It was mildly interesting to see the portkey in action, it lifted its passengers out of earth's gravity and then traveled to the location before dropping back into gravity, the spinning was needed to keep the passengers alive in what would otherwise have been zero gravity. The traveling itself was identical to apparition, but due to the lower gravity the squeezing sensation either went unnoticed or the feeling only happened when traveling within earth's gravity.
Outside the gates of Malfoy manor two aurors stood guard, Moody strode up to one and said "Auror Alastor Moody and Trainee Auror Nymphadora Tonks entering Malfoy manor, consultants Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter accompanying. It should be noted that Mr. Potter is underage but has been granted permission to use magic for this case by his guardian Albus Dumbledore, under the watch of Auror Alastor Moody."
The auror nodded and let the four of them pass through the gate, the moment he stepped over the boundary he felt the wards press down on him. They weren't anywhere as strong as Hogwarts wards but they felt more oppressive.
Lucius Malfoy met them at the front door "What took you so long? I called for the aurors almost an hour ago, I should have you reprimanded auror Moody."
Moody scoffed "Empty threat Malfoy, you don't have the power anymore."
"And what is Mr. Potter doing here?"
"He's with me, he's one of the best magical trackers I know." Moody said, leaving no room for Lucius to argue the point.
Malfoy sneered at them but let them in anyway, Harry instinctively spread out his magic and felt something amiss
"Mr. Malfoy… How many people are in the house right now?"
"Just us five. Narcissa is currently visiting friends and Draco is still at school"
"You don't have a house elf do you?"
"Not since the summer, I haven't had the time to get another one."
"Then why can I feel six people in the house?" Harry asked slowly
Moody's eye began spinning frantically, obviously looking around the house "Where is the sixth person?"
"I can't really tell, it's just up"
"I checked the wards, there is no one here." Malfoy insisted
"No one or no human?" Harry asked cautiously
"What's that meant to mean, they're the same thing you stupid child."
"And what about vampires, ghouls, the fae or even just a hag would fall under the classification of 'not human' so answer Potter's question, do your wards detect people or humans?"
"Humans" Malfoy spat out through clenched teeth
"Potter, is it possible the person you're detecting isn't human?"
Harry reached out for the signature he could feel, it was clearly hidden so he couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from, he could tell it had a single aura so it wasn't a house elf, it also wasn't as dense as the Cornish pixies so it probably wasn't a fae. Having never had the chance to see a vampire or ghoul he didn't know what they were meant to look like but he from what he could see of the beings signature it didn't look like a human or a hag.
"It's possible, it's so faint it's hard to tell."
Moody stared at Malfoy and asked "Do you have an attic Malfoy?"
"I… do, but it's been sealed for as long as I can remember, I highly doubt anyone could break into it." Malfoy said slowly, as if he were trying to convince himself
"Well then perhaps you should have kept your vault in your attic if you're so sure of its protections."
"My great Grandfather sealed the attic back when he was Lord Malfoy, I suspect with blood magic. As such the only way to open the attic is with either the key or an equal amount of power, if it were for the fact the key has been lost for decades I would have stored the vault with the attic."
"Is the entire attic warded or just the door?" Harry asked hesitantly
"Whatever do you mean boy?"
"Well, if it's just the door that's been sealed you could just blow a hole in the ceiling and climb up."
"The entire floor is sealed foolish child."
"Let's cut the chit-chat and go have a look at that attic." Moody said gruffly as he marched off through the manor, Harry suspected he was using his magical eye to see through the walls for the correct way through the house, that or had been here so many times he had memorised the route.
Eventually they reached a corridor that seemed to lead no where, it was only when Harry looked up and saw the dense magic covering the ceiling did he realise this was the way into the attic, presumably the stairs were hidden in the ceiling and would descend when triggered.
"Do you think you can you open it up, Potter?" Moody asked curiously
Harry Looked more closer, if he strained his mage sight he could just about see inside the magic, the problem was it was so dense it had become almost opaque. He had quickly zoned out Mr. Malfoy who had begun to rant about how it was impossible to open the attic.
The protections were a classic conditional ward which were already powerful, but it seemed blood ward gave the ward even more power. The end result was an almost impenetrable ward of pure magic, it would have taken Harry days to take it apart piece by piece without help.
Fortunately this time he didn't need to actually take it apart, instead he focused on the epicenter of the ward. As he hoped he quickly found the clause for the conditional ward, just as Malfoy had said it was looking for a particular magical key.
