Ginny sat in Teregatt, feeling restless in her mud body with the crown on top. She had been practicing on her own for who knows how long in here, relentlessly increasing her control over her telekinetic tendrils. But it still wasn’t enough. Eric started that food fight in the great hall and his sudden ‘deal’ with her reminded her that she couldn’t be complacent. He was asking for permission now to do those horrible things, but who knew how long it would last. Even if she surprised Eric with her number of magic tendrils, it wouldn’t be enough. After a second's shock he would recover and know everything that she was capable of. She needed to learn something that could be her surprise for him, even if it would take away from the growth of her main telekinesis magic.

Ginny sat there thinking for a moment before remembering something. The search function on the crown of Teregatt sitting on her muddy head. She’d always used it to find the practice room and the portal room when she needed to. But could it find other things too? Balthazar had mentioned a long time ago that he had been creating magical lessons for her. Maybe there was a book, or it was written down somewhere where she could learn from them?

Balthazar was probably still busy fighting off Fate, Ginny knew that he must be putting all his focus to that, especially after Ginny had messed things up slightly by using Teregatt’s energies to bring all the house-elves to Teregatt itself.

The house-elves had presumably left outside for Azkaban, Ginny still hadn’t seen anybody in Teregatt while she walked around in its empty hallways.

Ginny sent her request to the crown and waited for over a minute as the crown hummed softly with magic on top of her head. Then suddenly she felt a tugging sensation of where she should go. She let out a sigh of relief and followed the crown’s nudges as she walked through the maze-like hallways. The crown must have found something that matched her request.

Eventually Ginny reached another blank wall. Using the crown Ginny opened the door that she could sense was there. She went inside and looked around to see that it was a storage room of some sort. Lots of strange enchanted objects were scattered around or mounted on stands proudly in little corners. On the far side of the room was a table with a heavy book that looked nearly six inches thick and wide. Its brown leather cover had ‘Magical Lessons - For the Queen’ written on it as if by hand in bright red letters. The crown nudged her towards the book one last time as she approached before deactivating now that she’d found it.

Ginny reached out to pick up the book, but then hesitated as she saw her hands made of black mud. Right, she didn’t want to get the book dirty…

She focused and decided that she’d try practicing one of the structured spells like what she learned in school. They were so rigid and complex compared to using her magic tendrils. But they were very reliable and Ginny needed to practice doing them without a wand so she didn’t forget how to cast them without one.

She formed the spell structure for a levitation charm in a little ball in mid-air before shooting it out to hit the book. The book floated upwards to hover a foot off the desk. Ginny turned around and with the book floating behind her left the room and returned to her normal practice room with the crown guiding her way.

When she returned to her practice room with the pillar of floating steel orbs that she usually practiced with, she floated the book in front of her. Ginny glanced over to the invisible pillar where the balls floated. She could use the crown to increase their speed or change the pillar’s dimensions to make it harder. Or even change the size of the balls if she wanted. They could go from as small as a grain of sand to as large as a car. Ginny had put one massive one and a dozen grains of sand for the last few weeks of practice. It had significantly increased the difficulty.

Ginny looked back at the book. But she couldn’t keep practicing that. She had to learn something truly new so she’d have something to surprise Eric with if they fought.

She used her magic tendrils to carefully open the hovering book in front of her. Luckily the crown translated any foreign languages for her so whatever language Balthazar wrote this in was perfectly understandable as she reached the table of contents in the front. The whole thing appeared to be handwritten. There was a list there of different things she could learn. She felt a wave of excitement as she read through. Something new!

She had wanted to do this years ago, but had clung to the telekinesis, scared to learn something new without Balthazar and accidentally develop bad habits she’d have to break later. She remembered how hard it had been to keep her magic tendrils unanchored on her skin when she was first starting out, and that was with only a small time of doing wrong. What if she had learned it the wrong way for months or years? Then it would be excruciating to relearn it.

