Once everyone had sat down in Alchemy, Albus stood up and raised a finger.

"Today, after more than a year full of lovely learning, I am afraid we will have to talk about your NEWT exams," he said. "It's a pity, I know, but I have been informed by the board of governors that exams are in fact necessary. So I thought the simplest way of making sure everyone heard about this would be to explain it right now, as I am in fact doing."

He finished his little speech and looked proud, until Hermione put up her hand.

"Professor, I think you forgot to actually tell us anything about the exam," she said.

"Ah," Dumbledore smiled. "Thank you. I knew something had slipped my mind."

He turned towards the board. "Since Alchemy is quite an individual subject, it cannot be fully covered in a stuffy exam room. There will be a stuffy exam room, I am afraid, along with demonstrating that you can do a number of fairly basic transmutations, but a significant part of your mark will be in the form of project work."

Harry tilted his head slightly, and raised his paw.

"Mr. Potter," Albus said.

"What kind of project work do you mean, Sir?" he asked. "I know that we've been keeping notebooks, is that part of it?"

"An excellent question," the Headmaster told him. "It's a great pity that it wouldn't make much sense to put on the exam. But yes, Harry, the notebooks will be part of it – you will in fact be doing an investigative project, into properties which alchemists have not yet fully explored."

"You mean we're doing original research?" Mandy said, impressed, then belatedly put her hand up. "I mean, ah, Professor?"

"Quite right, Miss Brocklehurst," Dumbledore confirmed. "And while that may sound strange at first, I will remind you firstly that some of your colleagues at this very school have been advancing magic in new ways themselves – and secondly that Alchemy is a field which has not had many practitioners, on the whole, over the years. The simple fact is that it is a terribly uncommon thing to study, and as a result there have not been many Alchemists – so there have not yet been enough of us doing enough things to have discovered everything."

He let that sink in for a moment (a moment in which Harry felt a sort of embarrassed pleasure that he was fairly sure Dumbledore was talking about him, or at least partly about him, both for the Nora-and-Empress thing and for the Ratatoskr thing), then tapped the end of his long nose.

"Of course, that is not to say that we have not discovered a lot of things," he said. "And I would be singularly bad at thinking of things we have not yet examined, because if it came easily to mind I would have most likely already studied it as an alchemist myself. So I wonder if any of you might have an idea or two?"

Several hands went up, and after some consideration Albus selected Blaise to speak first.

"Aren't there some metals which Muggles have started making recently, which haven't been discovered before?" he asked. "Would those do?"

"An interesting suggestion, Mr. Zabini, but I fear that at least some of those metals would be rather dangerous to study," the Headmaster told him. "I would not like to see the result of one of your test transmutations being that you had managed to make the alembic fantastically poisonous, so I would not want to see you undertake the project unless you had gone over it to explain why that would not happen before starting."

Hermione went next, and asked about plastics, and Dumbledore told her that that seemed like quite a good field of study if you asked him. There were lots of plastics and there was definitely scope to look at more than one of them, and Hermione considered a bit before saying that she wanted to look at whether there was a difference using recycled plastic.

"That sounds like a fascinating thing to discover," Dumbledore smiled. "I will be looking forward to it."

He reached behind him onto his teacher's desk, and one of his notebooks jumped up and flew into his hand.

"For the purposes of this project, I will want you to be using a new notebook," he informed them. "You should label it with your name, and the date, and put down all the hypotheses you have and experiments you conduct while doing your research – in as much detail as possible. That way, the examiners will be able to tell what you have done, and you will only need to bring in an example of a transmutation you have conducted to show you have done the research."

"What if you find out it's useless?" someone asked, quietly enough that Harry couldn't quite tell who had spoken.

Dumbledore beamed. "I must say, I delight in discovering something is useless. Imagine how much time I have saved for future generations by writing down clearly and with proof that the idea does not work."

Harry's paw had gone up while Dumbledore was talking, and the Professor pointed to him. "Mr. Potter?"

"I was wondering about Muggle computer equipment," Harry explained. "At first I thought about things like liquid crystal displays, because those work at Hogwarts and they're all about changing, and maybe that's an idea someone could do, but then I thought that perhaps just doing transistors would work. Those are about changing from one thing to another as well, it's what they're meant to do, and it's all about a small effect making something big happen."

"Wonderful," Dumbledore told him. "I believe Harry has at least one idea going free to anyone who can catch it – and nobody else should feel they need to stop suggesting things once they have their own project, as well."

"What about doing something with helium?" Sally-Anne suggested. "There's loads more of that around now than there used to be, and it's got all sorts of properties you could do alchemical things with. You could make floating rocks, maybe?"

"Not only an excellent idea, but quite a fetching decoration," Dumbledore complimented her. "Though I would advise using too many of them on one tree, as you might find it floating away..."

January became February, and as the snow became sleet the second Quidditch game of the year rolled around.

Ron had been sure to run the team fairly hard, giving them plenty of practice sessions, and had also done what Oliver had done in his later years on the team and set up second-string players. He'd gone further than Oliver though and made sure to have at least one backup player for each position, meaning that they could do drills on things like Beater defence or tackling or even Seeker-against-Seeker chases (and how the other players could intervene with that) while their backup Keeper let Ron watch during attempts at shots on goal instead of focusing all his attention on acting as Keeper all the time.

The result (at least as far as Harry could tell, remembering his own year on the Quidditch team) was that everyone knew what they were doing and was good at it. Which was really all you could hope for.

"Welcome to the third Quidditch match of the year," Luna said. "Or the first, depending on where you think the year starts. Or even the fifth, if you still think the year starts in April like people did in the Middle Ages. Anyway, on one side we have the Gryffindor team, captained by Ron Weasley, and on the other side we have the Hufflepuff team captained by Zacharias Smith."

"I am so glad for magic," Neville said, looking up at the drizzling rain and sleet streaming away from them as if it was hitting an invisible glass bubble. "There's no way I'd be watching a Quidditch game in the middle of winter like this if it weren't for those spells."

"If it wasn't for magic, you wouldn't be watching Quidditch at all," Tanisis pointed out. "You know, technically."

