Spellcasting was an interesting subject Percy decided.
It focused on the wizard's technique when preforming spells and the many ways they can be cast. Percy didn't learn too much, after all Hecate taught him methods of using spells that wizards hadn't even theorized, but it was good to refine his technique.
The teacher and their desk sat on a raised platform and the students were each given squares of space that were separated by wards for safety. It was uncomfortable for many of the students like Percy who were better at sensing magic though, because every time they crossed the boundaries on the boxes they felt the protective wards weigh on them. However, it was a small price to pay for saftey.
At the moment they were learning how to improve their wandless spellcasting, the specific hand movements to help one's focus, the easiest spells to use, and the expected limitations of it.
When Percy first learned of wandless magic he had been excited, a way to do magic without a focus? That had excited him. It surprisingly took five entire days for that excitement to wear off. Mostly because he was able to keep himself entertained because he kept replicating things he saw in the Star Wars movies. In his defense shooting lighting from his hands, even if it was weak, is and always will be very cool.
That was the downside of wandless magic however, it was an extremely difficult thing to learn and the results simply didn't make up for it. It was why Hecate was surprised when he was still enthusiastic for the subject for many days.
Sometimes Percy kind of felt like he cheated by training with Hecate as he watched his other classmates along with him. It wasn't a competition when he was taught by a goddess who knew every secret of magic.
So as he was his roommate trying to banish an item he decided to help.
He walked through the wards and grimaced as he felt as if a very heavy blanket was placed on him, "Yo."
His friend jumped and turned to him, "Oh! Uh, hello Percy."
Percy pointed at the red rubber ball his friend had been glaring at for the past ten minutes and said, "You need some help with that?"
He seemed to think about it before nodding. "Yeah sure, any tips?"
Percy took a sip from his water bottle before sitting it down and fully entering his friends square, his muscles loosened after no longer feeling the weight of the wards. "What are you doing whenever you try to banish it?"
"I speak the word and do the hand motion, then I imagine a silver light coming from my hand and hitting the object."
Percy thought on it for a minute, he knew something was missing there, but it had the three recommended steps, movement, incantation, intention... Wait. "When you imagine the spell do you think of the spell hitting the object and the object moving or the spell hitting the object?"
The other boy looked confused for a second before his mouth formed an 'O'. Then he looked back at the ball, "Depulsio!"
The red ball flew across the square and bounced off the wards. Percy's roommate smiled at him, "Ay, thanks Percy!"
After saying his congratulations Percy went back to his square and started shooting baskets with the ball and a conjured basketball hoop. He would summon the ball back to him wandlessly to appease the professor who was making rounds helping and scolding students whenever it was needed. Eventually the professor made her way to him and watched him mess around with the ball for a while, then after watching for a couple minutes she left without saying anything. She did the same to one of the girls behind him.
Twenty minutes later class ended and Percy went to the mess hall. Louis sat down next to him and started asking him about what Percy was doing with the ball, after spending ten minutes explaining the game to him and promising to take him to a game on their weekend break Percy heard someone clear his throat behind him.
Percy turned around and saw his other roommate Michael waiting expectantly with his arms on his hips dramatically. After a moment of Louis and Percy staring at the boy wondering what he wanted Jonathan started speaking. "Well what are you waiting for, make some space for your better-looking friend."
Percy snorted and moved along the bench to allow him some room to sit down. After getting himself comfortable between Percy and Louis, Michael asked if he could also come along for the game and started talking to Percy about the different the different teams. Apparently he was a Celtics' fan, which started a small argument between him and Percy who was a Knicks' fan.
Of course they did occasionally stop to explain a term to Louis, who was mostly able to keep up with their argument with their help. Eventually both of them realized the other's opinions wouldn't change and stopped. However they did occasionally snipe at each during the rest of the meal.
After their lunch they had potions, Percy was really looking forward to this class, it was definitely his favorite subject. Which Hecate was certain was because of his heritage, seeing as he was a 'child of the sea'. She was probably right.
The potions class took place in a well ventilated room that was somewhere on the third floor of the castle. Each work station had a place to secure a cauldron, a large table, and a magical rock that heated to a specific temperature that sat under the cauldron to make the potions as flawless as possible. Great shelves held an abundance of ingredients.
The professor started speaking, "Hello class, I will be your potions professor, today I simply want to assess your skills. The hospital in Paris is running low on pepper up potions and any potions that are of professional quality. So I decided our first lesson will be to brew some. I encourage you to add any modifications to the potion that you would normally use, however please inform us of any of these changes so we can test them to see if they are safe. You have two hours, begin!"
