"Alright!" I yelled enthusiastically. "The beam is holding steady and…!" I turned and checked the rig's double standing behind me for any signs that something might be wrong. "… the new rings seem to be able to stand up to the heat!"
"Of course they bloody can, you idiot. I told you, that's adamant! It'd be useless if it couldn't stand up to a little heat." Lys growled back.
I chuckled. "There is no little about that heat, its tens of thousands of degrees we are talking about here, probably more!" I laughed. "Look at what it's doing to the wall! And the metal plate behind it!"
"Yes, yes. It's very impressive." Lys told me, her disinterest clear as the nose on my face.
I turned from the spectacle in the other room to give the half-dwarf a dark look, "You know, you are really taking the fun out of this." I complained irritably. "Would it kill you to be a bit more excited? Look at this! It's amazing." I squeed excitedly.
"I'd be excited if it was in any way useful." She responded. "What you have made here could be replicated by a simple spell."
"The hell it can!" I denied explosively. "There is no spell that can do this! That's a focused stream of high energy plasma! And that's a small plasma core, can you imagine what would happen if I used a full-sized one?! Hell, can you imagine if I shrunk a big core and used multiple ones." I trailed off as various destructive visions danced before my eyes. "Oh yeah…!"
"Woopie?" Lys said half-heartedly.
I gave her another dark look. "Funny… You are not going to ruin this. Besides, there has never been a way for an enchantment like this to generate an indirect effect like this, they are restricted to affecting the target directly."
"What are you babbling about?" Lys asked flatly.
"Defensive charms, like the ones placed on Hogwarts. The way they defend this place is by directly affecting the target, usually by targeting the mind like the various repelling charms or generating a barrier that stops apparitions and other forms of magical transportation. But you won't see the charms shooting lightning or fire, because no one has ever been able to do anything like that. If you want to affect the target, to curse it, then the target needs to come into physical contact with the cursed object or the only thing emplaced charms can do is make it difficult for you to reach where you want. That's how the ancient Egyptians did it, they cursed various things throughout their tombs and since you can't detect such things by look alone, well… there is a reason why curse breaking is so dangerous." I rambled.
"Are you getting to a point sometime soon? I have things to do."
The point is that with this setup you can create automated offensive charm arrays that can target anything uninvited within an area so long as a proper detection charm is layered on it." I told her excitedly. "You'd just have to determine friend from foe, probably by giving all the friendlies a charmed token that exempts them from the defenses."
Lys frowned as her eyes glazed over and she reached up and grabbed hold of one of the thick braids and fiddled with it thoughtfully.
"And, if you added some of the charms used on Bludgers, well, then you will have something that will home in on anything unfriendly and then blast it to hell," I informed her smarmily before giving her a little push.
Lys snapped out of her dace and gave me a mild glare before crossing her arms and looking away. "Alright, so it might be of some use."
"Some use she says." I mocked her.
"Shut it."
"Admit it, it's awesome!" I cajoled as I moved around her.
She kept turning away from me though. "It's adequate."
"Stupendous?" I suggested with a poke at her shoulder.
She slapped at her hand but missed as I pulled it away. "Decent."
"Amazing!" I crowed.
"Passable." Lys countered.
"Marvelous…" I breathed moving into her bubble.
"Stop that!" She snapped and took a swipe at me even as I dance away from her.
I blew her a raspberry. "I win."
"You are a child." She growled at me.
"Says you! You can't even admit that you were wrong and that I'm just smashing." I retorted without missing a beat.
Lys rolled her eyes. "The way you are going on you'd think you'd invented a universal solvent."
"Imagine a swarm of these things coming at your enemies." I countered.
Lys eyes glazed over again and her lips twitched up a bit.
"AH HAH!" I crowed and stabbed her forehead with my finger.
Lys flushed and tried to sock me again. I jerked away as I laughed at her while trusting my hands in the air and did a little dance. "I am the champion, I am the champion! No time for losers 'Cause I am the champion... of the world!" I sang off-key like the troll that I was. I wonder if Queen was a thing yet.
"Alright, that's it!" She yelled and stomped over and grabbed hold of me, hoisted me off my feet, which is impressive seeing as I'd already reached my final height of six feet two inches, but then dwarves are roughly three times as strong as a human, then she chucked me like a basketball towards one of the walls.
"Cannonball!" I yelled as I flew towards one of the hard, hard stone walls. But just before I was to hit it I slowed to a halt and righted myself before flipping around and gave the fuming dwarf maid my best shit-eating grin. "That was rude."
