Harry potter : Forgotten Lord

The next week passed tediously slowly as their classes turned towards revision for the upcoming exams, which was rather pointless for him. However, it did give him the opportunity and free time to check his bases, but with the increasing tension forming within Ravenclaw house, as pressure to get high exam results steadily grew, an unofficial party was thrown to help relieve the bubbling tension before it exploded.

The party was organised by the senior prefects and had the unofficial, silent backing of Professor Flitwick, but it was a rather mild, rather tame affair, as his housemates let their hair down for the single night. The 'unofficial' party also served as an unofficial victory party for the up and coming win of the house cup, which Harry personally thought was jinxing fate, since they still had another couple months left of the school year.

But he could hardly blame his housemates for such a belief with their massive point lead over the other houses. Nevertheless he enjoyed the party, even if the music was horrible, and far too out of date for his personal tastes, given his musical palette was still strongly influenced by the muggle culture he had grown up in. Predictably, their head of house turned up just half past ten sending them to bed, ending the official/unofficial party.

With the quidditch cup decided for another year, everyone's attention turned towards the house cup, as the four houses' attention and focus shifted.

Naturally, with the Slytherins defeat on the quidditch pitch, the head of Slytherin house was particularly unjust, as the potion master attempted to rob the other houses of their points, using any excuse, no matter how contrived, to justify taking points to even the imbalance. One such feeble excuse was 'turning the mixing spoon too loudly,' costing Ravenclaw 3 points, much to the class' disbelief.

Of course this devious tactic didn't go unnoticed by the other heads of house, who responded in kind with a wide range of different tactics, their own head of house returning fire with a vengeance. It quickly got to the point that every time Professor Snape took house points unfairly, Flitwick would give them twice as many points back, 'for being helpful' or 'having the right study ethic,' and other such minor things.

Thanks to this clever tactic, Ravenclaw had already gained an additional 68 points from this 1-2 ratio, making him wonder how long it would last before the potions master realized what was happening and would stop his point shaving.

Even with all of this Ravenclaw's lead was gradually extending, with their house point total nearing the 800 point mark with the Hufflepuffs following in second with a good 550 points. Slytherin was in third place by less than half a dozen points, with a total of 453 to Gryffindor's 447. He knew, though, that Gryffindor would retake third place soon enough, just as soon as the head of Gryffindor had a chance to look at the recent point reductions and retaliated in turn.

He turned his attention back to his mother's journal resting on his lap, instead of revising like the rest of his year mates and friends. He was taking the night off to relax, more than confident that he would ace his exams with minimal effort on his part. How could he not be? He all but had a mental copy of all the textbooks he had read in his codex. Plus, he still had over a week left until the exams started anyways, so that was close to 168 hours give or take, so more than enough time to do some quick recaps if necessary.

He was currently rereading his mother's private journal, more specifically her 6th year at Hogwarts, the year she started to become friends with his father and his father's closest friends.

Reading his mother's words, the elegantly written script easily held his attention, but with every word he read he felt himself getting closer and closer to his long dead mother. His heart started to ache once more at the unjust loss. However the one thing he couldn't fully understand was how his father's best friend, Sirius, Harry's godfather, had gone from being a loyal, trustworthy friend, to turncoat and betrayer... Of course, many things could have happened over the years, to turn a once close friend to foe, so it was certainly possible that something had happened to split the pair apart.

Another thing he took note of were the small, but regular references to a magical map which could track people around Hogwarts. He reread the relevant journal entry for the third time.

'Remus is my partner for the end of year rune project, which isn't too bad, at least I can count on him to pull his weight. The idea he had was most interesting. It was so ambitious and original that we surely will get an O for our efforts, if we can pull it off, that is.

The idea is to make a magical map, whose purpose is to show real time locations of people around the school, for any building the map is enchanted to. At first we considered the idea of applying tracking charms to everyone, but that wouldn't work, the charms would fade too fast, and so many active charms of the same type, in a single structure, would create inevitable interference.

The more I consider the project, the more I think we may have overextended ourselves. It's just too difficult, too ambitious for our level of magical knowledge, but if we could make this map, it could be so very useful and have so many possible applications.

The ability to track and identify individuals in real time could easily be used as a tool to help fight against the dark lord and his death eaters, who rely on deception and their secret identities to mask their actions. We could finally know the true names behind the masks; it could also be used to detect polyjuiced infiltration agents if we could make it work properly.

Considering everything he knew about the map, as he mentally pieced together all the small facts and references he came across in his mother's journal, he quickly concluded that the magical map was probably in the same place it had been since it was confiscated by the caretaker in his father and mother's final year at Hogwarts. That meant it was safely stored away in the caretaker's storeroom somewhere, if it hadn't been destroyed or disposed of.

He didn't have to think too long or hard to decide that the map itself was far too useful to simply be ignored, if it could be recovered with some effort.

It would help him to navigate around Hogwarts while having the ability to easily avoid people during his midnight walks. The map would also give him the ability to find people easier around the school, rather than just walking around aimlessly, trying to find someone.

It would also prove to be extremely useful for any of his future security needs, if he could copy the runes and methods used to originally create it. He could then create a version for use in his own home later on, just like his mother believed, or even his future businesses and lands.

The map could also be used to indirectly spy on people from his dorm room. Sure the map's ability to actually spy on someone was limited, but it could still prove useful. Even knowing which individuals were meeting together and for how long, had some value. Perhaps there was an alliance in the works, perhaps a conspiracy.

The same was true for things like who was fucking each other or cheating on their significant other or who was in a relationship, even if just for blackmail purposes. Every bit of information had its value; it just might not be immediately clear what that was or if would prove useful in the short-term.

He made a mental note to himself; after the exams were complete, he would try to recover the map for himself one night. The deciding factor that finalized his decision to recover the map was that both his parents had a direct hand in creating it, and he wanted it for that reason alone.

He wanted another tangible piece of his mother and father's unofficial legacy.

...

It was kind of funny how the word 'exams' had different effects on different people. Some were in a near constant state of panic and fear, to the point that the school nurse was liberally dispensing doses of calming draught to the student body.

He took no small amount of pleasure watching several of his rivals and enemies panicking. However, while most of the school panicked, you could feel quite a bit of excitement building within Ravenclaw house, as all its members eagerly accepted the challenge of examinations. This was their time to shine.

Much like the exams he had sat for in primary school, they had been called in by name and given their own individual sized square table in the great hall, before being handed anti-cheating quills and ink and their test paper, before then being given a prepared speech about the exam procedures.

The first examination had set the pace, building his self confidence to ever increasing heights with the terribly easy exam on charms theory. It was so easy, in fact, that it resulted in him finishing about half an hour ahead of everyone else in the room, which resulted in a self-satisfied smirk.

Predictably, sitting in the middle of the great hall with a giant smirk on his face caused his head of house to come over and advise him to look over his exam paper again, which he had already done out of habit. Not that it was truly necessary, since he did effectively have a word for word copy of the issued textbook in his head.

Naturally his casual dismissal of his head of house's concern caused the man to quickly look over his exam, before leaving with a somewhat shocked expression on his features. So obviously, his head of house had only just realized how far advanced he was. Or he had done really badly; but he sincerely doubted that.

Most of the exam questions were basic theory about individual spells, about the wand movements involved, or the charm's effects. So, all-in-all, pretty basic stuff. Upon leaving the great hall he quoted Darth Vader, "All too easy," he said, much to the ignorance of his year mates.

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