Chapter 216: Secrets In the Walls, DA Reps

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The gray room in the Architect's vault with the dull ambiance was now lit with shining MLE throwing their luminescent glow to brighten up every corner of the place. In the lit-up room, Quinn sat beside the pedestal with his hands on the pedestal.

After getting the plainly visible(fantastically hidden) clue from Stigweard Gragg's autobiography, Quinn had decided to act on the hint and arrived at the vault the first chance he got. Now, as he sat in the room with magic seeping into the pedestal through his hands, Quinn could feel the existence of something other than solid stone.

"There's nothing in there," he muttered in a low voice, but it reverberated in the room. He had been sitting in his current position for many minutes, but there was nothing in the pedestal stone.

He was using the same principle used by him in his aquatic sonar skill but with Earth magic to sense around the floor using earthen vibrations.

When it came to elemental magic, Quinn was a master at Water, Wind, Ice magic which he learned from his various escapades, but that didn't mean that he was clueless about the other elements — it was a dream of every boy to control elements like a god, and Quinn was no different in that regard — he had knowledge for and skill in other elements like Fire, Lightning, and Earth, albeit at a lower level than Water, Wind, and Ice.

He sighed heavily and retreated his hands from the pedestal. He propped his upper body with his arms acting as a support with his palms against the floor.

Earlier today, when he had entered the vault, Quinn was excited about finally making some progress and hopefully finding the answer to the pedestal-archway problem, and just maybe applying the solution today itself to move onwards, but from the looks of it, none of that was going to happen.

"Maybe I just need to hone my Earth magic.. . maybe there's something here, but my magic can't detect it," his Earth magic was indeed weaker than his other specialties.

Given that there was nothing for him to do, Quinn decided to just practice his Earth magic right here between some very natural, earthen rock. His magic once again started to seep out of his palms, this time into the floor. It was only a couple of seconds before Quinn snapped out of his thoughts and sat up straight. He looked towards the floor and once again placed his palms to spread his magic inside, and there was it; he hadn't imagined it.

"Oh my, there's really something in there," he muttered and closed his eyes. "Can't tell what it is," he said with his brows furrowed, "it's all so fuzzy."

Quinn could feel a couple of inches of stone layers that acted as the floor, but beneath that, there were plenty of hollow spots of various shapes and sizes dotting his range.

"Well, I can't break the floor now," he sighed. He didn't know what was inside, so it was too risky to split the floor as he had originally planned if the autobiography hadn't given him anything to see what was stopping the pedestal from sinking into the floor.

"Hmm.. . I guess I need to improve my skill to clear the fuzziness of what's inside.. . but, how far does this go?" Quinn crawled on his knees and plodded around the pedestal, and as he expected, the hollow spots were all around the pedestal.

"I should mark the area till these hollow spots extend," he said and reached into his pocket before summoning a red piece of chalk; it was made from the special material to be used in runes, but he didn't have anything else, so he had to make do with an overqualified stick of chalk.

Quinn started to crawl outwards, and every ten inches, he would stop with the chalk ready to mark a circle, but no matter how many ten inches he repeated, the fuzzy hollow spots didn't stop appearing. Soon, he was at the edge of the floor where it met with the walls.

"Don't tell me.. ."

He immediately stood up on his feet and put his hands on the wall, and it was as he expected. The hollow spots extended into the walls as well. To make sure, Quinn walked around the room, his hands gliding on every surface he could touch(he even climbed up to the roof), and the result was the same.

As he stood beside the pedestal with his eyes surveying every corner of the room.

"Except this thing," he patted the pedestal, "there are hollow spots inside every single thing.. . pretty sure that Architect didn't skimp on costs by using cheap material.. . there's something in there.. . the question is what?"

Quinn rubbed the teal ring on his hand, and his thoughts went to the way he had found it — there was a pattern to the Architect's method, and if the second clue was infuriating, Quinn had an inkling that the second clue in the autobiography was just one of the places that the Architect might have dropped that line (pure conjecture.)

"The hollow spots must have something to do with the pedestal.. . they key is Earth magic.. . I wonder what I would find.. . "Quinn exhaled before climbing the pedestal to sit on it. A book came out from his pockets, and his research on Earth magic began.. . if nothing, he was going to get increased Eath magic skills out of this.

- (Scene Break) -

Ivy Potter(The leader of DA), Hermione Granger(The Gryffindor representative), Daphne Greengrass(The Slytherin representative), Marcus Belby(The Ravenclaw representative), Susan Bones(The Hufflepuff representative) all sat in a modified AID office — a round table had been placed in the middle of the office around which all the members sat — while Luna Lovegood(the AID representative) sat behind Quinn's desk with her wand out poking around a rhombicuboctahedron made from various materials (woods, glass, steel, aluminum, rubber, etc.. .)

