The moment Iain cast that new spell, the diary went completely silent.
"No, wait! Upperclassman? Upperclassman, are you still there?" Since he had failed to get the answer he wanted, Iain began smacking the diary's cover with both hands.
But even when he escalated to tickling the diary, it remained as lifeless as an ordinary object, showing absolutely no response to his increasingly provocative behavior.
"This is bad…"
A vague sense of dread washed over him. Iain looked around, searching for anything that might be used for emergency treatment, especially the kind of emergency treatment one might apply to a diary.
"Hoo, hoo, hoo…"
Out of options and now firmly in the realm of desperate improvisation, Iain laid the diary flat on the table, bent over, and blew at the edge of the cover.
The diary did not react.
He thought harder. A puff of air clearly was not enough. So he took a deep breath, grabbed the diary by the spine, aimed his mouth at the center of the cover, and exhaled with all his strength.
Mouth-to-mouth.
He was not entirely sure whether a book required mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but this was the wizarding world. A world run on belief. Who was to say brute force and optimism could not work miracles?
"Hoo, hoo, hoo…"
Iain kept trying.
The diary still did nothing.
"Click, click, click."
Little Skeleton poked its head out from under the bed, its hollow black eye sockets fixed on Iain, jaw opening slightly with a questioning rattle.
Iain ignored it.
"This is no time to get jealous, Magic Skeleton!" Scolding the most emotionally needy skeleton in the grade, Iain shoved the diary into his arms, climbed out the window again, and jumped down.
He rolled forward several times to stack invincibility frames, then bolted toward the nearest Muggle utility hub in town. Little Skeleton leaned out the windowsill, skull protruding into the open air, watching the pajama-clad figure sprinting off toward town with a book clutched to his chest. Its jaw opened and closed once.
It let out a soft click. Then, with no hesitation at all, as if it had already foreseen some looming disaster, it turned around and began checking Iain's suitcase and counting his belongings.
You could say it was safeguarding Iain's assets for him.
After stuffing the suitcase as full as possible, Little Skeleton dragged it toward the newer tunnel it had dug under the bed. The opening was too small, so it shoved the bed aside, jumped up and down on the suitcase a few times, and finally forced it through. Then it crawled in as well and sealed the entrance behind itself.
It behaved very much like a being preemptively sheltering from catastrophe.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Iain had already arrived.
The town was quiet in the early morning. The bakery had not opened yet. Yesterday's flag still hung from the post office pole. The hardware shop's shutter was only half raised.
None of that mattered to Iain. He ran straight to a Muggle power pole and, using two copper wires, began trying to steal a little electricity.
"Bzzzt… crackle…"
This might well have been the first attempt at Muggle-style emergency defibrillation ever performed in the wizarding world.
And the patient, in keeping with wizarding absurdity, was a diary.
Its material really was something special. Even now, in its apparently dead state, it did not catch fire from the high-voltage current. It only gave off a faint burnt smell.
"Bzzzt… crackle…"
Perhaps the electric shock worked.
Or perhaps something else did.
In any case, after Iain's frantic race-against-time rescue attempt, the diary, which had seemed totally inert, finally reacted again.
The pages twitched.
Then handwriting slowly began to emerge, faint and broken, like letters viewed through a veil of gauze. Some strokes were incomplete, some barely connected.
But Iain could still read it.
[What did you do????]
The emotion in those words was unmistakable.
Staring at that line, Iain let out a deep sigh of relief.
"Upperclassman, congratulations. Your diary has been revived by me. Unfortunately, I didn't have any spare parts on hand, so I can't congratulate you on becoming a boy diary."
He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked utterly relieved.
"I just cast that spell, and then you stopped moving. I thought your diary had died. Good thing my medical genius and miraculous hands brought you back."
Only now did he answer the question the diary had asked, taking the opportunity to praise himself as well.
[Are you mentally all right?]
The diary could not help asking.
It did not wait for him to answer, as though it had no real need to hear one. Instead, more writing flowed out as it explained what had just happened.
[At that moment, I lost all connection to the diary. So please don't phrase it as though your magic knocked me unconscious.]
The correction came with visible irritation.
But to Iain, that explanation seemed suspiciously evasive. Squatting by the utility pole, he immediately shook his head.
"Don't slander my innocence. I'm not into older women. I do not have that increasingly-mature-with-age sort of taste."
Iain knew very well how powerful his charm was.
When he was six, a grown woman had once been willing to exchange cash for a kiss. The orphanage children had eaten fresh green vegetables that day for the first time in ages.
[??????]
The diary's writing stopped for a very long time.
Then a dense string of question marks appeared, each one written with enormous force.
Pretending not to notice the two lines of punctuation, Iain picked the diary up off the concrete step.
"Beautiful upperclassman, is my new innate magic an anti-magic field? You know, the kind where all magic in a certain radius just stops working?"
His super brain was perfectly capable of reasoning. Based on what had happened, this was the most logical conclusion he could reach.
The next line of writing appeared more quickly.
[You think your magic disrupted my connection because it suppressed my magical power?]
"What else would it be?"
[I think it's much more than that.]
The response came swiftly, as though the writer had truly glimpsed something.
"What do you mean?"
Iain was instantly intrigued. He had known his magic could not possibly be something that boring. Magic had to take after its owner, and he possessed both an interesting soul and an interesting body.
[We'll know soon enough.]
The diary was being maddeningly cryptic again.
"Upperclassman, are you from Gotham by any chance?" Iain despised riddlers with every fiber of his being, but he needed the answer, so passive-aggressive sarcasm was all he had.
[Ha ha.]
That was all the diary wrote.
Iain was about to press further.
But before the words could leave his mouth, the diary's promise that they would know soon enough resolved itself far more quickly than expected.
"ROOOAAR!"
A savage bellow tore across the sky.
Iain looked up.
And saw a creature that absolutely, categorically should not have been there.
A Hungarian Horntail.