"Wait-expulso doesn't have a color? Was Greenwald fucking with me?"
Gerard looked confused and Z looked a bit sheepish. As often as she ran into Gerard and talked with him over cigarettes and mutual bitching sessions about upper year students being ridiculous, she still hadn't known him very long and she really couldn't expect him to read her mind.
"I have this thing muggles call synesthesia. It doesn't really have a name in the magical world because it's sort of hard to tell if people have it here because of all the weird stuff going on all the time. Basically my senses are sort of mixed up? Most of mine is connected to letters and numbers which is why I'm so good with Arithmancy and Runes. There's uh, colors and things have personalities so like if an Arithmancy equation is wrong, to me the colors look wrong, something's off in the color scheme or a part of it is clearly upset with another. It's kind of weird, I know. Another part of it is that, well we think it's that I see magical energy. There's not really another explanation that makes sense, but it's not 100&, so it might be connected to something else neurological that we haven't figured out yet.
"But in essence, I can sometimes see spell work while it's happening or the after effects if say, a box was charmed. So expulso looks like a sort of dull red to me. My friend Alex said that the spell's red for everyone, but obviously he was fucking with me. Bastard. Anyways,"
Z gestured with her wand, spitting some multicolored sparks. "If this whole nonverbal defensive spell thingy is all about combining spells, I'm very much in favor is using everything I can to figure out how it's done, including fucked up senses. I did terribly on Professor Lazzara's last practical test. And Warwick and Thompson were being awful to some of the second years last week, in addition to their general creepiness. So they deserve to have terrible, unexpected things done to them."