot, History of Magic ed. 1