C011 - Plans and RoR
Through Flitwick, who I found after breakfast, I learned that there was an enchanter called Randolph Spudmore, who was a Ravenclaw alumni - my guess with 'Randy Spudmore' was therefore close enough.
After an awkward meeting with Harry at the infirmary where the boy hadn't said anything to either me or Madam Pomfrey before I left, I snuck out of Hogwarts towards Hogsmeade using the rather infamous secret passage of the Whomping Willow towards the Shrieking Shack right after lunch. The weather was rather nice, so it took me a while to go there undetected. Or, well, hopefully undetected.
Once outside the Hogwarts wards, I called for Patrick to give him instructions while inside the dilapitated shack.
"Patrick!"
With a soft crack, my diligent house elf appeared in better clothing than the first time we met. He was even smiling. Though with the various dark curse scars he still carried, I was a little creeped out by it.
"Master Talion called?"
"Yeah, I have a few tasks for you if you're willing? They need a healthy measure of subterfuge - so you'll have to impersonate someone or otherwise fool a bunch of wizards," I coaxed, and his smile turned into a grin.
"Tricky nasty wizards!? I shall be doing as you ask of me," he quickly agreed.
"Nice. First, I need you to find and approach Randolph Spudmore. According to my professor, he has a small shop that hasn't opened since he took it over from his grandfather in Diagon Alley. It's only a few houses away from Knockturn Alley. I need you to find out if he has money problems before he's done finishing his big project. If he does, here are some instructions for how you may deal with him," I ordered as I handed over a folded parchment that I poured my brainpower into since that fiasco with the twins at breakfast.
It outlined a bunch of conditions for me to invest in him, though I was honest with myself that I wasn't sure if my maximum of 9.000 galleons I could provide him was enough to coax Spudmore if he even had money problems. What I was certain about was that my conditions were much better than those of the goblins or the other pureblood wizard moneybags, because I actually named limits on the profits I could make on top of rather low interest rates if his sales wouldn't be as big as we would both hope.
Plus, it came with free advertising tips to give him an even bigger headstart than in canon where the Quidditch World Cup used his broom almost exclusively as far as I was aware. If nothing came of it, so be it. I didn't need millions of galleons in the bank to begin with. Not through this deal. I had a magic stick to change reality hiding in my sleeve - money was secondary for my current long-term goals.
"And the second task?"
"Project Gossip Empress. Under no circumstances can Rita Skeeter find out this came from me. So use the typewriter I had you steal, type this letter on a piece of paper and hand it over without her having any chance to find out it came from you or me," I explained as I handed over another piece of parchment. Patrick knew about a few plans because I gave him warnings and asked for input for a few that I knew I needed his help with.
On the parchment I handed over, I gave up some of the juiciest gossip I knew about Dumbledore. Like him being the lover and personal creator of two Dark Lords. I knew for a fact that Rita Skeeter didn't need much to write the most scathing slam piece, so I provided plenty of circumstantial evidence.
Like his early life neighbor Bathilda Bagshot, who was also the great-aunt of Gellert Grindelwald. Or like the truth behind Dumbledore's father and the death of his sister Ariana. Or like Tom Riddle, who Dumbledore picked up from Wool's Orphanage a few years before the end of Grindelwald and how Dumbledore behaved when he did, forever creating a shadow in an orphan's heart.
I doubted she would print the origin of Voldemort because even Rita had a limit, but I was looking forward to what she spun out of my tales. She did write a 900-page autobiography right after Dumbledore's death in canon. So she was by far my best choice for this. She was certainly smart enough to pursue it until she had enough and would create the utmost damage possible to Dumbledore's image.
And if she somehow wanted to weasel out of it because Dumbledore was at the height of his political power with the 'savior' now attending Hogwarts, I started the letter with the greetings 'Hello little beetle' and I just knew she was smart enough to figure out what that meant. It meant that I knew her animagus secret and would expose her should she not work with what I gave her.
With that out of the way, I talked a little more with Patrick before heading back. I couldn't be missing for too long, and I had a whole bunch of stuff to do at Hogwarts anyway.
The trip back was quite awkward because the Whomping Willow was not stunned when I came out of the hole in its roots. Almost getting slapped into smithereens out of nowhere awoke a sort of untapped potential in me as I dodged with reflexes I never knew I had in me. I even dodged toward the knot you needed to press to make the tree go dormant and managed to save myself, but I still decided to make my next outing an official outing during a Hogsmeade weekend that even the first years were allowed to attend in this alternate universe. We were three years older than in canon anyway.
Back inside Hogwarts, I pretended to explore the castle with curiosity but made my way steadily upstairs before I found myself on the seventh floor in a corridor with a tapestry of some bloke trying to teach ballet to trolls.
I was in front of the infamous Room of Requirements. Thinking about the sorting hat thrice as I walked back and forth in the hallway, I found myself standing in a quiant, cozy little room with two chairs and a small little table between.
"You're rather quick. I thought it might take you a little while before you ask for my presence," the hat offered as greetings as his leathery form 'lifted an eyebrow' at me.
"Certain actions by our esteemed headmaster made my choice for me. I need to cash in this favor you owe me as soon as possible, and I hope you are rather good at what I ask of you," I challenged as I sat down next to him.
"Go ahead then, but I will limit it if it's too outrageous."
I nodded and inwardly wanted to scold the headmaster for taking my chance to get literally anything else out of the hat.
