27. Progress

The week went by as I worked on fixing my predicament. For starters, the second day after the bite I felt better. My body was no longer in pain… kinda. I was still in pain, but by then it had diminished to around half of what I had felt the day prior. That day went something like this.

After waking up and realizing the pain had diminished drastically I let out a sigh of relief alongside a small smile. Looking around the room I noticed, not for the first time, that Sophia is a messy sleeper. She tends to toss and turn on her bed until she is wrapped in a cocoon made out of her blankets and pillows. I couldn’t understand how that could be comfortable taking into account how tightly packed she looked. 

As I went through my morning ablutions I continued to frown as I thought further on Sophia’s sleeping habits. The more I thought about it the more pissed off I felt. Chances were she had learnt to sleep like that as a self defense mechanism. By reducing her surface area as much as she could it would make her look smaller and therefore make it so she could be ignored with ease. 

With a deep breath to calm my emotions I continued thinking. Sophia’s situation alongside Harry’s was deplorable… well it still is taking into account they will have to go back on summer break. The thought made me feel uncomfortable but I still had the better part of the year to find a satisfactory solution. 

With my morning routine finished I went to the common room as it had become the norm. As per usual I was rather early in comparison to my yearmates, though I wasn’t the earliest by a long shot when the whole house was concerned. Fifth year and seventh year students are the most predominant early risers. Afterall, they had the pressure of their OWLs and NEWTs to contend with. 

“Morning Sophi.” I called out as I felt the presence of my roommate coming down the stairs. Now, a week and a bit into our school year this has turned into routine as well. She would amble barely awake to our little spot in the common room before cuddling up to me. 

“Mornin.” A small smile appeared on my lips as I appreciated the simple moment. Sophia cuddling up to me taking a deep breath before her breathing would level out into a soft cadence indicating she had fallen back asleep. I of course continued to deliver a mild amount of my relaxing pheromones. Again, this has become our norm. 

After appreciating the moment I couldn’t help but sigh. I knew that what I was doing was extremely manipulative. By now Sophia had grown dependent on my pheromones. They weren’t addictive per se but she had been conditioned through the past week by them. To put it simply, the girl had trouble relaxing without me around. 

I wondered if I should stop. Perhaps I should start reducing the dosage until I stop altogether, a sort of detox therapy if you will. Or I could up the dosage, add more insidious effects at a time. Wrap her around my fingers and warp her into whatever I want. 

Sighing cleared my mind. Those dark impulses have been appearing every so often ever since that little accident back when I was six. It wasn’t hard to put them aside, but the ideas they fed me were still thrilling. I could imagine it, a few years in the future, a mature Sophia with a collar around her neck, a leash in my hand as she looked up at me in pure devotion. Her supple body naked for my taking and pleasure. 

I shook my head and let out a shuddering breath as I concentrated on bringing my heart rate back to normal. For the time being I would let the status quo persist. Afterall, it's only been a week of school, no need to rock the boat just yet. 

A while later I found myself sitting at the ravenclaw's table eating a breakfast consisting of hard boiled eggs and toast. Not the most flavorful meal but I didn’t feel like eating anything fancy either. Sometimes simplicity is what is needed to give life that little bit of shine. Afterall, if you knew nothing but the lap of luxury you could never appreciate it. 

“Say, Silver, I heard a rumor.” Hearing my name I turned to face Patil. Although studious and a bit introverted the girl still loved gossip. It was an interesting contradiction in her persona. 

“What about?” I asked back while taking a bite out of a piece of toast with some butter on it. Carbs are important for an early morning meal, especially for kids like us who will be burning a lot of energy throughout the day. 

“Well I heard that the ghosts avoid you for some reason?” Ah, that. Well it was somewhat true while also being false at the same time. The ghosts didn’t avoid me per se. It was more like we simply didn’t interact with one another. To tell the truth I was glad for it. I have heard of how much trouble that pesky poltergeist Peeves tends to cause. 

“No idea why, though I don’t think they actually avoid me. It's more like we simply don’t interact with one another.” The rest of breakfast was filled with simple small talk and the day flowed by. Once classes were over I got back to work on solving my little lycanthropic problem. 

“Well, for the time being there is little I can do besides checking the library and running some simple experiments.” Not wanting to waste more time on the former I got working on the later. The experiment I wanted to run was in regards to the questions I asked myself the night prior. What is the trigger for a werewolf to transform? For now I couldn’t check the internal clock theory. The psychological theory could be easily checked by a form of self hypnosis though. With that in mind disappeared into the RoR.

Using one of the many secret passages I went to my little hidey-hole slash lab and got to work. I had thought of running the experiments using myself as the text subject but I quickly dismissed the idea for two simple reasons. One, turning would be troublesome and two, seeing as I am still in pain, meaning my body hasn’t finished adapting to the curse, the data collected wouldn’t be trustworthy. 

