-- Clara POV —
While most of the summer break was dedicated to learning wards, I had still meditated plenty. I had enhanced my mindscape multiple times, its efficiency more than double compared to before. Now I only made small changes on the regular, still perfecting the symetry in ways I did not even know existed. But it all originated through something else.
Originally I wanted to devote all my meditation time to animagus comprehension, but it turns out, that I tremendously underestimated the effect that multiple animagi had on my mind, so I needed to enhance the sturdiness of my mind. This meant, that I did not have as much time to focus on my animagi forms, though I still racked up a total of six opposites, which I had fully comprehended and at least a dozen which were not good enough yet.
This also lead to my current predicament, as my body, mind and soul practically begged me to finally transform. I could not transform into a fox, as I needed something opposite to that. I originally planned for my first transformation to be either an owl or raven, but they were even more similar than the grasshopper. Nevertheless, I finally had decided, after stressing over this question the whole summer break. My first transformation would be a toad. It was a stroke of genius cough luck, through which I found that one. Curiously, it was already near completely comprehended, as it perfectly combined everything I needed. It liked water, could jump very high, had a musical note, could swim, was pathetically weak, slow, small and no endurance. All compared to a fox, but still. This type of toad especially was just useless in any way and form.
-- Professor McGonagall —
Clara Ollivander, that weird one girl you just do not get out of your head, visited me with the request to supervise her animagus transformation. I saw no reason to refuse, as even if I did not help her achieve an animagi form, she would try on her own and in the worst case kill herself while doing it. So I just raised an eyebrow and agreed: „Ok, but…" There will be strict rules I wanted to say.
-- Clara POV —
I promptly transformed, as I was suppressing this sensation since at least one month, focusing on the toad being the only challenge.
It was disorienting, feeling like being compressed, shrunk, put through a meat grinder while alive, reassembled into a block and then stretched, until you were you again, just in a different form.
While the transformation was a full success, being a toad went against my whole being, thus was even more uncomfortable than the transformation. I still needed approximately ten minutes, before I could turn back, as while it was anything but perfect, it was still an animagus transformation which filled me with euphoria, relief and excitement.
The professor directly started scolding me, about giving her a warning and whatnot. My objections were either drowned out or purposefully ignored. Retrospectively, I could understand it, but I thought supervising my animagus transformation was clear enough. She apparently misinterpreted that as guiding me through the process, probably with a potion or ritual, not that I would just straight up transform not even a second after asking her.
After I had the scolding part behind me, I excused myself, before returning to my classroom. Today I planned to improve upon my mana filter, the core to be exact. I want to use a part of the mana to power a gravity enchantment, to compress the mana even more. Previously I was planning to use the flow of mana and limited space as pseudo self compressor, but that would not work in the long term.
While I do not need that part of the end product yet, I needed a lot of time to test it and even impure mana could be used to test the compression effect. So my current plan was to make two prototypes out of treated iron to see the effect of both variants. I also want to take it a step further, making two identical ones out of treated copper.
I had more than enough treated material saved up, so I promptly shaped six rough spheres, two out of copper, two out of iron and two out of wood, all being perfectly round through the nifty spell: „Perfectus Globus." The resulting object had an inner space with the exact radius of ten centimeters, the outer wall two centimeters thick and a perfectly smooth surface on the in- and outside.
Soon I finished carving both wardschemes in the wooden spheres, testing them for functionality, fixed the worst mistakes and improved a few things like bad calligraphy, loops and mana leaks.
For this and the following steps I used a newly learned spell. It was originally used to bypass the anti copy spells on books, but a wardmaster saw it as the perfect way to factory print wards and commissioned a spell crafter to change it for his purpose.
This and a few other spells were gifted to the guild of wardmasters after his death. He was not a native Britain as you can see or it would be stuck as secret family magic forever.
There were different variations of this spell. One for applying the copied wardscheme on the same material and another to apply it to different materials, respectively Tutela Duplicatio and Tutela Duplicatio Mutatio.
The latter was a lot more complicated than the first one though. The greatest effect of this spell is in research, as I now had three identical wardschemes for both of my ideas, which saved time, double and triple checking the same work hundreds of times and so much more. I also had the exact original wardschemes saved for future experiments and documentation.
I would need to get an expanded warehouse suitcase for storing those. While you could not enter warehouse suitcases like normal expanded ones, as they could not handle living beings, they had immensely more storage capacity, a search and labeling function and similar things to help retrieve, store and manage a lot of anything else.
Afterwards I started testing them. First up came the copper one without an additional enchantment. I simulated the given environment through manually pushing mana into the object. At the start it worked, but after a few seconds the object exploded. I tried the same with the iron one, which did not explode but had subpar results, as too little mana was coming through the outer hull.
The gravitation enchantment did not change the results for the copper one, though I could see the effect of it on the iron one. The copper ones were promptly vanished, a reminder jotted down in my notebook that copper is more manaconductive than iron but cannot hold up to the strain of my current wardscheme. This meant, that future prototypes will be build out of iron.
