He couldn't help but smile as he sat back down on his comfortable bed, as he bit into a rich green apple, the sweet, but slightly sour juices running over his highly sensitive tongue.
He looked over the student questionnaire/survey form he had just written, re-reading the couple dozen elegantly written questions upon the tanned parchment. The questions were on a good mix of subject contents, things like teaching style, favourite subject, worst subject, best teacher, worst teacher, and so forth. This was the start of how he was going to get back at the manipulative headmaster for revealing his animagus form to virtually the entire British magical community.
Back in primary school, his teachers would often ask the class how they would rate the module, so that they could improve the material for next year's class.
Hogwarts, on the other hand, didn't do this in any form, so either they just didn't care about what their students thought of their subjects or the school in general, or perhaps they just arrogantly assumed that they knew better than their charges, or even worse, just assuming they were the best and would always remain that way... Snape, for example, probably thought that. Or perhaps the idea just never occurred to them to ask their students, with their unique perspective, what they thought.
It also probably didn't occur to them that different students learned in different ways and that one singular, uniform approach to teaching did not and would not get the best results for everyone. Whilst this was a simple scheme to get a modicum of payback, there were several alternate reasons behind it, beyond just simple revenge and his personal need to get even with the manipulative old bastard.
On a personal level, he was bored, very bored. His lessons were no longer challenging; in some cases, the lessons were so utterly worthless to him that he actively skipped the classes, actually preferring the inevitable detention with his head of house rather than listening to the fool drone on. This latest scheme of his would hopefully force a change. He didn't want to be held back from reaching his potential by attending classes that merely wasted his limited and valuable time via unchallenging work.
He wanted to climb to the top, to be pushed, to be challenged to grow and excel beyond his current limits and skills. He simply wanted to learn more, to improve his understanding of magic so that he could fulfil the promise he made to himself before joining Hogwarts, to make his dead parents proud.
Hogwarts' vaunted reputation for excellence was looking like complete and utter fucking bullshit at the moment, or perhaps was only true a long, long time ago. The alternative made him shudder; if Hogwarts really was the premier magical learning institution in all of Europe, he didn't even want to know how bad the rest were.
The by-product of this scheme would also have the effect of improving the standard of teaching for everyone; well, he hoped it would, otherwise he would be giving serious consideration to transferring to another school.
The Potter family's wealth and power had always been based in Britain, and thus attending Hogwarts was both a long tradition as well as a good idea to make contacts and be visible to the who's who of magical Britain. However, there was a point of diminishing returns. If Hogwarts was holding him back from reaching his true potential, it wouldn't matter how many contacts he made in Britain; he'd be impaired for life.
After the student survey was completed, the second part of his plan would begin. The gathered results would be processed and then sent off to Rita so that she could write up a startling article on the state of the Hogwarts education system, backed up with historical and publically available (but hard to find) exam results to show the many failing areas of the school's curriculum.
This, combined with both Sirius' formal complaint and the upcoming Triwizard Tournament, would hopefully rouse the ire of the sheep-like British magicals, creating quite a headache for the headmaster to handle. And with the headmaster's currently weakened position, his plan's degree of effectiveness would increase greatly, helping to make bigger waves and hopefully trigger a positive change to the school.
Putting the draft questionnaire to one side, he still had to decide how to effectively and stealthily deploy the survey around the school and collect the results without being detected by either the headmaster or the staff members. Seeing no immediate solution to the dilemma, he decided to do something else with his remaining evening and think on the matter later.
Lazily flicking his wand to summon his fourth-year charms book to his bedside, he turned to the bookmarked page. Once again, he was reading about a fascinating piece of magic called animation charms and their inner workings.
Animation magic actually encompassed an entire subset of varying magic in the charms field and was one of the most difficult types of charms to master. They required a clear and specific intent, a great deal of concentration, and an intimate understanding of both the magic at work and the desired outcome.
The user had to be able to visualize and understand every aspect of the movement. At first glance, that seemed easy, but imagine, for example, all the unconscious pieces involved in successfully walking or running or doing any complex action. Most of the time, we do these things unconsciously without giving much thought to the individual pieces and parts. You couldn't do that with animation charms. In time, a skilled practitioner could do most of that unconsciously, but like a child learning to walk, there was a great deal of practice required.
The magic also required just the right amount of power behind the spell; too much power would destabilize the spell matrix, causing the object to explode; not enough power, and the object would fail to animate properly. You also had to take into account the object's size and the material that it was made out of before casting the spell, as some materials were more magically resistant than others. Bronze, for instance, was an incredibly magic-resistant material to apply external magic to.
So, in essence, it was one big balancing act, with many individual parts that all needed to come together perfectly to work properly. The mind arts would prove a huge help. One of the easiest objects to animate was human-shaped statues. Unless handicapped from birth, everyone had a bit of unconscious knowledge on how a person should move correctly in the back of their minds.
The problem he was currently facing, as he looked around his Spartan room, was that he had nothing human-like in shape to animate.
For any other use, he could just transfigure some objects into human-like shapes and statues, but the transfiguration magic, at his absolutely beginner level, would create interference with the animation charms, making it even more difficult to achieve the correct balance needed for the charms to work properly, as two different types of magic were forced to coexist in a single vessel.
A skilled wizard with a great deal of experience in animation magic could unconsciously take that into account and adjust accordingly within moments, but he was a long, long way from that level of proficiency.
Considering the problem for a second, he decided to take the safer option and give his cousin a visit to see if he couldn't temporarily borrow a couple of her teddies for some experimentation, rather than risk making the task more difficult and more dangerous by combining two different brands of magic together at his current novice level.
After all, he was a Ravenclaw; he wasn't some reckless Gryffindor who charged blindly into dangerous situations and merely hoped for the best. He was just fine with slow and steady progress in this case.
...
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