On Tuesday morning, sunlight streamed through the towering Gothic windows of Hogwarts Castle, casting mottled patterns of light and shadow across the ancient stone corridors. The air was filled with the mingled scents of old parchment, polished wood, and the faint, almost imperceptible sweetness that belonged uniquely to magic.
The first-years of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff were making their way together toward the Charms classroom.
Alan Scott walked beside Hannah Abbott, who was chattering away, overflowing with gratitude.
"Alan, your 'Memory Palace' method is practically a miracle!"
Her face glowed with excitement as she waved her small hands, practically bouncing with energy.
"I can recite the entire semester's timetable word for word now—backwards, too! If my mum found out, she'd probably think I'd been enchanted with some kind of intelligence-boosting spell!"
Alan merely gave her a slight smile and nod. His gaze had already moved past Hannah, fixed instead on the classroom ahead—the place where his journey into the theoretical side of magic was about to begin.
Inside, Professor Flitwick—tiny in stature—stood atop a tall stack of books. The added height allowed his pointed wizard's hat to rise clearly above the lectern, visible to every student.
With his distinctively high-pitched yet piercingly loud voice, he announced the beginning of their very first lesson:
"Welcome, everyone, to Charms! Here, you will learn how to wield wands and spells to make the world shift and change according to your will!"
A low buzz of excitement rippled through the class, impossible to contain.
Today's subject was the very first true spell every first-year would attempt—the Levitation Charm.
"Wingardium Leviosa!" Professor Flitwick's voice rang through the classroom.
"…Remember well, the two most crucial elements in casting this spell are: first, the precise pronunciation; and second, a graceful wand movement—something like a 'swish and flick.'"
As he spoke, he demonstrated with his slender wand, executing the motion to perfection. A faint silver light shimmered, and a feather on his desk floated gracefully into the air.
"But most importantly," his tone grew serious, "when you cast, your willpower must be sharply focused on the outcome you desire—in this case, to make it fly!"
He went on to carefully explain the finer details of pronunciation, the force and angle of the wrist movement, and the mental focus required. For most of the first-years, the information was already more than enough to push their brains into overdrive, as they struggled to absorb and memorize it all.
After finishing his explanation of the basics, Professor Flitwick scanned the rows of young, intent faces and asked his habitual question:
"Now then, does anyone have questions about the principles of the Levitation Charm?"
The classroom fell into silence.
The first-years glanced at each other—just remembering what had already been taught was difficult enough. Who would have questions? What even was a question? Could you eat it?
Yet in that hush, a hand was raised.
The gesture was neither hurried nor hesitant. It was calm, steady, five fingers pressed neatly together, as precise as an illustration in a textbook.
It was Alan Scott.
Professor Flitwick's small body gave a faint tremor, his large eyes behind the glasses glinting with surprise. Not many first-years dared to ask questions in their very first Charms class.
But almost immediately, he beamed with delight, nodding encouragingly.
"Oh! Mr. Scott! Please, go ahead."
Alan rose to his feet, his figure tall and upright in the morning light. His voice was clear and steady, each word carrying distinctly to every corner of the room.
"Professor, I have a question."
The moment he spoke, all the hushed whispers from the students around him died instantly.
"Just now, you mentioned that our intention must focus on the result. So I'd like to ask: when we cast the Levitation Charm on a feather, is the magic we output a fixed minimum value just sufficient to overcome its weight, or does the spell itself contain a kind of adaptive mechanism?"
Alan's tone wasn't fast, but the weight of his words thickened the very air of the classroom.
"This adaptive mechanism—does it dynamically and optimally adjust the magical output according to the object's actual mass, volume, and the air resistance that needs to be overcome?"
This question wasn't a mere stone tossed into still water.
It was a precision-guided missile, striking straight at the very core of the lesson, piercing the surface and driving into a depth no one had dared to touch.
Every first-year froze.
Their expressions solidified into blank masks of shock.
A moment ago, their thoughts were still tangled around how exactly to pronounce Wingardium Leviosa or how their wrist should swish and flick. But Alan Scott… he was discussing the charm's power output model and its adaptive algorithm?
Was this really something a first-year should even be thinking about?
Even Professor Flitwick—veteran master of Charms—was struck dumb.
His wand, halfway through a demonstration, hung stiff in the air. His mouth parted slightly, and his eyes behind his round lenses widened to their fullest in sheer astonishment.
In all his decades of teaching, he had seen countless prodigies. But never—never—had any student raised such a profound, so… scientific, so essence-piercing question in the very first week of their first Charms class.
After a brief, breathless silence, Flitwick's eyes lit up with the blazing brilliance of a scholar glimpsing an uncharted frontier. The joy and admiration radiating from him seemed to make his entire figure glow.
"A… a question of tremendous depth, Mr. Scott!"
He brandished his wand, his sharp voice rising a full octave with excitement.
"Magnificent! This is precisely the kind of question I dream to hear! You've touched upon one of the modern core fields of Charms research—the intelligence and efficiency of spellwork! For this question, ten points to Gryffindor!"
The awarding of points finally broke the petrified silence of the classroom. But now, the looks the other students cast at Alan were no longer merely those of seeing an oddity.
They were gazes turned toward something unfathomable, a creature beyond their comprehension.
Then came practice time—and the room split into a comical contrast.
Most of the classroom resounded with uneven shouts:
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
"Wing-GAR-dium Levi-O-sa!"
Students sweated and flushed, swishing and flicking furiously at the feathers before them, desperate to make them so much as twitch. Ron Weasley jabbed so hard with his wand he nearly speared his feather. Seamus Finnigan got so overexcited that sparks spat from his wand tip, almost setting his feather ablaze.
And in one corner, Alan Scott's desk was shrouded in an uncanny stillness.
His feather floated serenely in midair.
Not trembling. Not wavering. Perfectly suspended exactly one foot above the desk, as if held aloft by an invisible, precise hand.
But Alan wasn't satisfied with that.
He didn't try to raise it higher, nor to make it spin in some dazzling display that other students would have killed to achieve.
Instead, he did something that left even Hermione Granger—who had been covertly watching him—utterly dumbfounded.
Alan spread out a fresh sheet of parchment on the desk, picked up his quill, and began scribbling furiously.
Meanwhile, his feather moved.
Not soaring, not circling—but shifting in erratic, complex ways.
It darted abruptly left, dipped sharply downward, then sprang diagonally upward. Its path was impossible to predict, a chaos of random motion—yet still confined, as if bound by unseen reins, within a neat cubic space.
Brownian motion.
Alan was using a basic Levitation Charm to simulate a classical phenomenon of Muggle physics. And what's more, he was actively recording the feather's erratic trajectories as raw experimental data.
In that instant, Hermione felt a shock like never before. She had always believed herself to be the most studious, the most prepared among her peers—she had even pre-read the entire term's textbook. Yet what Alan was doing had already surpassed textbooks. Surpassed studying.
He wasn't just learning magic.
He was dissecting it.
And in doing so, he had transformed what should have been a lively and engaging Charms lesson into a dry, dizzying experiment in theoretical physics—forcing everyone present, Hermione included, to confront a crushing, undeniable truth:
The gulf between people could be impossibly vast.
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