After years at Hogwarts, Harry was starting to get used to the idea that Christmas would be a day with a thick blanket of snow on the ground.
What was less expected was that it was also snowing in London, as Sirius reported happily while Harry was halfway through opening his presents.
"I've not seen it do this actually on Christmas in ages," he explained, by mirror. "I know it happens all the time at Hogwarts, but…"
"Did you stay at Hogwarts over Christmas, when you were a student?" Harry asked.
"There or at your dad's house," Sirius replied. "I kind of miss that place, but it got sold off when you were two because it wasn't going to be used for a decade or so. I think that's part of why you've got so much gold in your vault."
Harry nodded, then tried his best to swallow a snigger and ended up with something more like a hiccup. "It just occurred to me… it'd be a bit hard to gift-wrap a house."
"I think I could probably pull it off," Sirius mused. "I'd need about three reams of paper, though, and it'd have to be somewhere Muggles wouldn't notice."
He leaned a little closer to the mirror. "So, did you get anything good yet?"
"The books are always good," Harry said, inspecting one called Dragon Rider. "Nothing I've already got yet."
He looked at one end of the table in his tent, which had a pile of already-opened presents, and ate some wrapping paper. "And I'm not really sure this 'Iron Dragon' game is quite what you'd expect from the title, but if it isn't then maybe I can mess around a bit until it is."
"I'm pretty sure you're supposed to play games at least once before changing the rules," Sirius chuckled, then frowned. "Actually, if you're changing the rules, is that Slytherin?"
"I think technically it's designing a new game that shares most of the rules with the existing game," Harry countered. "Which would make it Ravenclaw."
"That's all right, then," Sirius said. "I'll allow it."
Harry smiled.
"Harry, was this you?" Ron called, from outside.
"I'm not sure!" Harry replied. "I can't see through the walls!"
He pushed his bench away from the table, leaving the remaining unopened present pile for now, and stuck his head out the door.
Since Ron had been about to come in with the thing in question, this meant that Harry just about avoided getting a hand to the muzzle.
"Oops," Ron winced.
"It's fine," Harry assured him. "Do you like it?"
By way of reply, Ron shrank down to Nutkin, and carefully put on the squirrel-sized flight helmet that Harry had got him.
He tapped it a few times, nodded, then took the helmet off again and unshrunk. "It seems to fit!"
"I asked if it could be a Portkey," Harry explained. "But they don't make one where you can activate it by saying a word, and then I thought about it a bit and realized that even if they did you'd need the word to be in squirrel… so there's a charm instead which makes it so that really loud sounds aren't as loud as they should be."
"That's actually really useful," Ron said, inspecting it. "I was going to be silencing the engines, but I suppose there's air noise and stuff as well."
He looked up. "Thanks, mate. I have to admit though that I'm never sure what to get you, which is why it was just chocolate."
"Remember, if it's something that I already had, I can just eat it," Harry said. "But the chocolate's meant to be eaten, so it's a good choice."
He paused. "...wait, I just realized. If I'd put a tiny mirror in a microphone on the helmet, and it was one end of a two way mirror, you could talk to someone on the ground that way. I should have thought of that."
"That's a good enough idea that I want to do it now," Ron admitted.
There was (in a way) only one table at the Christmas Feast, a big one made by moving three of the House tables together with the High Table in a sort of odd almost-square. There were few enough people at Hogwarts over Christmas that they all fit around the one table as long as you thought it counted as one table, and just about everyone seemed willing to charitably allow it to count.
"Do vampires have Christmas?" Dominic asked, as the main courses arrived. "I mean, you're here, but… I heard about something to do with religious stuff?"
"Nah, that's mostly not real," Melody said. "It's kind of… weird and complicated."
She waved her hand. "It goes back, um, about two thousand years, or something? There used to be a sun god, and so for that god the sun was holy, and people back then saw vampires burned really easily in sunlight and assumed it was for anything holy. But that's not really how it works."
"It sometimes seems like there's more made up stories about this stuff than real ones," the manticore sighed. "It's all terribly complicated."
"And yeah, I celebrate Christmas," Melody added, snagging herself some Yorkshire pudding, and then some black pudding to go with it. "It's a pretty good holiday, really. Lots of food and presents in the middle of winter."
Harry chuckled. "It must feel different in Australia."
"That's because of the kangaroos, right?" Ron asked. "Or… something."
He looked over at Skara. "Obviously you're celebrating Christmas now, but is it something you normally do?"
"Some goblins do," she told him. "We usually do presents the day before, though."
"Huh," Ron blinked. "Sounds a bit odd. Why's that, then?"
"Dunno, really," she shrugged. "Why do you do it on the twenty-fifth?"
"...um…" Ron began, then shrugged as well. "Yeah, fair enough."
"What about the goblins who don't do Christmas?" Harry said, cutting himself some quiche. He cut a bit too deeply, getting the foil as well as the quiche, and shrugged before just having some of the whole thing at once.
"Mostly it's something similar, called Yule," Skara explained. "It starts four days before, on the shortest day of the year."
Harry had thought that that was just another word for Christmas, because of things like Yule Logs, but he had to admit that he wasn't confident in whether Muggles would just have got the two things mixed up.
Or anyone else, admittedly. It sounded like he might have.
"It seems kind of weird to be doing this when it's so cold," Ron said, on the twenty-seventh. "Rocket testing stuff, I mean. Didn't the Challenger have trouble because it was so cold?"
"I think so," Harry agreed. "But that's because of O rings, and I don't think this one has any O rings."
Ron nodded. "That's right."
The rocket they were moving outside to test – after having made sure with Professor McGonagall that it was okay – wasn't actually the same one as the one which Ron had used for his Runes coursework. This one was altogether smaller, partly because Ron had gone back and done some calculations (with Hermione's help, which was entirely sensible because you wanted that sort of thing checked) and realized that a lot of the height of a rocket was so you could carry enough fuel. But Ron had no such worries about fuel, so while he wanted it a bit long and thin to help with steering it didn't need to be as tall as all that.
Another change had been when Ron realized that – because he was going to be able to take off and land on the same bits of ground – he could actually get away with having legs on the rocket itself, even though on a Muggle rocket that sort of thing would be pointless because it'd be throwing that bit away.
The result of all that was that Ron's rocket was about eight feet high and two across around the body, or three feet across at the legs, once it had been unshrunk. Moving around something that big would have been sort of difficult, but magic offered several different solutions and the one that Ron had picked was to just shrink it down and carry it around in a bag.
It wasn't big enough for a human to use, but Ron thought this size would be enough for 'Single Squirrel To Orbit'.
"Should we be taking notes about this?" Harry asked.
"Actually, could you?" Ron asked. "I've got a shrunk pencil and notepad in my supplies bag, but if I take notes with those they're really small and hard to read."
