— Clara POV —
Over the next few weeks, I originally wanted to research and learn magical languages and their history. But as we all know, plans get made to be scrapped, as I spent most of the time learning a new mind art, as I wanted to teach it in my first fast track class. Namely intent infusion with the focus on spoken words. It was a subcategory of basic casting theory - needed for basically every magical discipline, which gets expanded upon, so that you can convey complex meanings with less words or even just sounds. It was not that hard to learn, but I needed to teach it too, so I couldn't just half ass it and put way too much time, practice and focus into it, neglecting most other things.
Originally Henry and I wanted to wait for next year, before officially starting my fast track class, as we both doubted, that most students would even be able to learn how to meditate in this time, but apparently house rivalry was a major motivating factor, as it helped spurn people on. Most people also signed the contract, with a few outliers, which either thought their home training was better or had other reasons.
Well, back to my point being, that I choose to start my fast track class this year, with intent infusion as the likely first topic. That also meant, that I needed to send out invitations. From my original ideas, only Hermione „survived", as Harry was "kidnapped" by Henry and Ginny had no talent whatsoever for the mind arts, which was apparently an ongoing trend for the Weasly's, as only the twins had acceptable talent, which were taught by the DATDA professors, who warned me to not help them in any way, as a twin bond is way to problematic, as to just meddle with it. Apparently the mind arts were wholly different in some aspects, which only could be understood, if you had experienced it. In return, they promised me a book about exactly that, which would be a treasure trove. The twins were also consequently excused from the mind arts course, though they were still bound by the original contract.
Hermione accepted without even thinking I would guess, but Daphne Greengrass needed a lot of persuasion, but ultimately came around, after I invited Draco Malfoy, on Henry's recommendation and insistence, as he had apparently huge talent, but Henry just didn't like his personality, so he didn't want to immediately reach out to him about an apprenticeship and choose to wait until his seventh year. After he accepted, he also convinced Daphne, though the specifics are not known to me.
Luna was a given.
I also had my eye on a few fifth and seventh years, but they all declined, citing their OWLs and NEWTs as a reason, which was understandable. Sixth year students were sadly no talented batch and the same could be said for the third and fourth years, though the third years were just a bunch of lazy buggers, as they had the most students who didn't put any work into the mind arts, though they attended the lecture, which also meant, that we couldn't really gauge their talent.
The first and second years had a lot of potential, but the fundamental knowledge of magic was just not enough to consider most of them.
After I had got all answers to my invites, I scheduled the first lesson, which rapidly approached and was finally upon me. I was not really nervous, more excited to be honest, but as I walked into my classroom, I was greeted with an intense staring contest between 4 people, who were locked in a one vs three, even though two of them were not invited.
„If stares could kill, I would have a corpse and I can tell you, it is possible. Greengrass, explain", I said, as I entered the room and asked the only uninvolved person, before promptly silencing three of the other four, as they wanted to explain themself. Greengrass aloofly answered: „Trading boring and useless insults, like every time those three meet." Which was nothing new to me, but still irked me: „Potter and Weasly out! There is a reason you didn't get invited and if I find you disturbing my course again, I will assign you detentions! I do NOT care over who started it and what this is about, but rest assured, I can and will stop anything inappropriate from happening here. The door is over there, the silencing charm will wear off after a few minutes. Be on your way then gentleman." I cheerily waved them of, though my expression was anything but kind.
Turning to Malfoy, I said: „I know your usual conflict with those two, with Hermione being the fuse most of the times, so I will warn you one time and one time only. If you so much as think about insulting her in this room, which you apparently did just now, I will assign you detentions. I expect you to respect your classmates on the basis, that all of you are sentient beings. You don't need to be friends, hug each other or anything like that." There was a short silence, before Luna came skipping through the door: „Perfect, we all are here now. Sadly the current class size is not that big, but it is probably better that way. I think we can skip introductions, as we all know each other. Now while you three", I said, turning to the second years: „are a year above me, I still am your age and the teacher of this class. If you have a problem with me teaching, though you wouldn't be here if not, there is the door. I am more than qualified to teach this course, as I got an international grandmaster certification for the mind arts with focus on occlumency and theoretic knowledge. Now, do you all have signed the contracts I sent you?" I asked, before promptly being handed four of those, which I securely stored in a dedicated space.
„What can you tell me about intent, answer from my left to right please", I said, pointing at Greengrass.
„Intent is used to cast spells more effectively, with extreme examples being the patronus charm, cruciatus and killing curse, which require specific intent to cast, either being pure happiness, the craving for pain or senseless destruction. It is also used in various rituals, potions and things like intent wards." Greengrass said, followed by similar explanations from the others.