Ginny shook her head. It would be fine. She was sure that Balthazar had noted down the bad habits to avoid in this book. She’d just have to pay extra attention and make sure she was careful.

She read through the table of contents in the front and went down the list. A few of the options stood out to her.

Psychic and Mind arts.

Heat/Fire Manipulation.

Enchantments

Mass Construct Summoning

Water Manipulation

Teleportation/spatial repositioning

Bodily enhancement spells

Earth Manipulation

Disguise/Infiltration spells

Elemental detection. Elements seen based on the training environment.

Banishing spells/Incorporeal entity combat

Gas/Air Manipulation

…….

The list went on and on, Ginny’s eyes growing wider and wider as she went to all of the things that Balthazar had written on the list. Her mind raced as she quickly used her magic tendrils to flip through the pages to investigate all of the different fields that Balthazar had written about in this massive book.

All of them started with an unstructured magic base, much like Ginny’s telekinesis had. Just like her telekinesis all of them had a basic exercise that she would have to practice and there were several pitfalls and bad habits that Balthazar had written for each that she had to avoid.

He had also included a description of what ‘basic mastery’ could accomplish. Ginny assumed that he meant mastering the single exercises he included with each subject, was what he meant. There was nothing in the book beyond those single things to practice for each category.

She was so excited as she flipped through the pages that she didn’t even notice when the crown pulsed in warning. Ginny was in the middle of reading a line when the world twisted around her and she woke back up on Earth at Hogwarts. She sighed as she sat up and prepared for the morning run with Alexa and Jack. She’d be back tonight again, it was only one day…

It took her three whole Earth nights to finish skimming over everything that Balthazar had written in the book and take in all her options. She knew that these exercises must be hard, so she wanted to pick the right one if she was going to take time away from her telekinesis practice for it.

A lot of the options were either not for combat, or a foundational skill to learn something more advanced later on. Or just too focused. Elemental detection would let her use her magic to detect certain elements. Balthazar wrote that it would help her elemental manipulation skills. So if she chose to learn fire or earth manipulation then learning elemental detection it would help her increase her control and ability to improve her abilities once she could sense the relevant elements directly.

But on its own elemental detection wouldn’t help her in combat at all.

Teleportation sounded amazing, but the exercise she would have to practice made her head hurt just by thinking about it. She’d have to try that sometime later when she wasn’t under so much pressure from Eric.

The mind arts would be powerful… But they made Ginny feel icky. Being able to erase people’s memories or manipulate them on a whim… that wasn’t a power that she wanted to have. And even if Eric had learned this she shouldn’t be in too much danger. The method used a magical connection between the person and their target to connect their minds. Ginny had read through it carefully and the tube of magic or mind bridge should be something that she would be able to easily detect with her magical senses if somebody tried to use mind magic around her. So she could just use her telekinetic tendrils to disrupt the mind bridges around her whenever they formed if it came to that.

So mind magic was out. Even if she wanted to learn it, Eric could disrupt any mind bridges just as easily as Ginny probably could.

She was tempted by all of the elemental manipulations. They seemed interesting. But it wasn’t enough to just have an element like fire around you for it. She also needed to infuse the area with her magic, like Eric had done with his giant ball of flames that he had created when she saw him fight. Although it was much more efficient magically to infuse your magic into an existing fire to control it rather than summoning your own from nowhere.

But the problem was that elemental manipulation was magically expensive. It was ‘cool’ and powerful, but Ginny would rather be able to budget her magic and only use as much as she needed to rather than be forced to use big attacks all the time. Which was almost a certainty with elemental manipulation. Oh, also elemental manipulation stuck you in place. Like when Eric fought Fate at the Quidditch world cup, he had to stay within his field of magically infused flames to fight and wasn’t free to move around or he wouldn’t have any infused flames around for him to fight with anymore.

