Magic
Chapter: 13
Sirius, Sniffy and Richard stood in front of the Leaky Cauldron and then walked in.
Richard was looking around for a bit to see the first magical pub in his live.
It looked like a normal pub with nothing special, there just were many wizards and witches around.
Richard was feeling let down a bit since he had expected a much more magical bar. The only thing which made it a bit better in his eyes were that the tables were cleaning themselves with rags that were flying around and that you only needed to say what you wanted to order out loud and when it was ready it would be sent floating over towards your table with a flicker of the barkeeper's wand.
Finding their way towards the backdoor, they then stood out there in front of a closed wall. At the side stood some trash bins.
Richard could not get it why the bar owner would do something like that and that the entry into the magical world made no sense at all to him and he thought.
'No muggle without getting directions from a wizard would be able to find their way inside the pub because of the muggle repelling charms placed around the pub.
They could have just put a nice opening into the back here and it would look a lot more welcoming, but that are wizards for you. They would never think of some easy solution and god only knows how many charms and enchantments this wall needed to open up like this.'
The wall shifted to the side after Sirius tabbed the right sequence of bricks with his wand and they walked into diagon alley.
At the beginning, Richard was really exited about this whole trip since it was his first time here and he had very big expectations for his first visit.
These expectations were squished down soon after they entered the alley.
All around them stood really old looking houses which should have needed renovations for forever and it looked like time was never able to move on in the construction companies of the magical world.
'What normal thinking person would still build buildings like this? Or not renovate them altogether. Some shops look like they would fall down at the lightest breeze.
Moreover, Magical people have no fashion sense at all. They are all wearing robes that look the same only in different colors or different silk. Who the hell would design such a thing? Why not make different clothing which is much more comfortable while wearing them. I doubt that they wear much under their robes and they would feel the heat under them the whole time.'
Most of the magical people did not own clothing with charms on them because they were too expensive for most people. Only purebloods and rich people could afford such things.
'I would hate to wear that, alone the thought of how hot it must be inside them let my body begin tp sweat.
At least we are not standing out too much here with our clothes on, we just get some surprised glances when our animals on the robes move around.
Well, if someone asks what this spell is, we just answer with: "it is magic" and look at their dumfounded faces. That is an amazing way to get out a good laugh.
Alone the thought of this makes me want to laugh out loud. I wanted to try this since forever.'
Thought Richard as they were walking through diagon alley. Not much was going on here and not many people were found running errand. It was a weekday and apparently the busy days are not on workdays.
Richard was changing his opinion of diagon alley when they went into the shops where all things were magical. Random things were floating all around, strange noises were heard all the time. He found a strange cat wander around in Florish and Blotts bookstore on whom the color of its own fur changed color every now and then. At first, he thought that it was more than one cat but after asking a clerk there he was sure that it was only one.
Sure, from the outside the shops didn´t look that great but from the inside they were really magical in every possible way. They even went to a potions shop and looked around for a bit. The smell there was something no word could really describe. The smells changed every few steps when they intermingled with other ones and it was funny to smell them.
Going into a few shops to get their things they wanted to buy and after that they got a hold of them, they then went to Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour and had all some fancy looking ice cream.
Then they headed right to his vault in Gringotts and riding the best rollercoaster ride he had ever experienced. Richard was completely content with his first visit at diagon alley.
After their relaxing afternoon they went home via Sniffys teleporting.
Richard did not buy many things inside diagon alley. He just got himself a few new books from Flourish and Blotts and then he searched every store for occlumency and leglimency books. He found none, not even in Knockturn alley. There they were looked at with various different expressions that ranged from curious to flat out cunning.
Only after Sirius knocked out one of the thieves that were lurking around did this various people withdraw their gazes.
Dissatisfied with his shopping, he then asked Sirius if he had access to the black library and if he could get him the books that taught leglimency and occlumency.
Sirius only said that he had no access to it since his mother still lived there and she knocked him of the wards and keyed him in as an outsider that will be attacked if he ever came near it.
After he said that, he also mentioned that he knew occlumency and he could teach Richard himself.
Richard could not wait to start and run excited into the living room after banging his head on the table for a few times while cursing: "Damn I am so stupid. I would have just needed to ask. How stupid could I be.