"And as for watching games in the middle of winter, mate, I support West Ham," Dean said. "I've been to a few games where the weather was worse than this, and had to suffer from losing as well."

Harry scratched his head. "Besides, we did watch Quidditch in first-year," he pointed out. "And second-year, as well, or at least you did, because I was busy competing. Didn't you get wet then?"

"I'm allowed to not like water now, I'm part cat or something," Neville shrugged. "You agree, right, Tanisis?"

"That's stereotyping," the sphinx informed him.

"Just because it's a stereotype doesn't mean you have to avoid fitting it, queen," Isaac said. "I've been on the Quidditch team for over a year and I'm still grateful for not being wet, even though I've been practicing in it for abar a year and a half. Dominic is on the Hufflepuff team this year, and he's been practicing in this proper baltic weather too."

"Oh, we're all grateful for not being wet," Dean said. "Not caring much about being rained on is one thing, actually preferring it is another."

Harry was still trying to process queen.

The whistle blew, and everyone looked towards the pitch as fifteen brooms rose into the air.

Ron went pelting straight for the Gryffindor goal hoops, and there was a complicated ten seconds as the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff Chasers tried to establish control of the Quaffle until one of the Hufflepuffs got it and made a quick run on goal.

That first shot got blocked, and Ron threw the Quaffle upfield. Melody's Bludger knocked it much further towards the Hufflepuff hoops, and Kayleigh spun upside down to catch the Quaffle before throwing it in and scoring the first goal of the match.

"That's a good omen," Dean said. "We learned that in Divination."

"That's the kind of thing Professor Trelawney teaches in Divination?" Hermione asked, disapprovingly. "It seems like common sense."

"Actually, that was Firenze," Dean replied. "He said that either the team which scores the first goal is better, or the team which scores the first goal is luckier. And if it's better, then it tells you who's likely to win, while if it's luckier then – hey, it's not like anyone's going to turn down luck."

"If we'd had him for OWLs I might still do that subject," Hermione mused. "It's a much more sensible way of doing things."

"I think he once said that a dice that came up six a quarter of the time was still loaded," Dean said. "So divination doesn't have to work every time to be helpful."

"Die," Neville corrected.

"Blimey, I get enough of that in Trelawney's classes..."

On the pitch, Zacharias Smith had got hold of the Quaffle now, and was driving towards the Gryffindor goals with Dennis and Demelza chasing after him and Cadwallader swooping in on his left as support. Ginny abandoned her orbit looking for the Snitch to come diving down as well, looking to interrupt their movement towards the Gryffindor end, and Melody launched a Bludger straight at the formation.

With such a concentration of force coming his way, Zacharias threw the Quaffle up and to his left and ducked out of the way.

"That could have been quite painful," Luna observed, as Ginny swept right to avoid being hit by the Bludger and both Dennis and Demelza turned to focus their attention on Cadwallader. "I wonder where the Hufflepuff Beaters are – oh, there's Ellie!"

Harry was fairly sure Ellie meant Eleanor Branstone, who swung her bat and knocked the other Bludger straight at Ron. He did a sloth grip roll to avoid the ball without losing his guard position, but the spin meant he lost track of what was going on on the field for just a moment… a crucial moment, as Cadwallader punched his Bludger back across to the right and Dominic swept down from overhead.

His tail flashed across – padded in a layer of Quidditch armour to prevent anyone from being injured – and hit the Quaffle straight towards the bottom Gryffindor goal hoop, getting past Ron's last-minute defence and evening up the score.

"That was quite clever," Luna told everyone. "I wonder how long it took them to practice that?"

"I wonder how long they tried to make him a Beater before deciding to stick him with Chaser," Harry said. "It's really tempting to do that."

Ginny was rising back up to altitude, and Harry saw Ron shake his head once – not looking at anyone else, so probably just for his own benefit – before giving a sharp signal, which sent Melody and Jimmy out to chase Bludgers and the Chaser team ready for pushing up the field.

"Could we use the silver globe to tell what the weather's going to be?" Neville asked.

"Weather's a bit tricky," Dean replied. "Sometimes you can predict it weeks or months in advance, but sometimes you just can't predict it at all. I guess maybe with the globe you could see clouds coming, but that's kind of a waste when you can just… look out the window?"

"It's an underrated way of forecasting the weather, man," Isaac said.

Tanisis sniggered about something – Harry wasn't quite sure what – then Hermione gasped, and Harry's gaze snapped up to the Quidditch game.

The Hufflepuff Beaters had hammered in both Bludgers towards the Gryffindor goals at the same time as Zacharias had thrown the Quaffle, meaning that Ron was facing having to catch a Quaffle without being hit by either Bludger. He had just a moment to prepare, and spun his broom around to face backwards before putting a foot on the brushes and jumping off.

He shrank down to Nutkin, all but vanishing from sight for everyone except Harry (and getting quite close even for Harry) and the Bludgers whistled past either side of him just as the Quaffle arrived. One of his paws touched it, then he grew back out to full size and his foot just about snagged the bristles of his slowly-reversing broom.

Shrinking back a second time (this time using his foot as the reference instead of his hand) Ron let go of the Quaffle but he'd had enough time to bat it downwards. That meant it missed the goal, bouncing off the hoopstand just under the rim, and Ron was able to get settled on his broom before diving down and catching it.

"Bloody hell," Neville winced. "That looked dangerous."

"Well, squirrels don't hit the ground that hard, they're light," Hermione replied. "But it was absolutely very dangerous and I'm going to give him such a talking-to!"

"It was a hell of a save, though," Harry said, emphasizing the point with a half-intentional flare of his wings.

"I just wish he'd make less ridiculous saves," Hermione replied, as Ron threw the ball to Kayleigh and she zipped back up the field with it.

"I wonder if he thinks the Quaffle is an acorn," Luna told the audience. "It would explain a few things, though only a few things."

About five minutes later, the score was eighty points ahead for Gryffindor – after Dennis managed to get a crucial pass to Demelza just over the range of Dominic's tail – when Ginny flipped over into a high speed dive.

Harry groaned.

"What?" Hans said. "What's wrong?"

"She's too far from the Snitch," Harry explained absently, watching the little flickering golden fleck as Ginny sped towards it – and as Summerby also began speeding towards it, from much closer. "Bad luck this time."

