 Teapot Occamy| gryphons&giraffes&goats,OH MY | chaser of the truth | flutiful❧
Oh, arithmetic. That made a lot more sense, actually. Arithmancy, arithmetic, easily confused words. ”Arithmetic, yes. My mistake.” Now that mistake had been cleared up, she could move on to learning more about what actual arithmancy could do.
All words were weird if you thought about them too much. ”Different languages have different words for the same thing, so if we were to nuemerologically analyze the meaning of a tree in our language, the result might be quite different from the meaning of a tree in Russia.” Did that even make sense? ”Even with one person using one language there could be different results, like if your name changed because you got married or adopted or something. Different name, different numbers. What does your name say about you then? And if someone gets your name wrong and leaves off a letter, that would entirely screw up the calculations.” For some, their surname represented a long family line or the love of their life. To her, it meant nothing. The name of a man who has left her life before she was even capable of forming any memory of him. Her name was nothing but a word that had always been too difficult to spell. It was a common error for people to forget the second L that came after the B.
Cordelia listened intently and took notes as the professor introduced the concept of arithmal-really-long-word. Holy hippogriffs, that word was a mouthful and yet another example of a word that no one could spell correctly. Number revealing charm. That was words Cordelia could understand. So this spell would produce smoke numbers. Seemed simple enough. Wait, did the professor just say she was casting the spell on the caterwauling charm? You could cast this spell on other spells? This sounded more complicated than expected. When it was time to get an object, Cordelia went up and selected a broken clock from the professor’s desk. Returning to her seat, Cordelia set the clock down on her desk and practiced saying the incantation without her wand. ”Emfanizo Arithmou. Emfa-ni-zo Arith-mou. Emfanizo Arithmou. Emfanizo Arithmou. Emfanizo Arithmou.” Once she was sure that she could say the incantation correctly, Cordelia pulled out her wand and started practicing the clockwise motion without saying the words yet. Eventually she was confident enough to try putting the incantation and wand movements together. ”Emfanizo Arithmou,” she cast on the clock, moving her wand slowly in the clockwise motion. A little smoke spewed from her wand but it disappeared before it could start forming numbers. She would have to try again. Focusing more intently this time, Cordelia again cast the spell on the clock in front of her. ”Emfanizo Arithmou!” This time, stronger smoke came from her wand as she repeated the slow horizontal clockwise motions. The numbers appeared before her - 8 4 2 0 1 6 0 - and Cordelia quickly jotted them down in her notes before they disappeared. The numbers on her paper matched the ones written on the board. She had done it!
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