32 Chapter 32

The antidote, as it turned out, was harmless. That didn't stop Milo from buffing himself up with a Resistance spell and keeping his Antitoxin on hand before taking his dosage, however. Despite the fact that, aided by Snape's potion, Milo recovered from the after-effects of his poisoning fairly quickly, the rest of Autumn at Hogwarts was, well, unpleasant.

Harry and Ron made absolutely no progress in their hunt for information about the Philosopher's Stone among the teachers, and for such a powerful and famous artifact, Milo could barely find anything about it in the Hogwarts Library. He Scholar's Touch-ed his way through mountains of thick, dusty tomes without even opening their covers, and while he learned a lot of apparently useless information, there was little that seemed relevant to him. Scholar's Touch didn't grant any special powers to aid in memorization, so the fact that he 'read' the books so rapidly actually made it harder to keep his facts straight. Still, he reckoned he'd absorbed enough general setting information that he could start making Knowledge (History) checks about this world.

It was during this period that Milo noticed something unnatural about the people here. The more he watched them learn, the less he was sure that they were even human at all—they looked human, sure, but...

Well, to start, there was the food. The people here were obsessed with it, and kept comparing the various flavours of dishes that the house-elves cooked up for them (Milo was dying to meet one of the elves here, he was sure they could help him. Elves were annoying, sure, but the pointy-eared pansies and magic went hand in hand). Some even developed favourite foods and avoided certain ones altogether. To Milo, food was a logistical challenge to be overcome while adventuring and a source of danger if it ran low (thus, the Everlasting Rations, which were all that Milo ever ate). The actual taste of food was something that only came up in plot-relevant situations – like smell, and the weather. The people of Milo's world only smelled things when they were important, like a Troglodyte's stench or a potential clue (or red herring, for that matter). Otherwise, why bother even mentioning it?

Another peculiarity in these people was the inordinate amount of down time they required. Milo had to spend eight hours sleeping and an hour memorizing spells, but that left fifteen hours a day to put to use attending class, fighting monsters, and crafting items off-screen. Milo knew an Artificer by the name of Alton who, when he finally got his hands on a Ring of Sustenance, spent two hours sleeping, eight hours crafting magic items (the maximum amount per day) and the other fourteen hours in a day mass-producing baskets to fund his adventuring. Alton did that every day for three hundred years straight, with breaks to fight monsters to recover lost Experience Points, until he'd amassed a fortune large enough to attract the attention of a wandering Blue Dragon. Alton's unfortunate demise aside, it was just good sense to put their hours to use—they were only given twenty-four in a day, after all. And besides, manual labour was the sort of thing done during a timeskip, anyways, it's not like it got in the way of the story. Even Hermione seemed shocked by the amount of time he spent reading and working. In just one week, Milo managed to custom-tailor his fifth-hand Hogwarts uniform (untrained, but with +2 for masterwork tools (which Milo also made himself) and +4 from his Intelligence) until it rivalled Draco's in quality, read more books than any of his classmates (save Hermione) could in a year, and carve holy symbols of Pelor, Heironeous, St. Cuthbert, and Boccob into key locations around Gryffindor Tower. That had earned him some strange looks, despite the fact that the residents there were fully aware that there were vampires on the same continent as them. That was all in addition to the daily chores all first year Gryffindors were required to do as punishment for trying to kill or maim the Slytherins back in September. Milo theorized that, while he had to spend an hour poring over his spellbook, performing arcane research, and memorizing spells every morning, the Wizards here had to spend at four to eight hours a day (judging by comparisons between Hermione and Ron, it was an amount of time equal to eight minus their Intelligence Bonus, in hours per day) sitting around on armchairs and talking about the weather.

But that wasn't the really weird thing. The more Milo watched these students in their classes, the harder a time he had sleeping at night. The way they were learning was wrong. It was oh, so, incredibly wrong. Ordinary people learned in discrete increments: they levelled up, their powers, skills, and abilities increased, and then they plateaued until attaining enough Experience Points to go up another level. It was just obvious. That was, intuitively, the way everyone—humans, elves, dwarves, kobolds, mindflayers, small fluffy hamsters, everyone—learned.

Watching his fellow Gryffindors, Milo wondered, though it seemed impossible, if their skills didn't develop gradually. There seemed to be a slow, constant growth in magical ability, historical knowledge, broomstick skills, or whatever, that depended on that student's particular aptitude in that area. Hermione, for example, was the fastest to learn in Defence Against the Dark Arts, Charms, Transfiguration, Potions, Herbology, Astrology... actually, pretty much all of their classes except for Broomstick Flying (which went to Harry, who was also, to be fair, pretty close to even Hermione in Defence), and History of Magic (to Milo's intense embarrassment, it was the only class he seemed to be doing any good in, and even that was only as a result of his supersonic library binge).

That wasn't to say that Milo was completely useless in class, it was just... he had to wait and hope that whichever particular Charm (this world had a totally different definition of Charm than Milo's, which caused him no end of confusion) they were about to learn was fairly close to his limited repertoire of spells so he could fake his way through. If it wasn't... well, having to be helped by Neville Longbottom when attempting to learn the Cutting Charm was somewhat embarrassing. Transfiguration wasn't too bad. He managed to get by, to a certain extent, with using Prestidigitation to change the colour and, on one memorable occasion, taste of the object he was attempting to transfigure. He started out ahead, but now he was barely scraping a A (which stood for Acceptable, and was counter-intuitively, the lowest passing grade) but if he didn't get some new spells soon, he'd slip into P (for Poor) territory with alacrity. Charms was going distressingly poorly until Flitwick announced they'd be learning how to levitate objects. Milo simply cast Levitate quietly then said "Wingardium Leviosa" with the rest of them, and astonished the class and earned him five House Points by lifting an entire table, complete with Neville (who had been leaning against it and grabbed one of the legs in a panic as it started to float away) and lowering it back down again.

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