Miller McArthur

**Miller Terrence McArthur**[?] is a runologist known for his articulate demeanour and consistent use of his peers' full first names. He is the main character of the in-progress book, *The Gifted School*.

## About

Miller has a long nose and short diagonal eyebrows. He prefers to keep his hair short and tidy.

Miller's voice is flat[?] and reedy. He thoroughly dislikes being 'out of the loop', and seeks to know as much as he can about any given subject.[?] He strives to be the best, and does not enjoy to come second, to the point that he prefers to place third over placing second.[?]

He particularly enjoys the 'sliders' offered at Makutu Kura, which he called 'little burger things'.

Initially, Miller is adamantly schoolwork-oriented, however he attempts to learn too many subjects at once and begins to fall behind, later settling down in his attempts to understand magic. Over the years, spending time with his dorm-mates Chester, Kris, and Landon results in the discovery of a chaotic side to him. He often got information about the school's social scene from older friends like Isaac Fern and Theo Osborne.

He had an on-and-off friendship with Rochelle Qin, where the two would compete for the better spot in classes, and the 'loser' would break off the friendship for a couple of weeks before they later decide to study together again. Eventually Miller learns to accept 'failure', though he keeps his perfectionist view of success.

## History

### Early Years

As a child, Miller lived around the suburbs of Auckland, not far north of the city. He read frequently as a hobby and was ahead of most of his classmates in school.[?] He felt that his primary school principal had a crabby voice which was second only to that of Doris Baker. He and his Mum got along well, bonding over their need for meticulous planning of events and tendency to write lists of things.[?]

In primary school, Miller befriended a girl named Emily, because she did not ask him to help her with homework and instead challenged him to do it all faster than her.[?] He and Emily maintained a friendly rivalry for the top spot in Maths classes, with Emily having been ahead by the time he was to attend Makutu Kura. Miller promised to send her letters the night before he left for school. He was also friends with a boy named Theo, who disappeared one year claiming to have moved away.[?]

For his twelfth birthday, Miller's Dad gave him a watch, which he grew fond of.

### Attendance at Makutu Kura

Main Article: 2010 School Year

Miller was informed about the existence of magic by an unknown lady, who proved rather unhelpful and left him and his mother in Punanga Street. He and his family were curious, as they had been told that magical children are usually magically-active, but nobody could recall any instance of magic being done in Miller's youth.[?] Upon the commissioning of his wand, wand-maker Margaret Mervin described him as 'angular', and had considered fashioning him a wand made of Elder. They made it home with the help of friendly passers-by via unknown means, but Miller later missed the School Bus, notably sticking his hand out to draw attention from passengers in the hopes of making it. Following his belated arrival at Makutu Kura his name was called on a class roll and he was identified as the missing student, being given the name "Missed-it-Miller" to his dismay. However, he was delighted to see that his old friend Theo was actually a wizard who attended the school.[?]

Miller was able to choose between two dormitories that still had free space for him. He ended up in a dormitory alongside Chester Hart, a weird boy who he took a little while to warm to. Miller did not appreciate Chester's immediate attempts to befriend him and when Chester assumed something he would awkwardly contradict him, such as when Chester posited that Miller liked to be up early like he did, with Miller replying that he was woken up by the rain that morning. He also thought that Chester was not good at sorting his priorities, as he wanted to trade Miller's watch for a wall clock for their dormitory, but refused to give away a spare bean-bag.

He commiserated with his other camp-mate Mae Reed about her proximity to her dormmates Olivia and Mya, who were prone to listening to music at night — he was privately glad that he was on the other side of their camp, and could only hear faint noise. After his dormmate Kris fell down the hill their dorm building was situated on, Miller was the second to fall, and a few weeks later Landon fell down, and finally Chester. Kris and Chester became fired up over the idea of making a game out of not falling down the hill, and Miller was by default a part of the game. From every year on, they kept track of who fell down the hill in what order, occasionally including the names of friends or other students who misjudged the tricky steps leading to Kris and Landon's dormitory.[?]

Despite being nervous about his first Transfiguration lesson, he answered Professor Wendow's curve-ball question correctly. He had read up on the material before attending school, and had also practised writing on parchment with a quill. He was mildly interested in spell-casting, especially after watching a teacher successfully cast a spell.

