Chapter 145

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2/3/93

Dear Harry

I think that having a tent with all those charms sounds amazing for long term camping, but pitching it in a non-magical public place would be a huge risk whether it was properly made with permanent runic magic or you'd done it yourself temporarily with a charm to tell you when you needed to reapply the other charms. Even if the tent was spelled so someone without magic couldn't see it or accidentally walk into it, there would be a risk that somebody would see you disappearing into it or appearing out of it. You definitely couldn't use it in a public camping ground which you'd need for toilet and showering facilities, unless you could make a magical bathroom in your tent. It would be safer to have them in the tent so someone didn't notice you coming and going from the facilities without having a family staying in the camp ground. I hate to say it but camp grounds these days aren't just for holiday makers, there are a lot of homeless people living in tents and while a lot of homeless people are good people who are just down on their luck there are some desperate people out there too and a boy on his own who obviously has money or at least plenty of food, clean clothing and a valuable tent, would be vulnerable to be robbed or taken advantage of. If you had running water and cooking and bathing facilities in the tent you could camp somewhere hidden enough but coming and going to get food and things would still be an issue.

That being said if there isn't already such a thing and you can find a way to make the charms long term, maybe to last at least ten years perhaps, there would probably be a market for magical tents. It might make a decent business idea if you could patent the charms so nobody could find a way to copy it and steal your idea. There must be other wizards interested in travelling or temporary accommodation they could put up in their yard for extra guests. Maybe look in the luggage shop since they seem to use a lot of the same charms you want on the tent on their bags and they're in the travel goods business, trunks would mostly be used for travelling other than for going to Hogwarts.

Speaking of bathrooms, you're right even a rarely used toilet should definitely be cleaned in that month unless they've been spelled somehow to be self cleaning, all the toilets here at college both in the dorms and in the lecture halls and lab buildings are cleaned daily whether they get a lot of use or not, and the staff that cleaned it should have reported the potion brewing to someone in charge. But maybe they did report it, as we suspected that Snape had to know where Hermione was brewing the potion to be able to substitute her attempt for a more successfully brewed potion. I'm still not sure why the professors would let her get away with trying to brew a potion so far above her ability level, if she doesn't know that the potion was substituted it only encourages her to try something similar again, perhaps while she's at home over the summer when there's nobody to keep an eye on her and stop her from poisoning herself.

So if the professors and cleaners knew about it and decided to leave it alone or fix it for her either with or without telling her they knew, that just leaves the risk of the other students finding it. Was it in one of the stalls, where she could put an out of order sign on the door? Or has the entire bathroom been spelled somehow to prevent other people entering it? Could that be done without anyone noticing and talking about it?

I think if I'd come across an experiment being conducted in a restroom then I would have tried to find out what they were doing, perhaps taken a sample. If someone did that during the brewing process it would affect the ratios of the potion to the ingredients added afterwards, would the potion still have worked? Would someone have done that or would you know that it was too dangerous to do?

I've been thinking about the tracking charms you're worrying about, unless they can be cast directly on a person they're probably on your wand (the one you use everyday because whoever cast them wouldn't know about the real one unless the charm was cast by the creepy guy in Ollivander's) because it's something they think you wouldn't dare leave behind and you should not have more than one of and they know where to look for you if you don't take it because there's only one place in Britain that we know of to replace it, other possibilities are your glasses or perhaps your trunk, schoolbag, clothes or shoes, something you would be sure to take with you if you left, so maybe you could get past some of that by transfiguring a stick or something into another wand and borrowing clothes from Dean for the day until you can buy your own, unless you have clothes in your trunk that you're absolutely certain you've never taken out of the security of the trunk and you know it's never been broken into while you were at Hogwarts or at the Weasleys. You'd need a new pair of glasses, or a charm to temporarily fix your eyesight until you take the Polyjuice. If the charm is on your person would a strong cancelling charm end them? Or is there a potion or something that will remove all magic cast on you? Even if the tracking charms are on your things, it might be worth trying to find and brew a potion that does that and take it regularly just to be sure nothing else is influencing you, or to force feed it to the next adult you desperately need help from. That way you'd know whether they really wanted to help you or not and if they notice that they've been freed from several compulsions, well… as they say the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Or at least a potential ally.

One other thought about the tracking charms, if you do have one on you or your things, they must have been applied since you returned to school this year since nobody found you at Dean's or Seamus's last summer. So unless it's because they realised you weren't at the Dursleys the whole time you said you were, what else has happened to make Dumbledore or someone else want to track your whereabouts?

My classes are all going well, I wouldn't go as far as saying they're all meeting all my hopes for them but the professors are all competent teachers and enthusiastic about their subjects so they're coming closer to all meeting my expectations than normal. I don't know whether that's because I've lowered my expectations or because I chose classes with better professors this semester. I think I did take into account who was teaching and what I know of their teaching styles and what my friends and housemates said about them more this semester than I used to so hopefully it's the latter.

I've always wondered how Batman's adoptive parents managed to keep him secret from the government. Surely someone at school would have noticed something before he was old enough to hide his extra strength and reported it. After all your world has a whole government division dedicated to making sure nonmagical people don't remember seeing magic and they were just normal people.

Your friend always

Spencer

A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.

Please stay safe everyone.