Harry watched as Penny added ingredients to her potion. They were in a new abandoned classroom close to the Hufflepuff dormitory.

They'd had a discussion about Harry's improvement in potions and had decided that while he was doing much better this term, going towards an Acceptable without as much effort as last year, they should keep up the pressure. Harry just thought that Penny liked spending time with him, the way she smiled whenever they met was quite indicative of that theory being true.

He sighed and glanced down at his own potion. "My colour is off, in comparison to yours, still," he said, earning a glance at his brew from the girl.

"My work has started improving. I started implementing some of the suggestions from that scribbled sixth-year Potions book you gave me. Your potion actually looks how it should, mine is just even better." she said enthusiastically and continued stirring, while Harry sighed.

"Hey, don't be down!" Penny said cheerfully as she stared into her cauldron, "It doesn't suit you." Her blonde hair whipped back and forth, threatening to spill into her work. The window behind her head showed a depressing rainy September day, as was much too common in Scotland.

"I'm not down." Harry replied, "I'm just fed up with sucking at potions. It's been more than a year, can't I get a break?" he complained, as his concoction turned just the wrong shade of orange. They were making a fire-resistance potion, and it should have been a bit more on the yellow side.

"I'm pretty sure that's how people feel in comparison to how you're doing in Charms, and Transfiguration for that matter. Oh, also, can't forget Arithmancy," Penny said, "Didn't you say that Professor Vector can't stop praising you, and using you as an example for the fourth years?" Harry snorted.

"She's doing that because she's a sadistic bitch with a bad sense of humour," he said darkly, thinking back to the looks he'd gotten from his new classmates after their first Arithmancy lesson together. Apparently, there were only so many, 'Look at the proposed solution from Mr Evans, isn't it elegantly efficient?' that they could handle. Or, if she was feeling particularly mean, she would comment on a botched calculation with a tut, 'Aren't you ashamed that a second-year is doing better than you?'

Quite frankly, most of Harry's classmates looked like they were on the verge of losing it by the end of that hour-and-a-half session. Harry had quickly vacated the premises after that, using some hidden passageways to get as far away from the fourth-years as possible. One of the advantages of exploring the castle at night and knowing that there were things to find.

"You shouldn't talk about her like that, how crass, what would your fucking aunt say to that!" Penny gasped, causing Harry to snort, while she blushed and laughed at her own words. She was cute like that.

Harry looked down at his potion and saw that it had reached its state of metastasis. The part of the process where it would have to sit for a day, exactly a day, 24 hours. No more, no less. It was why they were brewing this bad boy on a Saturday. Also, Harry had shown his friends how powerful his incendio charm could get, and they wanted to test out if it could eat through some magical protection. Harry prophesied that his fireball would destroy the object laced with his version of the fire-resistance potion, while Penny's version would hold.

"All right, I'm done here." He announced and started packing up.

"I'll be finished in a few minutes, delaying the last reaction to strengthen potency," the blonde girl said, still working on her brew. "You want to get lunch together after?"

Harry considered it, before thinking of the lucrative practice he could get in the room of requirement in terms of his dueling. He had a fight scheduled with Tonks tonight and it was time to go big or go home. "I think I have a date with some spell practice, not really hungry yet. Breakfast was big. Tomorrow after Cedric's try-out?"

"Alright. You do you," Penny said, somewhat sadly. Harry felt the need to reassure the girl somehow, but he couldn't think of a good tactic. He looked at her for a moment, hefting his leather satchel.

"Thanks for practising with me, let's see if you can take the heat tomorrow, eh," he said and walked off, waving at the girl with a raised hand. He got some sort of weird hand spasm in return, the other hand clutching the potion ladle and stirring. Harry shook his head after the door to the room closed behind him.

"That girl is way too passionate about Potions," he muttered and started his ascension to the seventh floor. It wasn't an overly long walk. He'd taken it so many times, ever since he'd started regularly going to the Room of Requirement last year, that it was almost an automatism. Once arrived he swiftly entered the room, put on the sorting hat and looked at IT.