The heir of a noble house is of course able to use occlumency and leglimency. "
Seeing Richard act like this, Sirius and Sniffy could only laugh their asses of and thought that Richard really kind of seemed to never think of the simple solutions and he only ever took the complicated routes.
After that started his occlumency lessons and while Richard wanted to learn leglilmency, Sirius did not allow it and justified it by saying:" I will only teach you leglimency if you have reached the second step of occlumency. Before that I will not teach you anything of it, because you would not be able to do it. Even if you would be some kind of genius, you would not be able to learn leglimency while not being able to use occlumency proficiently."
Richard grumblingly accepted that and his lessons were added to his daily routine.
These lessons would be in the early afternoon and it would be 2-3 times per week since it would not make a difference if he would be learning it more than that. The reason of that was that occlumency is based on the mind and he could train it by himself and did not need constant supervision.
After doing that for about a month he was able to calm his mind so much that he could affect his emotions but he needed 1 more year to make some basic occlumency shield which amounted to nothing in front of a trained auror like Sirius. He was able to smash it apart within a mere moment.
Richard was so happy to achieve that state after so much training and was really downcast at the moment Sirius smashed his shield apart like it was only made out of paper.
Now that he just got 9 years old and Sniffy and Sirius threw him a big surprise birthday party with cake and everything. They all relaxed for the day and had fun while flying around on brooms in the garden.
He had trained for a long time and his magic had grown considerably.
Richard had learned every spell in the textbooks for the first year and could cast everything on it wandless without any problem. At the beginning he had many troubles with it but after he got the hang out of the first spell it got much easier to learn the second spell. It felt like a muscle and with control it got much easier over time of constantly training in it.
The magical energy needed for the spells was great but with his steady magical training and the growth his magical core underwent after his many years of training, he now could cast about 10-15 spells wandless.
After that he would need to recharge his core with meditation or just wait for it to reclaim the lost energy.
Richard found out that his magical core should have been already big enough to undergo one transformation of the next stage but he waited for that. Because he read in some magical theory book that, if he turned all his magical energy into a complete and pure form of energy and not the energy, he possessed right now which was full of impurities, that he would get much stronger.
That he had impurities in his magic did he find out when he looked inside himself with his consciousness through meditation.
His goal was now to get his energy to a complete pure level and expel every impurity out from it.
Richard was working on it for a few years now and under his constant training he saw immense improvements.
He let the magical energy flow throughout his whole body and after that back into his core which got faster and faster every circle after it got a full circle inside his body.
His maximum of turns he could get the energy through his body was now 30 times, after that it was not controllable anymore and wreaked havoc inside himself.
Richard only tried it to go over these limits one time that was a really bad idea. He was met with a week of bedrest since he got too injured in the process.
Sniffy was shocked silly when she found Richard lying on the couch drenched in his own blood and frantically searched for a healing potion which she let him drink. He only woke up the morning after that and was not able to control his own body.
Anyway, with controlling the flow of magic throughout his whole body, his magical control got much better than before and because of that he needed much less magical energy when casting magic.
Instead of the 5 spells he would be able to perform wandless from the first year curriculum of the Hogwarts books before, he now could cast them 15 times.
Richard knew that he would be able to let his magical core upgrade to the next stage and therefore his magical storage capacity would grow immense but he wanted to reach perfection and wanted to have a complete pure form of energy.
The magical energy was not that unknown anymore and he understood it to some degree.
It seemed that after every training session, were he completely depleted his energy with spells, his core was able to grow a tiny little bit and therefore absorb some more energy into itself.
Richard also found out that it was his "magic" after it got absorbed into his core. When he used spells to expend this energy, he would not really use up these energies. He overserved it and got to the conclusion that the magic was converted or used for the spell and after the spell was done, the energy of him was around in the surroundings.
It was then slowly drawn back into himself. But it was like the energy was in some kind of quagmire and it would take it a long time to return to himself.
He would be able to reclaim a tiny bit of this energies automatically and after at most one day it would all be back and his core would be full again. It was returning slower if he used up more of his energy. It felt easier to draw back the magic energy when he had more of the energy inside his core. But when his magic core was completely spent or most of it was used up then it took far longer the replenish.
