Cho knew there wasn't much point in checking out the Sports Healers' schedule for February. She'd been granted the time off for her wedding. That had been double--triple--checked last month. So, as for when she was working... that time would be spent with Puddlemere United. She always got her second choice, and the only way she was going to get her first choice was if she stopped picking Tutshill. Kamal always scored the highest on their tests, and that meant he got first pick. Her first pick. Even on her most confident days, she still scored half a point below him. Half a point. Sometimes less than that. She hated coming in second, so she hated checking the schedule. So, she was outside the door, deliberating on whether or not she really would bother to check, when she spotted a familiar head of blonde hair.
"Hannah!" she called out, a smile melting away her frown as she spoke. "Hi!"
Hannah turned at the sound of her name, and managed a smile when she spotted Cho. "Hi," she said, walking over to her side. "What are you doing here? I thought you were off to Luxembourg."
"I am. Soon. I had to pick up enough supplies for the match," she said, patting her tote bag. "And then some. Ben's playing, after all. You?"
"I'm here for work," Hannah said, her smile falling and a furrow reappearing between her eyebrows. "I'm...well, I'm Obliviating people."
"Oh," Cho said, a knowing tone in her voice. "I've never been obliviated. Unless I have. Well, that's a sc--" She forced a small smile. "I wonder what it feels like."
Hannah laughed. "Like nothing, if it's done right. I had to let them remove a small memory during my training, so I'd know what it was like."
"Huh. Do you know what memory they took? I guess you probably don't, unless you wrote it down. Did you write it down first?" she asked, her mind suddenly filling with questions she didn't know she had about Obliviation.
"I did," Hannah said. "Frost--he's the one training me--made me write down everything I remembered about the memory, including what happened before and afterwards, and then I read it after he Obliviated me to see where the memory cut in and out. It's sort of like reading something you wrote in you diary when you were five but that you don't remember anymore, even after reading your diary. Only it had happened just that morning."
"Can you tell if a person has been Obliviated? Like can you go into my memories and tell me if someone has messed with my head? I'd really like to know now."
Hannah bit her lip. "I could look," she said after thinking about it for a moment. "You can sort of feel the places where things were cut and stitched back together, so to speak, and modified memories are never as vivid as real ones. But it might be hard to find if you don't have a hunch as to where the memory might be. Otherwise, I'd just have to be lucky and stumble across it."
"Could you look sometime? Just in case? If you don't mind, I mean," Cho said.
Hannah shook her head. "I wouldn't mind. I already know most of your secrets anyway, right?"
"Oh," Cho said, her eyes going wide. "Right."
"It's not like mind reading," Hannah said quickly, before she gave Cho the wrong idea. "It's not even that much like Legilimency. All I see are little glimpses of things, and the places where they connect. Without any context, it's hard to make much sense of them. It would be hard to. It already takes so much concentration that it makes my head ache."
"I don't want to make your head ache," Cho said. "But I am curious."
"We can do it sometime next month, after I'm done doing it professionally," Hannah said, and then glanced toward the lift. "I was headed up to the tearoom. Do you want to come with me?"