“Alright, so it isn’t a psychological trigger.” What I had done was simple. I used some vitality to mess with one of my living test subject’s sense of time so he would believe the full moon would be tonight after conjuring an illusion of a full moon, the result? Nothing.

“Okay, so it is either a biological clock or an external factor.” I was leaning more towards the latter. An internal clock could easily be messed with, not to mention that it could also get messed up by the kind of quick travel witches and wizards can pull off. Afterall, it is bright and sunny in Japan when it is night time in England.

“A form of magical wavelength produced by the moon probably.” It did make sense. I remember reading in a book that some rituals require moonlight to work. What if, instead of moon light, those rituals need the magical wavelength the moon produces. If that is the case then it makes sense the transformation triggers with a full moon as that would be when it produces the most of said wavelength.

“How to test it though.” I continued mumbling under my breath as ideas flew by in my head. There are a few glyph formations that should maybe work, probably… I wasn’t sure, I hadn’t had the time to fully test my glyph’s capabilities and my understanding of enchantments is still shallow.   

Sure, I know a lot of theoreticals on enchantment and could write a whole readable book using runes, but that didn’t mean however that I was an expert. For that matter the few enchantments I have done myself tend to be unstable. The only reason they don’t go blowing up in my face is because I use glyphs to forcefully stabilize them. 

Whatever, I would get better at enchanting with time. For now though I needed to get working on a method of analyzing moonlight and whatever magic wavelength it produced. If that worked then the next step would be to try and make a synthetic version of it. The purpose of this would be to expose one of my captives to it and see the results. 

If all goes well and I am right, then the step after confirmation would be to create a tool to filter out that specific wavelength from myself therefore preventing any unwanted transformations. That would buy me all the time in the world to develop a proper cure or even better, it would allow me to experiment and figure out how to turn this curse into a blessing. Waste not and all that. 

With a plan in mind I got to work. For starters I would try to detect the sun's magic wavelength as just like the moon it also held magic properties that were often used in rituals or at the very least I thought so. Again wizards with their lazy attitude never worried to figure out why stuff works, just that it does. 

It made sense to me though. It would explain why vampires burn when exposed to sunlight. It is said that the sun represents purity. The moon too but it is sort of different. I like to think of the sun’s version of purity as a scorched earth policy. Either you become pure or you burn. The moon on the other hand could be compared to the purity of a clean stream. A softer form of purification that would leave stuff intact. This of course was extrapolated from the rituals I read that used either. 

An easy to understand example of it would be something like this: You have a dirty rag. If you were to use the sun’s version of purity the dirt and the rag would burn to nothinges. Meanwhile the moon’s version would wash away the dirt leaving a clean rag. Now this might lead you to believe that the moon’s version is superior, that is not the case. What if instead of a dirty rag you had a literal pile of trash that you simply don’t want. In that case the moon’s version wouldn’t be able to purify it, simply put the filth would be too ingrained into the objects. Instead you would need the sun’s version to reduce the filth to nonthinges. 

With that tangent out of the way I continued working on inscribing both glyphs and runes on a piece of aspen wood I found in the RoLT. It wouldn’t have all that much power nor would it last long but this was nothing more than a proof of concept. If it worked then I would get to work on refining the structure of the enchantment as well as acquiring better materials. 

By the time I was done the sun was about to set. Even so, there was enough sunlight to run a test. As I let both my magic and vitality flow into the inscription I waited for it to work. Not long after I began receiving feedback. The thing didn’t have an interface but instead fed the information directly into my magic. 

“FUCK YES!” I shouted as I felt the results. I was fucking right! At least when sunlight is concerned. Sure, I was getting some strange readings but I simply marked that as standard deviation due to the fact I was taking the readings at dusk. Again the time of day and position of the sun had its effects on magic. Magic as a whole is a rather convoluted thing that works with a set of well defined rules that no one knows. So far I have managed to figure out a few. One of the most important ones is that magic has memory and understanding. 

To put it simply, the reason why runes work is because someone in the past took his or her time teaching Magic what each rune is meant to do or mean. So now magic remembers that and when someone writes an enchantment using runes magic follows that understanding. In that same vein, magic listens to beliefs and behaves like so. People believe that the sun and moon are symbols of purity and so when magic gets exposed to their light it takes purifying aspects. Dusk is seen as the coming of the night, of the dark and dawn is the reverse. All of this are things that magic has learnt from us and takes into account. 

None of that is important right now. What is important however is that with this all I need to do is get the wavelength for moonlit magic and I will be golden. Although again for the same as explained before moonlit magic from different states of the moon might have slightly different wavelengths but for now it was just a matter of study and experimentation. 

The rest of the week went by just like that. It just so happens that I was right. By the end of the week I had gathered enough data on moon light to correct the deviation of different moon phases. Now it was just a matter of reproducing the correct wavelength and exposing one of my little wolfy friends to it.