Feral volunteers to make her a tasty picnic for her birthday.

Sherlock volunteers to help.

They emerge from the kitchen on the big day carrying an enormous picnic basket between them, which neither one could manage on his own. Well, they could levitate it, but Feral is still not keen on pointing his wand at things he'd like to keep and Sherlock assures him that this way is more fun.

Bella has found a nice picnic spot on the edge of the grounds, and turned a napkin into a picnic blanket which should last long enough.

Tony provides her charming company!

Feral is proud of the food.

So is Sherlock.

"You guys are the best," says Tony. "There should be more birthdays around here."

"Feral, did you pick one yet?"

"Nope," he says. "Do I need one? I could just make picnics whenever. Picnics are fun."

"Maybe we should do a picnic on some kind of regular basis. This is California, it's not like it's going to have unpicnicky weather one day."

"I'd love that!" says Feral.

"Hear, hear," says Sherlock.

"Once a month maybe," says Bella.

"Hell yes."

"Awesome!" Bella flops onto her back on the blanket, looking up at the sky, and pops another strawberry into her mouth.

Flopping is a great idea. Feral flops into Tony's lap. It is comfy there.

She ruffles his hair and feeds him a cookie.

"...Holy shit," says Feral.

Tony is also staring.

Sherlock is curled up next to Tony, not doing much of anything at all.

Feral emerges from Tony's lap and attempts to give the glowy person a hug, despite the obvious insubstantiality problem.

"What the fuck just happened," says Feral, hugging her.

"Yeah. What he said," says Tony, hugging Sherlock.

"I killed it," Bella says. "It's gone."

"How, though."

"With a - super-Patronus. I wasn't sure if it would work but it worked."

"What did you actually do, is what I'm trying to get at here," says Tony.

"I sort of - you know how I got mist when I thought about the right books - I just thought about - I'm not sure how to put it in words."

"...Oookay," says Tony. "Bella has Special Patronus. Got it."

"I'm pretty sure I could do it again, now that I know I can."

"...You're gonna want to go around slaughtering Dementors now, aren't you."

"Of course!"

Feral hugs her some more.

Hugs. "I will need to think of a way to go to that British prison without getting arrested. And then I have to find out how to find wild ones. But I'm going to get them all."

"...I could fly you places," Feral offers. "Thestrals are good at finding."

"That would be great," Bella says.

"I wonder if I can work from far away. Maybe I should try sending my glowy person to Azkaban from here. You know, with a message. For the dementors. 'Goodbye forever'."

Feral snorts. "I'm not stopping you."

"Gotta do it the hard way, then," says Feral.

"Suppose so. Summer project, maybe, I will read up on United Kingdom wizarding law. I wonder if it is even technically illegal to destroy their dementors."

"I bet they'll find something to charge you with," says Feral. "Or somebody'll just kill you. in the middle of you trying."

"Hmmm. I should probably practice on wild ones first, anyway, I'm not sure how well Glowy Person holds up against groups of Dementors or anything."

"Yeah," says Feral. "Clear out those first, then hit the big one. Makes sense."

"Unless someone notices the wild ones are disappearing and gets nervous about Azkaban."

"Who the fuck tracks wild Dementors?"

"Well, I don't know, but I bet someone notices when souls start getting sucked out, maybe there's someone keeping statistics who'd notice a drop."

"Maybe," says Feral. "But I still don't see them getting nervous unles somebody actually catches you killing one. It's supposed to be impossible."

"They might get nervous for other reasons. If they thought the Dementors were, I don't know, collecting somewhere they didn't track and being obvious."

"Sure. But they wouldn't, like, tighten security on Azkaban to stop you breaking in."

"They might ask the Azkaban Dementors. They have some way I don't understand of communicating with them, I don't know if other Dementors can tell what just happened to this one." She gestures at the cloak. "Speaking of which I don't know how to dispose of that."

"Yeah, okay," she says, and she holds her wand ready to put out the fire if it threatens to spread to the trees.

"Thanks."

Feral grins. "Anytime."

Bella rummages around in the picnic basket. She finds some chocolate cookies that they didn't get to. She presses one into Sherlock's hand, takes one, offers the others to Feral and Tony.

Om nom.

Nibble nibble.

Tony eats her cookie with one hand and hugs Sherlock with the other.

"Are you okay? Should I bring back my glowy person to pet you more?" Bella asks Sherlock.

"I will be fine," he says, snuggling Tony. "It was much worse last time."

"Okay." Bella munches her cookie. "Let's go in."

"Good plan."

Feral unhugs from Bella and packs up the basket to bring it back to the kitchen. It's light enough by now that he can manage it himself.

Bella goes to the library to see if she has missed any Dementor or Patronus books (she hasn't) and then to muse on what exactly she did to make her Glowy Person, and then to brainstorm about extermination procedures. (Sherlock could probably use a nap.)

After a little while, Feral comes looking for her.

Here she is, tapping the end of her pen on her notebook. "Hi, Feral."

"Hi," he says, flopping into the nearest chair. "So are we gonna go kill things or what?"

"I'm making a list of things I need to find out before we start. And I don't think we'd better do it during school, and can you even find things like 'whatever Dementor is nearest within the continental United States'...?"

He shrugs. "I dunno. I know I can find a person, or a place, but not a thing, like a book or something. I don't know if I can find Dementors or not. I don't think I can find you the nearest one, like that, but does it actually matter if you get the exact specific nearest Dementor or not?"

