Chapter 2.6: The pirates' rebuttal
MSSSC: Liquid luck
In the following weeks, both Charlotte and George spent all their free time studying the tons of books stored all over their common room. It was a never ending work, where were they supposed to start when the definition of luck itself seemed so elusive? Yet they were very motivated to give it their all for the cause.
"I've asked the others, but they don't know how to help you, either" George said after twelve days of research, he still tried to sound cheerful but the tired note in his voice was very clear to Charlotte. Even more demoralized than before, all she managed to answer was: "Maybe I'm spreading my back luck also to the rest of you..."
"It's a potion, the book calls it "felix felicis". It seems quite hard to prepare, but it does exactly what I need, liquid luck which I can drink whenever I need it!"
"I'm a bit worried, this potion is supposed to pass through months of brewing. How can we hide it for so long?" George commented, just before starting to add the first ingredients to the boiling water. "We are going to bottle the intermediates and continue to brew them the following night, I guess.", answered Charlotte. So many things could go wrong, even without considering her bad luck, but she did not want to surrender before trying.
"Are you alright? These is something weird around your arm!", exclamated George, suddenly. Charlotte barely at the time to say:" It's nothing, I just have t..." when a very worrisome black smoke started to whirl from the caldrum.
"My face, what happened to my face?", asked Charlotte, in shock. But George did not answer, because he was stepping back from the caldrum as the smoke became more and more dark and menacing. Her bad luck was not satisfied yet, what else was supposed to happen to her?
"You've been very lucky at passing from the hospital ward tonight, who knows what would have happened if we let you around with that curse for any longer!" the school nurse said. Then, without further hesitation, she handed Charlotte an amber-coloured potion.
"So it was a curse making you so unlucky? And it is completely gone, really?" asked George, skeptical, the first time the met again. "The nurse said so" answered Charlotte. "But we can try to test it".
"Well, winning a chess game without any weird interruptions you should be a quite good demonstration, you're right." commented George. Charlotte answered by nodding happily, before focusing again on the game.
"You see, I won! I won for real!" Charlotte said, jubilant. "You beat me bad, to be honest", admitted George.
And so Charlotte was able to defeat that unlucky curse she caught who knows how much time earlier. Once again she was not loosing objects all the time, she could exercise her speels without fearing unexpected failures, fly on a broom without risking to be stuck by lightings and everything else. For everyone else this was just normal but, after so long, she finally felt again so lucky!
Chapter 2.5: Surprises
From Luna's diary
Maybe we should consider putting up a sign saying: "Beware the cat!" at the door, Mango keeps attacking our neighbours even when they just knock at our door asking for some sugar. Sometimes she can be really territorial...
But this will be another day's problem, we have more urgent things to worry about: this morning we woke up to find leaking water from almost any sink and shower in the house. What could have caused it, a spike in water pressure?
It wasn't a great start for the day, we barely had the time to repair everything before rushing to work, so we weren't able to investigate properly.
All the aliens finally seem to be settling well, we hadn't to erase any memory because of questionable disguises for months. Both the official and the unofficial news haven't reported anything about those self-proclaimed pirates in about a year, and everyone seems to be doing their best for integrating among the earthlings.
A lot of alien babies are also being born, some of them are children already, actually. This is seen as a great achievement for our people, considering that until one generation ago our genetic asset was not stable enough for reproducing without exploiting humans and pollinating them, which is how most of us were born. By integrating the earthlings' genome into ours, however, the new generation has acquired the ability to reproduce exactly as humans do, making abductions and pollination completely superfluous.
Despite this, however, official sources continue to say that we aliens and humans are still genetically too different to have children, and that thus we should ignore them. I have never focused on this topic, but I would really like to delve into it and find out the biological reason which could justify those conclusions...
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Returning home, I almost tripped into the next surprise of the day when walking up the stairs: Daisy just had two kittens! She seemed a bit slower than usual, but we were too busy to investigate and the long fur hid the rest.
I think they resemble a bit Milo's cat, Pedro, don't you agree, my dear diary? In either case, we have decided to keep the kitten on the right, Papaia, while the kitten on the left, Coco, will go to Milo, Noemi and Celine's place.
After having prepared a more comfortable spot for Daisy and her kittens, I heard Hermes returning back from his work. He surprised me a bit, he usually works until much later than this, but for sure I didn't complain.
Hermes: Well, I'm trying to.