My Sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry began like all my other years at this venerable institution. I'd decided to postpone my planned reveal of my five new... whatever I was gonna call them... for next year. It would have a bigger impact then, what with some of the future big players coming to Hogwarts. It also gave me more time to train Nel. A year and change should be enough time to whip her into shape and then she could help me put on a show. I bet I could get Lys to help too.
So, that meant that I spent the sorting ceremony as I always did, sitting in my lab, tinkering with some project or another, which is pretty much what I'd been doing since I'd gotten back a week ago, after helping out Lys' family get a start on the Dwarven Revolution. I had a lot of fun doing that. There really hadn't been all that much done, to be honest. We just did some broad planning on how to hide stuff from the goblins effectively. We just didn't have enough people in "the know" yet to really get anything real out of the ground, and probably wouldn't have for quite some time. I doubted anyone would follow a sixteen-year-old girl into battle. Still, we did get some work done and the Mine of Billingr proved to be a more interesting place then I would have expected, for while the dwarves might have lost their skill in shaping metal and magic, stonecraft was a talent that was alive and well, and practiced extensively by the dwarves of the village.
It had reminded me of some of those salt mines where the miners had spent their off-hours sculpting artworks out of the salt deposits. The Dwarves of Billingr did the same, they just used stone instead. It actually seemed to be something of a hobby crossed with a training opportunity as the parents took their children down into the mine and taught them how to work the stone. The result was beautiful, if a bit random.
Once I'd gotten back to Hogwarts the first thing I'd done was set up habitats for my new magical curiosities that I'd found in the Deer Woman cave, making sure to mimic the environment that I'd found them in. They seemed to be doing good for now. I didn't know what use I would have for them as of yet, but there were a few things that I wanted to try out. Particularly with that glowing silk. I didn't know what I was gonna do with that yet, the Wizarding world didn't produce any silk of its own, not even the Eastern Wizarding communities from what I had read. All silk, hell, most fabrics were imported from the normal world wholesale. The closest I'd found was the weaving of Demiguise fur into Invisibility Cloaks. I honestly found that passing strange, the weaving of cloth was one of the oldest professions there is, to have it fall out of use in the wizarding world in favor of just buying it from the muggles seemed... odd. Particularly since wizards and witches still made their own clothes, you'd think they would produce their own types of cloth.
I'd have thought there would be some interest in silk, particularly fairy silk due to its prismatic qualities, which I could not help but believe would be very popular with the women. There had to be a market there.
And on the subject of fairly silk, the fairy pupa had still not hatched but had at least not grown any larger from the last time I'd seen it, which I took as a really good sign. Whatever was going to come out of that pupa would at least not be very big, so if it proved hostile and dangerous, I should have time to deal with it before it had a chance to break out of its improvised prison. Just to be on the safe side though, I'd put a charm on the glass that would strengthen it. I just had to hope that it couldn't teleport, or eat magic... man that would be horrible.
Okay, that might have been a tad paranoid. So far as I know there have never been an arcanovore, or anything like it, at any time in the wizarding world. I'd have to check for sure later, never could be too careful.
After I'd gotten done with that I'd pulled out my Caster and looked it over. It might have been useful in my fight with the Beast, but probably not. Its rate of fire was too slow due to how long it took to reload. I'd designed it that way because that's how it had appeared in the show, but it wasn't a practical weapon when you came down to it. To Gene Starwind the Caster had been an ace in the hole, a weapon of last resort, one that used a type of ammunition that was both rare and expensive to acquire, in that sort of setting it made sense to have a had loaded mechanism as it gave each shot a sort of gravitas. But that didn't apply to me; I could make new shells easily. I needed to go back to the drawing board and make something more practical.
But it looked so damn cool!
The nerd in me was screaming bloody murder at the mare thought of abandoning this glorious piece of nerd culture!
But needs must.
Be strong Drew.