Lys disparaged my lineage and taught me some new curse words.
"That's really rude." I laughed, taking no offense. I did deserve it after all. Besides, I always feel appreciated when a girl curse me out. It shows that they care. I told her as much.
Lys was not impressed. "Will you grow up!"
"I'm about as tall as I want to be, I already have trouble with low hanging lamps and some doorways. Do you really think I need more knocks to the head?" I asked her with mock-concern.
"I think that at this point it can't hardly do any more harm." She snipped at me.
"Oooh, good one," I admitted.
Lys sighed in exasperation. "You are unbelievable."
I shrugged and floated down to stand beside her. "Eh, life is too short to be serious all the time, or even most of the time, really."
"I'd like to see you serious, just once." Lys shot back.
"You have, I believe I showed some truth serum down your throat that time. How did you like that again?" I shot back easily.
Lys gave me a baleful look.
"See? You don't want me to be serious. I'm scary when I'm serious." I told her smugly.
Lys snorted.
---
Lys crackled madly, sounding like a deranged hag, as she appeared and sent a few spells at me in quick succession, a stunner followed by some sort of lightning spell that only just missed my running ass as I dodged behind a corner before taking off in a sprint down a hallway. I was starting to really regret asking Lys to have a little combat practice. As it turns out it seems Lys has some pent-up frustration in relation to me and felt that this would be an ideal avenue to express it.
Her shark-like grin as she accepted should have been a red flag. The ever so slightly deranged giggle should have been another, but being the naive trusting short we'd gone on ahead and adjourned to the Room of Requirement, which I configured to manifest as a replica of the interior of Hogwarts to serve as our battleground. I'd thought to use some other locale, such as Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, but as I found out the Room is not capable of making an outdoors setting. On an entirely academic level, it was interesting to find another limitation of the Room. It had remarkedly few of them. There might be ways around it but for now, I had to content myself with the largest indoor space I had a good memory of, which was Hogwarts.
I'd thought it would be a nice little challenge, though not too much of once since I'd never seen Lys take much interest in any sort of combat-oriented activity, despite her stated goal of essentially waging war against the goblins at some future point. So I'd thought this would be a fine introduction to what she might have to face in the future. It wouldn't put it past the goblins to hire wizards to help defend their interest should Lys actually manage to unite the Dwarves into something effective. She needed the experience, I thought. So we'd gone on ahead and I immediately regretted every decision that had led up to this situation! I'd never given her house-elf side much thought beyond using it as an avenue to tease my short grumpy partner, I'd never seen her dad the house-elf pop anywhere, that I could recall anyhow. but at the word go she showed me that she could teleport-spam like fucking Nightcrawler! She'd appear, shoot some spells and then vanish again like a demented jack in the box. Paddy had been sandbagging against me, the little fucker. I'd get him later.
Just as soon as I could pull my ass out of the frying pan I'd just taken a seat in!
I dodged away again with a manly yelp as a freezing spell splashed over the wall I'd been pressing again, leaving a thick sheet of ice in its wake. I turned and shot a stunner towards where the spell had come from only to be met with Lys' fading laughter. When the hell did I end up in a survival horror video game? Fine, two could play at that game. I cast a quick Disillusionment Charm, waving my hand over my head and weaving the magic into the form I desired and fading from view. I followed it up with a Quietening Charm on myself to hide the sound of my footfalls.
I needed to level the playing field a bit. But how? Her ability to teleport gave her area supremacy, being able to appear anywhere to attack me. I needed to negate that somehow. I needed to... split her focus, maybe? Yes! I needed to give her more targets! Something to attack her, keep her moving around.
"Hiding, are we~!" Lys teasing voice drifted towards me. "I thought we were going to FIGHT!"
I felt an involuntary chill travel up my spine. God, who would have guessed that Lys had it in her!? I'd have been impressed if my stomach wasn't trying to crawl out my damn ass! I needed to work fast, but with what. I looked frenetically around for something to use against my opponent until my eyes landed on a row of armors. That would be perfect! I could animate them and send them out to harass Lys while I skulked around in the shadows until I got an opportunity to strike when she was distracted. I quickly made my way over to the first one in the line and started to carefully cast the animation spell.
"There you are." Lys voice interrupted me from behind, making my stomach drop even further.
"Aw, fu..." I managed before I felt the telltale sign of having been hit by a lightning spell before I blacked out. Lys would never let me live this down!