The dwarf blinked. "...how did you know that so quickly?"

"Harry's ridiculously good at finding the Snitch," Tanisis explained quickly, and then Summerby had the Snitch – just ahead of Perry, who flashed past him at what Harry thought was more than a hundred and fifty miles an hour before flaring her wings and making a rendezvous with her own broom.

It skidded to a halt not far above the grass, and Ginny spread her hands in a resigned gesture as Hufflepuff began cheering.

"Good game, really," Neville judged. "I know it sounds silly given what just happened, but I think Gryffindor has the best Seeker at the moment and that means that having a good Chaser team is a fearsome combination."

"No, seriously, how good is ridiculously good?" Hans checked, a bit plaintively.

"I saw his games," Colin told Hans, with a grin. "It was hilarious, Harry would just go for the Snitch like it was magnetized."

He frowned. "Or like he was magnetized, since it's already metal."

"Gold isn't magnetic, remember," Harry reminded him. "It's only iron, cobalt, nickel, and I think some weird other elements as well, but gold isn't normally one of them."

"Yeah, but there is magic involved," Colin said, but he was stroking his slightly fuzzy chin. "Maybe, um, like they were both magnetized?"

"There's something I should have mentioned in Alchemy," Hermione realized. "Making things that aren't normally magnetic into magnetic things, and whether you can make something magnetic for… well, things you can't normally attract with a magnet."

"Alchemy sounds right weird like," Isaac judged. "You know, sconner?"

Dean coughed. "Does someone have a Scouser to English dictionary? I kind of feel like I need one."

"Don't be a whopper," Isaac grumbled.

Valentine's day was next Saturday, and Harry mostly noticed the same way he'd noticed the last couple of years… which was when people did rash or outright foolish things as part of romance.

Fortunately nobody actually tried dosing anyone else with a love potion this year, and the worst Harry had to deal with was when someone in Gryffindor challenged someone in Ravenclaw to a duel.

Though that was quite messy enough.

"All right," Harry said, leaning back with his tail coiled as a support and with his forepaws crossed over his chest. "I don't think I'm going to be asking which of you two actually cast the first spell. I know Michael was the one who challenged, but I also know that this was a duel not an ambush."

The Ravenclaw boy, Lowell Goldhorn, looked mulish. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that it's past curfew and the two of you were both casting spells when I arrived," Harry said. "Do either of you actually think that was impressive?"

"I had to," Michael said, but it sounded like he was trying to persuade himself as much as anyone else. "He insulted me."

"I did not," Lowell replied. "You just can't take it that Clarissa was going out with-"

Harry coughed, and both boys fell silent.

It might have been that a bit of flame came out.

"You've got two choices," he said, looking around the damage that a few minutes of OWL-student-level duelling had done to one of the spare Charms classrooms. "You're both getting detention for being out after curfew, but you can either take it later and lose forty points each, or you can take it now and it'll just be the detention."

"What's the catch?" Michael asked.

Harry landed on all fours with a thump, then waved his paw around at the wrecked room. "It's not really a catch, but if you take the detention tonight then you'll be clearing up this room. That means fixing everything, including the things that were already dirty or broken when you came in here."

Lowell grumbled a bit, then sighed. "I guess it could be worse."

"Yeah," Michael said, then remembered who he was agreeing with.

"And if either of you starts fighting again," Harry continued, "I'll assume that means you wanted both detentions and the forty points off."

The tricky thing was trying to make sure that neither boy would be too resentful, while also doing enough that they'd both focus on being annoyed at him rather than each other.

On Sunday afternoon, Harry pored over a dictionary, then noted something down in his research notes.

"Do you think this is the right meaning?" he asked, pointing out gamaru to Hermione. "That's got a conjugation which means to gather completely."

Hermione looked at it, then at the dictionary entries.

"I don't think so," she replied. "The connotations of that word are more to do with completeness than gathering, so it might have the wrong meaning – you don't want the runework to be trying to gather all light in the area, just what you're trying to look at."

Harry nodded, and crossed the word out.

"Right, so I'll probably have to use…" he began, then flicked through. "Hamamu? That's about gathering and collecting… or, no, this one looks better. Matahu is about collecting or fetching, and it's a word with astronomical connotations."

"Or you could just use tadanu," Hermione reminded him. "You'd need to decline it properly, but that's the verb 'to give' and you just need to form it right."

Harry wrote that one down as well. "Yeah, that could work… and I'm already planning on using the form of babalu that works with multiplication."

"If that works, I'm going to be seriously impressed, mate," Ron told him. "Futhark is enough for me so far, I can translate the others okay but making a sequence is a real pain."

"It's going to be on the exam, I expect," Hermione said.

"Don't remind me," Ron groaned. "I just hope I get something that's got the right meanings, and I can space it out so it's technically working."

He raised his hand to block Hermione's next comment. "And yeah, I know that's not really the best way to do it, you don't have to remind me about that either."

Harry sniggered.

"How's the work on the Ratatoskr coming, anyway?" he asked.

"Well, we've got the typewriter set up," Ron replied. "I've been practicing on it, just so I can get my… er, my paws in. It's harder than it sounds, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and that lot are really doing well to do their exams with it."

He stretched. "But apart from that… well, you know about the changes to the silver globe, obviously, that's going fine… oh, yeah, and Nev had an idea for the spacesuits, so what we're going to do is just get a suit of armour and cast some charms on it. There's this weird one from the sixteen hundreds that makes it so the suit's all one solid piece, and you're not meant to cast it on the head bit or you can't breathe but that's what bubble-head charms are for."

"I looked at making the engine nozzle move around a bit, because that would help with turning," Hermione said. "But it's all a bit fiddly and we don't really need it, so that might have to wait for if we make a bigger one later. At the moment the gas nozzles are good enough."

Harry thought about that, tail flicking lazily.

"What's the plan for the next launch?" he asked.

"Testing things, really," Ron replied. "I don't want to be going to the moon until we're sure all the bits that are needed to work there work there, because while I could Apparate down to the ground from orbit I couldn't do it from the moon."

"Unless we get this runic array working," Hermione added, showing Harry her own notebook.

