Hope was a good carver, but was excited to try the magical method. "Scri-bere!" she uttered, one, two, three...five times, and was excited to see the letters of her name slowly form on her cucumber--HOPE.
Then she paused. For the first time in her life, she was disappointed that she had been given her mother's maiden name for a middle name, because there were so many letters in 'Merriweather'! Laboriously she carved letter after letter--this was not so fun after a while, when the novelty had worn off. Then finally the last (which also was longer than it could have been), and eventually, finally, ARCHARD joined the other two names on her cucumber. "Whew! I almost ran out of cucumber!" she exclaimed to herself, not realizing that she had spoken out loud.
On approaching the kappas, Hope tried to pick the smallest one available, hoping it wouldn't be too strong for her. Even though her mind knew that these were fake kappas, her gut was reacting with fight or flight syndrome as if they were real (they did look very fierce). "Here, kappa!" she called out to the creature in front of her, as she bowed and backed away from it at the same time. Because the shield charm was the only one she'd mastered so far, so she wanted as much distance between her and the kappa as possible. Besides Protego, the only other plan she'd come up with was running away, which might be difficult in this crowded space.
Hope had pretty good aim usually, but she was under stress, so her cucumber flew straight at the kappas's head, travelling along with a lot more force than she'd intended. |