Harry was only too happy to agree, and after digging around for a notebook in his own things (and discovering he'd forgotten to bring a writing implement, before just conjuring a pencil) Harry wrote down the date and that they were doing two tests.
"Which one are we doing first?" he checked.
"Probably best to check the escape mechanism first," Ron decided. "If that one goes wrong it's not a good idea to do the other one!"
Harry nodded, writing down the heading. Test 6, Crew Escape Device. "So… okay, what are the steps?"
"Well, on the actual Saturn Five rocket the crew escape thing was that they had a smaller rocket that blasted the whole capsule away," Ron replied. "And then some parachutes. But with this it's just an ejector seat and a tiny broomstick."
"And you're going to be able to repair it afterwards?" Harry checked further.
Ron shrugged, tapping his pocket where his wand was. "Reparo for the hole in the side of the rocket – it's a bit which isn't Unbreakable, I did think that bit through – and it's actually one of a line of rockets the Twins made specially, so I can just put another one in the seat."
Harry wrote down those steps.
"Good luck," he added. "Or… is it bad luck to say that to someone who's about to do space stuff?"
"Merlin knows," Ron admitted.
The ejection system, it turned out, worked quite nicely.
Ron seemed quite pleased, though the process of being fired through the side of his rocket at considerable speed (with the head of his chair making the hole) by a firework, and then using his shrunken Nimbus 2001 to avoid crashing back into the ground, had been what he described as 'an experience'.
"Bloody loud," he added. "Thanks for the helmet, too."
Harry was quite pleased that his present had been so immediately useful.
"Reparo," Ron said, then, and the fragments of the rocket picked themselves up and flew back together to replace the side panel. Some of them came quite a long way.
"Did it have to go so far to the side?" Harry checked.
"Yeah, that's in case the rocket's about to blow up or something," Ron said. "I worked out I needed at least twenty or thirty feet… it's kind of, you need it to be enough that you get away from any explosion, but not so far that it'll just fire you straight into the ground if the rocket's tipping over. That's why it goes up as well as sideways – and I think if I'm pointed almost straight down then I've got bigger problems and should probably Apparate."
"So if you're pointed almost straight down, Apparate away before you reach Hogwarts," Harry summarized.
Ron nodded, then slapped his forehead. "Forget my own head next… bombarda."
The blasting curse made a small hole in the side of the rocket, and Ron put the seat back. "Forgot to do this before I repaired the gap…"
It was times like this that Harry could see the value of checklists. It would be a terrible thing to be a hundred and fifty thousand feet in the air and suddenly wish you'd remembered to bring your space helmet.
"Okay, I think that's everything," Ron said, some minutes later. "Let's go."
Harry wrote down the heading for Test 7, engine half power, and watched as Ron stretched up to put his palm on the nosecone of the rocket.
He jumped slightly, and shrank down into Nutkin – shrinking in reference to his palm, so he ended up at the top of the rocket instead of the bottom – then got in through the hatch, and shut it from the inside.
There were a couple of minutes of wait, while Ron got everything sorted out inside the capsule, and then there was a fwoosh as the peroxide flow started and hit the catalyst.
They'd planted the rocket on as flat a piece of rock as they could find, and in the first couple of seconds every bit of grit or sand that had been on the slab got blasted away all at once. Then there was a long period when the noise was quiet at first and slowly getting louder – it turned out that there was only so much a Silencing Charm could cope with unless you cast it better than Ron had – but apart from that nothing really seemed to be happening except for great clouds of white steam billowing up.
Harry knew what was actually going on. Ron was slowly turning up the power, clicking the gear knob he'd cannibalized into his control system over from one gear to the next and keeping the brake caliper squeezed with his other paw, and sooner or later they'd reach the point where-
Even as he was thinking about it, the rocket began to move. It skidded a few inches sideways, then broke contact with the ground, then landed again as Ron abruptly let go of the power and the rocket jet cut out almost instantly.
Harry dutifully wrote down that there'd been a takeoff – only just, but only just was what they were aiming for.
"I definitely want that mirror thing next time," was the first thing Ron said once he was out again. "It felt really spooky to go sideways like that, I wasn't sure what was going on…"
"I was ready with a Stopping Charm," Harry told him. "But yeah, there were a few times I felt like it'd be good to be able to warn you about stuff."
He shrugged his wings. "Still. Apart from wanting a better Silencing Charm, and that, I think that went really well."
"Oh, absolutely," Ron agreed readily. "That was on, um, it has seven gears on the left and three on the right, and the ones on the right are more important, and it was two and five. So a bit more than halfway… but the engine doesn't start until I was on one and two, because that way I have something to set it to when I want it to not go off."
Harry nodded his understanding. "So you can go up at about one g at most?"
"Or do two, in space," Ron confirmed. "I really think with this now I could just point it at the sky and turn the power on, and be in orbit in, um… about a quarter of an hour?"
He sniggered. "Bet if you told an actual Muggle astronaut about this he'd say it was really cheating, because I don't even need a heat shield…"
Nineteen ninety-six turned into nineteen ninety-seven, and Harry spent the period of transition at Dogwarts – or, more correctly, just outside Dogwarts.
Fred and George, and Anna and Tyler, and Sirius (and presumably Remus, though Harry wasn't sure of that one) had all agreed that the new year would be a great chance to advertise the MMM fireworks. There was only really one place they could do that safely – which was Hogsmeade – because while they were making indoor fireworks which never went through a door or window it would be a bit hard to show those off.
You'd just get coloured lights shining through curtains and stuff.
At Hogsmeade they could set the fireworks off with abandon, though, so long as they didn't get too extravagant, and the practical upshot of that was that there was an hour or so of setting off novelty fireworks as midnight approached.
Harry acted as the fireworks setter-offer, which meant that at least one of the two twin pairs was telling him which one to set off next at any given time, and it was kind of a lot of fun. Not the same kind of fun as attending a fireworks display, going 'oooh' and 'aaah' (or, on one occasion, 'Merlin's eyelids!' from the direction of Ron), but since each firework needed a chance to shine it meant that Harry could still look up and watch as they detonated.
Sometimes there was a cloud of butterflies which flittered around for twenty or thirty seconds before vanishing with tiny cracks of white smoke. Sometimes a great flying creature rose into the air, or the firework split into three which each split into three to make a kind of tree shape, or it spun like a Catherine wheel for thirty seconds before spelling out HAPPY NEW YEAR.
On one particularly memorable occasion, Taira directed Harry to set off two at once and they turned into a winged horse and a hippogriff.
That was enough of a spectacle that Harry sat down to watch, because they weren't just shaped explosions but animated creatures that stuck around for at least two minutes. The winged horse was made out of white sparks which continually crackled and sparked, while the hippogriff was somehow constructed that while it was also made out of white sparks the sparks were much dimmer and it gave more of an impression of being a mobile starry night sky rather than anything else.
