Chapter 21: The Change, and The Room Of Requirements (2/2)
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The very next day, Quinn began drafting a medium-term plan spanning two years. He climbed down into his suitcase and stepped into the library.
On the paper in front of him, Quinn wrote what he wanted to do before entering his third year.
”Completing Hogwarts education with practical usage,” wrote Quinn as the basic goal of his two-year plan. Quinn wanted to cover Hogwarts' cover subjects and the electives he was interested in; Potions, Herbology, Transfiguration, Charms, Defense Against Dark Arts, Arithmancy, Study of Ancient Runes, and Astronomy. He wasn't interested in Divination and Muggle Studies and wasn't sure if he wanted to pursue Care of Magical Creatures; he wasn't thrilled at the idea of being close to magical beasts.
Next was ”Supplementing all the Hogwarts' subjects with knowledge from around the world.” Quinn's approach had always been to expand his knowledge from reading books from all around the world. From his experience of learning the first four years of Hogwarts' curriculum, he knew the curriculum was missing several things that text from other schools could supplement. It was the same with every school and region in the world. Everybody was missing something, but at the same time, everybody had something to offer as well.
The third goal was ”Learning new branches of magic that were taught in other schools.” There were other branches of magic like Transmutation, Illusion magic, Dark Arts, Alchemy, Elemental magic, Warding, Soul magic, Healing magic, Abjuration, Body magic, to name a few. Quinn wanted to learn these magics to the N.E.W.T level or equivalent.
Coming to mind arts, he wanted to set some goals. Quinn decided he wanted to build the highest level of occlumency defense in his current system. He wanted to make sure that his defense would stand firm against a master occlumens, plus he wanted to increase the immersion level on his memories. On the legilimency front, he wanted to become a master legilimens by the end of the second year; Quinn was planning to use the entire school body to explore the insides of a mind.
Quinn knew he needed to be ready for the year when the Basilisk roamed the castle. Quirrelmort didn't scare Quinn; he just needed to ignore the professor and not poke his nose in the matter. Quinn would decide if he wanted to make a play for the Philosopher's Stone when the time came. Currently, he wasn't sure if he wanted to go against a professor of defense against dark arts with a master of dark arts stuck to his head.
After Quinn decided his plans for the next two years, he thought about the immediate plan. With Quinn's increased focus, he wanted a place to practice magic, and the best place for doing so would be the Room Of Requirement. Quinn hadn't gone to the seventh floor because he was too busy getting used to the new lifestyle at Hogwarts, but now that he had spent a week at the school, he was ready to go to the mysterious room.
It was time to the greatest room in Hogwarts known to Quinn.
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On Monday, Quinn had a History of Magic class at nine (9) o'clock in the morning, and after that, he had two hours of free time and one hour of lunch. Quinn decided to skip lunch and spend three hours in the Room Of Requirement.
The room was located on the seventh floor in the left corridor of the Hogwarts castle. Quinn looked at the tapestry depicting the attempt of Barnabas the Barmy to teach trolls ballet. He recalled the method to enter the Room Of Requirement and walked past the tapestry three times, thinking about a place to practice magic.
Immediately after the third time, a door appeared opposite the tapestry. Quinn, with a beating heart, pushed the doors open and entered a spacious room. In one corner of the room, he saw dummies to practice charms and jinxes. In another corner were objects of different shapes, sizes, and materials to practice transfiguration. He also a potion workstation for brewing potions. He was also surprised to see a comfy chair for sitting while practicing mind arts.
Quinn walked around the room and saw the details in the room. He found that the room had everything he wanted, but Quinn also noted that the room specifically provided things related to the magic he wanted to practice today.
On the transfiguration corner, he saw a sizeable amount of mercury, Quinn had planned to study how mercury reacted to transfiguration, and the room had read that from his mind and provided him with mercury. On the charms' corner, he saw a fast-moving golden snitch as he had imagined wanting a snitch to practice the Slowing Charm. On the potions workstation were copper cauldrons and the tools he needed to brew a Befuddlement Draught.
”The room provides what I need,” Quinn dropped his book bag on the comfy chair and walked to one of the dummies and casted an Exploding charm (Bombarda) on it, and the dummy exploded, and Quinn smiled when the destroyed dummy didn't disappear or fix itself.
