Disclaimer – I solemnly swear that JKR owns everything Harry Potter. Whether or not I am up to no good with her characters is for you to decide.

-oOoOo-

A/N – Sorry that this has taken so long. Thankfully, real life seems to have slowed down and I finally have a chance to get back into writing. Unfortunately, during the time between the last chapter and this one, my computer blew up, taking all my notes and ideas with it. I think that I've finally rebuilt it all and have now learnt a valuable lesson about having back-up copies in multiple places. So, without further ado, here's what you've all been waiting for, the next chapter in The Fourth School.

-oOoOo-

The Fourth School

Chapter 14

Harry walked into the classroom to find his teacher in her usual position: seated cross-legged on top of one of the desks.

"Wotcher, Harry," Tonks greeted.

"Hey, Tonks," Harry replied with a smile as he perched on the desk directly opposite her.

"Right, I haven't got a lot of time tonight – old Scrimgeor's given me an extra shift starting in about two hours," Tonks informed him.

"You sure you want to do this tonight, then?" Harry asked. "We can always skip."

"Yeah, not a problem," Tonks smiled. "I've got a couple of hours to kill. Might as well be here with you than sittin' around at home twiddling my thumbs."

Harry gave her a nod of gratitude.

"Right, then, you been keeping up with your practices?" Tonks asked.

In reply, Harry began morphing his head through the various contortions that Tonks had assigned him.

Starting with his hair, he changed it from its usual black to red to white to green and then blue, followed by an attempt at changing just the tips of his hair into a bright silver while the rest of his hair reverted to its natural black. For the most part, he was successful. At least, it was the closest that he'd ever come to getting it exactly how he imagined it. There was just that one patch in the middle of the top of his head that never seemed to do as it was told. This time, its tips changed, but to a light blue instead of silver.

Leaving his hair with its changed tips, Harry focussed on his nose. Peering down at it with his crossed eyes, he watched it elongate, then turn bulbous before spreading out into something that looked as though he'd just been punched and finished with shrinking it and turning it up and making it slightly more pointy.

Morphing his ears was next. This was the feature that he'd been practicing the shortest length of time, so changing his ears into large flappy things, followed by returning them to normal except with points didn't take long.

He demonstrated his final morph by poking his now forked tongue out at his metamorph teacher.

"That's excellent work, Harry!" Tonks praised. "I can really see a huge improvement since last week."

"Thanks, Tonks," Harry beamed.

"Since you're doing so well, how about we move on to the next phase," she suggested. "Changing the colour of your skin."

To emphasise this idea, Tonks slowly morphed her skin from a pale white through to a tanned golden colour and then continued through to a deep mocha and finished with turning her skin a deep mottled green before she allowed it to fade back to its natural colour.

"Wow, Tonks, I didn't know that you could do that," Harry stated, staring hard.

"Yeah, well, it's not something that I need to do very often, unless I'm undercover or have been sitting at a desk too long and need a good all over tan," she smiled impishly.

"You really think that I can do that, too?" Harry asked.

"Of course you will, Harry," Tonks told him. "By the time I'm finished with you, you'll be able to change every single part of your body. At least on the outside."

"So what's left after I master this?" Harry asked.

"Height, weight, eye colour," Tonks replied, ticking them off on her fingers, "then changing just a single part of you, like a finger or other appendage."

"So, still a lot to go then," Harry commented.

"Yeah, but you knew that when we started," Tonks replied. "Give it another six months and it'll almost be as natural to you as it is to me. Now, you ready?"

At Harry's nod, she continued.

"Okay, hold up your hand in front of your face. We're going to concentrate on it for now. I want you to really take in what it looks like – get a picture of its colour firmly in your head, know it …

-oOoOo-

A slight tapping sound finally penetrated Hermione's concentration as she approached the shelves in the Potter Haven library. Lifting her nose from the ancient runes text that she had been absorbed in, she blinked hard. Yes, she was exactly where she expected to be – the top level of the library.

Being able to walk from her room to the library while reading and without paying any attention to her surroundings had taken very little time to learn. But then, she had expected nothing less. She'd been able to do it at home and that had involved negotiating the stairs and multiple corners. Here all her feet had had to learn was to go in a straight line and allow her peripheral vision to note any closed doors in front of her, and considering that the library door always remained open, then that wasn't a problem.

Letting the book slip down until it was tight against chest, Hermione looked around in search of the strange tapping sound. It didn't take long for her to determine that it was coming from the level below. A half dozen quick steps brought her to the balcony where she could look down.

What she saw caused her eyes to widen in astonishment before her lips curled upwards in a barely suppressed giggle.

Below her, standing at one of the tables, was Harry. What had particularly caught her attention was the fact that jutting out from his dark green T-shirt were two arms of widely different colours. His left arm was almost jet black, except for two of his fingers which appeared more golden as they rested on a pile of books. His right arm, by contrast, was a shocking white from elbow to wrist with a blood red hand.

