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Chapter 39 Galleons.
8 Oct
"Tonks and Clearwater Transfiguration Services!" Tonks sing songed as Harry opened the door and chuckled at his friend's antics. Penny playfully shoved Tonks into the room before the door was closed and the two started going over what alterations Harry wanted. A decent sized hole was to be transfigured into the middle window of the Professor's quarters for the forge's chimney. Filling an enclosed space with smoke wasn't good. Ideally there wouldn't be much of any smoke as that meant the fire wasn't being taken care of properly. Harry may not have much experience at actual blacksmithing but he'd paid attention to the old blacksmith from the day camp and learned quite a bit. Then two tanks needed to be transfigured, a water filled slack tub and one he'd fill with oil when needed to act as a quench tank. Harry also required their Transfiguration skills in making an anvil and a few metal racks along with a sturdy work table. The final tools he'd need to start working metal he'd spend a bit of his limited funds on to Owl Order. He'd rather spend the money on proper tools rather than try and make them himself and potentially ruin a future project with a broken tool.
"Hmm, we're going to need quite a bit of metal for all of this Harry; though because we'll only be changing the metal and some stone from one shape into another it'll be much easier to make the Transfigurations permanent." Penny explained as she looked over the designs Harry had drawn up.
"Where exactly do we get this much metal though? I doubt that we'll find a ton of it just lying around Hogwarts." Tonks commented as she looked over the plans as well.
"We can probably scrounge up enough by raiding a few of the unused classrooms. A lot of the chairs and some of the tables have metal legs, plus we could get lucky and find a metal table or two." Penny replied as the three made plans to quickly go through every room in the corridor the hidden workshop was in and then expand out to the rest of the mostly abandoned section of this floor of the castle. By the end of their raiding trip the trio had found quite a bit of metal that wouldn't be missed. But they'd taken long enough that Tonks and Penny only had just over an hour to get everything transfigured before curfew and Penny would have to start making her Prefect rounds. But the two proved their capability by finishing everything with time to spare. The only thing they didn't have enough metal for was a full size anvil. So Harry had agreed to make the anvil a bit smaller than standard to start and they'd try to 'reclaim' more metal after the Yule Break to get it up to size. All in all Harry couldn't be happier with his new blacksmith workshop or smithy as they were technically called; but Harry was pretty sure to call it that implied that he was a professional which he clearly wasn't yet.
Sunday was spent collecting stone to transfigure into the forge itself so that when Harry's tools were delivered he'd be able to start working as soon as he had some free time. This only took the better part of the morning and so the trio had spent time practicing Wandless Magic. Tonks had gotten the Stinging Hex to work wandlessly and was quick to demonstrate it to Harry, with him as the unfortunate target. She'd been beaten to the punch by Penny though. The Ravenclaw Prefect had been able to get three spells working in the same time that Tonks had gotten one. Penny's wandless spells were Flipendo, Wingardium Leviosa, and the Impedimenta Charm. Tonks had asked her younger friend about her speed and Penny had stated that she did the same as when she learned a new spell with her wand. Penny just seemed to have a knack for breaking a spell down and figuring out how to make it work.
The school week went by with increasing excitement as the Yule Break approached. Harry's tools arrived on Wednesday and he'd stored them in his finished smithy. Now all that was left was to get some charcoal to fuel it and Harry would be set. Hagrid had mentioned that you could buy charcoal from Hogsmeade and agreed to pick some up for Harry when he went into the village on the coming Saturday. With nothing else much to do with his homework finished, Harry had taken to working out his newest runic design for his Rune Safe. Trying to incorporate the ambient magic absorption function into his multi-layered security sequence was proving itself very difficult. He was still trying to tweak the ambient magic sequence to be more efficient and to take in large amounts of mana all at once. If he wanted to charge his safe's array quickly it would be for the best if he could just drop a large amount of mana into it all at once. Figuring out how to make all the different runic sequences work together as a proper array would probably be the hardest task he attempted this year and Harry couldn't wait to make his design a reality.
Harry waved Tonks and Penny goodbye as they boarded the self-moving carriages that would take them to the Hogwarts Express and back to their families for the break. Hagrid would be bringing the charcoal around noon tomorrow and until then Harry planned to finish all of the homework given to them for the break. With it out of the way Harry could spend the rest of the break working in his smithy to make more metal for his Enchanting. In between that he'd continue to work on the Rune Safe array. He'd made a breakthrough with getting all of the security sequences to work together but he still needed to tweak the mana absorption sequence to get it to integrate. Maybe if he upped the strength of the absorption? Or the rate that it could absorb mana? He'd rewrite it again and see if either version of the sequence worked.
The next day Hagrid delivered Harry his charcoal as promised. After a grateful thank you to his friend Harry had made his way to his hidden workshop and set about getting his forge ready. With a bit of metal he'd managed to 'reclaim' from an abandoned classroom on the sixth floor, Harry set about his first attempt at metallurgy. The results were better than he expected, the metal had been properly imbued with his mana and it had become the shape he'd wanted it. Harry was fairly sure that the fire had been a bit too hot a few times as three of the metal bars he'd made had melted out of shape. He'd had to pound them with one of his hammers back into the correct thin bar he was aiming for. He still had five more glass lenses so he was going to make another set of Scouters. Four of them would go through Owl Order again while he'd be writing to Madam Aveline in France about selling her the fifth one.
On Sunday Harry had written his letter to Madam Aveline with his offer of selling her the Scouter she wanted directly for ten Galleons. He'd sent the missive off with one of the school owls and then passed Hedwig the gifts for Penny and Tonks.
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