Harry guessed there was probably some smoke involved. And magic, though that was just an educated guess.
The two of them then got in a fight, one which saw flailing hoofs and claws and wings flaring and flapping, and first the horse and then the hippogriff got the upper hand (or hoof? Or claw?) until the two of them charged at one another in the sky overhead and exploded.
It was all really quite impressive.
Harry had homework over the holidays, but he also managed to budget enough time to read that new Dragon Rider book.
It was an interesting read, partly because the dragons in it had a completely different sort of breath to the normal kind of breath dragons had in most things. It was still fire breath, but in most cases it was actually more of a healing breath than a damaging one (except in certain circumstances).
Another thing which Harry appreciated was that, while it was called 'dragon rider' (and indeed someone rode a dragon) neither the dragon nor the rider got largely ignored to focus on the other one. It definitely felt to Harry like they were working together, which was pleasant, and he wondered if he should lend it to Dean when he was done.
Thoughts about lending out books reminded Harry that it wasn't all that long until he'd be able to use magic outside school, and the idea of being able to efficiently get copies of all the books he was interested in out of the stock in the Barbican Library had him feeling quite happy while he finished the book.
"I can only see one disadvantage with that," Hermione told him, when she was back from the holidays. "It won't be possible for us to just guess what book to get you and be reasonably sure you don't have it."
"We can't normally guess that anyway," Neville said, then snapped his fingers. "Oh – Hermione, you're the oldest of us, right? What was it like being able to use magic at home at last?"
"I didn't get much chance, really," Hermione admitted. "We had relatives or Mum and Dad's friends around most days."
She smiled. "Actually, speaking of which, I got asked how you were all doing by someone from their surgery, so I had to make things up a bit. Harry, you're doing Ancient History and Chemistry at A Level, Ron, you're doing engineering, Dean, you're an arts student," she pointed at Neville. "And you're doing biology and maths. And then I just focused mostly on the Ancient History stuff whenever anyone asked a question."
"Oh, right, because of that Decline and Fall book," Ron realized. "That's clever."
Hermione looked quite satisfied at that.
"That was a lot more details than I managed," Dean admitted. "I just said I did art and that we were drawing mythical creatures a lot, then spent the rest of the holiday talking about football. Apparently we're getting Ferdinand back after loaning him out, which is probably going to help."
"Must be tricky," Harry said, thinking about it. "I could talk about it with my Aunt and Uncle, they know about magic, they just don't want to know."
Harry couldn't actually remember if he'd ever explained to them that he was a dragon. It had been something he'd thought went unspoken for so long that he might just never have got round to it.
"It's one of the things that makes marriages with Muggles awkward," Ron contributed. "Still, most people seem to make it work."
He paused. "They do, right? I don't think I know."
"I don't think any of us know, not yet," Dean shrugged. "My mum and dad are both Muggles, so are Hermione's... Seamus would, though."
Harry discovered to his pleasure at the start of the term that Apparition Lessons were available to anyone who was either seventeen years of age, or 'will turn seventeen on or before the 31st August next'. It was twelve weeks for one Galleon a week, and so he signed up straight away.
"You know what I wonder?" Neville said, looking at the notice. "Why they don't just say "In Sixth or Seventh Year."
"Maybe it's in case someone's had to repeat a year," Ron guessed. "You know, if someone was really thick."
"That's not the only reason," Harry reminded him. "Someone could have been ill before their exams, or had to repeat a year because they got suspended, or something like that."
Ron nodded. "Good point. If someone was really thick or unlucky."
"I suppose it'll do," Hermione sighed.
"What I want to know is why there's such a big crowd around the notice," Dean said. "There's only ten people who are in the right year to sign up."
"Good question," Harry agreed.
Maybe it was a sign of enthusiasm or something. Or maybe it was the poster next to it about ideas for Valentine's Day.
Could be either.
"This term, we'll be covering a topic I'm sure many of you have been wondering about," Professor Babbling told them.
She turned around and chalked some runes or rune-like letters on the board. The first was a diamond pattern with four lines, inscribed with the bottom two lines drawn first and then the top two completing the box – but with a little bit of the first two lines left as an overlap, so it wasn't quite a perfect diamond.
The second one was almost the same, but instead it was the right-hand two lines drawn first. Then the third was made up of four of the golf-peg-like marks that Harry recognized from Assyrian runic, in a much vaguer diamond shape, and the fourth one abandoned the diamond shape altogether and had two vertical marks on the right with two horizontal ones facing them on the left – there was still a sort of square shape, but you had to squint.
Then the fifth and final one was just one vertical peg-mark and two at a rising angle – a combination which Harry had seen before.
"These are all the same word," she told them. "You might recognize that last one as the rune for sun in the Assyrian runic script, but they started as this first one which was a direct symbol of the sun. Then it was rotated, and after that it underwent progressive layers of simplification. Yes, miss Granger?"
"Why did they turn them on their side?" Hermione asked.
"The original shape of Sumerian writing was vertical, if you remember," Professor Babbling explained. "Then when they began writing horizontally, in the same way as English, they simply rotated the whole of the writing at once so that it could still be read in the old way."
She tapped the board. "If there is a correct runic sequence in Assyrian cuneiform, it can also be written in Late Babylonian, Early Babylonian, or either form of Sumerian – though Sumerian must be in the correct orientation. You cannot, however, mix them, in addition to the usual rule on how the rune scheme must be correctly drawn or it will not be magically potent."
Harry took down some notes about that, underlining the bit about how you couldn't mix them.
"A similar rule applies to words, as well as to the individual runes," Professor Babbling said, then, and wrote out words in Latin, Spanish and French as an example – scola, escuela, ecóle. "The letters which make up a word change over time as a language evolves, and this means that which rune sequences are coherent change – and mixing together components which do not work together in a runic sequence will at best result in nothing working."
Harry was the one to put his paw up, this time. "Professor, most of the languages we do for Ancient Runes are ones which don't really get used at all any more. So why do they work?"
"An excellent question," Professor Babbling told him. "Three points, I think. And the answer is that a magical script – and, indeed, magical words – are still magical even though the language is not currently being used."
She held up a finger as a caution. "While magical incantations are individually magical or not, it is a whole language which determines whether it has the potential for runic enchantment or not. However, this also means that the whole language you use for a given inscription must be entirely internally consistent… and this is why when we learn a Runic script we usually stick to one which is no longer being used as a language, and learn it as a static rather than a dynamic system."
Harry had to think about that one a bit, but then he realized why.
He'd read some Middle English (with great difficulty and a dictionary), and he'd seen some of the older books in the library which had those funny cursive esses which looked like an 'f' as much as anything. And if you were writing in English (if you could write runes in English) and the rune script was self-consistent in one of those, using even a single modern word by mistake could be a disaster.