These people had gathered here to discuss matters about DA, and Quinn had been generous enough to lend him his office to hold the meeting while he was out. Of course, Luna was there to keep an eye on them.

"We have to work something out because if this keeps happening, we won't be able to fix another DA meet," said Ivy with the Marauder's Map open on her lap to keep an eye on Umbridge, Filch, or anyone who seems to lurk around outside the AID office.

It had been two weeks since DA was formed, and they had two meets, and things had been going smoothly in those two weeks, but now they were finding it almost impossible to fix a regular night of the week for DA meetings, as they had to accommodate three separate Quidditch teams' practice (there were no Slytherin Quidditch team members in DA), which were often rearranged depending on the weather conditions.

"It would be better if we don't try to keep a fixed night for the practices," said Marcus, after considering the Quidditch situation, "It would be better for us to keep the timings of our meetings unpredictable and flexible, seeing that it suits our needs better.. . and if anyone was watching us, it would be hard to make out a pattern."

"I concur," said Daphne shortly.

"That's fine and all, but we would still need to work off the Quidditch schedule because that's when the Quidditch players are free," Susan Bones said while looking, "and only if there are any last-minute changes — which seeing the recent weather are going to be plenty — that we are going to change our schedule."

"Then we will need a method of communication to communicate the time and date of the next meeting to all the members in case they needed to change it at short notice because it would look so suspicious if people from different Houses were seen crossing the Great Hall to talk to each other too often," said Hermione, adding her two knuts.

The five people collectively sighed. The Quidditch reinstation had hit them hard — from early morning to the last moment before the curfew started, the Quidditch pitch had been aggressively occupied as the three teams started their team training camps later than usual — Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw teams worked overtime to procure the little field time they could get after Snape would assign a big chunk to Slytherin even after their regular protests.

"Any idea on how to bring about this secretive exchange of information?" asked Ivy as the moderator to keep the conversation moving.

"I have an idea," said Hermoine, "I was thinking of using the Protean charm—"

Hermione stopped as Luna suddenly got up from her barstool, making a noise and all but ran into the place behind the red door as it shut closed behind her, startling them with her abruptness.

"Uhm, I know this might be out of context," said Susan curiously, "but what's behind that red door.. . "

Ivy and Hermione exchanged quick glances remembering the time they had thought of the question and the outcome of their curiousness. Ivy did know what was inside, even though she was looking in the dark with a Lumos lit at her wand tip.

"It's Quinn's workshop," said Marcus without looking up from the current standing schedules.

"Have you been in there?" asked Susan, more curiously.

"Hmm? Yes, a couple of times," answered Marcus.

" " " "You have(?/?!)" " " " asked all four girls in unison.

Marcus looked up, startled at the sudden barrage of questions at him. "Y-Yes, I have.. . like I said, it's a workshop — with everything you would find in a standard workshop.. . though he does have pretty strange stuff there.. ." there was a look in his eyes that showed that he couldn't forget things even if he wanted to forget.

The red door opened up again and came out Luna with a sheet of paper in her hand as she approached the table. She placed the paper smack dab in the middle of the table.

"As part of the spell-enchanting initiative launched in 1994, AID provides a mass order service where you, for a small fee, can place objects in bulk quantity to be charmed with spells of your choice," said Luna as if remembering something she had read from a manual. "And lucky for you, as it so happens, our extensive list of spells do include the Protean charm in them," she pointed at the list of spells, and there it was — Protean charm.

Luna then raised her sleeve to show her black wrist bracelet with a silver tag on it. She raised her wand and tapped it for the words — [Hello.] — to appear on them.

They all watched as the words disappeared and a — [Hey, what is it?] — appeared on the silver.

Luna tapped her wand once again — [Making a sale.]

The five people raised their brows at that.

[.. . Isn't the DA meet going on?] — came the reply.

Luna nodded even though the conversation wasn't face-to-face — [I'm selling the Protean charm 2 them.. .] [.. . this is a demonstration.]

[Ah.. . let me guess. They're thinking of.. .] — the disappeared and new words appeared — [.. . ways 2 communicate 4 meeting times.]

The five representatives blinked, but they weren't surprised.

Another message came back — [Well, if U can, close the deal, C U later.]

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Luna pulled her back, and the conversation was over. "We offer cheap rates and have express delivery times. We can craft the object to be charmed in accordance with the designs you submit, or you can provide us with the objects, and we can charm them in any Protean configuration you desire," she said, finally finishing her pitch, and waited for the response.

Daphne was the one to speak for the group. "Thank you for that demonstration, Luna. We will let you know our decision after some discussion," she said.

Luna nodded and then skipped back to Quinn's desk, back to whatever she was doing before going to pitch mode.

