"I don't know for sure, but - I don't think so. I think he's like a - a really good record of a person that you can voice-operate. He doesn't know about things that have happened since he died - he could remember my name for the length of our conversation but he couldn't tell me the name of the current Herbology teacher. And if I waited quietly for five minutes after asking him a question and then repeated it the exact same way I got the exact same answer, and when I asked him if he'd give me the Herbology safety lecture he didn't even wonder why I wanted it or whether I hadn't heard it well enough this morning or about how didn't I say I was going to drop it, he just recited it all the same. And I asked him what he did with his time and he just said he was an herbology teacher - and if I asked him point blank if he was dead he'd say yes and explain what killed him but on every other subject he talked about his lifetime like it was nowish."

"Well. That makes me question how current the Herbology safety lecture can possibly be," he says after a moment.

"I suppose the idea is that the plants don't change very much," shrugs Bella.

"But procedures do. Or they should, considering who they have failed to protect."

"Yeah. Feral probably doesn't even care, but I'll tell him anyway," snorts Bella.

"It won't do him any harm to hear it."

"Yeah. Tomorrow in Charms." She writes this down, after the notes on her conversation with the ghost. "It's a pity about Mr. Sutherland. I was hoping ghosts would be good enough and then the problem would be figuring out how to leave one and coming up with ways to go on interacting with stuff, but it's not good enough at all."

"Has it occurred to you that the problem you intend to solve might not be solvable?"

"Yes, but I think it would be premature to decide that while I am eleven."

"Of course."

Bella puts her things where they belong, and then she gets ready for bed and flops thereinto.

And Sherlock, as usual, doesn't sleep.

At Charms the next morning, Bella finds Feral and tells him about the results of her conversation with the ghost. "So I don't think he's really a person," she concludes sadly. "Also Sherlock pointed out that the safety lecture can't be very up to date."

"I changed classes. I bet you're going to stay anyway, though."

He grins. "It's like you've met me or something."

"I have totally met you," giggles Bella.

"Anyway. Did you hear I got kicked out of Transfiguration?"

"Yeah. Someone wanted you to point a wand at a firecracker, I'm not surprised it was a disaster. What happened after?"

"I went to Healer Song," he says. "He told me I've got something called a premature spillway. Like using all that fire as a kid burned a hole in my magic. He wrote me a note to get the teachers to quit giving me crap about it."

"Oh. I hope that works. What are you supposed to do about it, just wait? Does it go away?"

He shrugs. "The affinity for fire doesn't. The lighting things up by accident might. If I'm a good boy and don't use wandless fire. Like that's going to happen. Well, he said he didn't know if deliberate wandless fire would hurt anything or not, because he's never heard of it working like that in the first place."

"Well, as long as you've got your wand on you, why do you need to do it wandless, if it might make it worse?"

"Because it's more fun?" he suggests.

"You're creative, I bet you can come up with other ways to have fun that don't mean you can't aim your wand at anybody you like or anything you can't replace."