"Futhark simplifies in a similar way, over time," Professor Babbling told them. "But I will not be going over how, because there is a very real risk that someone could mix up the runes. Anyone interested is advised to read Simplification to Staveless, by Merideth Twig."
Harry wrote that down as well.
Professor Babbling waited until they had taken notes, then swept the Latin-French-Spanish off the board and replaced it with four similar-looking heiroglyphs. "It is critical, when translating active runes especially, that you discern which rune schema is being used – a difference here can have an enormous effect on the translation of the meaning…"
"Do you know what classes they used to teach at Hogwarts?" Harry asked, late one evening. "I just wondered today if they'd changed them."
"It is quite possible they did," Empress replied.
Harry could hear a faint tik-tik-tik through the mirror link, followed by a whirr of wings. Then a sharp tak, and the tik-tik-tik sound began again as the cycle repeated.
"I am enjoying your gift," the ancient basilisk told him, and Harry smiled.
He hadn't actually heard her using it before, but what he'd got Empress was something fairly simple – a wooden ball with some of the same slow-the-fall-down enchantments as a Quaffle, and another one to make it glow in the dark. That made it easy enough for even someone without hands to use to play 'fetch' with her animated fire-lizard pet, and while Harry would be the first one to admit that it had been hard to think of what to get Empress it seemed like he'd picked well.
"As for your question… I believe Potions has always been taught here," Empress said, sounding like she was thinking carefully. "Astronomy and Divination were once a single subject, Astrology, and most of the spellcasting classes were once Battle Spells, Household Spells and Travel Spells."
She paused. "And there was Dark Arts, though that was only taught to those who had already passed five years at the school. Salazar thought that was foolish, that if Dark Arts were the hardest of spells to use safely then they should be studied for as long as possible even if spellcasting was only taught in the last two years."
"What about Ancient Runes, and History of Magic?" Harry asked. "Those are the ones which I remember wondering about, because… it sounds silly, but there wasn't as much history back then."
"There was quite enough to be learned," Empress reminded him, with a sibilant chuckle and to the background of the wooden ball bouncing away again. "A thousand years ago it was the height of Rome, and its fall, and the post-fall."
She paused. "Though, yes, to the best of my knowledge the class was simply called 'Runes'. And to the best of my knowledge there was a class in Latin and Greek, which your modern Hogwarts does not have."
"It has a good Dragonish teacher, though," Harry said, with a chuckle.
After a few seconds' pause, he picked up the books he'd laid out. "We've run out of the Pern books, I'm afraid," he explained. "So there's a few choices, and I thought I'd ask you which you were more interested in… firstly, there's another book by the same author as the Pern ones, which is about people with powers that are a bit like magic but mostly not."
"Intriguing," Empress hissed.
Harry put that one down for now and picked up the second. "Then there's a science fiction book, which would be more like Dragonsdawn than anything but with more space stuff in it than that book. I partly thought of this one because it's got Basilisk in the name, though that's just the name of a planet."
"Well, it sounds like they have excellent taste in names for planets," the basilisk in question judged. "Would it be hard to follow?"
"I was going to explain anything that was a bit hard to understand," Harry assured her. "The third one is one of the Discworld books, which are sort of a funny sideways look at magic and culture and things like that. It's the sort of place where Death is a tall skeleton on a white horse, but if he drinks enough he's still going to fall over backwards."
"I think something funny sounds like just the thing," Empress decided. "Was there a fourth, though?"
"Well, I could read you the sequel to The Hobbit, which is The Lord Of The Rings," Harry supposed. "It doesn't have dragons in it, though."
"A sad loss."
Harry waited, and after about twenty seconds Empress spoke again.
"I think the Discworld book sounds best," she decided.
"All right, then," Harry agreed, putting the others away, and opened it to the first page to read the first line before flicking his gaze up to the dragon on the cover of Dragonsdawn.
"This," he said, "is the bright candlelit room where the life timers are stored – shelf upon shelf of them, squat hourglasses, one for every living person…"
A week or so into February, and only a few days before the start of the much-anticipated Apparition lessons, Professor Diggle began a lesson by taking his hat off with a flourish.
"Would anyone be able to tell me what use these things have, in the event of a proper fight?" he asked, taking out first an origami bird – then a small statuette, a glass rabbit, and finishing up by pulling an entire chair from within the hat's brim.
A few hands went up, somewhat dubiously, and the Professor pointed to Draco. "Mr. Malfoy."
"They can confuse your opponent," Draco suggested. "If you throw them at him then he'll wonder what you're trying to do."
"Alas, not quite what I was looking for," Professor Diggle said. "Close, though! Miss Li?"
"Is this about using magic in creative ways, Professor?" Su checked.
"Very well done, Miss Li," their Professor told her. "That is indeed the topic – though you'd better be good at other kinds of magic!"
He spread his hand. "Alas, I won't be able to show you how to use Apparition in a fight, because none of you are yet qualified to Apparate. But there are many other tricks… for example, the famous Killing Curse cannot be stopped by magic, and your only defence is if it hits something else."
Professor Diggle twitched his wand, and the origami bird fluttered up.
"Such as this, for example," he explained, as the bird circled once before bursting into flame. "Though of course the Killing Curse is extremely destructive, so you should not expect a poor origami bird to last through more than one. You can use Transfiguration to Animate an object and use that to catch spells, or you can use a Charm to Levitate it, or you can Conjure something instead."
He gave them all a pleasant smile, as the glass rabbit animated and began jumping in front of his face. "Can anyone else think of another such trick?"
Draco's hand went up again, and Professor Diggle decided to point to him for the second time.
"If you bombard your opponent with things then you'll distract them," the Slytherin boy said. "Like I already explained."
"Quite!" Professor Diggle said, sounding tremendously excited. "It can be quite hard to focus on getting your Expelliarmuses and your Stupefies quite correct when you are being beset by animated birds, and if a chair kicks you in the shins it will mess up both your spellcasting and your footwork!"
He winked. "It may be a little less directly satisfying than a Dancing Hex, but you also do not need to hit your opponent with the spell itself – which can make everything a lot easier."
Harry put up his paw.
"So like what Cedric Diggory did two years ago in the Triwizard Tournament?" he asked, when called on. "He used a lot of Transfiguring rocks into dogs, and that kind of thing."
"An excellent example, Mr. Potter!" their professor agreed. "A little inventiveness makes that sort of thing work much better! But can anyone think of a different example that does not use Transfiguration?"
That resulted in a bit of silence, then Ron put up his hand.
"I thought of Conjuring, but I was pretty sure that's something we cover in Transfiguration," he explained.
"Quite right," Professor Diggle agreed. "Either you are conjuring something new, or you are moving something around that already exists, or you are Transfiguring or Animating something that already exists. There simply isn't another option, because the object has to come from somewhere."
