"Of course, those two troublemakers." Though neither had gotten into anything too crazy since the first day, White had never quite shaken the idea that they were likely to start fights. "I'll see what I can do, but don't let those two drag you into anything you should be doing."

~~~

The next month and a half passed very differently for each of the trio. Rather than petering out towards the mid-year break, as Richard had grown to expect, the work load at school seemed to increase with no end in sight. Richard started to feel a little stretched thin, with OWL level schoolwork and the Society for Creative Research both demanding heavily on his time and attention. 
Sitting in for Caelum's painting sessions became the icing on the cake. He even suspected it was messing with his head, as by mid-November he had begun experiencing a recurring dream where he was the painting, looking out from his weird two dimensional world. He wasn't even sure how his mind had developed the imagery, and when he woke up he found he could barely even imagine what it had been like. 

By the fifteenth of December, his grades had started to slip a little, and he found himself having to practice his spells a little harder to get them down, and he found himself practicing vanishing while Cae painted him in the last SCR meeting before break. 

"Try not to capture too much scowling," Richard told her wearily, as he put down his wand in favor of a book. It was yet another of Clowers' texts. He was an unfortunately prolific writer.