[Room Of Requirements.]
[TPP]
As Nate entered the legendary room, because of which he even considered entering Hogwarts. Hogwarts did have the largest collection of magical literature in the world, the problem- it was not sorted. Like at all. There were sections but they were themselves
There might be parchments and journals written by Merlin himself in the bloody library that nobody bothered to check or parse through the literature. It makes searching for information consistently near impossible. The Accio did not help in such a scenario either.
The room of requirements was a boon for anyone looking for magical literature. The fact Dumbledore's Army used something that could do what the room did as nothing more than a glorified classroom or a bloody kissing booth is amazingly stupid. This thing could be used to parse through information in the Hogwarts library.
The room provides to the best of its ability what ever the user needs. Nate was looking for magic so obscure that there were only brief mentions of it in the Grey Library in the legal section, that said in no uncertain terms.
Nate was looking for magic of time. Specifically, magic related to time travel and localized temporal manipulation. The branch of magic was called Choronomancy. It was magic so dangerous the ministry would actively hunt those that pursued it. It was a taboo to even discuss such magic, it was considered worse than magic related to the soul simply due to the fact that soul magic usually affected only those practising it, and the ones it was being practised upon, but temporal magic could erase someone just because they happened to see a time traveller.
Nate knew that if his grandfather got a whiff of the magic he was planning on learning and manipulating, he would never see his wand again. With good reason, since ending up a squib would be better than existential erasure.
Nate knew that he was toeing a line so dangerous that most would call him mad, but he knew that if his gamble with temporal magic paid off, he would win against the last enemy.
As he looked at the hundreds of books and rolls of parchments in the room of requirements. Books with titles like Artes obscurae, நேரம் பற்றிய ஆய்வு , कालस्य झलकम् , 時間 , קסם זמן ,etc. Most of the parchments were either arithmantic calculations for spell creation, astrological observations or journals filled with ideas and theories. Quite a few in different languages, a few were in latin and romaic which were the only languages I recognized.
All the built up excitement vanished seeing the absence of even a single piece of literature that was in English and since most of the magic he learned was control based he never had to learn spells from other languages except for some of the charms. He sure as hell did not speak a single one of these languages. The only one he even could think of knowing was
Nate looked around the room to find any English literature. As he was searching through the room, he found a table filled with dictionaries and a book titled, "Languages Long Forgotten.", the only bloody English book in the whole room. It was as if saying there would be no shortcuts. You gotta learn a lot of languages.
Nate had never wanted to give up on his idea of pursuing time more than at that particular moment.
He sighed as the tesseract's alarm charm went off. It was time to move to the great hall. He picked his rucksack and took the compass in his hand as he dragged himself out to the great hall.
[Great Hall.]
[TPP]
When Nate entered the Great Hall some people had already arrived for breakfast.
He took a seat at the head of the Gryffindor Table as he created
a solid illusion of a stool that was invisible. It was an idea, he came up with after Dumbledore used the invisible snake against him, what would happen if I created a solid illusion and then rendered it invisible? Lo and behold, a solid plushy chair that was invisible. It looked like he was sitting in the air.
As he was waiting for the house elves to bring in the breakfast, his attention was drawn towards the two Weasley Twins, one of them was strutting towards him while the other twin was lingering a bit behind.
One of them spoke up, "Morning mate." The one in the front greeted while looking at Nate as if he was looking at a Christmas present.
"Yes, Mr. Weasley?" Nate greeted politely.
"You can call him ' Fred' and me ' George'", said the twin that had lingered behind while grinning at him.
"Yes, just call us by our names, we aren't ones for formality." Fred waved his hand dismissively, he then looked at Nate with the same weird look and said, "What I am really interested in, my good sir, is what have you done to your bed in the dormitories, it looks like it is one of the grasslands we saw from the train's windows. It was massive from the inside too. Then there is this invisible lion throne you are sitting on."
"What he wants to ask is what spells did you use to do all that?" George asked, smiling at Nate before glaring at his twin.
"A couple charms." Nate shrugged. He was not sure how bad their pranks would get if they had access to spatial expansion charms and the Illusionary Arts. He shuddered to think of the pranking possibilities with the help of illusions.
"Can you teach us?" Fred asked bluntly, while George nodded along at the question he still gave his brother the stink eye.
"No. It takes a lot of time to teach it." Nate lied with ease.
Fred looked appalled at the blunt refusal.
"Can you at least tell the spells to us? So we can practice them on our own." George tried to salvage the situation for themselves.
"No use. It will most probably be in the restricted section of the library. And I won't recommend sneaking in there before third year otherwise, you might get cursed by one of the darker books or journals. What I want to know is what were you doing? Looking through my bed like that?" Nate asked, quite curious.
"Oh we thought you were still sleeping, so we decided to wake you up so you wouldn't get late on the first day and miss breakfast." George shrugged as Fred nodded along at the explanation.
"Makes sense, thanks for looking out for me." Nate dipped his head a bit to show his thanks.
"No problem mate." The twins took the seats on Nate's right.
A few minutes later, they were joined by Lee Jordan. And just as Jordan took his seat, the breakfast was served.
Half the staff table was looking at him sitting on the head of the table, flummoxed. Most would assume it was his way of sitting that had annoyed the professors, but the reason they were perplexed was the way Minerva McGonagall was glaring at one of her lions.
[Staff Table]
"Minerva, what has Young Nate done to draw your ire ?" asked a curious Dumbledore.
"The boy is going to be a headache, Albus. I understand him being a prodigy should allow him some levy, but I am telling you, he is gonna be worse than those four." Minerva hissed through her thinned lips as if remembering stories from wars long past.
"And what did Mr. Grey do that warrants comparison to James Potter and his ilk, Minerva?" Severus Snape asked instead of Dumbledore, looking at the new first year calculatingly, "The boy is relaxed and comfortable at the house table unlike most first years. I can see the similarities already- Arrogant, Boastful and hanging out with Arthur Weasley's spawn but, most of the Gryffindors are like him, I do not see something special."
"You would be correct in saying that young Mr. Grey is arrogant and boastful, Severus. I am pleasantly surprised he made friends with the Weasley twins at all. What you need to understand is that his arrogance is not completely misplaced Severus, and he has a strong dislike of authoritarianism. Now Minerva, you were telling us what the boy had done?"
"He made certain changes to his dorm bed." The vice-headmistress answered shiftily.
Dumbledore's eyes twinkled with amusement as he commented, "I burned down the curtains of my bed during my schooling as well, accidentally of course. Never liked the curtains anyway."
"He cast a spatial expansion charm on the bed after using a knitting charm to sew three of the four sides of the bed and the curtains together, then he cast an illusion like the ceiling. The elf responsible for the room was told to stay out of the bedroom he made for himself, and the poor elf was crying and punishing himself thinking he made some mistake. It took a lot of effort to explain that it was a security precaution by the boy."
[Author Notes:
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