Twin Power *Cedric Diggory Love Story* (EDITING)

10 years later...

Cassia's POV

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

I yawned, reaching over and switching my alarm clock off to stop the beeping. I pulled the covers off my body and slipped out of bed. As much as I wanted to go back to sleep – because I am not much of an early riser – I couldn't. My karate team had practice at ten o'clock today; we had a big tournament coming up on Monday night, and we had spent the last several days getting in gear. Today's practice was no exception, given that we had the day off tomorrow—our coach (or "Sensei Alex", as we referred to him) never scheduled practice on Sundays.

I had started taking karate lessons when I was six—since I was in kindergarten. One day, I'd seen flyers all over the hallways, advertising karate classes, and I got a little curious and decided I wanted to try one out to see if I liked it, so I took one of the flyers and stuck it in my backpack, to take home with me. When I got back from school, I showed the flyer to Uncle Ted and Auntie Andy and asked them to sign me up for a class. They had said yes.

That Saturday afternoon, I attended my first karate class with Sensei Alex. It was me and four other girls, and five boys. Sensei Alex was surprised at how quickly I picked up the moves; martial arts and hand-to-hand combat just came naturally to me, I guess. Halfway through the lesson, he had us all pair off and spar with each other. We'd have to fight each other one-on-one, and after three minutes, we'd have to pick a new partner to spar with—somehow I managed to win against all but one of the other kids. When the class was over, Sensei Alex approached me and asked me to join his competition team—I said I would talk it over with my aunt and uncle and let him know my decision within a few days.

My family was ecstatic when I told them about the offer to take up competitive karate; particularly Aunty Andy and my adoptive sister Nymphadora (though I called her Dora because she hated her full name—if anyone dared to call her Nymphadora, she'd blow up at them.). Dora was on board because it was "a good way to show some girl power." Uncle Ted liked the idea of me doing competitive karate because it would be a good experience. Aunty Andy had said that continuing the training might help me to control my magic.

See, ever since I was a baby, I'd been causing all sorts of odd things to happen—well, they weren't odd to my family. I had seen Uncle Ted, Aunty Andy, and Dora all using a wand on multiple occasions, though at the time, I didn't know that they were wands; me being a tiny, little girl, I had just wondered why they were waving sticks in the air. It wasn't until I was five or six that Dora took me aside and explained that she and Aunty Andy were witches, and that Uncle Ted was a wizard.

"Those sticks we use are called wands," she had said.

"That's how you have your magic?" I had asked.

Dora went on to tell me that magic didn't come from the wand itself; it was inside a witch or a wizard, and usually starts to show early on in their life.

Then I asked her, "Is that why your hair changes color?"

She shrugged. "Yes and no. My hair changes because I'm a Metamorphagus. That means I can change what I look like if I want to."

"So if you wanted to impersonate Aunty Andy, you could turn into her?" I asked eagerly.

"Mm-hmm." She nodded.

I was enthralled by this information, though at the time, I had yet to realize that I too was a witch, and that I was also developing my powers.

Once, when I was three years old, I had accidentally caused a power surge; I had woken up from my nap and started crying because I'd just been dreaming about something that had really scared me. I didn't know why, though; all I remembered was a thunderous boom, a flash of green light, and a woman's frightened screams. As soon as I started screaming, the lights in my room had started flickering wildly—and then they just went off. The lights downstairs had gone off, too, along with all of the major appliances in the house. It took four to six hours to fix it; lucky thing Uncle Ted had studied all those preservative charms, otherwise we would've had to completely empty out the fridge. I thought Uncle Ted and Aunty Andy would be angry with me, but they weren't—on the contrary, they were proud.