The back of his neck and what she could see of his face appeared to be his normal colouring at least.

Shaking her head, she moved towards the spiral staircase. Harry'd told her about Tonks' lesson the previous evening on changing skin colour before bed last night. As this was the first time that she'd seen him today, she could only assume that he'd been practicing that morning.

"Hi, Harry," she greeted brightly.

The continuous tapping of Harry's wand between a large leather bound book set before him on the table and the stack of books in front of it came to a halt as he looked up. She saw his eyes flick to each arm and a rosy blush blossom on his cheeks before both arms snapped behind him as he turned to face her.

"Hey, Hermione," he said warily.

"How's things?" she asked with a smile, wondering if he really thought that he could hide the state of his arms from her.

"Good. You?" he asked as his eyes darted around the library.

"I'm well, Harry," she replied before cocking her head. "What are you working on?"

A small smile escaped her as she saw his arms twitch before he settled on nodding his head towards the piles of books on the table.

"Enchanting assignment," he replied.

"Ooh, really? Can you show me?" Hermione asked eagerly.

"Uh, maybe later," Harry stuttered. "I'm, uh, right in the middle of it at the moment and I, uh, don't want to lose my concentration."

With a sigh, Hermione decided to take pity on the boy and stop teasing him. Reaching out and around him, Hermione grasped his hand and pulled it towards her.

"I saw you from up there, Harry. I know that your hands are different colours," she told him.

Harry's head dropped and his feet shuffled as he slowly brought his other hand into view.

With a soft smile, Hermione reached out one finger, slipped it under his chin and lifted his head until his emerald eyes met her own.

"What happened?" she asked softly.

"I was practicing what Tonks taught me last night," Harry sighed. "But I accidentally made this arm," here he lifted his left arm, "black instead of tanned. And when I tried to use the colouring of my right hand as a template for turning the left one back … I sort of mucked it up."

"And now you can't change either arm back?" Hermione guessed.

Another sigh accompanied his head shake.

"Well, let's see what we can do together," she suggested. "We just need to get you calmed down and not so worked up about it. And I promise that no matter what happens, that I won't laugh at you.

Entwining her fingers with his black and tan ones, she lifted their combined hands until they were right between their eyes.

"Now, how about you concentrate on my hand and see if you can get your hand and arm to match," she said. "Just look at our hands and concentrate, Harry. Make them the same."

At first nothing happened, but then, after nearly a minute of the two standing with their hands joined and Hermione softly encouraging him, the very tips of his fingers began to change. A healthy pale brown slowly began to spread down past his fingernails, over his knuckles and then faster up to Harry's wrist before racing up his arm.

"Well done, Harry," Hermione beamed at him. Then, after capturing the bizarre blood red and white hand in her own, she lifted it up. "Now, let's do the other one."

A minute later a normal looking Harry Potter was standing beaming at his best friend, their fingers still interlocked as they held hands.

"Thanks, Hermione," Harry beamed. "I was sure that I was going to be stuck like that until Tonks could come back next week. You're absolutely brilliant."

"You're welcome, Harry," she smiled back before lifting one delicate eyebrow. "And now you know what to do if you get stuck again, don't you?"

"Come straight to you," he replied with a small smile.

"Exactly. Now, as payment, you can show me what you're doing for your enchanting assignment," Hermione stated.

Letting go of Hermione's hands, Harry turned back to the library table that he'd been working at. A large leather-bound book was opened in front of him, with a stack of two dozen other books piled up around it.

"I'm trying to create an index for the library," Harry told her.

Hermione cocked her head at him. "Like a filing system?"

"Yeah. You remember how hard it was to find books back at Hogwarts?" Harry asked, and, seeing her nod, continued. "Well, I figured that there's already three levels to the library here and, even though a lot of the shelves still have a lot of space on them, if we keep buying books, soon enough we'll have the same problem here."

"That's a good idea, Harry," Hermione replied, impressed with the idea.

Harry nodded. "Thanks, I thought so. So, I came up with the idea of magically tying all of the books in the library to a master book." He shrugged then. "Although apparently, it's not that original an idea."

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked.

"Professor Miller tells me that most of the old families in the magical world will have something like that in their personal libraries," Harry explained, remembering back to the discussion that he'd had with his Enchanting teacher a couple of weeks beforehand.

"Then why wasn't there one at Hogwarts?" Hermione nearly demanded, frustration etched on her face with the thought of how much help it would have been to her studies.

"Dunno," Harry shrugged, "although, Professor Miller did say that with so few enchanters in Great Britain, that they tended to focus more on jewellery and trinkets rather than some of the older objects that would hardly ever be purchased. Guess it simply comes down to making what brings in the money."

"I guess that makes sense," Hermione agreed. "So, what do you need to do to make yours work?"

"I think that I've already completed the runes that I need to make the book remember information and recall it at a later date," Harry said, flipping to the inside front and back covers of the large book before him to show her. "At the moment I'm simply testing that part out."

