The Wand-Choosing Ceremony
The wand chooses the wizard. This is presented as romance. In practice it is closer to a slightly haughty vending machine that occasionally refuses your money, and it lives at Ollivander's, where the boxes are stacked according to a filing system known only to the dust. Submit yourself to it once for free; thereafter the wands will only reconsider you for a small handling fee, paid in gems.
Where to Find It
Ollivander's is the Weapons shop. On the shop's landing screen — and only there, not while you are mid-purchase of something pointier — a nav appears inviting you to "Have a wand choose you." Click it. The ceremony does the rest, which is mostly Ollivander removing boxes from shelves with the grim efficiency of a man who has done this eleven thousand times and expects to do it eleven thousand more.
The First Time Is Free
Your first ceremony costs nothing. Several wands will decline you outright. This is not personal; they have simply reviewed your application and found it wanting. Eventually one chooses you, because the alternative — standing in a shop being snubbed by sticks indefinitely — serves no one.
What you receive is a wand described by three things: a length, a wood, and a core — for example, 13½" Holly, Phoenix Feather. It is written to your profile and shown beside your name, the way any good identity is: in a footnote.
Re-Rolling (For Those Whom Destiny Disappointed)
Should the wand that chose you prove a poor judge of character, you may ask the shelves to think again. After the free ceremony the nav changes to "Try a different wand (5 gems)". Each re-roll:
- Costs 5 gems by default. The price is set by the administration and may differ on any given day, the cosmos being subject to revision.
- Charges you only when a wand is actually written. If the moment slips from Ollivander's grasp and nothing is recorded, nothing is taken from your purse. This is the one mercy in the building.
- Requires the gems up front. If the arithmetic is not in your favor, Ollivander glances at your coin purse, then at you, then at the purse again, and the ceremony politely does not happen.
It's Cosmetic, and You Can Overrule It
The ceremony's wand is decorative. It does not swing, parry, or affect a single point of damage; your actual combat weapon is a separate and far less sentimental matter. If you disagree with the shelves' verdict, you can quietly re-shape the wand yourself in your profile editor, which remains the manual override and asks no gems for the privilege. Destiny, it turns out, is negotiable in the settings menu.
Blanking the wand in your profile does not restore your free ceremony. The free roll is spent once and remembered forever, regardless of what the column says afterward. The shelves keep their own records.
The Rarer Woods and Cores
Most wizards draw from the standard catalog: twenty-four woods, eight cores. A further range of woods (Ebony, Elder, Lacewood, Olive, Pink Ivory, Purpleheart, Tulipwood, Zebrawood) and cores (Chimaera Scale, Runespoor Fang, Thestral Hair, Veela Hair) exists behind a velvet rope, reserved for supporters and staff. A ceremony cannot hand a non-supporter one of these, no matter how persuasively the wand argues; the same eligibility the profile editor enforces applies here too. If you qualify, the full range is on the table, and the shelves know it.
Ollivander's: a shop that has perfected the art of selling you something by first pretending it is not for sale, then implying it has chosen you, then taking your gems anyway.