Mind Over Matter

A Privet Bonfire

CHAPTER TWO

Waking up was... an experience. The sudden rush of knowledge as the library made itself known to her conscious mind only to quiet down a few seconds later. The Occlumency book she had been reading was perched on her chest was a good first test, so one 'intra mentis' later and she knew the whole contents, it was brilliant. Good old intelligent Tom Riddle just solved her referencing issues for homework.

She could actually still kinda feel his presence in her mind, like she knew that he was awake, but had no real indication of anything past that. It would be good if they could come up with a way to communicate outside of the mindscape but she wasn't going to think about it too much yet.

Looking back over at the bookshelf full of books that she could upload to her shared brain filled her with a sort of dread, does she have to do this for every book? Or could she just... maximise it. Like lumos maxima. Well he did say that nothing would happen if the spell didn't work so...

Wandering over to the shelf her main issue was getting over the tapping part... maybe if she did a similar thing to earlier with her magic? She could still feel it swirling around her like an extra limb she had never noticed before. Cautiously, she tried to extend it towards the shelf and was quite chuffed to see it react and sort of wrap around each of the books. It was now or never really...

"Intra mentis: maxima!" Oh wow, that worked. What a rush. Now she knew more about Occlumency than Snape probably did. Now for the rest of the room.

Wishing for the room to change whilst you were already in it was considerably harder than doing it from outside, but within an hour she had sufficiently exhausted both herself and the room's trove of books, both the ones the elves had deposited and books that had been hidden or lost by students, and now she knew a lot of very illegal things that even thinking about could probably earn you a spot in Azkaban permanently.

Like she had no idea that you could use necromancy and blood magic in healing to repair a dying organ! That sounded super helpful!

And gods the amount of rituals that she could perform for things! All with barely legal ingredients too not even anything that dodgy. She could fix her eyesight! Repair years of malnutrition!

There was also a fairly morbid dissection of an actual metamorph, which was horrifying at the same time that it was fascinating. Apparently they... she, could partially heal her own wounds because of that ability. And it was how her hair had grown back after Petunia had hacked it all off. Unfortunately she would still need to use the rituals for her fairly damaged body because the years had not been kind to her and that was apparently likely the reason that the ability hadn't fully manifested. It was too busy keeping her body together to change it visually. It was actually quite worrying. Maybe she'd ask Tom to send her the ingredients.

The last thing she wanted to do before heading up to the dorm, because it was approaching curfew now, was the Marauders map.

Now, apart from already being magically exhausted, she had no idea how uploading the map would go. Would it still work in the mindscape? Would she be able to know who was where at all times when in the castle or only when she was thinking about it? It didn't hurt to find out. She didn't actually know how the map even worked so it was going to be interesting. A tap and a spell later she had her answer.

She could see the whole map in her mind if she wished, locate a specific person, see who was in the corridor or classroom around her and apparently, if she focused on a specific person, she could tell what they were doing. Which definitely wasn't a function of the map that she was aware of. Not that she cared too much, but Tom would be positively gleeful that he could track Dumbledore in the castle. She did wonder if it could be altered to listen in too, but things like that wasn't her forte.