"How?" Hermione asked, her fingers running over the runes that she recognised.

"I'm copying the title, author and subject of each of these books into the master book and tying them to a particular page," Harry explained. "Eventually I want to have an index in the front of the master book that will let you rearrange and display that information anyway that you want, as well as tie a luminescence spell into each book and the master book so that when you find a book that you want, it'll display what level of the library and the shelf number and you can go there and see the book itself glowing until you take it off of the shelf."

"Wow, Harry, that sounds amazing and dead useful," Hermione exclaimed.

"Yeah, only Professor Miller thinks that I might have bitten off more than I can chew," Harry grinned. "But either way, I've got all year to work on it and it'll be worth fifty percent of my total grade. Even if I can't get it to do everything that I want it to, Professor Miller assures me that I'll learn a lot just in the attempt."

"And I thought that my Enchanting project was ambitious," Hermione groused good-naturedly.

"Why, what are you doing?" Harry asked.

"I was hoping to see if I could find a way to make a muggle torch work in a magical environment by using runes and enchanting to dampen the magical output around it and allowing the battery to work," Hermione explained.

"That is ambitious," Harry agreed, "and if you succeed, the implications could be staggering."

"I know," Hermione replied, her excitement fuelling the speed of her speech. "If we can get muggle batteries to work, then we could have muggle cameras and stereos and watches and maybe even computers and tellies. That's actually why I came down here; I was looking for a more advanced runes book."

"Would you like some help finding one?" Harry offered.

"I'd love some, Harry," Hermione smiled.

"Come on, then, the best runes books are down this way," he replied, pointing off to the left.

-oOoOo-

A resounding clang echoed across the valley as the ball ricocheted off of the side of the building for what must have been the tenth or eleventh time since the three boys had started playing.

"Why'd they have to build it there?" Colin complained as his brother, Dennis, raced off to fetch the errant ball.

"I know. The one decent flat piece of ground close to the manor and they put a whopping big building on it," Mickey agreed.

The three youngest boys in Potter Haven had had this discussion more times than they could count over the last couple of weeks. As far as they could tell, they were the ones most affected by the building of the eyesore.

Most of Diricawl Academy's students were girls and none had shown much interest in the idea of physical activity, unless you counted walking down to the loch for a swim, of course. And of the two older boys, any time that Neville had spare, he disappeared into one of the greenhouses and as for Harry, well, he simply went flying or took himself off to a secluded part of the valley to practice archery.

But for the Creevey brothers and Mickey Pemberton, they loved running. And they especially loved football, that is, when the younger two could force Colin to put his ever-present camera down. When they'd first come to Diricawl and discovered their shared passion, they'd staked their claim on the one large flat piece of ground near the manor where they could play – either simply passing the ball around or setting up some small goals for a two on one game.

But now, their space had been seriously impinged upon. And by no less a person than Professor Black.

"What do ya reckon he's doin' in there?" Mickey asked, not for the first time.

Colin simply shook his head as he trapped the ball that Dennis kicked back to him. "No idea."

The steel grey building that seemed to have been built almost overnight was huge. It was easily thirty yards long and half that wide. Most of the wall at one end actually seemed to be a pair of massive sliding doors that Colin thought that two of his Da's old milk trucks could drive through side by side with plenty of room to spare. What windows there were were all placed up high, far too high to see into, even if they weren't all blacked out.

"Did we tell you that Professor Black nearly forgot to come to potions yesterday?" Dennis asked as he re-joined the other two.

Colin looked up sharply at his brother before passing the ball on to Mickey. "You didn't tell me that."

"Yeah, we had to call for Nerri to go and find him for us," Dennis related.

"It's a good thing that the elves can get in there at least," Mickey stated.

"Not that they'll tell us what's actually in there," Dennis complained.

"Hiya, boys," a cheery voice interrupted. "How are you all today?"

The three spun around to smile and wave at Doctor Granger.

"We're good, thanks," Colin answered for them all.

"Glad to hear it," Doctor Granger replied as he strode across the grass.

The three boys watched him reach the small door in the side of the building before he rapped sharply upon it. A few seconds later, the dark head of Professor Black poked out. Seeing who it was, the door opened wider, allowing Doctor Granger to join his co-conspirator inside.

"Do you reckon that they'll ever tell us what they're doing in there?" Dennis asked.

"They'll have to, won't they?" Colin stated. "I know that Harry's been pestering them and this is his place."

"Yeah, but Professor Black's even stopped coming to dinner lately," Mickey pointed out. "Says that he has 'too much to do', whatever that means."

Taking a glance up at the sinking sun, Colin placed his foot on top of the ball. "What do you say to a little two on one before we're called in to dinner? Do you think you two can actually beat me today?"

Mickey and Dennis shared a grin.

"Bet you a box of chocolate frogs that we can," Mickey challenged.

"You're on!" Colin agreed before dribbling the ball towards their traditional half-way mark.