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Bella doesn't find a spare moment to practice with Feral again for a week and a half, which is just as well, since he does need time to try his hacked-together Occlumency strategy. Bella fills the time by reading her Philosopher's Stone book, twice, and following up on the leads in it, but apparently either the author did her research very thoroughly and there's nothing else to be found, or the ACAAM library just isn't that great.
The library is pretty great in some other respects, though. Whenever Bella finds herself at a loose end, she reads ahead and outlines essay assignments for the courses that are kind enough to offer syllabi so she'll be able to dash off and work on other things if the fancy takes her. She is strict about holding herself down to no more than one hour of outside-class flying a day, two on weekends, even when the weather is really nice (which it virtually always is). She got sufficiently nasty (and, for that matter, pleasant) surprises about features of the wizarding world in her first few days of immersion that she thinks it's probably a higher immediate priority to get a lot of reading in.
Then it's a Wednesday afternoon, Bella is between books, and she spots Feral at dinner.
"Hey, did you practice?" she asks him brightly.
occluminous
occluminous
"I don't think I will. I guess I might if I thought somebody was definitely going to try to do it for bad reasons or was going to modify my memory? Because then I'd want to really know if I could fight them off or not and better you reading me for two seconds and not wanting to learn anything too private than somebody else doing worse. But even then I probably would ask Sherlock instead because I don't want to catch fire and because he's pretty close to mindreading sometimes anyway."
occluminous
Bella goes flying until it gets dark, then stows Terpsichore, reads about the history of the Statute of Secrecy in the library until it's nearly curfew, and then heads back to her and Sherlock's room.
occluminous
"Hi, Sherlock! So apparently Feral makes a lousy Occlumency test subject because he has really intense feelings about most everything and can't calm them down and stop painting me big glowy arrows towards his thoughts, so I don't have a good way to figure out if anything I have him trying would work for me."
occluminous
Yeah, Bella's not sure she wants to outright ask on this one. If it weren't a big deal she'd be having someone try reading her directly. But: "If you ever feel like getting your mind read lemme know, but goodness knows I'll get it if you don't."
occluminous
Bella flops onto her bed. "I think I'll try practicing clearing my mind anyway so I have half a chance if somebody surprises me. I guess I'm not short on other important stuff to occupy my time if I can't think of anything else to do there, though."
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