Wooden shell, stylized and evil face, wand held in its right arm. The puppet of evil. He scowled at it and entered his stance. He'd learned the disarming charm, to no avail in approaching any sort of victory.

Protego, the shield charm, only let him hold on to dear life as the puppet blasted his defence to bits. But he got better, oh how he got better and now it was time to improve even more, even, further, beyond.

He attacked, the puppet dodged, counter-attacked and so it went for one hour, two hours, three hours…

-/-

Harry fell on his back, chest heaving and lungs cramping. He felt like he'd run a marathon. How long had he spent dodging and spinning and attacking and defending against the cursed duelling partner that the room had given him? All the while fending off mental attacks from the hat.

"Four hours, four breaks." The hat supplied, "I think you might be certifiably insane, or just too competitive for your own good."

Harry scowled at the high ceiling of the room as the void of magic that he'd created within him strained to re-establish its functionality. It would be fine by the time he had to duel Tonks, but for now, he was spent. "And I'm not any closer to beating it than I was before."

"But, you've exhausted your automatic magic draw, which was the point, right. Frightening that it took you that long, really," the hat mused.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"It's hard being me, excellency is a curse," Harry sighed and sat up in his position as the hat laughed at him. His head spun and just the act of sitting up caused his lungs to heave. His legs were jelly, which made it easier to put them in a lotus position.

"Alright, room," Harry said out loud, addressing the room of requirement, giver of pain, pleasure and learning. "I require an environment in which I can develop the magic sensing skill as quickly and efficiently as possible," he said and closed his eyes. He'd noticed in his sojourns to the room, that it was oddly shy in changing in front of him. It was quite human in that regard, changes happened best when he either exited and re-entered or when he closed his eyes.

Hadn't this been a part of quantum mechanics? That certain particles existed in superimposed states of uncertainty and ambivalence when unobserved, and it was only when they were being perceived that they had a fixed location? Well, anyway, after giving the room a few seconds he opened his eyes again and froze when he saw nothing.

His surroundings were all black, pitch black, he couldn't see the hand he was waving in front of his face, nor could he see anything else. He almost sweat-dropped as a pained grin affixed itself onto his face.

"Oy, are you serious? We doing some anime-training bull-shit here. Blindfolded level dark room, what's next, you going to try and hit me with a stick?" he asked. His voice sounded odd as if it wasn't vibrating very far through the air.

'Harry,' The hat suddenly said from within his head, 'I can't seem to be able to speak with you out loud, only like this. Whatever you may have wanted, what you got was…'

'A sensory deprivation chamber,' Harry thought back with a grimace as the absolute silence of the room descended into his ears after he'd finished talking.

'The Room of Requirement is a complex intelligence, almost as complex as mine," the hat said. 'Just that in addition to being capable of independent thought, abstract reasoning and interpretation, it also has access to probably all the knowledge within the castle, even if it seemingly can't bring books from the library here. Perhaps a remnant of Rowena's opinion that libraries were sacred and communal studying should be encouraged.'

'Where are you going with this?' Harry asked.

'I'm saying that if sensory deprivation is what the room thinks you need to learn the skill, it might actually be true," the hat claimed tentatively.

'You know people can experience hallucinations and psychosis in environments like this,' Harry thought with a grimace. 'But yeah, anyway, let's give it a try.' He finished, before beginning to sink into meditation.

That's what Flitwick had said. Empty yourself of magic, then meditate in an environment without too much of it. Something that this room probably represented at the moment? Obviously, he couldn't check that there was no magic present, considering he wasn't yet able to sense its presence or its absence, but he decided to trust the room for the moment. The only thing lacking was the presence of a powerful magical object. Unless the room or the hat on his head counted. Which, realistically speaking, they probably did. Other than a Horcrux Harry couldn't think of any magical artefacts more powerful than a millenia-old hat with telepathic abilities and its own personality, and what was probably the central intelligence of a magical castle that had had more than a hundred thousand magical students walk through its halls since its conception.