„Good, so you are all on the same knowledge base right now. Daphne gave a great example with the killing curse. Now a question for you: Is it possible to cast the killing curse with another contradicting emotion?" That question made all of them pause, before Draco shook his head. „While I can think of your reasoning, you are wrong Draco, it is possible. Please follow me over there", I said, before walking over to a small practice range with targets: „Now, I want you all to pay attention, as I cannot do this multiple times yet", I said, before promptly casting the killing curse onto a target. I waited a few seconds, mainly for a flustered Hermione to calm down, before casting another one at the target. „Can someone tell me, what the difference between those two casts was?"
I needed to wait a bit, before Draco said: „The first one was green, which is the normal color, while the other one was cyan. I would guess that you used a different intent, though I cannot imagine which." „Exactly. Now first lesson about intent. There are a near infinite number of different intents, which has a huge impact on potions for example. You can brew a dreamless sleep with the intent of no dreams, nice dreams, deep sleep, light sleep and if you are good enough even painless sleep, which will take pain away instead of dreams, though that is master niveau. My change of intent was similarly extreme. I went from hatred to mercy. Mercy in the sense of bringing a painless and fast death. This was widely used by mediwitches in the last wars. While I won't let any of you cast the killing curse, we will practice something else related to intent. Intent infusion. One example of intent infusion is spells, just as demonstrated, but there are other applications, like infusing your words or just random sounds with a specific intent. This, for example, is used by hit wizard squads for faster or stealthy communication. Now, there are two main challenges to this. One is the infusion part, the other is actually understanding or reading the intent. I could say move now, with the intent of right infused into it, but you wouldn't realize the difference", I said before promptly demonstrating exactly that. „Now, before I start with a more in-depth explanation, any questions?" „Yes", Hermione tentatively raised her hand; „Why does this count as a mind art and why teach it to us?"
„Good question. Intent in general is categorized as a part of the mind arts, which has a number of reasons. The main one for my decision to teach it is, that it does not use mana, instead using mental energy. The other reasons and in depth explanations will be taught in charms I think, somewhere around forth or fifth year. I know, it is not really a satisfactory answer, but if I really did an in depth explanation, we would sit here for a whole week or even more. Generally I would recommend, to take such categorizations as set fact and only start questioning them, after you have a related mastery to your name. The other part of your question can be answered way faster.", I said before starting to list a few reasons: „Because:
I want to.
It will help you with other subjects.
It will open a ton of other doors.
It is relatively harmless.
It is relatively easy.
It doesn't need any prerequisites.
It can be fun.
It is useful.
You can practice it wandlessly and consequently over the summer holidays and without a partner, though I would still recommend one."
I paused for a moment, contemplating if I should spoiler this, before I continued: „A big part of this course will be legilimency, which has prerequisites like intent infusion into mental threads, which will be another topic or also occlumency, let alone the theoretical foundation."
I waited for a few seconds: „No more questions then?" Pause: „Good. As you could see from my demonstration, intent, while elusive, still affects spells. For some it is a visible but harmless change like changing the color, while not modifying the end result. But there is also another possibility, which is changing the end result, without any indication to it. Episkey needs an intent of healing and/or closing a wound. If you use an intent for opening/aggravating a wound instead, it would still look exactly the same, but the end result would be devastating. This is why I would like you all to not use intent infusion for spells, until you got a good enough grasp on the concept. Intent infusion into words is, like I already said, quite harmless and also a good starting point to learn."
„Now, while heavily debated which of the two challenges is the better starting point, I will start with understanding/reading intent of words. There are few ways to accomplish the first success, after which there will be more. The easiest way to do this, while kind off brute force, is to meditate, while your unneeded senses are muted and I barrage you with a specific pre-selected intent. For this, I have lent these earmuffs from professor Sprout", I said, a slight smile hanging on my lips, before I pulled out four bright pink earmuffs: „Now don't be shy, everyone gets one!" I handed them out to a very disgruntled Draco and Greengrass, while Luna was pleased at the color and Hermione just took it without any indication of her mood. Continuing: „I will use the word the intent of walking. I learnt it the same way from Henry and while we won't make big strides today, we should achieve it before summer, so you can practice intent infusion into your words in the summer. Cannot really practice it, without any confirmation after all. The biggest problem will be meditating with your senses cut off, as it is quite disorienting the first few times, but also very good practice to get better at meditating, which is why you can keep those earmuffs until summer. But don't damage them or professor Sprout will nag me about it. The general objective of reading/understanding intent is sensing mental energy outside of your body, which is why you will meditate at the start, until you can take it a step further to being awake until you can also do it while hearing the actual word, which will also be extremely confusing at first, as every normal words has got the teeny tiniest bit of intent infused into it. The moment we get to that stage, you can experiment by yourself to enhance that specific intent until you yourself feel ready to slightly alter it. The stages after that are to reverse the intent and to just straight up replace it."