Harry translated off the runes, looking at Hermione's neat pencil and ink writing, and ran through it in his head.

"It looks okay to me," he said. "You've got the runes for force, potential, power and perfection in a loop going around and around, and then here you've got Jera instead of one of the Wunjo, so that's where you harvest the power. And it's a proper fire-air-ice-earth sequence, so it's not working in opposition."

"That's the idea," Hermione said. "The problem is, it's too generalist. We want this to amplify Apparition, but if we do it this way it's going to amplify everything magical – and that's assuming it doesn't end up with the wrong interpretation, because theliw isn't a word in any language I know of."

Harry frowned at it, thinking about how to solve the problem, and pulled over Futhark and Thou before opening it to the main dictionary page.

"Do you need it to be a four-elements sequence?" he asked.

"Well, we don't want it to go the wrong way," Ron said. "And if it reads as a word backwards that'd be a problem too, you don't want it going both ways at once… unless you can make one that's all about being slow and reverses all the runes, that would be good."

Hermione shook her head. "You mean unpredictable."

"They're not that far off being the same thing here," Ron said. "I assume. Anyway, Harry, you've got a pensive look on your muzzle."

"I was just thinking," Harry explained. "What you really want is one which has a word which defines what you need, and one where the matching runes for it happen to produce the sequence you need. So what about…

He grabbed a piece of spare parchment and wrote it down, half trying to think out what he was saying and half trying to get down the idea which suddenly seemed to make sense in his mind. "Fehu, Ansuz, Sowulo, Teiwaz. It's just the word fast, with nothing else about it, and it's fire-air-air-air. Or Sowulo, Pertho, Ehwaz, Ehwaz, Dagaz, but I'm not so sure about that one."

"Hold on a minute," Hermione said, picking up the Edda Carver book they'd got for Fifth Year. "Accio first page of chapter fourteen."

She hadn't bothered picking up her wand, and the Summoning Charm was quite weak – but it was enough to turn the book open to the right page, and she flicked through a few more pages. "I think you're right, for the first one I mean, going fire-air and then back to fire without anything else in between acts like an amplifier. It's a less-common type of sequence, but I can't see anything here to suggest it wouldn't be cyclic."

"So the magic would just run around and around and around," Ron realized, then frowned. "Or, well, you know what I mean, but… how do you get it out? Or use it at all?"

"You'd need to link to it somehow," Harry said, thinking. "Umm… I think I've got an idea, but we'd really need to test it. It's got to do with the Protean Charm, though."

"That's one of our signature spells, that is," Ron decided. "Patronus, Bluebell Flames, and that…"

"All right, you lot," Aberforth said, by way of introduction. "What do you think this saying means?"

He flicked his wand at the page, then the blackboard, and the words The worst policy is to attack cities appeared.

Harry considered it, thinking a bit, then put up his paw.

"Mr. Malfoy," Aberforth selected.

"It's not about that you just shouldn't attack cities," Draco said. "Not in war, anyway. If people knew that that was an easy way to avoid being attacked they'd just all stay in the cities, and you couldn't win."

"So…?" Aberforth asked, and Harry could see Draco frown – clearly thinking again, and not sure if the conclusion that had just come to mind was the right one.

"I… hold on," he realized. "It's something to do with how if you do attack cities, then it's basically worse for you than if you hadn't? Or something?"

"Potter, care to help us clear it up?" Aberforth asked.

Harry nodded. "I actually think clearing it up is the issue, Professor," he said. "Cities are full of people, and it's all going to be really complicated – not only is it easier for people to defend themselves there because there's more of them, but you can end up starting a new war or annoying people who might have actually been on your side before."

"A very good point," Aberforth told him. "In fact, it's such a good point that our next lesson is based on it."

He gestured. "Everyone get up, and float the tables over to the edges of the room… yes, the chairs as well. Come on…"

Once the floor was clear, Aberforth had them all mix up and stand around in the middle of the room.

"All right," he went on. "What we're going to do is a bit of a test. Muffliato."

Harry didn't hear what he said after that, there was just sort of a buzzing sound, but then Ernie MacMillan drew his wand and pointed it at Theodore Nott – and Theo dove for the ground, grabbing at his own wand before casting a shield charm.

Ernie's Stunner spell bounced off and hit Su, and her girlfriend caught her, but then Neville Disarmed Ernie in turn.

"Right!" Aberforth said. "Someone wake Miss Li up, please… thank you, Miss Perks. Now! As you probably guessed, Mr. MacMillan was the only one who knew what was going on there. He was told to attack Mr. Nott-"

"Yeah, of course it'd be me," Theo grumbled.

"Mr. Nott," Aberforth said, warningly. "If I'd picked you, a Slytherin, as the attacker, you'd have complained about stereotyping. If I'd not picked you or any other Slytherin you'd have complained about being left out."

Theo grumbled a bit more, but didn't seem to want to actually refute Aberforth's statement.

"Now, then," the Professor went on. "MacMillan and Nott were the only ones who should have been involved, and if we'd been in an empty classroom they would have been the only ones involved. But instead a spell went wild and hit Miss Li, and of course Mr. Longbottom got involved."

He rapped his fist sharply on the desk. "In a fight in a crowded space, it's much easier for things to get more complicated. But because sometimes they happen, we're going to do them again – for the rest of the lesson – and hopefully you'll be able to have your duel without hitting someone else this time."

Hermione put her hand up. "Should we just be innocent bystanders, then, Professor?"

"Indeed you should," Aberforth told them all. "If you don't hear me call your name, you're a bystander out shopping. Try not to get hit."

A lot of people got hit with a lot of spells over the course of the lesson. Harry was pretty sure every single person in the class had been hit at least twice, and in his case one of those times had been a Stunning spell which broke his glasses and scattered bits of glass and metal over the floor.

Fortunately nobody trod on any bits, and a quick Reparo fixed them – and it wasn't like Harry needed them to see, or anything – but it was a reminder that just because his scales bounced most spells it didn't mean he was invulnerable.

Harry hadn't exactly forgotten, but any reminder was good. It was the sort of thing you really wanted to remember.