Ginny was sure that Eric hadn’t cared about how good he’d be at combat when he’d chosen to learn fire manipulation. He probably had just thought it was cool and so learned it anyway, not caring about the combat disadvantages.

Enchantments, Disguise spells, and Banishing spells wouldn’t help against Eric in a fight. That only left two main options left of the options that interested Ginny. Bodily enhancement spells, and Mass Construct Summoning. Ginny spent a long time reading each section for both of them carefully.

After a while pondering, she finally decided on Mass Construct Summoning.

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Bodily enhancement spells could make her stronger, faster, even let her run on walls and jump in the air. All sorts of physical magic around her body. But if she ever messed it up, then she could really hurt herself. Causing her muscles to explode or damage her body with rampant magic of an out of control spell. And with Eric around, he might be able to disrupt her body spells if he got even one of his magic tendrils close enough to touch her.

So Mass Construct summoning it was. Luckily it also seemed to be a side grade of sorts from Telekinesis already. The same multitasking mind that Ginny had refined so much for telekinesis also was just as useful for this exercise. If not even more important than how it was for telekinesis.

Ginny read through the Mass Construct chapter carefully. After she was done she ordered the Teregatt crown to take her to the training room for it. It seems that for each of the fields of magic there was a specific training room which she could learn from.

The crown guided her and she entered the room. It was a large room almost like an obstacle course. As she stood at the entrance there were little hills and pits scattered across the whole area. Ginny looked to the walls and saw silver barrels of what looked like guns and all sorts of strange nozzles and enchantments covering them.

Ginny sat down in a meditative pose and started her construct summoning, using her magic tendrils that she usually used for telekinesis as the anchors to form them.

All around her a dozen little creatures popped into existence. She looked around and… Oh, they were so cute!

They were little black balls with a set of legs below them that they stood on. They had no arms, eyes, or any other features. They did have mouths though… The little things had a pitch black shiny surface like a bowling ball. But their size was closer to that of a baseball as they stood in place around her. Their legs were silvery and almost metallic and on the bottom ended with human looking feet.

Ginny sent a command to all the little creatures around her through her magic.

All at once the little creatures opened their mouths wide and Ginny yelped in surprise. The little divot that she had thought was a wrinkle had revealed itself to be a giant mouth filling almost half of their ball-like bodies. A mouth that was filled with a row of triangular sharp teeth that looked frightening.

Ginny sent a quick command and all the creatures closed their mouths again.

This was the easy part. Summoning so many at once was certainly a new experience for her. Usually for transfigurations with a wand you could only create one at a time.

But now comes the hard part. Ginny told the crown to activate the obstacle course and ‘defenses’ of the long room in front of her.

“Sorry little guys,” Ginny said apologetically to the little strange constructs standing around her, “It’s practice time.”

The little black balls didn’t protest. Ginny tried to think of a good name for them. Balthazar’s book had described them as a good construct to start with, but had never said what they were called.

“Hm. What should your name be?” Ginny said as she had one of the constructs walk up and leap into her cupped hands. She blinked as it jumped. She could sense that the jump had been effortless for it. It must be able to jump at least ten feet in the air or more on its own. Scary…

But she had the little construct cupped in her muddy hands and stared at it for a bit.

“Chompers?” She brainstormed, “Yeah, Chompers. You’re all Chompers now.”

She placed the construct down and had the dozen constructs all set up in a line right in front of the obstacle course.

“Alright, Chompers!” Ginny said as she sent the command to the constructs, “Charge!”

The Chompers took less than three steps onto the obstacle course before half of them were obliterated by a blast of flame that shot from the ceiling to roast them to a crisp and causing them to dissolve into loose magic.

Ginny used her multitasking brain to give independent orders to each construct to help it dodge as waves of attacks came from every direction. Her orders only helped them survive one second longer than their fellows.

“Okay. We’ll start at a dozen and work up from there,” Ginny said to herself, “I’ll just add more Chompers whenever I feel like I’m not making any more progress towards letting them survive any longer.”