Quinn was happy to see the damaged dummy not because he enjoyed seeing the mutilated dummy but because the room had even picked up on the finer details of his request. Quinn had also wished to practice his mending charm, so he requested the dummies to stay damaged.
Quinn swept an eye over the broken pieces and levitated them near the dummy. He began casting several simultaneous Mending charms on the dummy, and before he knew it, the dummy was like it never exploded.
Quinn nodded before his smile disappeared, and he said to himself, ”Let's get to work.” He removed his robe and levitated it to the chair and thus began the repeated explosion of dummies. Quinn experimented with the strength and accuracy of the Explosion charm. For Quinn, there was no difference between Bombarda and Bombarda Maxima as he didn't rely on chants and understood the essence of magic before practicing it.
When Quinn used the Explosion charm, he was the one who decided the configuration of the spell and not some words in Latin. Quinn decided when to explode the whole dummy or when to only take its head off. Quinn tried simultaneous casting and continuous casting of the charm and how it would affect him. Quinn found that he was at an acceptable level in continuous casting but lacked efficiency while he casted simultaneously.
In between explosions, Quinn experimented with the Mending charm; Quinn checked if it could mend the dummy if he completely eradicated a part of the dummy; the answer was no. The Mending charm could only fix the available parts. He also found that if he trapped one of the parts, then the Mending charm would mend the object and leave the trapped if it couldn't get to it. There was also a distance restriction, where if a piece of the broken object was farther than a certain distance, then the Mending charm would ignore the part.
After half an hour and hundred Exploding charms, Quinn decided he had enough practice with the Exploding charm and moved on to the potions part of the room to brew a Befuddlement Draught. Befuddlement Draught was a potion that caused the drinker to become belligerent and reckless.
He donned his gloves and protective goggles and got to brew the potion. It took an hour to brew the potion. Quinn withdrew his potion notes and began preparing the ingredient as he experimented for best efficiency. After starting the brewing, Quinn took out a stack of paper and started documenting every change in the potion, cross-referencing it with listed changes. Quinn observed his potions with an almost obsessive hawk-like gaze. Quinn had learned that some stages of different potions required constant attention, and not many books mentioned those stages, so Quinn had made it his goal to document every change of every potion he learned.
After an hour of careful brewing and close observation, Quinn had ten standard doses of the dark acid green high-grade Befuddlement Draught. Quinn poured potion in vials and packed three vials to send to Elliot at home, and packed five for long-term storage, and the last two doses, he was going to use on the stuck up Prefect, who scoffed while telling Quinn and his roommates that they couldn't Gobstones in the common room.
”Let's see if he can still have a stick up his butt after I give him this,” said Quinn with an evil smirk on his face.
Finally, Quinn stepped into the Transfiguration corner to work on mercury. Mercury was a poisonous metal, so with the utmost care, Quinn transfigured the given material into different things. He also boiled and froze the mercury and then transfigured it at those temperatures. Quinn tried to turn into different materials like other metals, rubber, wood, and many other organic and inorganic material. He even turned small droplets of mercury into tiny ants and relatively bigger cockroaches. He turned larger amounts of mercury into more complex things. Experimented with turning a drop of mercury into a much larger block of stone and tried to shrink down a glass of mercury into a small earthworm.
After working for a quarter of an hour on transfiguration, Quinn rested for fifteen before diving into his mind. At a distance from the West Manor, Quinn began building the Hogwarts replica. Unlike the West Manor, where Quinn had built the exterior before turning to the interiors, his current approach was going to be much different. Quinn was going to construct Hogwarts, one room at a time. For example, Quinn was going to start at the ground floor and then move up. His first room was going to be the Great Hall, and then he would expand to the rest of the ground floor. Quinn sat on the comfy chair, and for the rest of the time, he worked on his mindscape.
Fifteen minutes before one o'clock in the afternoon, Quinn exited the Room Of Requirement and headed to the defense of dark arts class while humming in a good mood.
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Quinn West - MC - Found RoR - Guess who has the best secret base in the world.
Eddie Carmicheal - Ravenclaw - Currently obsessed with Gobstones
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