So I'd sketched up a new design based on the general concept of a revolver and worked from there. I'd considered going with a more modern design with the shells stored in the grip but had discarded it. There was no romance to the more modern gun designs, no adventure, no... panache! The look ended up being a bit of a hybrid between a more modern and an old fashioned gun. It ended up looking like something that reminded me of a Mateba Autorevolver, with some obvious differences, of course. The barrels of this one would be much shorter and less bulky than that of the first Caster, and made up almost entirely of accelerator rings, seven in all. That might seem a bit overkill, but I'm a firm believer in the notion that there is no such thing. If you want to be sure that you killed that spider why not use a nuke? That way you get his friends too! The drum was similarly oversized and was large enough to hold six shells at a time. The hammer of the gun was a more modern design to allow for comfortable use, as was the handle. On a whim, I added a plasma laser under the barrels if I should ever run out of shells. I wondered if I could find a way to modulate the intensity of it, that way I might be able to use it like a laser sight.
The thought of plasma led my mind to plasma cores which in turn got me thinking about Lys's little mechanical monstrosity. She really had gotten improbably good with the whole engineering thing, her new workshop being filled to the brim with cogs, springs, and sprockets and other stuff I didn't even have a name for. It made me wonder if she could cobble together some sort of autoloader for me. There would be enough space behind the drum for me to use a space-expansion charm on. I should be able to make it big enough for a fairly big mechanism and have space over for ammo. Maybe she would even be able to make something that could load different kinds of ammo. I could add a small dial to the side to allow for selection.
I'd have to talk to her after the sorting ceremony; she was bound to swing by. Well, I suppose that would depend on where her brother ended up. If he were a Hufflepuff she might stick with him, show him the ropes. I personally doubted it. Grond was a little hellraiser, entirely fearless, and had demonstrated a certain lack of... forethought, let's say. He was Gryffindor material through and through in my opinion. But who knows, I couldn't look into someone's noggin like the Hat could. Well, I could, but the whole thing kinda freaked me out. I didn't like the thought of someone crawling around my head, and doing the same to someone else didn't sit well with me either.
Anyway, I didn't think the chance of Grond ending up in the house of the loyal, hardworking crowd was all that high, so I figured that Lys would be showing up once she got something in her belly and said goodbye to her brother. So I'd think I'd be seeing her in half an hour at the latest. Nel would be unlikely to come by, in fact, I had a feeling that I would be forced to hunt her down myself if I wanted to get things rolling. She would not be happy with me, but I think she would be grateful... eventually.
It might be a good idea to bring her along when I went ghost hunting, might be good to have a backup if my talk with Myrtle went south. I'd never seen the ghost girl that was Piddles first victim, never had a reason to, and since I don't frequent girl's bathrooms I never had a chance for an accidental run-in with her. But if the books and movies were anything to go by then she was extremely prickly and trying to deal with. Maybe Nel could step in if I foul thing up. And after that, I'd have to see if I could find some ectoplasm to experiment on. The information I'd found on that stuff was rather thin on the ground, wizards just considered it filth, literally. But it was the only tangible thing that ghosts and other spirit being left behind, so it was the only thing I could think of that might be able to get me some insight into what ghosts actually were.
I already knew they weren't the souls of the departed but something else. They didn't quite match up with what I remember reading about them back home, where they were described as unchanging; unable to move on from what they were when they died. But for that to be true then they wouldn't be able to able to remember new things, which they obviously did, or really take any action outside of what they would have in life. But they did that too. That's not to say that there wasn't a nugget of truth to what was said, they did dwell on things to an unhealthy degree. Myrtle was still depressed about the poor treatment of her by her classmates, after all, but she did show that she could let go of that, if only for a short time. But that was still indicative that they weren't as static as most believed. And then there was Houdini...
I'd really messed up that and lost a valuable source of intel in the doing.
Not my finest moment that.
Still, what was life without a bit of a challenge? I always did like a good mystery, and who knew, I might discover something interesting, hell, I might find a use for ghosts. If what Houdini could do could be taught to other ghosts then they might be able to make a place for themselves in this world that they were presently almost cut off from in most ways that mattered. I bet that they would welcome a chance to be useful again. Just drifting through their unlife didn't seem to make them any happier after all.
I was somewhat tempted to approach Peeves as well, he wasn't a ghost, but Poltergeists were a related entity. But he was Peeves; it was unlikely that I would be able to secure his cooperation. I might want to try to capture some of the other spiritual beings out there, the Boggart came to mind. They were captured regularly for the DADA class. I might be able to swing a Banshee as well, outside of their scream they were rather easy to deal with. A pair of enchanted earmuffs and I'd have my subject.
I made some notes in a binder to remind myself for later.
I had a feeling this would be an interesting year.
---