Once he knew what it was looking for he formed a small piece of mithril in his hand and gave it the properties the ward was looking for. The only trouble was it also needed to be the magical signature of the family, he could've gotten Mr. Malfoy to imbue his signature into the mithril but that would require him explaining his mithril, instead he instructed his mithril to return the signature of whatever was checking it.
For a laugh he decided to make his mithril form into the shape of a key and held it up to the ceiling, he watched as a tendril of magic touched the key before returning back into the ceiling, it seemed to accept it as valid as the steps started descending from the ceiling one by one, eventually forming a staircase which led into the now opened attic.
"What? That attic has been sealed for decades, I've had many experienced curse breakers try and fail to get in and you do it in moments?" Lucius spluttered
"As I said Lucius, the boy is one of the strongest magical trackers I know, now let us inspect that attic. Tonks, you and Potter stay guard down here incase the intruder tries to make a run for it while we're up there, Lucius, Albus you're with me."
"So how do you change yourself like that?" Harry asked after a few minutes had passed of them awkwardly standing at the bottom of the stairs
"What? Oh I'm a metamorphmagus, it means I can change my appearance at will." Tonks said cheerfully
"Useful skill to have." Harry said absently, thinking about what he could do if he had the power to change himself at will
"Yeah, it's saved my neck a few times, but a metamorphmagus is born, it can't be learnt."
Harry Looked at her for a moment, watching as her signature shifted and changed. He wondered if he could make his own signature change like that or if his mithril could replicate the effect for him.
"Perhaps... I guess we'll see won't we?" She chuckled for a moment before realising Harry wasn't joking
"People have tried to copy my powers in the past you know, none have succeeded before." she said cautiously
"Nobody got into Malfoy's attic before either."
"But that's completely unrelated!"
"Not really, when you think about it at the end of the day it's all the same magic."
As he talked he had formed a mithril bracelet that would make his hand bright orange, he activated it as he raised his hand so Tonks could see it. Her eyes widened comically as his hand quickly turned bright orange.
"No way… No way did you just do that, it must be a trick or something… make it blue."
It was easy to quickly reform the mithril with the idea blue instead of orange, the moment he finished reforming it his hand briefly went back to its original skin tone before changing to a bright blue.
Before Tonks could react a gigantic shape flew down the stairs and knocked them both to the ground and began charging down the hall. Harry absently noted it didn't give off a shadow as he thrust out his hand and a spear of mithril shot down the hall.
It looked like the spear was going to get the intruder in the leg but at the last moment they seemed to blur and move to the side, allowing the spear to shoot past. Harry quickly reached out with his magic for the mithril spear and managed to make it reform into a giant net which spread to cover the hall.
The intruder managed to come to a stop just before they hit the net, they turned and Harry realised it was a woman, she grinned at him and then seemed to turn into smoke, it easily slipped through the mithril before reforming back into the woman. By then Tonks' had retrieved her wand and had shot a red spell down the corridor which just managed to slip through the holes of the mithril while on a direct path for the intruder.
Rather than dodge out of the way the person thrust her hand upwards which made the floorboard rise up and intercept the spell, whatever the spell was it managed to fill the hallway with smoke, by the time the smoke had cleared the intruder had vanished.
"A Vampire managed to break into Malfoy Manor, Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter called in to help deal with the problem. Are we at risk of a new breed of vampire?" Bathsheda looked at Harry over the Daily Prophet.
The Prophet had somehow found out about the incident at Malfoy Manor despite the efforts of both Moody and Malfoy, Harry figured Malfoy wasn't pleased to have his name in the paper again having just recovered from his bad press from the year before.
"Honestly it wasn't as bad as they're saying it was, I just unlocked the door and the vampire was gone before we really knew it, Moody isn't even entirely sure it was a vampire."
"You still tried to stop them even though you could have let them go past, not many people would do that." Bathsheda said encouragingly
"Anyway, ignoring what the intruder was, I've had another idea. In order to get into Malfoy's attic I needed to replace the key needed to activate the conditional. Rather than get the magic from Malfoy I just made it replicate whatever signature the conditional was looking for. But I think I could incorporate something similar for the wards to fix the rune problem, if we set up the runes to make a small ward inside the mithril shield, then the mithril could pick up the ward and then replicate it to make the much bigger ward. I would need to incorporate a scale modifier but this way any magic going into the actual ward will never touch the runes themselves and as long as the internal ward holds the external ward will never fail." Harry said excitedly
"And if the external ward is only copying the internal ward it would eliminate most curse breaking techniques as there would be a buffer between the ward and runes… If we made the mithril hold the ward while the internal ward stones were being modified, then the headmaster could safely modify the wards without needing to drop the wards… Now we just need to get rid of the issue of the mithril draining the wards."