He steepled his fingers. "Let's move on now to specifics. I'd like you all to spend ten minutes coming up with ideas for how to use specific spells like that, and then we'll see how many we have between us."
Harry started writing straight away, beginning with spells like Avis to conjure birds and Aguamenti which made a rush of water, saying that the Water Charm could be used both to directly block or distract and as a source of water to then freeze.
That led to writing down the Freezing Charm as well, and then the summoning charm Accio as a way to pull objects in your direction. Then there were a few Animation spells, and after a bit more thought Harry realized that the Transfiguration spells where you turned cards into chairs would qualify as well as they'd make something that was small turn into something big.
Even a first-year spell about making a pineapple tap-dance would at least be distracting, so Harry wrote that one down, and the Patronus could be quite distracting as well. But Harry then decided he didn't want to end up with a huge list of spells that all could be distracting and not much else, so he added a few more bits of Transfiguration which made something that could fly around.
It felt like there should be some sort of Charm to make things fly around you as well, but after writing down that concept (and before remembering if there was one) they were out of time and Professor Diggle asked for some suggestions.
Dean had the idea of Summoning whatever your opponent was standing on, especially if it were something like a paving stone, while one idea Neville had was to Transfigure something into a shield – as in, a physical shield of the sort knights had – and use that, including to hit someone over the head if need be. He also said that you could probably do pretty well by Transfiguring a tree out of something nearby, though it was Draco who suggested you could just transfigure a bear and have it call for help.
"If it's going to call for help, then why a bear?" Ernie asked.
"I know I'd be distracted by a bear calling for help," Draco riposted.
Hermione, as it turned out, had what Harry thought was probably the best idea. There was a charm which let you levitate lots of individual things, and she suggested using it on a pack of playing cards before Engorging them all at once – so you had a whole collection of expendable cards in mid-air for you to defend yourself with.
Of course, you would have to carry around a pack of playing cards to make it work. (Though Harry had heard of a card game called Magic, and using those cards to do that sounded sort of funny.)
When Saturday rolled around and it was time for the Apparition lessons to begin, Harry found himself wondering whether it was like the types of teleportation that there were in other books he'd read.
There were a lot of choices, really. Sometimes there were simple tricks involved, as well, like in the Pug books where the houses of powerful wizards had patterns on the floor of certain rooms to make it easy to know where to appear.
Their lessons were scheduled for the morning, and in the Great Hall, and for a reason Harry couldn't quite discern they all had to line up in rows in their Houses – all four Heads of House were there, and by the time all forty Sixth-Years had arrived (nobody had been kept back a year, so they were all Sixth-Years) so had the instructor from the Ministry.
"A very good morning to you all," the instructor smiled, in a sort of thin way. "I am Wilkie Twycross and I will be instructing you all in Apparition for the next twelve weeks."
Dean immediately put his hand up (Harry was at the back of the line, so he could see it), and Mr. Twycross paused for a moment before calling on him. "Yes?"
"Does that mean the lessons will be going on over the Easter holiday?" Dean asked.
"Ah, well…" the Ministry wizard said. "That is an excellent question, Mr…"
"Thomas," Dean introduced himself.
"And, yes, I believe… I will need to get back to you on that," Mr. Twycross admitted. "It may be that you will be advised not to go home over the Easter holiday. In any case, I will be hoping to prepare you for your Apparition test over the course of the next twelve weeks, though only those of you who have already turned seventeen by that time will be able to take it at that point."
Harry wondered how he'd be organizing his test. He supposed that he'd probably be staying with Sirius for the second half of the summer holidays, so that would make it easy enough.
It did make him wonder if he should learn to drive, though. If there was a car that would fit him in any way that wasn't terribly awkward, at least.
Mr. Twycross went on to remind them about how it wasn't possible to Apparate or Disapparate at Hogwarts, and that Professor Dumbledore had lifted that jinx within the Great Hall for the duration of the lesson only – and that it would be very unsafe to try and Apparate out through an Anti-Disapparition Jinx.
The next bit was for everyone to separate themselves so that there was at least five feet between them, or in Harry's case about eight – which was fairly easy to manage, because the Great Hall was big enough – and Mr. Twycross conjured a wooden hoop in front of each student.
"The core of Apparition is made up of the three 'D's," he told them all. "Destination, Determination, Deliberation!"
Harry immediately started thinking about how those compared to going Between.
He supposed that Destination was obvious, it was making sure you knew where you were going to go. But then with going Between, making sure you knew where you wanted to go was followed by wanting to go there, and that was really all there was to it – you had to know where you were going and to be sure that you were actually going to travel.
And Deliberation wasn't really clear.
Mr. Twycross told them that step one was to fix your mind firmly on the desired Destination, like the interior of the hoop in their case, and Harry decided to do that rather than try and work out how to Apparate from the words alone.
The second step was that you had to focus your Determination to occupy that space, and let it fill your entire body. By the sounds of things that was what Harry had already started doing, thinking not just about where you wanted to go but about wanting to do it, and he did his best to focus on nothing but that.
It was quite hard, as it usually was when you had to concentrate on only one thing. Harry kept thinking about the dragon mentioned in one of the Pern books who'd appeared underground and been discovered a long time later when they found him while digging a tunnel.
The third step was to turn on the spot, 'feeling your way into nothingness', which did sound like going Between – and the Deliberation in this case was moving with deliberation, which Harry had a bit of trouble parsing.
It was on a one-two-three, but when Mr. Twycross said three – and even though Harry did his best to turn on the spot without hitting someone with his tail – nothing much seemed to happen. Nobody vanished in the faint crack of an Apparition, nobody disappeared and then reappeared in their hoop, though a few people got overexcited and jumped into the air and about half of the Sixth Years fell over.
Falling over was about the most that anyone managed during the first Apparition lesson, which was a bit disappointing but on the other paw Harry supposed that – really, if you thought about it, there were only three ways that an Apparition lesson could go. Either you'd get it right, which would mean you'd Apparated, or you wouldn't Apparate (in which case you'd fall over, or not fall over) or you'd do one of those awkward things in the middle like Splinching (which was so unpleasant that even the word sounded quite nasty).
They couldn't practice the magic itself over the week in between, and anyway there was quite a bit of homework to do (not to mention managing two clubs, and slowly reading The Pearls of Lutra while trying to actually do the riddles when they came up) but Harry still found himself thinking a lot about how you were meant to Apparate.
"Well, it's sort of like accidental magic, isn't it?" Ron asked, over dinner on Thursday. "Or wandless magic, but it's basically the same thing, you're doing it without a wand."
"They're different, though?" Dean said.
He waved his hand. "With wandless magic you need to be really good at casting the spell already, or pretty good at least, while with accidental magic you're doing it despite having no idea how."
