Chapter 109

There was a mad scramble as prefects tried to take control of the students. The teachers were all leaving, no doubt going to deal with the troll before it could run across any of the students. It was only as she stood up to go over to her prefect that she remembered something that caused dread to well up inside of her.

She whirled on her friends.

"Harry doesn't know about the troll."

One look at the others made her realize they had a similar thought. All of them were just as terrified at the thought as her. Susan felt like she was going to be sick.

This, she concluded, as fear for her friend settled in her gut, was the worst Halloween ever.

Harry waved his wand over the teapot sitting on the table. The teapot gave a brief shudder, then it began to change. It's form melted, flowing like liquid metal until it became an amorphous blob. Then that changed shape as well, six points protruded out of it to form four legs, a head, and a tail. The center began to flatten while the top maintained its somewhat dome-like shape.

Details began becoming clearer. Sharper. More defined. Bumpy ridges formed along what now looked like a shell. The skin along its legs became hard, rough, and gained a scaly appearance. Large toes with thick, pointed toenails formed at the ends. The head became sharper. A mouth formed along with a set of eyes and pronounced brow ridges. The skin became rough and leathery, while several wrinkles took shape under an elongated neck. Finally, a small, stubby tail began protruding from the other end of the shell.

Then it began to change color, going from the boring coppery color of the teapot to more earthy tones, grays and browns for the skin, and rusty greens and yellows for the shell. He added a few scratch marks onto the shell to give it a worn, used look for good measure. Sighing deeply, he finished the transfiguration with a flourish.

The whole process had taken close to five minutes. A lot longer than any of his other transfigurations had taken so far. Then again, this was third year course material, so perhaps he shouldn't be too surprised.

Wanting to see how good of a job he had done, Harry walked around the tortoise, inspecting it for any imperfections. It was a tad disconcerting how the tortoise's head moved along to follow him, its neck craning to keep its creator in sight, but he did his best to ignore the action in favor of his inspection.

It wasn't bad for a first attempt, Harry thought to himself, but it could use some improvements. The feet were malformed. He could see small areas that still looked like the metal along its shell. And while the head was shaped well enough, its brow ridges were too large. Not perfect, but he would improve with practice.

He also needed to work on the amount of time it took. He remembered when Professor McGonagall had turned her desk into a pig. The whole transfiguration had only taken a second. If he wanted to get that good, he would need to practice.

Waving his wand over the tortoise again, he undid the transfiguration and watched silently as it changed back into a teapot. At least his skills and untransfiguring objects and animals was getting a lot better.

Giving thoughts to his growing transfiguration skills, Harry had to admit that he was pleased with the progress he'd made. It had only been a month since he started and already he was doing third year transfiguration spells. Right now he was working on medium scale organic to inorganic, and inorganic to organic transfigurations. Changing medium sized animals to medium sized objects and visa versa. It was hard work, requiring both a lot of power and a lot of concentration, which was the reason transfiguration was such a difficult subject. It required a lot more concentration than Charms did.

It probably had something to do with how dangerous transfiguration was, he theorized. With Charms there wasn't much of a chance of something blowing up in your face unless your name was Seamus Finnegan. If you didn't do a Charm correctly it simply wouldn't work. On the other hand, transfigurations had the habit of turning deadly if done incorrectly. Granted, right now he wasn't doing anything potentially lethal yet, but once he got into human transfiguration things would get difficult.

There was also the fact that when transfiguring an object you needed to know what you wanted to change. With Charms you simply imagined what you wanted to happen, waved your wand with the correct movements, canted the incantation and it would work so long as you did everything correctly. When transfiguring it took more than just a basic imagination, wand waving and chanting. You had to see what you wanted to change in your mind, watch as the teapot transformed into the tortoise, or the rabbit change into the slippers. The more detailed the image in your mind, the better your transfiguration would be in real life.

A loud gurgling sound issued from his stomach and distracted Harry from his thoughts. A frown crossed his face and he looked down as more gurgling came forth, followed by mild hunger pains. He had eaten just a little under an hour ago. The fact that he was hungry again said a lot about how much energy he had expended while practicing.

With a sigh, Harry took one look around the classroom he had decided to use for his private studies. It was no different from any other classrooms. There were desks arrayed around the room, shelves that lined the walls, a chalkboard, and a teachers desk. But the room looked more worn than the others currently being used. Harry could see the dust on the desks, a layer of it several centimeters thick. This place had obviously not been used before he found it for a long time...