During his first Herbology lesson Miller met Rochelle Qin, a girl who by all accounts should have been making fun of him but wasn't. Miller found some of his classmates frustrating, as they were doing better than him in classes having grown up being educated about them, and also persisted for a couple of weeks in calling him Missed-it-Miller.[?]

Rochelle in particular also acted friendly towards him, a mannerism that she extended to almost nobody else. She gifted him a spare pair of working gloves on his first day as the teacher had not set them in the equipment list, but Miller later felt insulted by what he thought was a gift of pity, and tried to return them to her. He compared his friendship with Emily and his rivalry with Rochelle, figuring that he was responding much more poorly to failure now because he felt like the existence of magic was moving goalposts.[?] With this revelation he took a step back and stopped being so disgruntled by his peers, electing sometimes to study with Rochelle.[?]

Just prior to this revelation, in his dormitory, Miller was unhappy with Chester's sleeplessness, and when Chester promised he would try to stop but failed to do so, he assumed that he was trying to provoke him. This led Miller to angrily shut Chester in their shared bathroom one night, and he found him somehow outside the next morning. He complained about Chester's bothersome habits to Rochelle, who immediately shut him down and called him a horrible person. Miller, coming to understand what he'd done, apologised to Chester profusely and was forgiven. Miller finally remembered that his mother implored him to try and befriend people, and resolved to empathise with Chester better. Because of what he'd done Rochelle stopped talking to him for a while, but she and Miller became friends again later in 2010 after they were paired together for an Alchemy project.[?]

Miller went home for Term One holiday, but decided to stay at school next time after his Dad tried cooking stew in his cauldron.[?] Halfway through the year, his camp saw a new addition in the form of Cassandra Grace, a girl from America whose journey to New Zealand had seen so many bureaucracy shenanigans that she wasn't in the country to attend school until May.[?]

Main Article: 2011 School Year

The next year, Miller successfully caught the School Bus and rode to school with David Winfield, Isaac Fern, and Rochelle. Rose asked to speak to him for a moment, where she privately announced her upcoming forced engagement to Lucas Flint and admitted her fears about her future. Miller offhandedly mentioned this to Chester, who proceeded to happily chatter to the rest of his dorm about it. When Landon went to ask Rose if what he'd heard was true, she stopped talking to Miller for a while.[?]

Miller and Chester both revealed that they had brought extra items to furnish their dormitory with; Miller had brought a storage drawer and hat-stand, and Chester had bought fairy lights, having finally discovered a Bunnings near his home.[?] Miller asked Chester where he lived, and Chester promptly invited him to his house for the Term One holidays.[?]

This year, Miller reflected on the fact that Rochelle had briefly tutored him on how to properly use a quill. By the time Professor Baker began teaching, he felt confident enough to copy lines without looking. He was thoroughly displeased with being unable to use the Library for the first half of the year, as its renovations had been halted following concerns about its stability in a storm.[?]

Main Article: 2012 School Year

Miller took Runology as a third-year elective, as it had caught his eye and seemed interesting. There, he got to work with Kris Williams in group projects.[?] While working on a project about placing enchanted runes on objects to give them magical properties, he decided instead to carve enchanted runes onto blocks of wood, allowing for a variety of generic magical functions per-block.[?] He viewed his work with runes as a hobby.

To aid in the process of carving, he learnt to ~~transfigure~~ his wand into a precise chisel,[?] having entertained the idea of ~~wand transfiguration~~ since his second year. Upon showing Professor Wendow this trick, he was graded a *Brilliant* for the assignment he didn't do; it would be his last Brilliant for a long while.

Miller was unconcerned upon hearing about a dragon-kiwi hybrid that was apparently loose on the island, and thoroughly unamused by his classmates' responses to seeing it. He felt as though chasing after the Kiwi was childish, a sentiment he stood by until it passed by him one day being chased by January Hundley and Erik Domino, at which point he joined in.[?]

He and Chester were approached one day by Ruby Hunt, a student in his year, who proclaimed that Landon Sand was a vile monster, with plans to publicise information about Landon that she had no business knowing. Miller then became involved in the Plot to Ruin Ruby Hunt's Credibility, notably encountering the Kiwi again midway through secretly brewing a potion — it forced Miller and his group to restart the potion entirely, delaying their plot by a week.[?]

