54 Chapter 51
After a few days of rest, during which she had shut herself in her room and only seen her parents at mealtimes, her mother had tentatively asked if she would be returning to Hogwarts this year for her apprenticeship. She had dressed within minutes, gave her concerned mother a tired smile hoping to alleviate some of the poor woman's worries, grabbed her wand, and apparated to Hogsmeade, where she'd learned that it was going to be the first day of classes for the new firsties.
As she walked through the halls of Hogwarts towards the dungeons, absently musing that had she been a year younger, she would have gotten to see the famous Boy Who Lived in his first year before graduating. She shook her head and turned right, walking forward a few more feet before knocking on the door that opened into Professor Severus Snape's office.
"Come in."
The professor was at his desk, presumably writing out the lesson plans for the day.
"Your apprenticeship starts from after Halloween Miss Tonks. I presume you haven't forgotten how to read the calendar. Because if that is the case I'm afraid I must retract my offer." He said without looking up.
Last year, Tonks might have even cracked a smile at the quip. Now, she just didn't have the strength.
"About that, Professor. I'm afraid that I am going to have to refuse the offer. There have been some…extenuating circumstances," she said in a flat voice.
Professor Snape's hand stilled.
"Is this your idea of a joke Miss Tonks?" His voice was tight. With a pang of nervousness, Tonks realized that he was getting angry. "Do you realize how many students I have refused before I agreed to apprentice you?"
Tonks flinched, and then instantly regretted it.
"I'm sorry Professor," she said, keeping her eyes down while trying to hide her flinch.
The side effects of the incident were kicking in. She had been showing problems staying around men for long. When she'd flinched away from her father the time he had gone to hug her, he'd almost cried. She spent most of her time since then trying to curb this instinct. It was getting better, but it wasn't gone.
Despite her attempt to hide it, Snape must have caught the flinch, since his voice suddenly lost its anger.
"Is there anything you wish to tell me?" he asked quietly. When she looked up, his black eyes met hers and a sob wrecked through her as tears rolled from her eyes.
She told him everything.
"They will not be escaping punishments for their crimes." The man's eyes burned with rage. "I will make sure of it."
She thought of the screams and the few wisps of memories she had from the time she was drugged. "They are taken care of," she said.
Snape didn't ask her what she meant.
"Very well then," he said after a few moments of silence, "Is there any course of action you wish to pursue now?"
Tonks thought for a minute.
"I was thinking of the Auror program."
The professor stared at her for a second before pulling out a fresh piece of parchment. He scribbled something on it, put it in an envelope, cast a sealing spell on it and handed it to her.
"Take this to Alastor Moody."
She eyed the envelope before taking it and putting it into her pocket. She nodded at her old professor and turned to leave.
"And do be careful Nymphadora."
Tonks gave him a small smile and closed the door behind her.
You have slept in your own bed, HP and MP have been restored 100% each. All ailments and negative status effects have been cured.
The message greeted Harry as he was woken up by his alarm clock ringing loudly beside him.
Thankfully, his magically silencing bed hangings were closed, and the clock was inside the hangings on the bed, so his early alarm didn't end up waking up the entire dormitory. Rubbing his eyes, Harry groped for his glasses, putting them on once he found them. The sight in front him focused in his eyes.
Harry stared.
There, on his stomach, sleeping with her head tucked under her wing, was Hedwig the chick. Except that she wasn't Hedwig the chick anymore.
In what looked like a few hours, she had grown into Hedwig the prepubescent flaming albino turkey.
It was almost as if somebody had unloaded a vat-full of growth hormones into the phoenix's feed. Her beak was longer, her pale tail feathers had gained a golden sheen towards their tips, her wings and tail were more proportional to her body, and her overall size had almost doubled. She looked a bit lanky like her body had suddenly grown a lot in length while forgetting to compensate in breadth.
Harry, a bit worried about his new friend's health, cast an Observe on her.
Hedwig
Lv-30
HP-∞/∞
MP-∞/∞
Race- Caucasian Phoenix
Str-89
Vit-56
Dex-33
Int-20
Wis-15
Luc-24
Hedwig is an immortal phoenix. She has the ability to regenerate. She will undergo a full life cycle at the end of which she will burst into flames & rise from the ashes as a newborn chick. This Burning Day will happen less and less as she will start to age slower and slower in her life cycles. The first burning day usually occurs a few days after the birth of the Phoenix. She also has unrestricted teleportation to places she has seen before and boasts magical tears and song.
She thinks Harry is pretty cool but she is currently asleep and will rip his hair out one by one if he tries to dump water on her.
"Well," Harry muttered under his breath, deciding that the irony of dumping water on a phoenix to wake her up was not worth his hair.
Scrapping the ideas he'd started cooking up, he gently lay her down back on the bed. Covering her up with a blanket, Harry went and freshened up. None of the others were up yet, so he had free reign over the showers. After taking his time to freshen up, he went off to the to the common room bookshelf to look up some spells.
After first using the ID books, he'd soon realized that he could only learn a skill from a book once. For instance, from absorbing his reference Potions book, he'd gotten a respectable Lv3 in the new skill to start with, but that meant that any further leveling up could only be done by hard work. It took him hours of studying his school books to get up to Lv4. Theoretically, he'd mused, there were books out there that, had he absorbed to create the Potions skill, would have started him out at Lv10 or even more.
Added to that, there were only a precious few books that were old enough to have gained magic of their own, allowing them to be absorbed. Unfortunately, that meant that freshly printed books could only be learned entirely by hard work.
Harry sighed. 'Guess it isn't fair to get cheats for everything,' he thought, 'besides, reading was fun.'
One of the first thoughts Harry had after getting Hedwig was about how he would carry Hedwig around with himself since she was too young to actually fly around in the forbidden forest by herself when Harry was in class and too noticeable to leave in the dorms unguarded. Furthermore, her burning day was close. Even after thinking all night, he'd failed to come up with a concrete idea. Surrounded by the one-sided reflective windows of the Ravenclaw boys bathroom, however, he had a rather interesting thought.
There were windows in the office buildings of Muggle London that let in light from the outside, but didn't let light from the inside go outside…maybe something like that…
Harry, with this seed of an idea, went over to the Common Room bookshelves and located and pulled out three books.
Looking through the 'Construction Magics by Colin Furze', Harry went on to the windows section and looked up the spells for the glass panes that went into tinting windows. The spell was simple enough, and there were little to no wand movements involved. He quickly memorized the charm, thankful that it was an easy one.
Ping!
Spell learned!
Speculo lateres
This spell is used in the construction of mirrored glass out of plain glass.
-20 MP per use
He opened up the 'Beginner's Guide to Spell Modification and Creation by Griselda Marchbanks' and skimmed through the first few pages reading about how the most common examples were Protego Duo and Protego Maxima.
He was quite surprised when he read that Wingardium Leviosa was actually a spell just called Leviosa and it only had Wingardium as a prefix to focus the magic of the user on only the feather since the youngsters that were mostly taught the spell as an introduction to Charms had incredibly volatile magic. That way, if their dangerous and sometimes explosive magic was focused entirely on the feather, no bystanders would be hurt.
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