"Crossing international borders is complicated and long trips require more packing. There are an estimated fifty wild dementors in the whole world - I think the one I killed must have followed us specifically, or it'd be too weird to find one again so soon - so there's maybe a handful in the States at any given time, and you fly fast but going a couple hundred miles an hour is still a day trip if we have to go to Denver, let alone Boston."

"I should figure out how fast I actually am, probably," says Feral. "It didn't take me all that long to get to your place, either time, but I wasn't really paying attention to how long. And I've never seen somebody quote miles per hour on how fast Thestrals fly."

"I don't remember what time it was you got to Renée's, but it was a little before dinnertime when you got to Charlie's, when did you leave?"

"I don't really remember," he says. "How far is it, anyway?"

"It's like eight or nine hundred miles, I think."

"Okay, that's far," laughs Feral. "It didn't feel like nine hundred miles. It just felt like - some flying."

"But like when you left had you had lunch already?"

"Maybe?" he hazards. "I think so. But I don't eat lunch at the same time every day in the summer, so that could've been anytime between ten and four. And I don't know how long after lunch I left."

"Well, I'm in the eighth grade now, I can leave campus on weekends, let's see how long it takes to get to - oh, Santa Cruz? We can go over the water so nobody much will see me flying, that's allowed on brooms as long as you have plenty of altitude so it should be allowed on you. And get lunch and time our way back."

"Sure!" says Feral. "It'll be fun!"

"Although I should probably see if I can learn an invisibility charm of some kind since we'll have to go overland to find Dementors, probably."

"Yeah, good plan."

"Is the finding the sort of thing you could experiment with without actually going anywhere? Sit in your room, be like 'okay which way would I go if I were about to squeeze out the window and look for Bob The Nearest Dementor, and how far away is it'?"

"Yeah, no problem," he says. "Well - I can't tell distance exactly, like, I didn't know it was eight hundred miles to your dad's place. But I can tell whether one thing is closer or farther than another thing."

"Okay. We'll time to Santa Cruz and then you can compare Bobs against Santa Cruz."

He laughs. "Sure."

"And you can check after classes and if there is a nearby Bob we can go kill it and if there is a farther Bob it will have to come closer or wait till a weekend when I know how to turn invisible."

"Okay," he says agreeably. "How do you kill 'em, anyway? It is a special you thing, or a learnable thing? Because I mean, if I can learn it, I definitely want to."

"I... don't know if you can learn it. I am pretty sure it has to do with how I couldn't do the regular kind before. It's a mindset thing. I can try to explain it if you want?"

He shrugs. "Sure, okay."

"Dementors are a death thing," says Bella. "Obviously people die other ways, almost all of the time, but Dementors are sort of - about death. Almost like how unicorns are about purity - except you aren't in magizoology - I don't know. Does that make sense though, that Dementors are about death, bad in the way death is?"

"...Yeah," he says thoughtfully. "Yeah, it does."

"I'm not sure what casting a regular Patronus is like so I don't know if my guesses about regular ones are right, but they're all animals except mine, mine's a person, mine is shaped like a kind of thing that can know what death is and that it's coming if it thinks about it. Thestrals and eagles and owls can't do that. I think a regular Patronus is saying 'not yet' - kind of -" She sticks her fingers in her ears, "la la la, I can't comprehend mortality, I am a happy cartoony creature!" - she puts her hands down. "And Dementors aren't death itself, they're just about it. You can stop thinking about one thing if you think about another thing hard enough, you can stop being scared if you think about happy things hard enough, regular Patronuses seem to me like they might be the magic version of that?"

"Maybe," says Feral. "I dunno. That part doesn't make as much sense to me."

"Well, I don't know," shrugs Bella, "I can't do a regular one, this is me speculating about why mine is person-shaped. I bet you I don't turn into a Generic Humanoid if I learn to be an animagus."

"Yeah, probably not," snorts Feral.

"So regular ones are, 'la la you can't scare me I am a guardian animal'. And Glowy Person is like, 'I got a good look at you, and you know what, fuck you'."

He giggles.

Feral laughs. "Sure," he says, unflopping out of his chair.

"...huh," says Feral. "And that does it?"

"I concentrate on how I'm going to fix things, most especially Dementors, and I cast the spell and I get a glowy person," confirms Bella.

"How'd you figure that out?"

"I wasn't sure it was going to work," says Bella. "I thought about the Dementor a lot after we first saw it, though. What it looked like and how it made me feel and how I wanted to kill it. And once I was full up on chocolate - I didn't even eat that much of it - I felt kind of - like - like I was a critter it's a really bad idea to corner, does that make sense? You know how some kinds of animals won't attack you but if you hem them in you are not going to make it home intact - the Dementor sort of had me cornered, or Death did, or something, and that was a bad move. I'm rambling - just - it was the thing I thought of that seemed like might work. Especially based on what thoughts gave me mist when I was trying to do a regular Patronus."

"Huh," says Feral. "Yeah, I have no idea how to do that. It kind of makes sense, but it doesn't make sense for me, you know?"

"Yeah. I mean, if this was a systematized thing lots of people could do and figure out and teach then probably it would have been done already."

"We're both a little weird," says Feral, with an affectionate grin. "You definitely win Most Weird, though. Having an Animagus or a Patronus be a magical creature is rare, but it's happened."

"Do I get a prize for winning?"

"Sure," he says, and hugs her. "There's your prize."

She giggles.

He grins.