During the end-of-year holidays, Miller found his Dad standing over his cauldron again. Expecting him to be trying to cook stew, and fearing the amount of clean-up he'd have to do to sanitise his cauldron for its next magical brew, he rushed to the cauldron to find the beginning of a genuine potion taking place. It transpired that Edgar had a natural knack for brewing potions, but was otherwise unable to perform magic, leaving the McArthur family scrambling to remember any other incidents through any of their lives where they may have performed magic.[?] This led them to realise that Miller had in fact done accidental magic, having violently swerved a car he was a passenger in to avoid a crash at a young age.[?]

#### Creating Spells

Main Article: 2013 School Year

Partly as a side project and partly vying to win the School Spirit Competition, in 2013 Miller began to experiment with spell creation without informing anyone. As a result, he accidentally coloured his hair red. He was told that as he had not devised a counter-spell, his hair might stay that way for the rest of his life unless a counter-spell closely matching that of his own was discovered.[?]

While Miller did have the option to use existing enchantments or potions to temporarily turn his hair brown again, he found maintaining them to be too much effort and continued life with red hair.[?]

This year, his Dad surprised him by somehow turning up for parent-teacher interviews midway through the year.[?] Edgar was in turn shocked by Miller's hair, but eagerly sat through interviews with his son. Miller was suspicious as Ed seemed to have previously met the Alchemy teacher Professor Sand, who explained that it was thanks to his efforts that Ed was on the school campus.[?] Ed then spent the rest of the Alchemy interview regaling the two with the story of how he got to the island, including drafting and scripting a documentary on kākāpō, receiving permission from the Department of Conservation to travel there, and trying to spot Makutu Kura from the light aircraft he rode in on as it landed at Sealers' Bay.[?]

### Running a Shop

See Also: Miller McArthur's Rune and Warding

Following his graduation from Makutu Kura, Miller established a shop in Punanga Street with the help of Rochelle Qin. In his shop, Miller sold innovative trinkets enchanted and warded with runes; he also ran a location warding service.[?] Rochelle stopped by for tea occasionally.[?]

At some point, Miller owned a pet that he named Ruckus.[?]

## Magical Abilities and Skills

**Cassandra Grace**: "*A 'Brilliant'? In Transfiguration? How?*"
**Miller**: "*Um. Magic.*"
— Miller somehow surpasses Professor Wendow's expectations.
24/10/2019 - "The Very Dangerous Beast that's Currently Loose on the Grounds" - *Practice Fic*
*This article or section is a stub. You can help by expanding it.*
**Mathematics**: Miller won a Mathematics Competition in 2008.[?]

## Other

### Trivia

* By the time he leaves school, Miller owns a pair of spectacles, which he uses for fine-carving of his runes.[?]

### Notes

1. ↑ This individual was originally Cindy Flint, but as of latest draft this is no longer the case, and a new individual has not yet been found.
2. ↑ The mechanics of wands are not finalised currently and this statement is not definite.
3. ↑ This was formerly 'Side-Along Apparition', however no affordable instant-transportation system exists within the rework yet.
4. ↑ It is not yet known whether 'Transfiguration' will retain the name or assume a different name and method.
5. ↑ It is not yet known whether 'Herbology' will retain the name or assume a different name and method.
6. ↑ No reworked information exists for this yet but it's still worth keeping around.

### References

1. ↑ itsMiatch's User Blog
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 24/10/2019 - "The Very Dangerous Beast that's Currently Loose on the Grounds" - *Practice Fic*
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 24/10/2020 - "Who Wrote the Coursework?" - *Practice Fic*
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 ??/08/2019 - "Glove Return" - *Practice Fic*
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3  "Chapter 3" - **The Gifted School**
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 13/09/2021 - "Morning of the Third" - *Practice Fic*
7. ↑  "Chapter 1" - **The Gifted School**
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1  "Chapter 2" - **The Gifted School**
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Old Chapters - "Chapter 5" - *The Gifted School*
10. ↑  "The School Bus" - *Practice Fic*
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 09/04/2020 - "Setting Up Shop" - *Practice Fic*
12. ↑ 02/05/2018 - "Graduation" - *Old RPs*