The school year begun in earnest, with students struggling with their homework, well except for me and my friends since they all have my handy homework quills, and with OWL and NEWT students feeling the pressure mounting on them.
The Exchange, as it was now officially known, was still doing good. It is quickly becoming a bastion of inter-house relations, a place of self-improvement and to honor the positive values of Hogwarts such as hard work, learning, kindness, and loyalty.
My friends were very keen to learn my modded spells, since their values were greatly improved as a result. James and Victoria were more than happy to break them down and try to get inspiration from my pieces, while Christian was happy to simply learn them and incorporate them into his skills. I also got James a calculator, which surprised him greatly, but he was thankful for. Victoria is still undergoing her potion regime and physical training with me, making her look and feel incomparably better than before.
There were a few bumps at the beginning of the year regarding Victoria, mainly due to her joining in the Exchange when the rest of her house was against it. It left her alienated from a good number of them, but no one dared to bully her after how i had dealt with the previous two groups of bullies I encountered. One ended with a group in the infirmary, the group of girls from before the break ended up loosing 100 points for each participating house and detention for the next month, on top of having their parents notified. This made some people upset at me within the house, but I've gained more than enough points on my own to offset those lost, but it still left other houses angry at me for some time. Slytherins were a bit at a loss because of it though, since on one hand I've beaten them up, but on the other I defended one of their own against people from my house. The Exchange itself was a bit awkward for some time with her presence, but since she is rather straightforward and takes her time to help those who need it, people realized that she was a generally good person, just a bit intense. She was just a younger McGonagall basically, strict but she wanted to help.
With the bumps on the road passed after about a month, the time to make my designs come to life arrived.
I first started to make some of the muggle technology usable around magic. Now, I had already figured out how to do so for the calculators, the simplest piece I would enchant magically, helping me greatly. My plan was to introduce useful and entertaining devices, and avoid anything too drastic. I do not want to be targeted for being too extreme, from old families or ministry. I have plans for 4 pieces: calculator, voice recorder, Discman and GameBoy.
The voice recorder had some different quirks which needed to be fixed to work properly around magic. It obviously needed to be protected from magic and have a properly regulated rune battery, but the hard part was getting ambient magic from interfering with its ability to record sound. So i basically made a small scale magical energy filter to protect the area where it hears the sounds, while improving its ability to catch sound waves.
The portable CD player was a small mix of both of my previous projects. Had to make sure all the buttons would work properly after everything was protected. The sound had to travel through the headphones, which I enchanted as well to make sure everything would work properly. From what I could tell, cd's were perfectly functional, but the wizard world still used those old fashioned gramophones and records, making any music wizards listen to unavailable in the required format. So I'll have to remedy that.
The game boy was trickier. I had to make sure the buttons worked, the screen was fine, the sound wouldn't be affected and the game cartridges could function without messing with the enchantments on the GameBoy itself. A really hard challenge to make everything fit properly, but a satisfying one. Took me a month and a half of trial and error to properly make the thing work.
Before the end of the year, I now had a good amount of merchandise to sell in the FIRM center. Calculators, Voice Recorders, CD players, headphones, CD's, GameBoy, games, rune batteries, command runes for muggle parents and I would be able to create a great number of jobs to fill the needs for the basic product, the enchantments and selling the stuff. Overall I believe it will have a good effect on the Magical British economy and help people learn a bit more of muggle culture.
And so I made plans with the ever competent Scott. We invested into getting a contract with the muggle manufacturing companies using a tech company as a front, which I will actually sell the un-enchanted versions in the muggle world to avoid any issues. If it works great, if not I'll have to see if I should just confund some people. We've now started to build the enchanting center and have begun to look for employees through the FIRM center, which is becoming a good place to look for jobs as I establish new companies, and advertisements in the papers. I'm going to transfer Mr. Whitcomb from the center and put him in charge, since new employees were introduced and are taking care of the center itself, I can take away some of the management pretty comfortably. From our estimate, we should be able to get merchandise out before the Holidays.