„Now long story short. Earmuffs on please and try your best to meditate. We will try for thirty minutes today." While reluctant, all four of them put the bright pink earmuffs on, I need to remember to bring a camera next time. They slowly fell into meditation, all four of them way faster than I expected. I just sat down next to them, before slowly repeating the specified intent. It got tiring and boring after a while, but it was the easiest and fastet way, which also built a good foundation for the future. There were also spells and potions for this step, but they could lead to an addiction and have little to none educational value. I should maybe warn them not to use them, even if they grow frustrated at some point. Another way would be instinctual trust and understanding between persons, which was the way hitwizards did it, as they just trained their teamwork tirelessly, until this arose as a side effect of all that traing, at which point they built upon it further.
I continued doing this, but while I neglected most of my other plans these few weeks, I did restructure my mind again, again and again in this time. I had successfully expanded upon my first attempt at key value pairs. The first thing I did, was implementing an instinctual search construct as a new module. It is kind of a focus mode, where I can implant one or multiple keys or values, with differing options akin to a regex on steroids, after which I could see the physical representation of the key value pair links in my mind akin to a huge color coded spider web.
For this filter I implemented a temporary algorithm, which went through every single key and gave me a statistic and informational feedback, from which I could infer other changes I needed to make to my mindscape. The first thing I found in the data was a way to make my mind more dynamic, as I improved the geometry of my saved memories. But halfway through, I found a flaw and upgraded my search construct to have a huge rough spiderweb with smaller connected spiderwebs. After this step, I made another temporary algorithm, which gave me another set of data on which I improved and repeated this process another two times, with the third being an ongoing project.
I also have made plans for the next step in improving my mind, which would be implementing a test section, which validates and measures every aspect of my mind together with individual data reports on their outcome. Through this, I can then test other ideas I have and either implement or scrap them, depending on the results. While not foolproof, it is better than my current approach.
Together with this, I had theorized a kind of playground to test and stress new ideas, without needing too much time to rebuild my whole mind, which will be annoying in the long term, but I will wait with that, until I have improved my current mindscape more, as it was not in my ability to do that yet. While this sounds easy, it is anything but that as the mindscape is not a basic occlumency practice. It is the one of the deepest layers of your mind and because of that it is the hallmark of a master if not even grandmaster of the mind arts, at least by older standards.
After a bit more time passed, the thirty minutes were already over, so I decided to wake them up from their meditative states. The easiest way for that would be a stinging hex, but the most harmless one is an underpowered tickling charm on someones hand. I promptly did exactly that and after each of them removed their earmuffs, I asked: „Any luck?" „No" „No" „No" „Yes"
After they answered I continued: „Not surprising as it can be very difficult at the start. Wait, you said yes?" I asked, after I realized I had misheard the last one. „While I could not decipher it, I felt your mental energy five times. It happened pretty random and I can't reproduce it but it was there", Luna said: „Felt like lemon tasted."
I just raised my eyebrows at that, before sighing: „Ok, we will need to do another theory part now as that information is important, I hope that is okay for you?" After I got positive responses: „So first a short warning. Do not use any spells, potions or anything except meditation to read/understand infused intent as that has multiple dangers ranging from not learning anything to addiction." I sent a stern glance to all of them: „Felt like lemon tasted is Lunas way of identifying my mental energy and putting it into words, which is hard. Emphasize on her way, not yours and neither mine. Everyone perceives mental energy different, due to the simple reason, that to read any mental energy, it must interact with your mental energy or a similar medium. This process distorts the end result, which gives you an identifier which meshes both of those mental energies together. With enough control, you could naturally dispel the mesh or just straight up stop the mesh from happening, but for beginners like you four, it could be fatal to search for a sensation which felt like lemon tasted."
„In more clear words: Do not", I emphasized the not: „search for my mental energy while expecting it to feel like lemon tastes. Except Luna that is. This mesh is an unique identifier, which means that it is near impossible to find two mental energy meshes which are the same, though it could be close. One example would be twins for such a thing happening. And as good as this is to identify people, it is still possible to forge someones mental energy signature, which is the common term for this mesh", I stopped, ordering my thoughts: „Sorry for the disorganization right now, I didn't plan to hold this lecture until at least three sessions in. Back to the topic, you will probably never get into a situation, where someone forges a mental energy signature to fool you. There are ways to expose the forge though, which ranges from simply being able to tell, if it is badly forged, up to dissecting the mental energy to look for clues, which needs a tremendous amount of control and because of that will only become relevant a few years if not decades later for you."
„Last two facts about mental energy signatures for today, they change over time. This change is extremely slow, sometimes needing decades for a minor change, which most wouldn't even notice, but it is still possible for bigger changes to occur. Best example are kids and teenagers, as their nature is changing rapidly. The only exception is mental energy signature scrambling, which deliberately disguises your signature, though that is normally easy to detect and a future topic of these lessons on how to apply a scramble and detect it. Now a piece of general wisdom: Nothing is absolut. Any questions?"