Percy went to the shelves and grabbed several of the normal ingredients, he didn't need a book to know what they were. It was a fairly common potion that anyone who was specializing in potions should be capable of easily remembering. Once he collected the normal ingredients he went to grab any he would use for his own modifications. Sure some people gave him weird looks when he grabbed water lily petal and ram wool but he didn't care.
Percy mashed up the lily petals and put the mashed flower in hummingbird tears, then he stuffed the ram wool into the cup that contained the mixture to soak it up. Then he set the stone under his cauldron to four-hundred degrees and poured water until it was three fourths full. He added all the necessary ingredients like Japi peppers and mandrake root and stirred when was needed, except for when his modifications required quarter counter-clockwise stirs. After all that he took the dripping wad of ram wool and dropped it in.
Immediately the potion turned from the red to a dark pink, that got lighter with each stir. After four full counter-clockwise turns he turned off the heat and put some of his potion in the vial he was using.
When he brought his potion sample to the professor half an hour had passed, he wasn't the first finished, but he was one of the faster ones. Even with all his modifications.
The professor took a moment to consider his potion. "Well, obviously you did some modifications, what are they."
"I minimized the amount of steam that comes from drinking it and improved the flavor." Percy said.
"Improved the flavor you say?" The professor asked with raised eyebrows. It was virtually unheard of to change the flavor of any potion past the most basic ones that required no more than two ingredients.
"Yes, here have taste." The professor didn't look excited at the idea of drinking it but begrudgingly took the offered vial, his curiosity at the idea of a potentially good tasting potion winning. The professor brought it up to his nose and smelled it. Apparently satisfied, he shrugged and downed the entire thing in one gulp. A small amount of steam steadily left his ears.
The professor jumped up from his seat and clapped Percy on the shoulder, "Good work boy, how'd you change the flavor?"
"Water lily petals, hummingbird tears, and ram wool." Percy said.
"Wonderful, go ahead and start bottling the rest for the hospital." Percy nodded and went back to his station to store the rest. After all the bottles were safely secured in a box with cushioning and preservation charms he cleaned up his station.
He left the class five minutes later when his space was clean. His exit was only a couple minutes behind the person who finished first.
~O~
Percy lied lazily on one of the couches enjoying the warm sun that came through one of the windows on his fourth day at the school. He reflected on his schooling experience up to that point. So far he had a good time, his roommates had been nice, and his classes had been enjoyable. He had just finished his dueling class and probably made an enemy of one of the other students who had been very conceited.
Or at least he was conceited until Percy took him down.
Unfortunately Percy's method of dueling did not help him make friends. He would taunt his enemy and make him or her angry and prone to mistakes. It had worked exceptionally well on immortals and apparently wizards as well. Especially if Percy pushed the right buttons. Unfortunately it seemed to work a little to well that time.
Percy was taken from his thoughts when someone stepped between the window and where he was lying. Percy would have ignored them had they not been blocking his sun. He cracked his eye open and saw who it was.
You know what they say, speak of the devil and he shall appear.
Percy yawned and raised his armed over his head in an exaggerated manner. He rose one eyebrow when he 'noticed' the boy standing in front of him. He idly noted that nearly the entire common room was watching the confrontation.
After the boy started at Percy with contempt for an entire thirty seconds Percy decided to speak. "You ok there? You haven't moved for a bit."
The boy blinked at the 'disrespect' Percy showed to him before his eyes narrowed. "How dare you insult the Laurent family! Who do you think you are"
Anybody who wasn't already paying attention to confrontation certainly was now. Most of them hoping for some drama for the rumor mill that had been particularly abundant already.
Percy recognized the name, they were a family that formed shortly after the French revolution that made a fortune off selling extremely cheap wine when nobody could afford anything better.
Unfortunately being associated with terrible wine wasn't the best image. So they tried to distance themselves from their past and attempted to produce high quality potion supplies. In all honesty they hadn't much success and it was a bit of a touchy subject.
However they still had a lot of gold, so they were pretty high up there on the food chain. Not that it mattered to him.
"I was dueling you." This was definitely not the right answer to the boy if his reddening face was anything to go buy.
Surprisingly the boy didn't even reach for his wand as Percy was expecting, the boy seemingly had some self control. "And that gives you the right to speak ill of my house!?"
"You do realize I only said what I did to get you angry during the duel, right?" Percy said. "But I guess it was a bit more effective than I intended."
Honestly, those purebloods were so easy to get angry, just a couple lines about how their family was inbred or unimportant and they were provoked into doing something stupid.
"I don't care why you did it, you made an enemy of the Laurent family today!" The boy's face was concerningly red now, although now it was probably also from embarrassment and anger because he was making such a big deal of a relatively small issue.
"What, the wine family?" That response had a couple people chuckling and the boy yelling in unintelligible French, at least to Percy. After realizing Percy wasn't paying attention to him anymore the boy started to walk away. He continued to yell obscenities that were slowly becoming more understandable.