"What sort of things are going to be in our NEWT Defence exams?" Dean asked, at lunch. "We're not going to be basically shoved into a room and told to fight it out, right?"

"Probably not," Hermione said, but she sounded a bit dubious. "I expect… well, if I was doing it, I'd say it'd mostly be about making sure you can cast the right spells, like OWLs were, but also having some making sure you can still cast certain spells in a more difficult situation."

Ron nodded. "So… like, there might be some duelling."

"There might," Hermione agreed. "But I don't think they'd let Harry cheat by being a dragon."

"If turning into a dragon at age four counted as cheating, everyone would try it," Neville sniggered.

"I get what she means, though," Harry said. "I was just thinking about it earlier."

"Right, right," Ron agreed.

He tapped his foot on the floor, then took a large beef cornish pasty. "Anyway, we've just got that work about chapter twelve of the Art of War, and then we don't have Defence until next Monday. So… I was kind of wondering."

"There is Alchemy this afternoon," Hermione pointed out, as she took her own one – a cheese and onion one, if Harry's nose was correct. "Obviously not for you, or for Nev or Dean, but Harry and I are going to be busy."

"No, it's nothing to do with that," Ron explained. "I know by now what your schedule's like. The only time I try and schedule things during the week is Thursday mornings because that day you're free until lunch."

Hermione shrugged, unable to deny the truth of what Ron had said.

"I was actually wondering if we could send the Ratatoskr up again for another test, some time," Ron explained. "We've fixed a few of the things that were causing trouble, and I think it'd be good to make sure the new variation on the silver globe works. And see if we can work out how long it'd take to get to the moon."

"Well, Easter break's fairly early this year," Harry said. "Or it feels early."

"That's just the homework, I think," Neville guessed.

Harry shrugged. "So we could try for just after the end of term, or we could try during a weekend in March."

"Let's go for during the term," Ron decided. "We can always abort and go later, but if we aim for the last possibility then we might get stormed off."

"I could do you a weather prediction," Dean suggested. "In fact – we recently did this – I could do you a weather prediction for the whole rest of the year."

"Weren't you saying that Divination is a bit fiddly about the weather just a few weeks ago?" Neville said.

"He did say it was a bit funny about that sort of thing," Harry pointed out, but he was smirking.

By now he could usually recognize when Dean was in that sort of mood.

"Well, then, what is it?" Neville asked.

Dean grinned. "Changeable."

"...okay, yeah, should have seen that coming…"

Getting permission for a launch was easier the second time, because they'd already gone through the Ministry (and because, as Dumbledore said, they'd had something which worked and had only really added things to it), and so the hardest thing this time was actually making sure that they were in a good position to send Ron up again.

That meant sorting out homework in good time – Ron was doing his Transfiguration homework over Friday afternoon while Hermione was at Potions – and applying those last few changes to the Ratatoskr, plus hoping that the weather actually would be good enough for the take-off. It didn't matter much, certainly less than a real rocket launch, but going up in a storm would just be asking for trouble.

"Okay, so we've got some experiments to perform this time," Hermione said, checking a list. "We want to check on… the silver globe's new settings, like the new options for the predictions and the ability to fast-forwards and rewind how far it predicts."

"Silver globe," Ron repeated. "What's next?"

"The space suit," Dean answered. "Or, space suits, since I finished the one for Nutkin."

He took it out of his pocket and put it on the table.

"...did you have to use a transparent bit for my tail, mate?" Ron said, looking it over. "I get why there's a transparent bit for my head, but the tail bit's a bit weird, isn't it?"

"Not really," Dean replied.

He tapped the big plastic tail 'bag'. "This is your air reserve, and it's how you get in, too – the main bit of the suit's air tight, and so are the head and tail bits, but the hole where the tail bit attaches is big enough for you to climb into. Or at least it should be."

Ron examined the outfit dubiously, then put it on the nearest table and vaulted up onto it. He landed as Nutkin, and scurried over to the suit before awkwardly clambering inside.

He wiggled his paws a bit, testing the flex, then Dean picked up the tail piece.

"I'll fit it on," he said. "Hold still."

Nutkin gave Dean a resigned look, then nodded.

"It's a bit of a weird charm," Dean explained, fitting the tail piece into place and pressing it sharply – then letting go, leaving the clear plastic bonded to the rest of the suit. "It's one of the ones used for sewing, but this one's more multi purpose – I think it's what got used before someone invented the zip."

"And you're sure it's air-tight?" Hermione asked.

"Well, fairly sure," Dean answered. "I tested it by filling the suit with water for a while, and none of it leaked out – don't worry, I used a drying charm," he added, when Nutkin looked a little uneasy. "Anyway, the helmet attaches the same way. I put a Bubble-Head charm on it, but you should have enough air to keep going a little while even without it."

Harry took Hermione's clipboard, flicked back a few pages to the pre-flight checklist, and wrote in check helmet bubble head charm in his neat paw-writing.

"Good idea," Hermione said, when she reclaimed her clipboard.

Nutkin went over to the edge of the desk and shifted back to being Ron, then let out a sigh of relief. "I hoped it'd work that way. Now I just need to put that on the night before."

"And the human one," Dean said.

Hermione tapped her clipboard. "Both on the checklist. What else?"

"If the spacesuits do work – well, we want to check the air lock, as well," Harry told them. "Or instead. Or both."

"That's mostly just checking the doors are properly airtight and that I can use it," Ron said. "We don't really care about wasting air, we just don't want it all lost at once because it might blow stuff out into space that we want still inside."

He rubbed his chin, frowning. "Or, I don't think we care about wasting air, because the Bubble-Head Charm should replace it, but we should check that's working as well."

"On the list," Hermione said, writing it down.

"Going into space involves a lot more paperwork than those books I've read make it sound like," Neville mused. "Oh – we're also checking the expanded room bit, right?"

"Already on the list," Hermione agreed. "We're testing that Ron can return to human shape while on the Ratatoskr and fit, and we're also testing the typewriter."

Harry frowned. "Shouldn't it work anyway? It's just getting further away, and we know the Protean charm works a long way away."

"It's still good to test," Hermione reminded him, and Harry considered that before nodding.

It was a fair point.

"We also want to do that new way of launching straight up," Neville said. "I think?"