And so Ginny practiced, sending waves and waves of the cute and terrifying little Chompers to their certain doom in the ridiculously hard killing field set up in front of her.

— — —

Another Earth week had passed. Ginny had been trying to talk to Luna about Preston and the bullying, but the blonde haired girl was dodging her and denying that anything was happening when Ginny managed to corner her, before pushing past Ginny to leave again.

It was leaving Ginny frustrated, she only wanted to help Luna. Alexa and Jack had been helping too, but somehow when they went looking for Luna together to talk the girl, she was nowhere to be found. Ginny was becoming so frustrated that she had even considered telling Flitwick about what was happening even if she knew he wouldn’t do anything to help.

She had no evidence that anything was even happening, and she knew the teachers wouldn’t punish anyone unless they had to. McGonagall had taught her that.

But Ginny turned her focus back to her construct practice. She was up to a hundred of them simultaneously now. She was still learning how to order them as a big group. Sometimes she focused too much on saving one Chomper who was in trouble and that let multiple others that she had thought were safe get ambushed and destroyed by one of the killing field’s weapons.

Every time one of the little Chompers died, Ginny summoned more around herself, practicing making sure that the Chompers could be summoned along the whole length of her magic tendrils and that she randomized the position around her from which they appeared. Balthazar had written down that if she summoned them all from a single spot constantly then somebody could exploit that to destroy them before they could even get into the fight.

The slaughter was constant, Ginny resurrecting her little fallen soldiers almost constantly as the cruel room in front of her took their little lives and turned them back into wisps of magic.

Even after a full week of practice and her already good multitasking skill with her telekinesis, her Chompers still had only reached halfway across the large room. Somehow it got harder and harder as they made it across, so Ginny had to optimize how the groups of Chompers jumped and dodged to keep the most of them standing for the longest.

Sadly she had to sacrifice a brave little Chomper occasionally as a shield to protect a group of the others. Ginny wasn’t sure why she was getting so attached to them. She knew they were mindless constructs following her orders blindly. But it was fun to pretend that she was a general so she could cheer on her little soldiers as they made progress forward bit by bit under her direction.

— — —

Enough was enough. It had been another three days and Luna was still running away from Ginny and her friends. Even leaving meals early when they approached her at meals. It was time to pin Luna down firmly so she couldn’t avoid them or escape anymore. Ginny, Jack, and Alexa gathered in the morning but instead of doing their usual exercise went into the Ravenclaw common room and waited by the exit.

Luna appeared an hour later from the girls dormitory and ducked back in after spotting the three of them staring at her.

“What are you three doing? Especially you, Gryffindor?” Preston suddenly asked as he walked out of the boys' hallway.

“None of your business, Preston,” Ginny said, “Alexa’s more of a Ravenclaw than you. You can’t even solve Amvatroz’s riddles.”

Preston grimaced and looked briefly angry before shaking his head, “Whatever. If she loves our house so much then they should just resort her already. Pisses me off seeing her with those red robes in here so much…”

Preston left with his friends and didn’t bother them anymore. Luna peeked back and ducked away again when she saw the three of them still standing there guarding the door. The three of them waited patiently as the whole Ravenclaw house streamed past them for breakfast.

“You think she’s just going to skip it?” Alexa asked, “She really doesn’t want to talk to us that much?”

“She’s scared what her bullies will do if they see her talking to us,” Ginny said, “You guys can go, but I’m staying here as long as it takes. I’ve got one of Fred and George’s sickness candies in my robes so I’ll take it if a teacher asks why I didn’t go to my classes today.”

Her two friends looked at her in surprise, “Seriously?” Alexa said, “You think she’ll completely skip class just for this?”

“Maybe,” Ginny said, “Thought I’d be prepared just in case.”

Jack’s stomach growled and he looked embarrassed.

“Go ahead you two,” Ginny said, “I’ll be fine. Thanks for helping so far.”

