Loki looked at the students in front of him with a confused gaze as he remained hidden under illusions.
Given that the all-great Madam Umbridge had stopped allowing students to practice magic, Loki's hope of studying magic undetected while other students were busy in the DADA class, where the most variety of spells were cast, went up in a poof of smoke.
He didn't want to let her deviate from her original plans since he didn't want to alert either Fudge or god forsake Dumbledore himself who had clearly carefully planned out Umbridge's fate.
So now Loki had to make sure he kept his gaze hidden from the other more experienced and stronger professors as he studied the spells of all the students cast in their classes.
Specifically in the Transfiguration class, the class where people used their spells the longest, where Loki had to make sure that his experiments went completely unnoticed by Professor McGonagall, who could easily detect someone using their spirituality in a matter of seconds.
Loki's illusion skills only helped him to the extent of allowing him to hide his gaze and movements.
It did nothing to help him hide his spiritual fluctuations to use his own spells or abilities to experiment with the magic that other people were casting.
So hiding them from Professor McGonagall's gaze was something he could do willy-nilly, especially without the help of the Grey Fog.
As such, with his little control over the thin layer of grey fog floating around him, Loki worked hard to keep his experiments hidden.
But his results looked very unpromising as he had started to study all these spells.
'Not even other people's spells have any spirit threads attached to them…'
'How then are they even recorded?'
Loki frowned, not knowing if what he was doing was wrong in some way or if there was some other method he was missing out on that was not allowing him to access the spirit threads.
'Did they use some concealment ability to hide them from normal view?'
'....maybe they wanted to keep it hidden from the Mystery Pryer pathway people and made it harder to detect it because of that?'
'Hmmm…'
Loki went back to paying attention to the class studying as McGonagall taught them exactly how they could make elemental transfigurations.
Not something as simple as turning water into ice or turning it into steam.
No, McGonagall taught them all about how one could achieve transfiguration in a way that would give a solid object the properties of whatever element they chose.
For example, what if you gave a solid object the properties of fire? Such that it started waving and flickering, licking the air like flicks of fire, all while making sure that it still retained its solid properties so that it could be picked up and held?
What was this useful for?
Well, normally not very much other than the fact that objects transfigured to hold elemental properties couldn't be 'uncharmed' to stop having them, making them semi-permanent unless they were untransfigured.
But there was an important application, which was what the advanced classes taught next year to those who passed the OWLs this year.
The application was simple, transfiguring your body to become intangible like air or fire would allow you to completely dodge the unforgivables without getting hit!
Of course, not many could actually do this, but this was why it was done this year since the OWLs were this year and students' grades would decide if they could take this class again or not.
This was made painfully obvious when Loki spotted students around him struggling to even transfigure a small cube of iron, that Professor McGonagall had given them each individually, by giving it properties of any element they chose.
Loki had long since transfigured his cube to flicker around like a ball of fire and was currently playing with Hermione who had transfigured her cube by giving it the properties of water.
McGonagall passed by and gave them both thirty points for their display.
Hermione showed a smile automatically when she was awarded points but in reality she too was wondering about something different just like Loki.
'....how do I digest my potion as an astrologer sooner?'
'Digesting it by simply looking at the stars each night is too slow!'
'What do astrologers even do?'
Suddenly Hermione felt snuffed out that she'd skipped out on her Divination classes in the third year.
"You seem distracted?" Loki asked as he lightly kicked Hermione's leg under the table.
Hermione's eyes looked around in panic as she assumed she'd zoned out and that Professor McGonagal had asked her question and was waiting for a question before relaxing and looking at Loki with a frown.
"What? I just asked you why you were distracted."
"sigh It's nothing, I was just wondering about what'll happen to our teams this year."
Loki's eyes widened and he too exhaled as he nodded.
"Maybe we'll be given our own teams to look after like Cedric and his team did for us last year?"
Hermione shook her head.
"But they too had three members right?"
"Yeah, but we're divination specialists. So perhaps the school will split us up into two teams that don't have any Beyonders capable of divination?"
Hermione frowned and after a bit of thought nodded.
"That seems realistic."
"Of course it is! I can't be wrong after all!"
Hermione rolled her eyes good-naturedly before asking Loki a question that was rather strange.
"Loki…do you think there's a way I could travel to the moon? Like could a person apparate there?"
Hermione was looking at the other students' attempts at transfiguring their cubes and she missed the look of absolute horror that appeared on Loki's face.
'Is she corrupted!?'
Loki instantly checked Hermione for signs of any corruption, making sure that not even a single oddity was visible in any of her bodies.
Just as the silence was getting awkward, Hermione turned to Loki to see why he was taking so long to answer such a simple question.
But Loki recovered and simply smiled as he continued the conversation calmly, as if he hadn't been spooked out of his mind a few seconds ago, "I haven't really tried. But why the sudden interest? And why'd ya ask me?"
Hermione shook her head.
"Just asking. I asked since I remember seeing you teleporting away after…Daph…well you know what I mean."
Loki thought for a few seconds and then realised what she was talking about and nodded as he remembered teleporting away for a few seconds to try out the disk of wishes to revive Daphne.
"I do know how to apparate…but not even I have thought about teleporting directly to the moon with its help. It is possible to teleport to any location on Earth as long as you know the place well enough to be able to imagine it well in your mind."
"So you can go to the moon too?" Hermione asked again with a little bit of excitement.
Loki immediately activated his spirit vision to look into her Body of Heart and Mind.
'...she wants to teleport around space to act as an astrologer? How does acting as an astronomer relate to astrology girl?'
'But I guess she's getting desperate to grow stronger.'
'Traveling the cosmos at her level is a no-go though.'
'But how can she actually act as an astrologer?'
'...Hmm…she could act more like Luna…looking at the moon and stars for guidance and sharing such guidance with her friends…though I think that might be a bit too much for her to pretend to do.'
'I mean…she's the only person in the pathway currently.'
'So changing the pathway to match her own personality would not change much, especially since she hasn't taken in any Beyonder characteristics just yet so the only remnant will she needs to fight is that of the Original Creator which isn't very strong right now.'
'But to do such a thing she'd need authority over the entirety of the Door pathway through its uniqueness or high level Beyonder characteristic.'
'...waste of time…such a thing isn't very likely or possible to achieve.'
'But I should warn her against attempting to travel into the cosmos without becoming an Angel at the very least.'
***
A/N : Hello, first chapter after coming back. Thank you for patiently waiting for me to recover!
Kinda embarrassing to read this chapter now...it feels so bad. From the new chapters (after ~20 more) quality and length should both slowly increase.
Upload schedule will be one chapter for a few days before switching back to two and maybe even three if I'm free.
Also, feel free to give me any critiques or writing advice you feel might help me improve the quality of my writing and your experience imagining my story. Thank you once again for being patient with me and staying here to read what ever I'm writing!