Hermione wrote it down.

"There's that other thing we might want to test, but I'd rather not," Ron admitted. "Which is whether we can do a re-entry without slowing down first. All the Unbreakable Charms mean it should handle it fine, but I'd rather not realize I was wrong when the Ratatoskr melts."

Everyone winced.

"Yeah, bad idea," Neville agreed. "All right, is that everything to test?"

"Unless we think of something else before tomorrow," Ron nodded. "No, wait, already thought of something… we should try aiming for a specific orbit. As in, do one orbit, then change and do a different one, then come back down at Hogwarts. That way we'll know we can do it, and that's what this is about."

"Where does your friend the squirrel go in that?" Nora asked, as they adjusted the Ratatoskr on the landing pad.

It looked like it wouldn't be too bad, weather-wise, though Ron had suggested they try landing by silver globe anyway to make sure that they could do that as well. A trip to the moon would definitely take hours, possibly most of a day, and if it was snowing they couldn't just leave Ron up there until the snow was over.

A thunderstorm maybe, they didn't last all that long – and if they could land by silver globe, they could just come down somewhere else anyway and have Ron Apparate home – but it just came back to that.

"He goes up to space," Harry answered. "You know how when you fly high, you start having to work harder and breathe harder to do the same thing?"

Nora nodded, listening carefully.

"Well, going to space is when you keep going until your wings don't work at all," Harry told her. "And then higher than that. That's why he has to use a rocket to get there instead."

"Wow," Nora said. "What's it like? Is it where clouds come from?"

"It's… someone once said that it's so high up there isn't any down any more," Harry tried. "Things sort of float around. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it's just that there's nothing there – not even air. So Ron has to take air with him."

It was sort of hard trying to explain the idea of outer space, but what Terry Pratchett had said in the Nome books was a good start.

As soon as Ron lit the engines, Hermione began working with the controls of the silver globe.

Harry watched, interested, as the plot line got longer and longer – much faster than the actual rise of the Ratatoskr, which was climbing at a comparatively low acceleration and speed at first to minimize friction during the part of the run that was still in the atmosphere.

"What settings are you using?" he asked.

"This is for it to assume the accelerations stay the same for eight minutes, then turn off," Hermione explained, spinning the plot so Harry could see where the line changed colour – from blue to yellow – and rose further into the sky, then slowed and dropped back down a couple of hundred miles to the west.

She fiddled with something, and the plot line shortened. "That's about seven minutes… well, a little bit less, now, because what actually happens is you tell it to go a certain amount of time ahead and then that amount of time decays."

"How's it going, Ron?" Neville called into the main mirror.

Ron gave him a sciuridine grin, then went to the typewriter.

I FORGOT WHOW LOUD THIS OS, he typed out. BETTER SKLDNCING CHARMS?

"Harry, can you write that down?" Hermione asked. "Where's the scale on this… there. Okay, Ron, I think you need to keep at that engine power for another… thirty seconds, then you can turn it up."

The typewriter clicked again as Harry was taking the notes, and Dean was the one to look this time.

"He says it's Gting Quirtr," he said, pronouncing it with difficulty. "What do you think's causing that?"

"Thinner air, maybe?" Harry suggested. "Like with cars, a lot of the noise a car makes is the tyres not the engine, maybe a lot of the noise he hears is the air rushing past not the engine?"

"Could be," Hermione judged. "Dean, did you mean causing the sound, or causing the misspelling?"

The squirrel in the mirror typed something else, looking annoyed, and Dean whistled.

"Okay, I guess he can spell those words fine," he sniggered. "How are you deciding when Ron should start going sideways?"

"That's what the scale is for," Hermione said. "We want him orbiting at about three hundred miles up, so I'm going to have him start the sideways burn when he's about two hundred miles up – his momentum will take him the rest of the way, and there's a bit of a cushion there."

She picked up the nearest mirror. "Did you get that, Ron?"

Ron nodded in reply.

"I'll want you to shut off the main engine in another four minutes, and then…"

Harry was kept busy taking notes, his gaze flicking between the silver globe and the mirrors, as the Ratatoskr kept rising straight up into the sky like a star that had decided it may as well beat the rush to get home.

"All right, it looks like that burn to altitude went fine," Hermione said. "Shut off main engines, Ratatoskr."

SHUTTING OFF, Ron typed, and the subliminal shaking in the mirror image went away.

"Now, turn so you've got the horizon line outside both windows and pointing front to back," Hermione added. "It doesn't matter which way… that looks good. And start engine burn, keep it at low power for now but be ready to turn it up one click at a time."

She fiddled with the silver globe again, and when Ron started up his engines the blue line it drew for the Ratatoskr went east a bit before crashing into Denmark.

"Increase engine power," Hermione said, most of her concentration on the blue line – which jumped east every time she told Ron to use the controls. By the time Ron was at about half power it coiled almost the whole way around the Earth before hitting, and Hermione considered that with a frown.

"One more increase, Ron," she instructed. "Then angle up slightly."

The blue line jumped, now initially dipping inwards before spiralling outwards, and Hermione snapped her fingers.

"Stop there!" she said. "Keep the engine going, but don't touch the controls apart from that, Ratatoskr."

"I think I get it," Neville said, as Hermione tweaked the controls again – this time shortening the blue section of the line, making the yellow section coil around a bit at a time until she had a complete circuit. "You know that if he uses the engines like that for long enough it'll spiral outwards into space, so you just need him to turn them off at the right time. Right?"

"Exactly," Hermione agreed. "And… it looks like that's about twelve minutes at that power. Then we can cut engines and start the rest of the experiments."

"Marvellous," Dumbledore said, making her jump. "I must say, it's a delight for any teacher to see experiments being done during the free time of any student. It may be our job to teach, but our passion is to make sure that those who we teach enjoy learning."

"I'm not sure Ron's really thinking in those terms, Professor," Neville said. "I'm not sure I'm thinking in those terms."

"And that is the best part of it," Dumbledore assured him. "There's an old Muggle saying, that shaving makes hair grow back thicker. I must say, I've never believed it, unless if I regularly shaved then I'd end up with a beard that absorbed hexes like sponges."