“If you’re sure…” Alexa said, “Well, let us know how it goes. As soon as you get her to confirm it we can go to Fred and George and start dealing with Preston and the other bullies.”

“Okay. See you guys later. Have fun.”

Ginny waited there for another five minutes before she realized she was being ridiculous. She knew that Luna was in the girls dormitories. She could just go to her room and talk through the door.

The whole place was empty as Ginny went up to what she knew was Luna’s door. She knocked loudly and waited.

“Luna?” Ginny asked cautiously, “We just want to help you. I’m so sorry I didn’t check in on you for so long. I thought you just didn’t like me for some reason. But I want to help you now, protect you from those bullies. You don’t have to be scared.”

“You’ll just make things worse,” Luna’s hoarse voice said from behind the door, “I’m lucky that they haven’t noticed what’s happening yet. Preston’s a Prefect. Flitwick and the teachers won’t do anything. How could you help me?”

Ginny hesitated but then took one of her magic tendrils and slid it under the crack of the door.

“Hey, what are you…”

Ginny summoned a fluffy bunny from the end of her magic tendril. She had it hop over to Luna who was staring down at it in confusion. Ginny could see through the rabbit’s eyes now that she focused on them.

“It’s just a construct,” Ginny said, “Hollow on the inside, like a shell of magic. But it's soft and you can pet it just like a real rabbit. I can do a lot of things that most people can’t. So can you. I don’t care if Preston’s a prefect, if you let us help you then we can deal with him.”

Luna picked up the rabbit and stroked its soft fur.

“Could I do that one day?” Luna asked, her voice still muffled slightly through the door, “I’m up to twelve magic tendrils now. Could you teach me?”

“I can try,” Ginny said, “Just come out, talk with me and my friends. We’ll help you.”

There was a long pause.

“Promise?”

“I promise. Let’s go get breakfast together now. You must be hungry right? You’ve been leaving meals early to avoid us lately.”

The door clicked and opened to reveal Luna standing there holding the bunny.

“Okay,” she said, “I am hungry I suppose.”

“Don’t worry,” Ginny said as they moved, “Now that they’ve hired real chefs and send up the food magically from the kitchens directly, we won’t have less food anymore even if we’re a little late to the meal.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Luna said as they walked down the hallways, getting distracted by the swirling wards around them and slowing down to stare at it. The bunny dissolved into loose magic halfway through their journey and Luna looked disappointed but didn't say anything about it as they kept walking.

“Hey!” Ginny said as she had a sudden idea, “Did you know that Hogwarts is alive?”

“Huh?” Luna said, her eyes leaving the floating ward floating through the air that she had been focusing on intently.

“Yeah, Amvatroz, Eagle, told me all about it. Hogwarts is intelligent and she lives in the wards that are all around the castle.”

“Really?” Luna said, “I did think they were rather life-like the way they swirled about. Can she talk to us?”

“No, Amvatroz said that she never talks but still has feelings and pays attention to certain things about the castle.”

“Oh, that’s disappointing,” Luna said, “I would like to talk with her.”

“Well next time we’re alone and going back to the common room you can ask Amvatroz all about Hogwarts. I’m sure he knows all sorts of things about it that I just didn’t think to ask.”

“Oh, that does sound very interesting,” Luna said as she started to daydream again. But this time she didn’t slow down and stop as they made their way to the great hall.

Ginny sat down next to Jack and made space for Luna to follow her. She got some strange looks from the people around her as she started chatting with Luna a bit as they quickly ate to make up for lost time.

They separated and went to class. Ginny noticed Preston giving the two of them a confused and narrow eyed look from down the Ravenclaw table. But she ignored him.

After class Ginny and her friends met up with Luna. Fred and George were there too with serious expressions. Alexa must have already explained to them after Ginny threw her a thumbs up from across the great hall at breakfast.

It was time to plan how to deal with Preston and his goons.