Two days later, Tiera received the reply. This time, the letter was delivered by a sleek gray owl that swooped into the attic, dropped its payload directly onto the desk, and immediately took flight again without waiting for payment or acknowledgment.
Tiera snatched the letter and tore it open.
Dear Ms. Wu,
We are delighted to receive your response. We sincerely welcome you to join us and hope you will have an unforgettable and happy seven years at Hogwarts.
We've already made the necessary arrangements for the situation you described. Our beloved gamekeeper, Rubeus Hagrid, will arrive at your loft in the Old Town on the evening of July 31st or early morning of August 1st to take you into the wonderful wizarding world. Perhaps a younger wizard your age will accompany you.
Sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall Deputy Headmistress
Note: Mr. Hagrid is a tall but kind-hearted, hairy gentleman. Please don't be afraid, and we hope you both have a great time together.
Hagrid? And the accompanying young wizard, arriving on the day of Harry Potter's eleventh birthday (July 31st)? Tiera knew instantly. It had to be Harry Potter.
On that date in the original timeline, Hagrid would famously deliver Harry a cake, deal with the Dursleys, and then take him into the magical world through the Leaky Cauldron entrance to Diagon Alley. He would retrieve the Philosopher's Stone from Gringotts along the way.
The Philosopher's Stone—Tiera glanced toward the corner of the attic where the entry to the library was concealed. Merlin had also left behind an unfinished Philosopher's Stone. She wondered about the differences in their composition and power.
"Two months left," Tiera calculated silently. It was a tight window for preparation.
While her first year at Hogwarts would technically involve fighting Voldemort, Tiera knew that if she simply avoided becoming a hero, she would be safe from the worst of the danger. The true, indiscriminate threat was in the second year: the Basilisk.
The Basilisk killed Muggles and Muggle-borns alike without malice or selection. Even though no one died in the original timeline, that was due to immense luck and convenient plot armor—luck Tiera was unwilling to rely on.
"Thank you, Merlin," Tiera murmured, the gratitude completely genuine.
The day after receiving her acceptance letter, Tiera had already returned to the library and meticulously copied the contents of the Hyperion Tablet that Merlin had collected.
The clay tablet contained only a few key pieces of information: a method for learning Parseltongue, the process for breeding a Basilisk, and some flawed experimental spells and curses Hypor had developed. A crucial part of the tablet, detailing some kind of large-scale magical ritual, was broken and badly worn, leaving Tiera unable to decipher it.
Learning Parseltongue, the language of snakes, required both magical skill, linguistic talent, and a specific potion. Tiera's natural linguistic gifts, coupled with the knowledge she had been granted by the Great Race of Yith (which allowed her to read any text she encountered), meant she could already decipher the base language of the spell—a variant of Ancient Greek—after touching the Hypor Stone.
The missing piece was the potion itself: Hydra Poison.
The poison, a non-lethal (for a time) byproduct of Merlin's research into the Hydra's Blood Curse, was intensely dangerous. In its pure form, it would transform the user into a monstrous humanoid within twenty-four hours.
However, when administered alongside the gallbladder of a magical creature known as the Scorpion-Tailed Snake, the poison's effects were mitigated, merely rendering the user mute for several months. During this period of forced silence, the witch could practice and initially master Parseltongue.
Tiera's preparations were already underway. Most of the herbs required for the Hydra Venom were common and abundant in Merlin's garden, which Tiera had confirmed during her latest climb up the pyramid.
Even some of the rarer ingredients mentioned in A Thousand Miraculous Plants and Mushrooms, like the lost desert thorn flowers and fairy wings, were listed in Merlin's old, dusty, printed magic textbooks as components for common, though complex, potions like the Draught of Living Death or Polyjuice Potion. They didn't appear to be exceedingly valuable items in the magical world, only hard to find outside of specialist suppliers.
The sole major obstacle was the Scorpion-Tailed Snake's gallbladder. According to the 1645 edition of the Fantastic Creatures Illustrated Book, this snake had been hunted to the brink of extinction due to the extraordinarily powerful detoxifying properties of its gallbladder. Tiera wondered if any trace of the creature, or its preserved organs, still existed.
Ideally, Tiera would master Parseltongue and have the ultimate weapon against the Basilisk. But if the gallbladder proved impossible to find, she needed a fallback.
This is where Tiera's scientific background kicked in. She was a witch, yes, but her survival instincts, honed over decades in her previous life, defaulted to technological solutions when faced with unknown, lethal threats. When Tiera felt danger, she needed the tangible reassurance of science in her hands to feel truly safe.
Her plan involved chemical warfare.
Basilisk weakness analysis: The Hypor Plate mentioned that Basilisks fear loud roars and, crucially, fire when young. As they age and their scales thicken, ordinary flame is less effective because the heat can't penetrate their thick hide to affect the nervous system. The Basilisk also seemed to have a poor sense of smell, based on the setting of the Chamber of Secrets film. Therefore, obstructing its vision and overwhelming it with intense, focused heat was the best option for survival.
The Weapon: Thermite Firebombs. Thermite is an elegant solution. The reaction between aluminum powder and iron dioxide can generate temperatures exceeding three thousand degrees Celsius almost instantly—hot enough to melt steel. A blast of this temperature would certainly create a devastating, distracting obstacle for a creature made of flesh and blood, even a magical one, granting Tiera crucial time to escape.
The Mechanism: Sulfur Bombs for Ignition. Making thermite wasn't hard; Tiera had performed the reaction several times in her previous life's university lab, albeit safely in a controlled environment to teach chemistry principles. The difficulty lay in reliable ignition. To control the reaction time and deliver the heat precisely, she needed a chemical fuse. This required a simple sulfur bomb mixture (sulfur, saltpeter, and carbon powder) encased with a wet, accelerant-soaked cloth as a reliable wick.
Tiera imagined the process: package the thermite in a robust glass vial, mix the simple sulfur compound to act as a fuse, tie them together, light the wick, and hurl the package toward the Basilisk. The resulting heat could melt metal.
With her knowledge of cursed worms and the basics of magical dimension theory, Tiera already possessed considerable magical self-preservation ability for a first-year.
But in the face of a creature whose gaze meant instant death, chemistry felt far more reliable than a wand. It was a concept accumulated over decades in her previous life, a reliance on hard science that mastering a few short spells could not quickly reverse.
With the Basilisk contingency plan mentally drafted—relying on the desperate hope of finding the gallbladder, or the certainty of chemical explosions—Tiera now had exactly two months to master the second layer of Merlin's spiritual wall before Hagrid's arrival.