"Well I was thinking about that too, if we plugged the mithril into the leylines it could draw any necessary power from the leylines while the majority of the power comes from the mithril, this way Hogwarts can still have the powerful wards without needing to completely redesign any of them in mithril. We could even have blocks of specific ward runes that just slot into the main generator to change the wards like you were thinking of."
"Brilliant, let's test it here just to make sure and then we can invite Professor Dumbledore to check it out!" Bathsheda said happily.
"And you have removed the 'bugs' from the previous version?" Dumbledore asked as he tested the new Ward generator.
"Yes sir, Harry's idea got rid of almost every issue we had, we only have a slight issue of the mithril drawing some energy from the ward which can cause a fluctuation in power, but if we plugged them into the leylines like the current wards then that won't be a problem here. We just need to fix it later on if we want to use them elsewhere."
"Excellent, how long do you reckon it would take for you to replace the current wards with this new 'ward generator'?" Dumbledore asked joyfully
Bathsheda bit her lip as she thought it over "Without knowing the ward it's impossible to say, I would need to redraw all of the runes into the mithril by hand and then we would need to ensure everything is working correctly before we could implement it fully."
"Understandable, I will ask Nicolas to see if he will help you as he is something of a rune master himself and his knowledge of Arcanic runes is unparalleled. Very well then I will let you into the ward chamber every Saturday after Lunch, you will have until dinner to work."
With Christmas fast approaching Harry wanted to make something unique for his tutors presents, for Bathsheda he had designed a cube that would show any rune she asked for, he had hoped to have it show and make runic clusters as well but it proved too complex for his current time frame.
For Dumbledore he had designed a quill that could write in any colour and never run out of ink, but the main feature of the quill was that it could sign magical documents, there were already quills that could fill out documents but as the quill didn't contain the user's unique signature they couldn't be used to sign magically binding documents, that was until his quill which would hold the signature of Dumbledore.
He had decided to make a present for Flitwick this year as he now knew he didn't need to fear the goblins and his head of house had been very supportive of him when most of his fellow students had turned on him. His present was at first glance just an ordinary cube but it could hold any charm used on it, if Flitwick cast a levitation charm on the cube it would keep levitating until a new charm was used.
Currently he was working on Snape's present, Snape had once lamented how much time he spent brewing basic potions for the hospital wing. Self brewing cauldrons were available already, but as the brewer's magic was used in the brewing of a potion, self brewing cauldrons quickly ran out of magic and the time spent recharging the cauldron often equaled the time it took to actually brew the potion in the first place.
As his mithril cauldron would be able to recharge itself this was not an issue, the cauldron would also be able to make itself any temperature needed and would even preserve the potion when it finished brewing.
Snape would need to brew a potion by hand first while the cauldron 'recorded' his actions and then it could brew the potion by itself, it would even prepare the ingredients itself as long as they were left nearby.
The final present he needed was one for Nicolas, the trouble was Nicolas could probably make anything Harry was currently capable of with his knowledge of runes and alchemy. It didn't help that he had never complained about anything in front of Harry, eventually Harry had given up and asked Dumbledore for help.
"Sometimes the best present is the one that comes from the heart… I believe your mother once gifted her potions professor a water lily that turned into a fish, it didn't serve any purpose over than being something to look at. Does this help?"
Taking inspiration from his mother, Harry had decided to make a mithril bird that would gradually change into different shapes. He had imbued an alchemical property into the mithril which allowed the transmutation to keep hold, the bird would respond to preset commands such as "Follow" or "Stay".
Regrettably he didn't yet know how to get the bird to deliver mail so it was only decorative, but he hoped Nicolas would like it none-the-less.
Alongside the presents he was planning on sending letters to Filch and Nyphadora Tonks, he feared Christmas would be a bad time with Filch as he knew the man would be missing Mrs Norris. As for Nyphadora he wanted another chance to look at her Signature again and hoped she would be up for it.