Percy would have to remember some of those, they were pretty good.
~O~
Arithmancy wasn't hard, Percy couldn't call it that. After all, he had taken much more complicated math in school, but there was something about the combinations of numbers that tired him out. Percy had a hunch that using the numbers actually drew on the user's magic power but never bothered to actually investigate it.
That's why Percy was completely exhausted at the end of his eighth school day. His charms class had them casting the Fidelius charm, a powerful spell that required enormous concentration because of it's complexity. Then they had dueling class where he was against one of the other top students in it. Finally after all of that he had Arithmancy.
So when the enchantment activated on the letter he had opened he was completely unprepared. Pink foam exploded from the envelope and covered every surface within twelve feet of him up to chest height. Every conversation in the common room stopped and stared at it.
Percy pulled the spotless letter out of the envelope and read the contents.
Hecate enchanted the foam to make sure you can't just magic it away.
Have fun cleaning it up,
Leo
The foam near him stirred as Louis' head popped out. He had been sleeping on the couch next to him. Percy brought his palm up to his face and watched as the letter became transparent before it disappeared completely. He gave up and collapsed into the foam, it made for a nice cushion.
Around him people poked their heads through the foam and looked around in confusion. He cursed his friend as his vanishing spell didn't affect the it. He felt some of it get in his mouth and noticed it dissolved with a foul taste. Which gave him an idea.
He focused on the air in the large common room and pulled the water from it. Suddenly the air grew very dry and several gallons of water washed through the foam and dissolved it. By the end there was only foam on the students who he avoided cleaning in the spirit of the prank. Of course he cleaned himself though.
It wasn't long before word of the prank spread all over the school. No one was completely sure who caused it although he was definitely suspect number one because he was the only one cleaned from the water.
He didn't come out with the truth though, after all they were coming up with some very amusing theories. His favorite so far had been that the prank never actually happened and that the entire thing had actually been the brewing of a memory potion gone wrong that affected everyone's actual memories of the accident and the foam in the memory represented the potion. Apparently someone had been been feeling very symbolic.
Of course his good mood was spoiled when he went to bed that night.
~O~
Hecate paced back and forth in his 'dream' training room when he fell asleep.
She looked especially irritated and kept muttering things under her breath. He wisely decided to stay silent until she addressed him.
It was three minutes before that happened.
"We need to enhance your training?"
Percy gave her an inquisitive look but didn't say anything. She didn't like it when he questioned her actions, especially for important situations as it seemed this was.
However after a bit it seemed she was actually waiting for him to ask so he bit, "Alright, but why?"
"There will be war, Voldemort still lives." Hecate said.
"Wait," He was confused. "I thought he was hit with a rebounding killing curse?"
"He was." Hecate stated, "He somehow got his hands on a book about magic written by one of my descendants. It explained a possible way to cheat death called horcruxes. Luckily that was the only useful information in that book, after I realized what he had done I checked on all the other texts that held information of importance, they are still there."
"What is a horcrux?"
"A soul anchor, you sacrifice part of your soul in exchange for something that anchors you to the mortal world." Percy contemplated this, if he was going to get involved in that mess it would certainly prove a problem. "Not all is bad though, the fool made many lapses of judgement during the creation of them. First, he had untested instructions would put far more of the soul into the anchor than necessary. He also, from what I can tell, made several at once. Normally one can split the soul seven times, because of the magical power of the number. However it should be done so you only have one at a time, in his arrogance he has done the opposite."
Percy tried to process all of this information. "Why does it matter that he made multiple at one time compared to one at a time."
"Several reasons, first so you do not give up more of your soul than needed. The second is far more important though. Imagine death as a large... whirlpool that appears near a port for let us say... thirty seconds. The ships in port represent souls and the whirlpool sucks them up, a horcrux is similar to a rope that holds the boats to the docks. at about twenty-five seconds this rope will break but that isn't enough time for the ship to be sucked in so it is simply floating in open water. Normally then you'd make another Horcrux and the cycle would repeat, but not in this case."
"What he did was attach seven ropes, so that none snap while the whirlpool is there. However they will loosen and become damaged and after, if I had to guess, three 'deaths', three because of it's magical importance, they will snap and the soul will be sucked into the whirlpool."
That cleared things up a lot, Percy didn't mention that whirlpools couldn't really suck in large boats. Or maybe they were actually just small boats, she didn't explain their size.
Now Percy was just overthinking it.
"Okay so if I'm right we just need to kill him two more times and he's gone?"
"Right." Hecate said.
"So," Percy said looking around. "What does enhancing my training mean?"