He closed his eyes, not that there was really a need, and retreated into himself. He hadn't meditated in a week or so, but after having reached a certain level it was a skill that was impossible to forget. He first threw away the impressions and emotions of the day and then the week. What was left after all of that were his underlying anxieties. The realisation that his future knowledge was mostly useless and that he could only try to become as powerful as possible before leaving at the end of his schooling. His questioning if he should go to Dumbledore and give the man all the information he had, if he had a right to gamble with the life of James Potter by not releasing vital information. Most present was the fear though, the fear of being found out, what would happen to him, what people would try to do to him.

Perhaps it was time to deposit the information he had anonymously, at the headmaster's metaphorical door, he'd learned Occlumency after all. But now was not the time to be thinking about these things. Now was the time to

L

E

T

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G

O

Harry floated in an empty void, literally and metaphorically, he felt as if his physical body was being uplifted and wasn't touching the ground anymore. For the first time since he'd started meditating, or in his life in general, the effect he was capable of achieving with meditation was being mirrored by his actual surroundings.

What had Flitwick said?

The thought lazily tumbled through his mind, like a tumbleweed through a western flic.

Flitwick had said that one needed experience using magic, enough experience to feel it flow within oneself. Harry had that, he'd practised sorcery for more than a decade. He grasped that perception, that sense, the only one he had left, other than other physical impressions of his body and turned it outwards.

It was like flipping a switch. Whereas inwardly he felt a void, where magic had used to run, connected to his body or his soul through the well he'd been borne in, he now felt that void outside of his body as well. And he knew that it was a void. There was nothing. Just, if he focused, a ball of magic, different from what he could summon forth himself, sharp, dangerous, ancient, sitting right atop his head.

Harry woke up from his experience gasping for breath in a manner that was completely different from what he'd experienced after duelling the dummy for four hours. He scrambled forward to his feet, the sudden light blinding him even through his closed eyelids.

"You alright?" The hat asked while Harry went towards where he thought was the exit. He didn't answer.

'Hey kid, you alright?!' The hat asked more urgently, directly into Harry's head. The thing about telepathy was that since it was a purely magical endeavour, one wasn't limited by the amount of vibrations the air could transfer, or the power of one's lungs, or one's lack thereof. So when the hat decided to get loud in Harry's head, it got loud. The boy winced and sat back down on the floor. He fluttered his eyes open, before closing them again, while the spin that was his perception in general since he'd asked the room for what he needed attacked his senses.

"I'm, ok." Harry managed to spit out, trying not to hurl.

"Trust Rowena to come up with something so sadistic," Chanithachuah muttered as Harry once again started approaching the door so that he could exit the room. "Are you still up for it?"

"It worked, didn't it?" Harry replied, which was the horrible thing. The entire experience had worked. He'd felt the presence of the hat on his head. Old, powerful, sharp. Although, the latter was probably coming from the sword hidden within the hat, not his mentor.

Anyway, despite not necessarily wanting to repeat the experience, the fact that it had given such tangible results so quickly, was too much for him to pass up on.

"I'll be back tomorrow," he said, as much as it pained him to do so. The hat shook its head as Harry gently laid it down, where it would probably be transported back to the headmaster's office. Not that the man seemed to care much, apparently. Or maybe it was kept somewhere else during the year. Harry's headache was too big for him to bother asking.

"Have a nice afternoon," he said and left the room.

"You too, kid."

The door slammed shut behind him and Harry cast a tempus to check how much longer he had before he was supposed to have a practice round with Tonks. His eyes almost fell out of his skull when he saw that he'd spent several hours under the room's spell. He cursed, as this meant that he only had three hours to recover unless he wanted to re-schedule. But he didn't.

If he was too on top of his game he'd look ridiculously strong for a second year anyway, better to manage expectations somewhat, he thought. Or perhaps, was he underestimating the average Hogwarts second-year? He was sure that they could put up a decent fight. After all, hadn't Twix taught them well?

Maybe he could challenge Penny or Cedric next time, to see where the average level lay. But for now, he closed his eyes. Now he had to rest as best he could for his bout with Tonks. His stomach grumbled and he decided that he could rest in the kitchen while letting the house-elves spoil him.