"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.
"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."
Bella puts her things where they belong, and then she gets ready for bed and flops thereinto.
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."
"Yeah. Someone wanted you to point a wand at a firecracker, I'm not surprised it was a disaster. What happened after?"
"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?"
"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."
Charms ensues. They're doing Cheering Charms. Bella tentatively agrees to allow one to be tried on her after frowning at the description in the textbook for several minutes, but it doesn't work.