Hecate smiled but said nothing and suddenly he felt a large hand on his shoulder, he turned around and got a good look at the abs engraved on a bronze chest plate. Now, Percy wasn't short, he stood a bit taller than six feet, but the person in front of him towered over him, which meant he had to look up to see his face. He hadn't had to do that for years, and it was slightly annoying.
However that annoyance multiplied as Percy took a step back and looked up to see the literal flames for eyes that belonged to Ares. "It means that you are going to be training in the art of war with me, squirt."
Uh oh. That was going to be brutal.
~O~
Percy's friend and roommate Giovanni was confused when he realized he wasn't the first one up. He was one of those rare morning persons that actually enjoyed getting up early, a freak of nature.
It was only the ninth day of school and because he went to bed early he didn't know which of his roommates had which area. So he couldn't tell who had gotten up before him.
He quickly, or as quickly as one could, pulled on his blue uniform and went down to breakfast to find a pitiful sight.
Sitting at a table in the corner of the room was Percy. He looked absolutely miserable. His eyes had dark shadows under them and his skin was paler than usual, which Giovanni didn't even realize was possible. It was very strange, he had looked fine the day before, was he sick? "Hey, you ok Percy?
"Yeah, I'm... fine... Just tired..." Percy's voice was barely audible and Giovanni had trouble even understanding his French. "Just have to... take a shower, I'll be all good after."
Giovanni sincerely doubted that, but didn't push. "Alright, if you say so."
Then he started loading his plate full of croissants and jellies. He noticed that Percy only had a cup of coffee before him and then shrugged, not really his business.
~O~
Lucius Malfoy was a fool, a halfwit, a jester. He really thought HE the Minister of Magical Britain, under his thumb? He didn't get his way all the way up the ladder without any basic mental capabilities.
Or at least that's what Fudge was thinking as he dropped off Lucius' latest bribe off at the DMLE for additional funding.
Cornelius saw the signs, he would be blind not to. First was all the incidents at Hogwarts, the past three years at Hogwarts had been more eventful than any time in the last five centuries. Then there was the incident at the world cup, as if anyone actually believed it was just a bunch of drunk fans. The dark mark had been cast for heavens sake! And don't even get him started all the political maneuvering from the 'imperiused' Death Eaters and the people under Dumbledore.
Frustratingly, in order to hide his true intentions Fudge had been forced to allow some events such as the World Cup to slide with little investigation. That event especially had cause a lot of heat to come the Ministry's way internationally.
It wasn't all bad things though, Madame Bones had been one of his greatest additions to the Ministry. She had been discreetly been rebuilding the DMLE to return it to its state before the war with Voldemort. When Britain boasted some of the best Aurors in the world, only topped by the United States.
He still couldn't believe that Lucius thought he had bought the Imperius excuse for being a Death Eater. The only reason that man wasn't rotting in Azkaban was because he had money, a lot of it. Money which he wasted by severely underestimating its worth. It was hilarious when Lucius had offered one hundred thousand galleons for a new law. Of course he felt bad for the werewolves that it would hurt, but the money they had gotten from it had been nearly worth a one year of funding for the DMLE at at last year's budget.
That didn't count all the money they had spent on the the Department of Mysteries for the Unspeakables, suffice to say Croaker had been very pleased. Many fancy new magical inventions had been manufactured for the Aurors use.
Even so the law really wasn't even that bad, it really wasn't that unfair to have werewolves inform any potential employers of their condition. Even if he hadn't been bribed he probably would have supported it anyways.
Fudge whistled as he walked to his office, a skip in his step. His good mood was soured as he saw his Undersecretary Delores Umbridge working at her desk next to the entrance to his office. He despised the hideously dressed woman, he was a politician, he had little to no morals, but that woman... He only had her because for some reason Lucius wanted her there, well the reason was pretty obvious really. She was vile.
"Good evening sir." She said so in her girlish voice that reminded him of nails on a chalkboard,
"Ah, err, yes good evening Umbridge." She nodded and went back to her paperwork.
Fudge stepped into his office and closed the door behind him, then he went to the back, where a painting of the Atrium hung. He tapped the top left corner and took a small step back as it swung open. Then pulled out a bottle of firewhiskey and closed the hidden cabinet.
A glass was pulled out of another place and Fudge filled it with the alcohol. "Another productive day."
Then he downed it.
Yo competent Fudge, now who saw that coming!? Well I did I guess. Anyways I just wanna say while I won't be giving Galleons an exact worth I've always kinda viewed them from 20-150 dollars. Otherwise knuts and sickles are practically worthless, I mean seriously JK? 5 dollars a galleon? Its a GOLD coin!
I kinda rushed the end there but I really wanted to get this out so whatever. As far as I can tell it's at least decent.
Anyways I hope you enjoyed the chapter.
Stay safe.