Lists for those kind of things naturally already existed, but I somehow needed an entry into practical experimentation and those were easy observations which could be made without much additional work.
Out of curiosity, I made another wooden one without the gravitation enchantment, before repeating the same test. It did not explode, but sapped away quite a lot of mana into the wood itself, probably strengthening it, though I in no way know all the possible effects this could have.
After vanishing the wooden one, I was left with two usable prototypes, which I would leave in here for a time, as the amount of mana they required to be full was too much for me to manually input. I could offset that problem with smaller balls, as the volume together with different aspects like the gravitational enchantment affects the total mana capacity, but with my current skills it needed to be at least that big, as the wards and enchantments needed that much space to be written.
A lesser known fact about wardstone materials was corruption. It specified a material which already had housed a failed wardscheme, which was activated. Through this activation of an enchantment or ward, mana would seep into the material, which changed the material in very minute ways, even if they would not influence my current basic wards.
This is also the reason, I vanished anything I no longer needed and did not use the blueprints directly, but copied the wardscheme to a separate sphere of wood instead.
While you could reuse such materials through a complicated process, it is generally not used for cheap materials, as that process is also relatively expensive.
One other possibility would be corruption layering, which is a very hard technique usually only used by warding grandmasters. For this you intentionally and repeatedly trigger or even design faulty wards or enchantments to imbue an object with complicated properties and changes. But that is nowhere near my sold level yet sadly. It is an advanced form of treating material you could say.
The next week was mostly uneventful, except an enormous amount of people, even first years, testing out of classes. The headmaster suspended the whole week to let anyone who wanted try to test out. The only rule he set was, that you would no longer be able to try this year, after you had failed.
Most purebloods succeeded in history, some halfbloods in the new common sense class. The most amount of people per class to test out was astronomy, though only sixty-six percent passed, as the muggleborns overestimated themselfes. Most early year muggleborns also did not want or try to test out of other classes, though there were a few outliers. Hermione for example tested out of history, divination, herbology, potions, transfiguration, astronomy and charms, but also dropped care of magical creatures, as the ministries offer of a timeturner for exceptional students was invalidated through the independence of Hogwarts.
I tested out of OWL runes, arithmancy and divination, even though I did not have those subjects yet. Also succeded in astronomy and history NEWTs. It is astounding how much a passing interest can bring to the table at some point. I only realized that, as Firenze practically dragged me into his study to discuss it, after he saw me studying Tacitus in the library. I also applied for the fast track class of potions, as potions are needed in most wardstone treating methods.
Following this wave of mini graduations, if I can say so, there were a few changes to the schedules. Most classes are now no longer split for two houses per class, some first year courses get taught by new apprentices and more.
To the shock of the whole staff and student body, the Weasly twins tested out of all their classes, except mind arts, with straight O's for their NEWTs and got an apprenticeship for defense against the dark arts from the Ollivander twins and will now teach first and second year students. The whole school found out through an howler from their mother and most wrote it off as a prank at first.
Less shocking, for me at least, was the appointment of Luna as Hagrid's apprentice for care of magical creatures, though she was not allowed to teach alone yet. She also balanced Hagrid's more extreme understanding of creatures, which will prevent disasters, as Albus said. The most shocking in that announcement was, that Hagrid actually had an international certified master title in herbology and a grandmaster one in care of magical creatures. That man was just made for that apparently and I overheard him joking or boasting that he would have another grandmaster if his hands were not so damn big, not to forget that he is using a broken wand disguised as a pink umbrella of all things…
Neville got offered an apprenticeship from Sprout, though he refused at first and later conceded to start as her apprentice after he finishes all his OWLs. He naturally also tested out of herbology.
Slughorn refused to consider such, citing his limited tenure and McGonagall just has unnaturally high standards, though she apparently had her eyes on someone outside of Hogwarts.
Trelwaney and Firenze took in a student blessed and cursed by sight, though he is a first year and as such will not teach anything for the next few years.
The last two though are not public knowledge yet, but the Hogwarts rumor will will not need long to uncover those.
This still meant a very chaotic bi-weekly schedule, as through the new rules and future expansion there will be a lot of criss crossing in years, student amount and so on, as while most tested for OWL and NEWT level, you could still test for the first three years and skip into the fourth year classes, which was abused by a lot of people to get into a class with Harry Potter, who would have guessed. For all of Dumbledores brilliance, sometimes he is just an old goat.
The only advantage was, that you would now no longer be allowed to proceed with a class, if you get a troll in the tests at the end of each year. While the handling was on person by person basis, it made the requirements that much more stringent, as a huge amount of pupil apparently fail in multiple subject and previously the ministry forbid failing students.
But despite all the difficulties, the schedule works. Dumbledore still curses his new workload I heard. Though without the mind arts course it would not work, as simple meditation already helped with sleeping and productivity and as such improves the performance of students by a lot.