"Ron's got a point," Hermione told them both, and by extension Harry and Neville. "Accidental magic is known to involve really wanting something a lot, which is how children can do it even though they're not used to casting magic – it sort of lets them force it. While with wandless magic knowing how to cast the spell well makes it easier, but you still have to focus and want to cast it."
She pointed at Professor Dumbledore, calmly eating some garlic bread up at the high table. "Otherwise Professor Dumbledore would be casting spells wandlessly all the time, just from thinking about them."
"That does make sense," Dean admitted. "So… that means…"
"I think you might need to get so you can feel as determined as possible, while still being able to focus on where you're going," Harry said. "Or, so that focusing on where you're going is so easy that you can be fully determined?"
His wing waved around a bit as he tried to emphasize the right points, which was hard when he wasn't sure what the right points were. "It's not like going Between because you can do it on the ground, and because you can aim for somewhere without it being unambiguous… maybe it's sort of how you know where you're going, however it is you know that?"
"That'd make sense," Neville agreed, frowning.
"I know Charlie landed five miles south of where he was aiming, once," Ron added. "So that's basically getting lost?"
"When did that happen?" Neville blinked. "Must have been a bit of a shock."
"Yeah, he landed on some poor Muggle woman doing her shopping," Ron agreed. "Bit embarrassing, it was his Apparition test."
Harry wondered where they did the Apparition tests, now.
The next day, Friday, was also Valentine's Day, and as usually happened Harry spent quite a lot of the day thinking about how glad he was that other people were enjoying it.
He didn't really have anything specifically focused on Valentine's Day to do, except for the normal lessons he had (Transfiguration and Runes in the morning and nothing in the afternoon) and supervising to make sure the Valentine's Day events didn't get too out of hand.
The specially enchanted love-heart-shaped cards which flew to their intended recipient like butterflies – courtesy of a particularly clever idea from someone at MMM, though Harry wasn't sure who – went down well and were quite easy to keep track of, but there were also gifts going everywhere and sometimes they were a bit more disruptive… or a bit less pleasant.
Someone sent a supposed sweetheart a lit wizarding firecracker, which was harmless but quite startling when it exploded in the common room, while a box of chocolates anonymously delivered for Ron smelled so unusual to Harry (and, for that matter, to the Barlos girls) that Harry took them straight to Professor McGonagall for advice even though it meant interrupting her lesson to some second-years.
That led to both of them going to Professor Snape (and interrupting his lesson for some first-years), a few tests, and then all three of them going to give a surprised and quite shocked Romilda Vane a week of detention for the use of love potion.
Professor Snape seemed particularly angry about it, even more so than Professor McGonagall. Harry wondered for a moment why that was, because love potion was a sneaky sort of thing and you'd think it'd be a bit more Slytherin, but it only took him properly thinking about that to realize that was a silly way of thinking about it – you might find the sneakiest people in Slytherin, or you might not, but that didn't mean that everyone in Slytherin approved of any specific sneaky thing… just like going to punch a troll in the mouth would be brave, but nobody would expect Professor McGonagall to approve of it.
By the time all that was sorted out, it was the middle of the afternoon, and while both Professors went back to their interrupted lessons Harry decided to go and see how Ron was doing.
"There you are, Harry," Ron said, waving to him from a corner of the library. "Everything okay?"
"Not really, I had to get involved in giving someone a detention," Harry explained, seeing Hermione was there as well. "It's sorted out now, though."
"Sorry," Hermoine winced, looking up from a sheet of paper with some scribbled diagrams on it. "I was-"
"It's fine," Harry assured her. "Don't worry."
She still looked a bit worried, so Harry went on. "What are you up to? Runes homework?"
"No, or, not quite," Ron told him. "It's something I realized when I was reading one of those Mars books again… that rocket design I've got is great for going up, but it's not great at steering."
"I was out of Arithmancy by then," Hermione added. "So we're trying to work something out. It's either using some kind of magical solution by doing a broomstick steering enchantment sort of thing…"
"...or it's making a steering rocket thing," Ron took over. "We don't need to worry that much about being aerodynamic, but I still think it's better if we use small nozzles because a broomstick thing might not work at high speed."
"And that means I'm trying to work out what the thrusters need to be able to do," Hermione continued. "And how to control them."
"It's mostly going to be when you need to do things slowly, right?" Harry checked. "So you could do it with individual switches."
"Or levers," Ron said. "Or maybe still using magic, but making it so that turning a switch makes the vent open… I had the idea of making it a tank full of water that keeps refilling itself, for the propellant, but that would only work in space."
"But that would give you a supply of water, which you'd need anyway," Hermione said. "And then for steering on the way up or down you could use a broomstick steering enchantment – you won't be going that fast at that point, anyway, so it should work!"
Quietly, Harry decided to leave them to it.
It wasn't a particularly normal way to spend the Fourteenth of February, but then again Hogwarts wasn't a particularly normal school to spend your school years at.
The second set of Apparition lessons were a lot like the first, except for two things which were improvements. Or, rather, one thing was an improvement and the other was the sort of thing which Harry had to think about to see if it counted as an improvement.
Halfway through the lesson, with everyone scowling ferociously as they tried to muster Determination while still keeping up Deliberation and not forgetting the Destination, Blaise put up his hand.
"Purely in the interests of book keeping," he said, without actually waiting for Mr. Twycross to call on him, "what happens if we get one of those steps wrong?"
"Mr. Zabini, please do not distract the rest of the class," Mr. Twycross chided him. "However, to explain – everyone please stop focusing on your destinations until I tell you to start again."
There was a sort of sigh of relief that rippled through the hall, and Mr. Twycross began to list off.
"The first way that an Apparition can fail is if you do not have a valid destination, or if you have insufficient determination," he told them. "The Apparition will simply not work. This is the safest kind of error."
Since it was the only kind of error so far, Harry supposed that if there was one error everyone made all the time then that one was probably the best one for it to be.
There were a few mutterings (Harry overheard Justin say something about how at least that usually didn't happen when you were learning to drive), "Secondly, if your destination is valid but not where you intended, you can end up somewhere else, which is usually not a large problem but can be quite embarrassing."
That prompted more hands to go up, and over the next few minutes Harry learned (or, at least, had confirmed) that you could Apparate to somewhere you'd never been by doing it off the map. Or even by directions, so you could Apparate to "a mile to the north" or "the top of that hill over there".
It was more versatile than going Between, in that respect, although without as much range and with no way to go back in time.
"The third kind of problem is an error in deliberation," Mr. Twycross told them, then. "It is the infamous Splinching. It is relatively safe with so many people around to help, though."
Harry looked at all four Heads of House, and felt quite grateful that they were there to do the helping.
Especially when the other new thing happened, ten minutes later, when Daphne Greengrass managed to Apparate into her hoop but left her arm behind.