He could use a shortcut that he found out and use his meditation to feel the energies around himself and attract his own energies a lot faster. If he only got back 0.07 % of energy per minute then he could get back 1,6% with meditation. He needed only 1 hour to get his energy reserves back to full capacity when it was completely empty before and he was sure he would be able to shorten the process in the future.
Richard now was also a lot stronger after his years of training and he could now begin to train with weapons. He wanted to be able to hold himself against someone with a weapon, since it was his dream in his last life to beat some foe with a weapon and it would surely be cool.
His choice of weapon were fist weapons, he wanted to feel what he hit and he loved to be in close proximity to his enemies. Richard felt a rush of excitement at the thought of fighting someone in a street fight with only his hands and feet. There were no rules, just winners and losers.
Richard was thinking of learning how to fight with a sword but he then thought that if the opponent got too close, he would not be able to beat him with a sword since he would be hindered at close range. By fighting with his fists and other body parts, he would be a lot more flexible.
He therefore got enrolled into a jiu jitsu dojo in London a year back and was training there every other day with his sensei and other members. He really loved this activity and changed his routine to include into his usual morning training which more running and shadow fighting. He got do the dojo each other day for 3 hours to learn how to fight in close proximity.
The first month he was completely spent after his sessions and could only drop dead in the living room after Sniffy picked him up. There he forced himself to a meditative state and recovered his spent energy in about 2 hours.
It was not easy to not loose the conviction to meditate after your whole body screamed that it just wanted to rest and Richard only fell for it a couple of times after he found out that meditation helped him even with regaining his bodies strength.
He also hit a grow spurt in the last 1 year after he started training and was now more looking like a 11 year old.
Anyway, most of the time Richard and company was at home and never really got out too much.
Sirius spent most of his time in the basement to come up with new inventions and new ideas, the only time he got out of there was when he ate something or on weekends. He also visited Harry each other weekend, sometime alongside with Sniffy and Richard.
Sniffy spent much of her time on her hobby or taking with her friend inside diagon alley. But she was also cooped up inside the house most of the time.
Yes, Richard was out in the fresh air each day since he started his physical training and did do that in the forest a few minutes away from his home.
Richard found it refreshing to be out and on the fresh air and his morning runs were held throughout the forest.
Each day, he started with his run through the forest and which would last for a whole hour. After that he got to a clearing inside the woods. He found that on day where he scouted through the forest and used it since then. There he started his workout.
All of this started at 4:30 in the morning and it took him till 6:30, after that he then got back home to take a shower and eat breakfast with Sirius and Sniffy. The shower part changed after he learned a spell to clean himself without the need to spray water on himself and the one to dry him. At the first time using this spell, Sniffy and Sirius could only laugh at him when they saw him walking to the bathroom while cursing under his breath. He was completely soaked from top till bottom and mumbled.
"Damn, how could I forget to learn the spell to dry myself. Grmmmmllllll….. I had to walk here, soaked all over from the middle of the forest. Fuuuuuuu....."
That was all they two heard till the bathroom door fell shut. Both of them fell on the floor while holding their bellies and were laughing really hard.
They never let Richard forget this moment and laughed every time they saw them for some time.
His daily routine was mostly the same and he did that 7 days a week and 365 days a year.
Richard never changed or stopped this. His only down time was when he spent time at the Dursleys, but he never went on a vacation.
Finding that it was time to have a vacation before he got to Hogwarts and he consulted his plans with Sniffy and asked her to go with him.
She was super happy to leave the house for some time an be able to accompany Richard.
Sirius said that he did not want to come along with them since he planned to see his new girlfriend that he had gotten since about a month ago.
Richard had never met her and Sirius did not know where their relationship was headed but was not able to tag along for the vacation.
The only thing about her that Sirius told them was that she was a muggle and did not know anything about magic and Sirius claimed to have met her in town.
Richard was then beginning to plan out their vacation and because they had no magical passports and did not want to go through all the hassle that the ministry would have gotten them in for, they asked the goblins for some muggle identifications and soon came the day that they wanted to depart.
Richard found out a nice little spell in one old book that he got from one of his visits in diagon alley and he mastered it pretty fast.
The spell let him control his bodies age.