Harry wasn't the only one looking baffled. Even Ron seemed confused, as best as Harry could tell from Nutkin's expression.

"But the relevant Muggle expression is that, if you enjoy what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in your life," Dumbledore continued. "And so it is here. Do tell me what you discover, I'm sure it will all be quite wonderful."

Some minutes later, the main engine burn for the Ratatoskr shut off – just on schedule – and Ron began to float gently against his seatbelt.

"I think we can call that a success as well," Hermione said. "The new setting for the silver globe makes it much easier to schedule things."

Harry wrote that down.

"Speaking of scheduling, I assume we have one?" Neville asked. "A schedule, I mean, not a scheduling. That would be silly."

"We've got a schedule," Harry said, holding it up helpfully. "It's on the clipboard. Or… actually, we've got a checklist, not a schedule. There's some bits which we should probably do last, like changing orbits, because that way we can aim for Hogwarts, but apart from that we could do these in just about any order?"

LETS O SHAPE CHANGING FIRST, Ron requested via the typewriter. THEN WE CAN TALK ABOUT WHAT NEXT.

"I'm checking off the typewriter," Harry announced. "Because that clearly works."

Ron spent only a minute or so as, well, as Ron – which he said made him feel a bit ill, the whole space-sickness thing apparently more of a problem for a human than for a squirrel – but spent the time casting a couple of spells which he'd realized might be a good idea. One of those was a simple one, adding lights to a few places in the cabin, and then he cast a second spell which Harry didn't recognize.

"Sorry, what was that?" he asked, leaning forwards, and Ron looked embarrassed. And queasy.

"I didn't think of it before," his friend explained. "It just makes a strong smell, it doesn't last long but I wanted to see if I'd end up able to smell the smell, and I can't."

"Good," Harry decided. "It's better to find a leak that way, I suppose. And how's the suit otherwise?"

"Um…" Ron began, now looking very peaky, and turned back into Nutkin. Then he started coughing, because he'd apparently forgotten he wasn't wearing the helmet of his squirrel-sized spacesuit.

"Are you all right?" Hermione asked, worried.

Ron coughed a bit more, then grabbed for his wand (which he took care not to hold when transforming) and waved it, dispelling the strong scent.

SUIT GOOD, ALL RIGHT, he typed, after pushing off from the edge of the chest to get to the console, and curling his suited tail around a pawhold to pull himself closer to it. COULD SMELL NOTHNG BUT ORANGE.

"My uncle's car is like that," Dean said. "He got the air freshener years ago, I think he dropped it behind a seat after deciding it was too strong, and he just left it there."

"And you could move all right in the suit, right?" Neville checked. "The spell said it should be all flexible and stuff, more than normal plate, and normal plate is pretty flexible – but it's hard to tell."

WAS FINE, Ron assured them.

Harry checked those off too.

"What's left on the list?" Hermione asked, and Harry showed her. "Okay, we've got… the extra-vehicular activity, the orbit change, and checking how long the boost to the moon is likely to take. Ron, I think we're going to want to do the orbit change last, because since we'll be steering around to make different orbits anyway then we may as well do that one last."

Harry flicked his tail up for attention. "I don't think that would work," he replied. "Or, I don't think it'd work best… it's efficient, yeah, but we're doing tests here. So it'd be better to do the orbit change first, before we rely on it."

"That's a good point," Hermione admitted. "So… orbit change or EVA first?"

EVA, Ron typed out. WHILE IM ON THE ORBIT HEADING TO SCOTLAND.

"That does leave us about… what, half an hour without anything planned," Neville pointed out. "So… what do we do now?"

Ron considered for a bit, then held on to the paw-rail and reached out with his tail to snag his wand. It had drifted out of reach, though, and after a moment's consideration he waved his paw at it to summon it instead.

Harry sniggered. He'd been about to suggest that maybe Ron should keep his wand on a string, but Accio worked too.

"It looks like you'll be over Scotland in fifteen minutes," Hermione reported. "Probably best to start the EVA setup now."

Ron nodded, dispelling the conjured pack of playing cards he'd been messing around with, and went over to the typewriter.

LEAVING WAND INSIDE, he told them.

"You should put it somewhere where it's held in place," Dean suggested, which got a nod, and Ron put it into the expanded chest he'd used for extra legroom.

Getting from there back to the console (to pick up his helmet) and then to the Ratatoskr's air lock door took an extra minute or so, Ron carefully pushing off each time so he didn't have to use his backup of Summoning himself against something, and he was at the door when they all realized a bit of a flaw with the setup.

All five of them had agreed that it was a good idea to copy the kind of door you got on submarines and Muggle spaceships, with a wheel you turned around completely more than once to open the door, just because that made it really unlikely that it would be accidentally opened by anything the engine was doing. But the problem was that as a squirrel Ron didn't really have the leverage to open the door properly.

"...any ideas?" Neville asked. "In my defence, my Animagus form is at least as big as I am, so that's my reason for missing this."

"Hey, we all missed it," Dean countered. "And I'm the one with the reputation for noticing things."

"So, to summarize, Ron's stuck inside the spacecraft," Hermione said. "Well, I suppose it's better than being stuck outside…"

Harry noted that down, then frowned. "Actually, how are we going to fix that by redesigning the Ratatoskr?"

Hermione hummed. "Well… I think we'll have to make the door magic, unless we can think of something else. It'd have to be unlocked in a more complicated way than turning a handle, though… maybe a key?"

"Too easy to lose," Dean said.

The typewriter clacked, interrupting them all, and Harry bent over to see what Ron had just typed.

"He says we should get on with doing the orbit change," he read off. "Probably a good idea."

"All right, Ron," Hermione said. "We're going to aim to do one which goes over… let's say over Sicily. I want you to turn so that the engine nozzle is pointing perpendicular to your current direction of travel, so you keep the same orbital speed… then I'll tell you what to do once you start the engine."

Listening with one ear (though it was a very good ear at hearing things), Harry put a cross next to the EVA on the test list, and neatly wrote down that the main test hadn't been done successfully because they hadn't been able to open the door properly.

"What about some raised steps in a ring?" Dean suggested. "That way Ron could stand on the door and use those for footing?"