It was a lot less messy than Harry would have imagined, for someone to lose their arm. It seemed as though in some way the arm hadn't been removed so much as disassociated, still attached but at a distance, and it only took a few seconds for Professors Snape and Sprout to reverse the unfortunate accident with a cloud of purple smoke.
Daphne looked quite pale, afterwards, and went to have a bit of a sit down. But it meant someone actually had done the magic (albeit not quite correctly) and that seemed to give everyone a bit more confidence.
Harry was starting to see why they expected it to take twelve weeks for everyone to learn to Apparate, though. Either it was a very hard thing to teach, or it wasn't very hard to teach but nobody had much of an idea how to teach it.
Either way, it was much more clear now why some people might just choose to take the Knight Bus.
"I sometimes wonder why it is nobody tried raising dragons like this before," Dean said, rubbing Ivor's scales down.
If Ivor had been a mammal, or almost-mammal (like a winged horse, which were mostly mammals except for their wings and a few other features) then it would have been with a currycomb, but since Ivor was instead a juvenile Ukranian Ironbelly Dean was using a wire scourer.
"Probably because of how quickly they get bigger," Harry suggested.
He waved a wing over at Hagrid, who was carefully inspecting Horst's tail. The Horntail twitched irritably, then tried breathing fire, and Hagrid bopped him sharply on the nose as a reminder that that was naughty.
"To get it started, I think you need someone as big as Hagrid," he explained. "Otherwise you don't really have a situation where a misbehaving dragon can be told off, and that leads to bad habits."
"Sorry, didn't catch all of that," Dean admitted.
Harry thought back over what he'd said, and when he'd said it, and realized that he must have been speaking Dragonish for at least some of that.
"Did you get the bit about needing someone as big as Hagrid?" he checked.
Dean waved his hand, then got back to scrubbing Ivor's flank. "I got some of the words."
Harry repeated himself, and Dean nodded. "Yeah, that does make sense. And once you've got one well behaved dragon, like Nora, she can help out… maybe they need to have whatever's going on here at Hogwarts, too, though. Or maybe Nora was just totally unusual and learned Dragonish by herself?"
That was a topic Harry didn't want to speculate on too much, because it would mean getting quite close to the truth and the truth was something it was still best to keep concealed for now.
"Hey, stop," Vincent complained, as Vicky the Vipertooth began to roll sinuously over. "I hadn't finished cleaning that bit!"
She blew a stream of fire, one which went nowhere near anyone, then sneezed.
"Itchy," she said, and scratched her back on the ground a bit.
"I think that's her first word," Professor Kettleburn observed, bustling over. "Is that right, Harry?"
"I told her that word," Gary said proudly. "Itchy is a good word."
"You saying itchy a lot makes me feel itchy too," Sally told him, then found her attention diverted by the need to chastise Billy and tell him tripping people up was a 'No!'.
"Mr. Twycross, sir?" Lily Moon asked, with her hand up. "Why do we turn on the spot to Apparate?"
"That's part of the Apparition process," the Ministry instructor told her – and, by extension, the whole class. "Part of Deliberation."
"That's not what I mean, though," Lily said. "That's just saying that we do it. I'm asking why we do it, because surely we wouldn't just do it for no reason?"
Mr. Twycross looked sort of annoyed, then frowned, and around the room there were a series of sighs as people stopped ferociously concentrating on their Destinations.
"It is because Apparition is, magically speaking, moving without moving," Mr. Twycross said eventually. "And to turn on the spot involves moving, but you do not actually change where you are – which is quite similar, though not exactly the same."
"Right, I think I get it," Justin decided, out loud, which only made Mr. Twycross look testier. "It's like how the asphodel flower is associated with the Greek afterlife, and wormwood is medicinal and poisonous, and sloth's brains are slow, and all those things are involved in the Draught of Living Death which seems like death but isn't."
Harry overheard Professor Snape, very quietly, give three points to Hufflepuff.
"Well that makes a lot more sense, now," Seamus agreed. "Why couldn't you have said that three weeks ago?"
"Silence, please," Mr. Twycross requested. "Now, again, please focus on your Destination. Then feel your Determination fill you…"
Though it sometimes felt like the only thing they were learning was Apparition – especially when everyone was just out of another practice session where nobody had managed to Apparate properly, and when that was all everyone talked about for the next three hours – there were other things they were doing, and though everyone had slightly different schedules there were some things where it just made sense for Harry and all his friends to do them at once.
"Okay, spell development…" Dean said, drawing a few little circles for bullet points. "Actually, how is this different from doing the same thing in Arithmancy?"
"Arithmancy spell development is more like when you make a little change and calculate exactly what the magic will do," Harry replied. "Or it was at OWL level, is it different now?"
"It's still a bit like that, but we're doing it the other way too," Neville told him. "The sort where you define what you want and use that to try and approximate what changes you need… so if you work out that for you to be able to cook with a heat spell you need, um, two hundred degrees C? You'd look at the changes that that would have with whatever heat spell you can already make, and see how it'd have to be different in the calculations… and you end up with, um, not the words of the spell but a pretty good guess."
He shrugged. "So it's sort of like how it's done with Charms, except you don't have to guess as much."
"There is more to it than that in Charms," Hermione said. "There is a bit more guesswork, and there's at least two different ways of creating new spells in Charms without using Arithmancy."
"Oh, yeah, I'm starting to remember this," Ron said, half to himself. "Isn't there something about forcing yourself to do something once through accidental magic?"
"More than once, but yes," Hermione agreed.
"That still sounds weird to me," Dean admitted. "I was listening, in class, but it sounds weird that you have some bit of magic which you do by accidental magic and you then have to try and work out the words by… what, intuition?"
"That's why spell research is hard, it always involves at least some luck," Harry shrugged. "Remember Xenographia and Flipendnote?"
"I use the second one four times a day now at least," Neville said. "So yes."
"What I want to know is if someone has ever invented a new spell by sneezing," Hermione said, sounding highly amused.
"The Summoning Charm sounds like it," Ron suggested. "Blimey, imagine being that bloke? First you sneeze, then half your desk hits you in the face."
"Why are you assuming that it would be a man?" Hermione checked.
Ron shrugged. "Dunno the same word for a woman."
"I think it's Sheila, but only if you're Australian," Dean said. "Any ideas, Harry?"
"Best I can do is blokess, but that sounds like a movie villain," Harry replied, after some though.
A lot of the others didn't have the same feeling, really, like 'chick'.
"Blokette?" Neville tried. "Nah, doesn't sound right."
"We discuss the important things at Hogwarts," Dean announced proudly.
"I am afraid I must confess something," Dumbledore told the Alchemy class. "You see, I consider it bad manners to set something as homework if that homework would be made much easier by knowing something I have not yet passed on."