"I think Godric and the other founders made you a one-of-a-kind artifact for a reason."
The hat...nodded at that, interested where this might go.
"And I think, to do what you do, you needed intensive knowledge on the mind arts."
The hat nodded again, getting a feeling, no, hoping to know it would go into one direct instead of the other.
"I need you to make me formidable in the arts of Occlumency. Whatever branch you are willing to teach me, I want to know all about it. And since you can read minds, I want a head start in the magical defense branch of Occlumency with your help."
The hat inwardly breathed a sigh of relief, even if it didn't really breathe, and quipped back, "You're asking a hat to get a head start, lad?"
"Yeah, I do. Now go on, tell me the limits of this favor I'm asking," I countered with an exasperated expression.
"Well, there's quite a few things I could teach you. But! This favor I owe you isn't big enough to waste an entire school year on you. You get three sessions, and you take what you get out of it," the hat offered with a grim look.
"Three sessions? You know I need Snape and Dumbledore to stay out of my head. What makes you think three sessions is enough? I want seven sessions and a possible extension if I need it and can come up with a good enough reason."
"Four sessions and no extension. I'll even tell you why."
I narrowed my eyes a little and pondered over why the hat said what it said. It knew something I didn't, and I really didn't like that. Especially since I still didn't know if I could truly trust the hat to be and do what it said.
"Go on then," I bit out with clenched fists, trying not to show any of my apprehension.
"You're a Natural Occlumens or rather something very similar. Among magical talents, one for mind arts is rare among young magicals these days. I met a few of your kind through the years, but your so-called 'canon memories' were in a part of your mind that I have never seen before, hence me saying it's likely something similar. If I wasn't who I was and if my creators weren't who they were, I would not have been able to read any of your memories, especially not the 'canon' ones."
I tried to decipher the whole meaning and pondered every implication as I sat silent for a whole minute before I tentatively asked, "So Dumbledore won't be able to use his twinkling eyes to read my mind in mere seconds?"
"He could try, but everything other than your surface thoughts are hidden so far in your head, he'd need to take out his 'death stick', point it at your face and cast Legilimency with the proper incantation to get any further. And he won't do that unless you majorly piss him off and leave him no other choice," the hat argued.
"Why confirm things I couldn't have been sure about like him owning one of the Deathly Hallows?" I asked with furrowed eyebrows.
"Take it as compensation. Teaching Occlumens to a Natural Occlumens... had you asked this room for the knowledge, it would have provided it to you even if not as thorough. Sure, it can't transfer knowledge to you at the speed of thought like I can, but you would have faced none of the problems you were dreading."
"Then I'll just take it as getting something for free?" I asked unsurely.
This whole thing with the hat was making me paranoid without end. But staying away from the hat wouldn't help me. It knew all of my secrets anyway. So I'd take any kind of advantage possible. Things like that confirmation on the Deathly Hallow in the headmaster's possession. Though I knew the hat was too smart to do something like that by accident. I learned something the hat wasn't trying to share with me... I thought it didn't want to anyway: the hat could learn about a magical's talents.
It might just be talents in the mind arts, but I got the feeling it could do more by the way it worded the revelation - and not just by seeing it in the memories either. Otherwise, it wouldn't so accurately judge my supposed Natural Occlumens status as something different from the norm.
"Shall we get started then? Put me on, lad," the hat coaxed once it was satisfied with my satisfied curiosity, and that was what I did.
Since I could hide nothing anyway, I just opened up myself to this stupid artifact and got the first of four sessions underway. And it wasn't kidding in putting knowledge into my head at the speed of thought. I'd even go as far as labeling it as printing knowledge right inside my mind.
The branches of Occlumency it started teaching me were Mind Defenses, where probes from him would allow me to change my natural defenses into active defenses that would not only protect but also detect and even offer bait. And that was when knowledge about the second branch started, 'Memory Well'. It went from something the hat called 'Mind Clarity', which made sure the important memories you needed were readily available to you and crystal clear - all the way to Mind Alteration, which allowed you to create fake memories based on real ones to offer as bait. This 'Memory Well' branch taken to its extreme would grant a person an artificial eiditic memory, and I was a little surprised to learn this was the strongest aspect of my natural occlumency.
At the height of this particular branch of magic, you could do what I would call 'simulations', too - but only based on your own knowledge. Full-on potion experimentation without brewing physically was not possible, for example, but tactics for fights or intent for magic could be trained to a certain degree.
These last two particular branches resembled nothing like most fanfictions alluded. There were no mind palaces, no mindscapes involved. Just simple thoughts - well, anything but simple. But 'just' thoughts nonetheless. Sure, they would turn more vivid eventually, but I still wouldn't be able to copy Sherlock Holmes.
The last branch of Occlumency that the hat 'printed' into my brain for this session as he was assaulting my mind non-stop was what most purebloods learned at these P.S.Y. schools or at home, apparently. Empathy. A branch that gave you control over your emotions and allowed you to read them from others - and most importantly, it gave you fine control over your intent in any situation.
The hat called it the pinnacle of a solid spell casting foundation, and I really wondered if us 'poor souls' from the muggle world would learn that branch of magic in Magical Etiquette lessons.
I doubted it. But I was open to surprises.
When we were done for the day, I skipped dinner after my training session because I was ready to fall asleep on my feet. Something I would come to regret the next day.