milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Wingardium Leviosa is a first year spell, one Lily's had down for years now, simple levitation.

Still, it's good to practice the basics sometimes.

Which is why there's a small brown teapot (empty, of course) hovering about five feet above a table tonight.

And below it, a redheaded witch with her wand out, watching it slowly spin in the air.

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"You grew up not going outside?"

Lily's eyes are wide.

"Not until I was nineteen," Ellen confirms. "The biggest open space I'd ever seen before that was our atrium, and that was maybe... I don't know, it had a twenty-foot ceiling or so."

"I don't remember a time I wasn't in and out of doors all day.

"What was it like, seeing it for the first time?"

"I thought it was another room," Ellen admits. "I thought it was the biggest room I'd ever seen and that it just had a really high blue ceiling. It kind of spooked me that I couldn't tell where the walls were. And that the floor wasn't flat, because all the floors in the Vault were just flat and smooth and perfect and outside was all rocks and ground and slope and things."

"It's a reasonable thing to think, if you only know rooms," Lily says.

And then realizes something.

"So . . . wait, how did being here help you get used to the outdoors?"

Ellen indicates a door in the opposite wall from the entrance.

"That leads outside," she says. "Outside here, I mean, not to home or anything. When I first came here I'd go outside for a little while and stand under an open sky until the thought of how big all that space was got to me, and then I'd come back in here and sit with my back to the wall and breathe into a paper bag until I calmed down. I kept doing that so I could stay outside a little longer each time."

Lily looks at the indicated door.

"There's an outside? Like on Earth, not like ..." she gestures to the Window. "It's not that big a space, is it?"

"Oh no," says Ellen. "It's green out there- well, during the warm times it is, it's all cold and grey now. But there's grass, real live grass, and there's trees that aren't dead and brown- I mean, they don't have leaves right now because it's wintertime here, but still- and there are mountains and a huge lake full of clean safe water that things actually live in, and everything."

"I'll have to check that out sometime," Lily says.

"It didn't occur to me there was anything other than the bar here.

"You don't have grass and living trees?

"Is that from the war?"

Ellen nods. "There's a valley up north about a day or two's travel from where I live that's properly green," she says. "I've brought some of the seeds from the plants there back to where I live now, to see if they'll grow anywhere else. The rest of the area's a desert, though, so everything has to live on whatever it can find- and there's not enough water for real trees."

Lily nods. It all makes sense.

"Are they growing, or have you started yet?

"And where do you live now?"

"I planted them, but I had to travel," Ellen says. "I hired some people in town to look after the seeds while I was gone. If I make it back to Megaton any time soon I'll be able to check... that's where I live, a town called Megaton. It's a walled town, all made out of airplane parts. Um, flying machine parts, I mean. None of them work any more but they made great walls and stuff."

"Oh, I bet they do," Lily says, "if they're anything like the aeroplanes in my world.

"I hope your seeds are growing, too.

"How long will you be traveling?"

"I'm not sure," Ellen admits. "But it should all be settled fairly soon, I think. If everything goes well I should be able to visit Megaton again within a month."

Well, she hopes, anyway.

"How much longer do you have in school, by the way? We usually got sent to our future jobs when we turned sixteen, back home."

"Two more years after this one, which I'm about half-done with.

"I'll be sixteen at the end of next month, and we'll meet with our Head of House about careers advice, but I don't have any idea what I think I might like to do after school yet."

"Good luck with the rest of the year," Ellen says. "What kind of work do wizards and witches do, anyway? I mean- I don't imagine it's anything like being a court sorceror or something, like in the comics..."

"All sorts of things," Lily says. "There's a whole wizarding society, so almost anything you can do in the non-magical world, we do something like it.

"People work for the Ministry, and they own shops, and they work at hospital, and they run pubs and restaurants, work for the post, work for the bank, play for sports teams, publish newspapers and write books, manufacture things, go into law enforcement, butcher, baker, candlestick maker."

"Huh," says Ellen. "I had no idea. It sounds pretty normal, although I'm a little surprised there's a separate church for wizards."

(She means the Ministry. Someone only got taught American forms of government. Our apologies.)

Lily blinks, trying to think back over what she could have said that equates to church.

(Her family is C. of E., if not terribly observant.)

"Church?"

"... ministry?" says Ellen hesitantly. "You mean that's not...?"

"Oh!"

Yes, she can see where the confusion is coming in.

"No, it's more like ... the Ministry for Magic is like the government. It oversees all the legal and administrative things relating to wizards and witches."

"Oh! All right," says Ellen. "There didn't used to be anything in the American government that had a name like that, it was all Department of This and Bureau of That, when it wasn't Congress or the President or the Supreme Court. I'm sorry, I didn't realize."

"It's about the same thing, I think, though I don't know all that much about how the American government works.

"There's a lot to learn here, isn't there, about how other people talk about things?"

"Oh yes," Ellen agrees. "And it seems like it's something to learn differently for every person here, sometimes."

"Do people tend to be nice about it?" Lily asks, curiously. "When you don't understand things, or say things that sound completely mad to them?"