Groaning and hearing more strident screams from Petunia "Take a sandwich before leaving Dudley!", "Don't come home late, Dudley!", "Be careful!" Alexandra decided the possibility of all her relatives becoming silent for the next hour was extremely low. The young witch decided she had better stand up and go eat some breakfast, assuming any was left after the passage of the two pigs known as Vernon and Dudley. Alexandra stood up from her bed and began to search the clothes which she was going to wear today.
As she had nothing special planned today, she chose a grey T-Shirt and black jeans. Turning her to the right of her wardrobe, she noticed Dudley had once again thrown some of his own old toys and birthday presents in her room. How predictable of her cousin. Even when something was damaged or irredeemably broken, Dudley was throwing it here, no matter the little issue she also lived in it. Apparently, going down the stairs with them and sending them in the dustbin was too tiring for him. Every time of the year. Sometimes Alexandra despaired how low her cousin was falling. Then the mutual hostility kicked in again and the green-eyed girl didn't care anymore.
Seeing an opportunity to test her abilities before everyone come back upstairs, Alexandra tried to levitate the ruined remnants of a video game carton which had just found its way on top of the pile wandlessly.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
The effect was... brutal. Instead of slowly rising at the height of her eyes, the carton shot to the ceiling with the speed of a missile and disintegrated itself against it.
That was bad. Since she had come back from Hogwarts, every time she tried to do wandless magic, the results were apocalyptic. This was not the first time experiments went badly, and initially she had thought the failure of her efforts were due to her lack of practise and concentration. But one hundred per cent of guaranteed destruction was way too high. Before Hogwarts, Alexandra never had this type of problem. Before Hogwarts, she was able to change her facial appearance at will, teleport, do levitation and do some funny (and completely useless) things. Right now, all of her pre-Hogwarts skills she had tested, only the modification of her visage and teleportation worked correctly.
"Before Hogwarts..." she whispered. That was the key she knew. Alexandra had not tested her powers without a wand while she was in Scotland. There was no reason to, not when she had a wand.
"A wand..." and suddenly the realisation came. What was Ollivander the wand-maker had said? That the wand chose the wizard or the witch? But she had not asked what else the wand could do when she used it. The teachers had been very clear a wand was used to channel the power of a human's magic, the right of owning one having been denied to creatures like goblins and centaurs. However, they never mentioned side effects. Not that it mattered a lot, knowing the quantities of things the teachers never bothered to tell or to do for the students the whole year. Still, she would have to ask Flitwick if the use of a magical wand could make a witch or a wizard weaker than he or she was in reality. She had only seen one wand-maker in Diagon Alley, a fact which guaranteed a monopoly in this business as Vernon would have said.
The other possible reason was that the deadly spell sent by Devkins had shattered her ability to practise wandless magic. This...wasn't more engaging, honestly. At least with the first hypothesis you simply had not to use your wand. How did you study a curse supposed to have been erased from history centuries ago?
A tap on the window interrupted her ruminations. It was a brown owl, no doubt carrying the newspaper of the day. After going to Hermione's home, she had made a little travel to the Daily Prophet where she had paid for a year-long subscription. The main newspaper of the Wizarding world was definitely of a very low quality compared to the non-magical ones (and yes, Alexandra included the tabloids in the lot) but at least it allowed her to keep in touch with important events.
She had not long to see if there had been something important today. Having relieved the owl of its package, the vision of the headlines made her gasp.
NICOLAS FLAMEL FOUND DEAD IN HIS HOME!
Beyond this big title was a vision of the famous alchemist and his wife Perenelle lying dead in their living room. Unlike most wizarding photos, this one was not moving at all, and there was a lot of blood (she thought it was blood, the wizards photos were still plain back and white, making details difficult). Not good. Not good at all.
The rest of the article was not sharing a lot of reliable information. Aside from remembering how famous the man had been for his contributions to alchemy and his association with Dumbledore, the journalist who had written the article, a certain Rita Skeeter, had been more interested in putting in a single page all the unlikeliest rumours she could find than reporting honestly and truthfully the facts. According to the writer, Nicolas Flamel had been involved in everything nasty which had happened in France, England and the rest of Western Europe these past six hundred years, passing from conspiracy against the British Ministry of Magic to weird alchemist experiment on animals. It was extremely nauseating to read. Internally she wondered if the paper had been redacted like this because Flamel was French and a foreigner or because this Skeeter woman simply loved treat people like dirt. The second page, finishing this insult to literature, was full of ramblings and rumours that even Lavender Brown, gossip queen of Hogwarts, would have found ridiculous in a magical school. Alexandra was going to abandon her lecture for something more educative, like catching up with a late breakfast, when one paragraph she had missed at the bottom caught her eyes.
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