"Well, that explains a lot," Mandy grumbled, which about summed up the general reaction of the class.
"Indeed," Dumbledore said. "I am equally sure that some of you will have made the connection anyway, but rest assured that this particular round of homework will be marked while taking that into consideration. Now, and belatedly, I must actually explain to you what I unaccountably failed to pass on before."
Harry was fairly sure he'd followed that.
"I asked for a collection of properties which cannot easily fit together," Dumbledore went on. "And that is because today we will be starting our look into the matter of latent properties – that is to say, the creation of a single material which acts in two or more different ways depending on the situation."
Picking up something from his desk, Dumbledore held it up – demonstrating that it was a piece of charcoal, of the sort Dean sometimes used to sketch with and which they had already used in Alchemy previously.
Then he held it over a large glass tub, and snapped it in half.
It immediately melted, turning to a black liquid, and Dumbledore held up the tub to demonstrate. He sloshed it back and forth a little, then lit a wooden taper and dropped that in, and the liquid ignited with a sort of oily smoke.
"There are, of course, plenty of things you can do with this sort of trick," Dumbledore told them. "So many, in fact, that I have no doubt at all that your minds are positively fizzing with the possibilities. However, if you can please instruct your minds to remain unfizzed for a little longer, we will start with a simple example so that I can be sure you all have the right idea."
Harry actually didn't have plenty of examples in his mind, because the trick was almost too broad. It had been mentioned in The Hermetic Guide to Alchemy, he remembered that, but there had to be all sorts of restrictions on it… and if there weren't any (or, at least, if there weren't any apart from the fundamental baseline rules of alchemy) then the potential was so huge that Harry didn't have anywhere to work from when it came to coming up with ideas.
"Firstly, to the alchemical components for sensitization," Dumbledore went on. "We will want to include an example of a material which has different properties in different states into both parts of our alchemical formulation, and then combine the two."
The flames were out, by now, and Dumbledore replaced the glass tub with a metal one before putting up some transparent screens.
Everyone crowded around, recognizing that a further demonstration was going to take place, and Dumbledore took out a strange bead which might have been glass – one with a rounded head, like a normal droplet, but a very long and wispy tail which seemed flexible enough to twist a little as it was moved.
"Strange as it may seem, this is not a true product of alchemy," he told them. "It is a Muggle creation, known in this country as Prince Rupert's Drop and elsewhere as a Prussian Tear or Dutch Tear. It is made of glass."
Putting the Drop into the metal tub, Dumbledore told them all to watch closely – then took a large hammer out from a nearby drawer and hit the head of the Drop extremely hard.
"Merlin!" Parvati yelped. "What-"
She stopped, because the bead was still there.
"Prince Rupert's Drop is very durable indeed, as you can see," Dumbledore smiled at them. "I was at least ninety-five percent sure that would happen, and of course if it had not worked then I would be giving you a slightly different explanation now. But that is only one half of what is going on here."
He took a pair of wire clippers, picking up the drop's tail, and carefully placed the very tip of the drop into the clippers. Then he squeezed, and as soon as the clippers closed the whole drop exploded into dust.
"So it's really strong at the head, and really weak at the tail," Harry said. "And the fact that it makes such a massive change is why you can use that to alchemically set up something with two properties?"
"Quite correct," Dumbledore told him, putting the tub away again.
He clapped his hands. "Now! What we will be working on today will involve the creation of a material which is dry to the touch, but which gives off water when burned. This is not entirely dissimilar to a material Muggles have already created, but the alchemical version will be more effective."
"Hold on, wait, what?" Blaise asked. "Muggles have already made something that gives off water when it's burned? How does that even… what?"
"The material is called plasterboard, or drywall," Dumbledore told him, pleasantly. "It is largely made of gypsum, which contains water; however, it is disappointingly unable to produce this water in the kind of quantities we will be looking at today."
Blaise still looked stunned by the idea. Harry couldn't blame him, because he'd never heard of that material before.
"Speaking of gypsum," the Headmaster went on, "we will be wanting to begin with some, along with one of the two Prince Rupert's Drops which you will be using…"
In yet another Apparition lesson, the last before the Easter Holidays, Harry tilted his head to the side a bit and twitched his ears.
His glasses tried to leap free, and he arrested them with a paw.
There was a definite surly air to the proceedings, by now, largely because most of Sixth Year had decided that Mr. Twycross either didn't really know how to teach Apparition or he did know but was deliberately withholding it.
"But why do people Splinch?" Theodore demanded. "You keep telling us not to do it, but it's not exactly easy to avoid doing something if you have no idea how it's happening."
"Splinching is the result of insufficient Deliberation," Mr. Twycross replied. "That should be all that matters."
Terry Boot didn't just interrupt like Theodore had, but he did put his hand up, and Mr. Twycross waited for about ten seconds before finally deciding he couldn't avoid it and calling on the Ravenclaw.
"Splinching is when you Apparate and not all of you goes," Terry said. "Is that because you're sort of compressing to be really small, and not all of you shrinks enough to fit?"
"That is a complete and incorrect simplification of the reason behind Splinching," Mr. Twycross said. "The process of Apparating involves a collapse, not a compression, because it is a matter of alteration of space instead of alteration of matter, and then the collapse is reverted in the new location. If, however, the collapse is performed with insufficient deliberation then the Apparition itself occurs before the collapse is complete, and the two areas of space remain linked."
He gave Terry a vaguely supercilious look. "That is why you cannot Apparate if you have Splinched and the Splinch has not been resolved."
Harry thought that was actually a lot like what Terry had said, but he supposed the difference was important if you were an Apparition expert.
"What about if you just wanted to Apparate to, um, 'London'?" Susan asked then. "Would that make you more likely to Splinch because you're being vague?"
"As I am sure I have already explained, a failure in being specific in Destination leads to your not Apparating at all, not to a Splinch," Mr. Twycross said. "If, however, you are specific enough to appear somewhere in London, then you will not Splinch unless your Deliberation is at fault."
Dean muttered something, too faintly for Harry to hear, and a claret-and-blue scarf appeared in the middle of his wooden ring.
Then, with a quite distinct crack, he Apparated into it.
"Just like that, yes!" Mr. Twycross said, sounding excited for the first time since he'd arrived. "Quite correct!"
"It's amazing how much it helps to know what's actually going on," Dean said, smoothing out the scarf before stepping back out of the wooden ring. "And I think everyone's getting confused by all the nearly identical wooden hoops on the same floor."
Mr. Twycross didn't seem to know quite how to react to that.
AN:
Ron has decided to go to space, and he's putting in the effort to make it happen.
Also, Mr. Twycross isn't a very good teacher.
And that is a real property of drywall, gypsum is about fifty percent water by volume and so it takes a lot of heat to evaporate off the water.