Harry wrote that down as well. "Like canal gates? I've seen those sometimes."

"Well, uh… probably?" Dean guessed. "More than me, I'm an East Londoner. You want a Brummie, they have more canals than Venice."

"Do you think Venetians ever say they're the Birmingham of Italy?" Neville asked.

That sent Dean into an absolute laughing fit.

Since they couldn't do the EVA test, and since Ron's trajectory was sort of towards the moon, Hermione said that they should do the lunar orbit insertion timing check and then have Ron head back to Hogwarts.

That led to a bit of confusion, because the phrase 'lunar orbit insertion timing check' was a bit of a mouthful, and Hermione tutted before telling Ron to point the Ratatoskr at the moon and turn the engine on.

SECURNG FOR ACCLERTION, Ron typed out, and spent the next few minutes bouncing around the cabin making sure that anything which was floating around wasn't any more.

He probably could have done it with judicious use of Summoning and Banishing Charms to speed things up – both to attract or repel himself so he was where he needed to be, and to move things around. But it looked like he was having a lot more fun doing it that way, and the four of them waited until everything was in place and Ron was back in his seat.

Then he spun the Ratatoskr around so that it pointed towards the moon, and turned the engines to full power.

Hermione promptly started the stopwatch on her watch, then zoomed out the silver globe so that it showed the Earth, the Moon, and the enormous gulf between them. A red-silver thread stretched out towards the moon, rocketing past and off into space, and Hermione began moving the time axis – changing it so that now the plot showed a red line followed by a yellow line, and the yellow part of the line snaked around as she tweaked where the boundary between the two rested.

"Angle up a few degrees, Ron," she told him. "Yaw left a bit… a bit more… okay, roll left twenty degrees and pitch forward slightly?"

Ron did his best with each instruction, and after a minute or two the red-yellow thread of light that plotted out the Ratatoskr's course dipped so close to the lunar surface it seemed to touch – but by looking very closely Harry could see that it wasn't quite touching. Then it went shooting back towards the Earth.

"That's about… one hour and eighteen minutes," Hermione said to herself, checking her watch. "A bit more than I thought… oh, that must be the extra because of the Earth's gravity."

Ron looked quizzically at the mirror.

"Okay, Ron, you can come back now," Hermione added. "Engines off, turn a hundred and eighty degrees so you're facing towards Earth, and then full engine burn."

While Ron was engaged in flipping the Ratatoskr end-over-end so it was now pointing back towards the Earth, Hermione took the clipboard and made some notes on it.

"This is one of the reasons I wanted to add extra bits to the silver globe's spells," she explained. "That one predicts where you'll end up if you go at the current acceleration and then do a turnover, so… now we know how long Ron will take to get to the moon."

"About three hours, then," Dean said, quite up to that bit of Arithmancy. "He could go after lunch and get back for tea."

"Now that is getting more like what I think of as proper space travel," Harry announced. "If you're spending days to go between stars, that's okay, but if it takes days to get to the moon then it's a bit slow somehow."

Hermione drew a circle in the air. "We're still working on going long distances much quicker, remember."

She checked the silver globe. "Okay, Ratatoskr, one minute until turnover."

"Shouldn't you be saying mission control, or something?" Harry asked.

"Nah, she's his girlfriend," Dean sniggered. "It's sort of, you know, inherent."

Dropping back into the atmosphere was almost routine – even though it was only the second time, the fact that the Ratatoskr had so few of the normal restrictions of rocketry meant that they could take their time and come in at low speed, and Ron touched down with a gentle thump.

The door opened a little while later, and Ron jumped out before shifting back from Nutkin.

He undid the transparent helmet that made up part of his spacesuit, and let out a sigh. "Phew."

"Sorry about the door thing," Dean voiced.

"Nah, I missed it too," Ron assured him. "But Nev, mate, I thought you were better than that."

Neville looked distinctly lost. "...um, you what, mate?"

"You didn't think to do Ground Control to Major Ron?" Ron asked. "I know we did it in Muggle Studies."

Hermione tried not to laugh. "You know I did that too, right, Ron?"

He shrugged.

Harry wasn't sure if they'd ignored Dean's girlfriend comment or not, really.

On the one paw, maybe they had, or they'd both be a bit embarrassed. On the other paw, maybe they'd realized it and stopped thinking it was something to be embarrassed about.

"That's not exactly a happy song, though," Neville frowned. "Remember?"

"Yeah, we did an essay on it, but still." Ron shrugged again, which seemed to answer that.

"...you know," Harry said, thinking about the flight. "Maybe you should get some practice being disoriented and levitated as a human, Ron. You're fine on a broom, but you weren't doing too well when you were in space."

Ron looked vaguely like he wanted to protest. "Yeah, but… yeah…"

He looked at Hermione. "Please tell me magic can solve this problem like it solves everything else?"

"I think there is a potion that works on motion sickness," Hermione mused. "We'll have to try it next time."

The final week of term passed in a blur, one which was full of the teachers trying to put as much as possible into their heads while not quite starting on exam revision – something which was going to consume most of the next term and some of the holidays, Harry was quite sure – and also one in which Bill Weasley's wedding, something which had been a long way in the future for months, was now suddenly looming up ahead in a vaguely ominous way.

It felt somehow ineffably weird, to Harry, to be planning to do something big outside the castle on Easter. Christmas was another thing, it was Christmas and Christmas played by its own rules, but Easter was something that had just been 'spend two weeks mostly sitting around at Hogwarts" for Harry for six years now, and while he knew intellectually that he was going to no longer be at Hogwarts before long that was still too big a thing to think about.

Going to a friend's wedding at Easter? That was small enough to focus on, and even though it was much easier for wizards to organize than Muggles – just because of how easy travel was – it was still odd enough that Harry wondered what it was going to be like.

It was also, Harry was fairly sure, going to be his first time in another country that was a proper other country. Unless he was forgetting one.

AN:

Of course, what Dumbledore forgot to mention is that it's better instead to become fascinated in your job. Or perhaps both.

There's a platitude for every occasion. You have to forgive an old man for getting the wrong one.

If anyone's confused about what Isaac's saying, remember, he speaks Liverpudlian. Not English.