The rest of my time was spent focusing on my binary runes. I spent a lot of time trying to get it right and being stuck at the last hurdle. I just couldn't get it to work properly. I was missing something in them to make my Runes as powerful as I wanted them to be. But, everything clicked when I remembered magic itself is manipulated through intent above all things. It is why accidental magic happens, why we can cast silently or wandlessly, and how magic started anyway. I was too worried about turning binary code into a valid rune language that I forgot to put the intent behind them. After that joyful bit, I was able to use my new success and recreate the vanishing box and desk-work quill properly, with some fun defenses and counters added to it, in the hopes of stopping others from tampering with them or replicating them. My businesses for these two were already in there preparation stages, and with me finishing my code, employees could start learning the exact pieces needed for the product. After they've been strictly sworn in of course. Scott actually found me a very skilled runes expert who was very willing to be in charge of the facilities as long as the pay was good and he could learn my code. I had no problems with it so we gained another extremely competent muggle-born.
I've also started to organize my notes and research into proper books. I think I'll publish them after the basilisk debacle, when I've finished my OWL's. My results will give me quite a bit more legitimacy to my work. Being too young does attract problems. But aside from that, I've decided to call the store where I'll sell my two inventions BonesWork, after the family and all. The vanishing box will have different models: basic will be a simple one with limited protection from tampering or wear and tear, advanced which will be bonded to the user or permitted individuals and with good protection plus a warranty, and deluxe which will be finely crafted and inlaid with either gold or sliver, nearly impossible to tamper with, great many protections and everything the advanced does. That way normal families can get one and the snobs can feel superior with theirs. The quills will simply be similar how the quill stores work. The better the feather, the more expensive, and the more expensive the better the enchantments.
My friends had progress of their own as well. James was quite surprising since he's being nominated as one of the leading figures within the charms club. His skills and creativity towards the subject have worked wonders for him, and this will basically guaranty his presidency for the club in the following years. He was really excited and our little group of four had decided to celebrate his success by treating him in Hogsmeade, with Butterbeer and food aplenty. We did find out that our dear James, along with a lot of boys, was rather fond of Madam Rosmerta and would blush constantly around her. Hehehe, ammunition.
My wilder friend Christian was fitting in quite well as a chaser and making a good name for himself as a natural in the wizard sport. Although our team did extremely well during the cup this year, we still found ourselves in close second as Slytherin team was able to crush Hufflepuff with a point difference we couldn't make up. Although he was down at not being able to win, we still tried to cheer up the guy, and with a Phoenix helping comfort a creature manic, it was very quick.
Victoria has changed drastically since returning from the break. Due to her new routine of exercising in the morning with me, she's been able to start building up more muscles and improving her energy and positivity as it makes her feel good after finishing. This coupled with her finishing the potion regime I had her under, she's hit quite the growth spurt and was able to start filling out areas a girl undergoing puberty tends to fill out. Her height was quickly passing others, well except for me since at the age of 13 I stand at 5'7, but it made her very happy to be growing like she was. She's stopped pressuring herself to surpass me in everything after seeing, in her words, 'just how perversely brilliant and dedicated' I was towards magic, but instead she has made me a sort of goal. Something one should aim to become as a witch or wizard. Being with friends also helped her come out of her shell more, as she jokes around with us, participated in our debates, becomes active in our studies as we help each other out. I am overall, very happy with her progress.
And so the school year came to a close. I was monstrous as always with O+ across the board, Victoria had a good amount of O's as well, but her performance at the beginning of the school year dropped her grades. James was good as well, getting himself O+ in Charms and Transfiguration, but potions, herbology and Astronomy were giving him some troubles. Christian was nailing Herbology and CoMC as he got O+ in those and EE in his magical classes, but almost failed history and potions.
The Ravenclaw table was very happy this year, because we had finally stolen the house cup from Slytherin. Even with the lost points from the bullying accident, we were still able to squeeze by to win the House cup. It's was interesting to see so many bookworms celebrating the event in the common room, the night before departing. I decided to have a bit of fun and put on a light show using lumos in ways that left my housemates speechless. Even Christian was a little surprised at what I could do with it.
And so ended my final year of studying without anything going wrong in the castle, you know, except for the new DADA professor every year, but that's besides the point. A few more months and the golden trio will arrive. Well the golden boy, the one who knows what to do, and Ron.