Testing 1, 2, 3

Kira's Room, March 4 th

"I swear, Potter, this is the last time I will help you," Kira snapped. "I don't care how much Viktor begs, it's just not worth it!"

Ignoring Kira's complaining, Harry looked at the large piece of parchment in front of him. All over the page were scribbled notes and theories about Harry's Spell Creation project. "I think it should work this time."

"That's what you said last time, and the time before that."

"Well, maybe, if you would help instead of just pointing out things I was doing wrong and making fun of me, I would have finished it sooner," Harry argued.

"Excuse me? This is your project, Potter! I'm helping you out of the goodness of my heart!"

Harry didn't believe that for a minute. Kira was only helping because of their deal with the Animagus transformation.

"The mistake was thinking we could just increase the brightness of the lumos spell," Harry said, making a few notes at the bottom of the parchment. "Instead we should have looked at other amplification spells like sonorus and work backwards from that."

"Which is what I said a month ago," Kira pointed out.

"Fine. You were right. Happy?" Harry asked, starting to get annoyed at Kira's attitude. If she wasn't one of the best students at spell creation in the school, Harry would have stopped asking for her advice a long time ago.

"Yes, now let's see it."

Drawing his wand, Harry started the movement for a simple lumos, but incorporated an upward slash and ended up pointing his wand straight up before saying, "Caecus."

Instead of a small light appearing from the tip of his wand, a blinding flash of white light encompassed the entire room for a brief moment before vanishing a second later. Kira screamed and fell to the ground rubbing her eyes. Harry stumbled backwards, blinded by his own spell.

"Potter, you idiot! I can't see!"

"Neither can I," Harry said, shocked that the spell had worked so well. He had learned the blindness curse in his Dark Arts class just prior to the end of the fall term, and he couldn't help but think that there had to be an easier way to blind your opponent than hitting them with a curse. That's when the idea came to him to increase the power of the lumos charm to disable your opponent. What had started out as a simple idea had ballooned into a much more difficult project when he realized that the lighting charm couldn't generate the amount of power to temporarily incapacitate anyone. After going to Kira for help, he had finally succeeded in creating the spell.

Unfortunately, it appeared that a side effect of casting the spell was that it blinded both the caster and the opponent. Harry would have to remember to close his eyes when using this spell in a duel. Still, it was a good way to throw your opponent off. Since it wasn't a curse, jinx, or hex, the spell couldn't be blocked by a shield or dodged, forcing your opponent to almost certainly suffer temporary blindness.

After almost a minute of seeing only white spots, Harry's vision slowly began to come back. The first thing he saw was Kira angrily pointing her wand at him from across the room. Her eyes were bloodshot and tears were flowing down her face. A silent stupefy from Kira's wand caused Harry to leap out of the way.

"Get out! Get out now!" Kira snarled, sending another curse and forcing Harry out of her room.