"So, as I was saying," started Hermione, "we can use Protean charm to enchant a non-descript object to communicate the date and times of the meetings.. . as for enchanting the object," she looked at Luna, casting magic at the multi-sided object, "I guess we can outsource to AID."

"What're we going to charm?" asked Susan about the non-descript object that Hermione talked about.

"We can discuss that out, and one of us can tell it to Quinn," said Marcus.

" "I will/can do it." " — came two offers.

Ivy and Daphne looked at the other. For a second, they looked at each other with confusion, then varying emotions, and then their eyes flashed a sharp glint at each other.

But then something caught Ivy's eye, and she looked down at Marauder's Map.

"Filch is coming this way," she said while getting, "we need to leave."

This was the deal for using the AID office for the meeting. They had to leave before anyone could see them together, giving Umbridge the leverage to shut down AID. It didn't matter if it was one minute after the meeting; if they saw someone lurking around, they would have to leave.

Everyone got up and followed Ivy out of the office as Luna waved them goodbye. Ivy led them through one of the secret passages mentioned in the map, and soon they were on an entirely different floor away from the AID office.

"We will discuss this later," said Daphne, "get your ideas ready for the next time we can meet."

They nodded and were about to disperse into their respective directions when Hermione spoke up,

"Marcus," she called, "can I talk to you for a moment.. . I want to talk about Ravenclaw Quidditch schedules." She also turned to Ivy and said, "You go ahead, I will meet you in the common room."

Ivy shrugged and walked away, as did Susan and Daphne, leaving behind Hermione and Marcus.

"What is it?" asked Marcus, "I already gave you the booking schedule for this week."

"I don't want to talk about Quidditch," said Hermione quickly, "I want to talk about Quinn."

Marcus became a bit suspicious. "What do you mean?" he asked.

Hermione took a deep breath and directly came to the point, completely cutting out the beat-around-the-bush phase. "Does Quinn like Greengrass?" she asked.

It took Marcus a few seconds to make sense of the words that entered his ears. "Why.. . do you ask that?" he asked in reply.

"I want to know," she said shortly.

"Do you.. . like him?" asked Marcus, thinking that's why she was asking.

"No! I like someone else," said Hermione trying to squash that line of conversation, "I'm asking for a friend of mine.. . she likes Quinn."

Marcus didn't completely buy that reason.. . it was cliche. "Okay.. . but where did you find hear that Quinn likes Daphne," he asked.

"Carmichael," she answered.

"Eddie said that?"

"Yes, does Quinn like Greengrass, or not?"

"I can't be sure because Quinn doesn't really talk about who he likes or not."

"So, Carmichael was lying?" said Hermione hopefully.

"I wouldn't say Eddie was lying; as I said, Quinn hasn't ever brought up who he likes, so all we can do is guess who he likes," said Marcus chuckling and sighing at the same time. "We have actually talked about this a lot and observed Quinn when he's around girls, and in doing so, there have only been a few who he's free around, and one of them is Daphne — she's the one he's most comfortable around.. . so, Eddie must've pushed that as Quinn liking Daphne, and we never know, it might be true.. . but Quinn is a private bloke, so only he knows."

"So, Quinn has never said that he likes Daphne?" asked Hermione.

Marcus shook his head.

'That was good. This was really good,' thought Hermione.

If it was someone else, then the words of friends might have counted as something, but this was Quinn West they were talking about; one could never be sure about the things said about him if it didn't come from his own mouth (even then things could still be a bit iffy.)

If Quinn didn't say that he liked Daphne Greengrass. Then there was still hope for her friend.

But at the same time, things weren't all well. If Tracey Davis asking Eddie Carmichael about who Quinn liked wasn't a sign, then today, Daphne and Ivy shooting daggers at each other was the proof.

'Daphne Greengrass also likes Quinn,' thought Hemione, 'and time of the essence.'

"Thank you, Marcus," she smiled, "that helped a lot; also, let's keep this between us. My friend doesn't want anyone to know that she likes Quinn just yet.. . you know what is it like, us girls can be mean.. . okay, see you later."

Then she all but bolted, leaving Marcus behind, confused.

"Girls are mean? They are confusing as well."

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Quinn West - MC - I'm BZY, C U 2morow.

Luna Lovegood - Employee - I pitched, I'm done; back to work.

Ivy Potter - DA Leader - Likes Quinn.

Daphne Greengrass - Slytherin representative - Likes Quinn.

Susan Bones - Hufflepuff representative - Doesn't like Quinn.

Marcus Belby - Ravenclaw representative - Likes Quinn, but not that way.

Hermoine Granger - Gryffindor representative - Doing best friend duties.

FictionOnlyReader - Author - I'm L8, C U 2morow.. . maybe, tomorrow mid-terms start yet again. Man, three trimester an year has too many examinations.

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