In other words, he could now, theoretically, completely change his growth to some degree. Theoretically because if he wanted to look like an old grandpa or like a baby, he would need to put in an insane amount of magical energy.
His limit were the looks of a 25-year-old man but that cost him almost his whole magical energy.
He would need to hold the spell activated for a long time and all the magical energy he used to input into the spell were occupied for the time being while the spell was active.
Therefore, he could not cast any other spell if he wanted to look like a 25-year-old.
Richard also did not want to get accustomed to the looks of his 25-year-old self, because he would be living inside hogwarts in his normal form and it would really be disconcerting if he was not accustomed to his young form anymore.
For that two reasons, he put in only so much energy into the spell that he now looked like a 16-year-old teenager.
The training really did some nice things to his figure. Richard was now quite tall for his age and was almost 1,80 m tall.
His black hair was kept short and he looked quite handsome with his brown eyes and athletic figure. He was not bulky in any way and had muscles all in the right places. Magic did free him of skin troubles and gave him a smooth skin in a nice and healthy looking color that was not too white or too dark.
He had gotten this skin tone after being out every day for the past few years.
He did not know how this magic worked but figured out after a bit of fumbling around with it that it was some kind of substitute magic. It turned his magic into body cells and they then created his aged body. Because he used them to look like that, he could not use them for anything else while he looked older. It also was not possible to drop the magic and use the now free magic to use, now he needed to regain that slowly. He chose the 16 year old look because it did not use up too much of his magic and he could use the majority of it.
In his last life, Richard was average looking and could not be seen as handsome or bad looking.
But after his reincarnation, he grew up to become quite good looking. Richard saw it for the first time after he used his aging spell. He was shocked that he looked this good.
He was never narcissistic but he loved how he looked right now. At his trips to diagon alley he also found out some peculiarity of the people there. There was no one with skin troubles or whom he deemed as ugly, almost all people were relatively good looking and he never found even one fat witch or wizard.
Richard deemed that magic was the reason for this and it should be the truth. That was quite the different thing from the books, in the books were found some fat people and also a lot with skin troubles. For example: Hermine Granger had willful hair and buckteeth, Neville Longbottom was quite chubby and so on. Harry also had trouble with his eyes. That was not the case till now, Harry never needed any glasses and this was one of the major differences Richard found till now.
Magic should be the reason for this and it should help people to not get too ugly or troubles with skin eyes etc. Witches and wizards did not even think of it like a gift, to them it was just something which they were born with and that was it.
They never really thought about it too much and just left it alone that they looked much better than most muggles did.
Anyway, with his new aged look and clothed like he used to be, when he was a muggle, by wearing some jeans and a t-shirt he got ready to go to the airport.
Sniffy came out of her room and she had cast a spell on herself to look like a 16-year-old girl.
Richard was stunned when he saw her for the first time after she cast the spell on herself. She looked stunning. That was the only thought in his mind. She looked like a completely beautiful girl with long black hair that draped over her shoulders and was currently putting them into a ponytail so that they would not get in her way.
At the sides of her face, she had 2 strands of hair hanging down that were colored in white and accentuated her face nicely.
Sniffy was wearing a black skirt with black tights under it and one normal looking white shirt with the writing "Sunshine" on it in a glittering style like her top.
She was a little bit smaller than Richard but not by too much and was at the height of 1.7 meters.
Her eyes were the same color that she usually had and they were shiny blue and if one looked to closely then they would surely get lost into them.
That writing on the shirt described her really on point.
Sniffy was not realizing why he seemed so out of it and was giggling a bit then found that he was looking at her and swirled her body around one time.
"You are looking really good." Was all what Richard could say and got a "Thanks" back from Sniffy.
'She really looks amazing. I would not mind her to stay in this form but that would not be fair. That's not her natural form and I will not ask her of this, ever. It would be same like if she would ask me if I can transform into a house-elf and stay that way. I also would not be comfortable with such a thing.
Even if I could, I would not want to permanently live in a hose-elf form.' Were the thoughts of Richard when he got lost in his own thoughts for a moment.
"Ready?" asked him Sniffy in an exited voice since she was really looking forward to this trip and was holding her hand out towards Richard.
"Yes of course, that trip will be our first vacation together and I will make sure that we will never forget it." Said Richard and he took her hand and they plopped away without any sound.