After finishing his preliminary study of Fluffy's defensive system, Alan finally withdrew his mind from those ancient, intricate wards and turned his attention back to the entrepreneurial project he and his friends had started, a venture full of unforeseen possibilities.
The Gryffindor common room glowed warm and orange; the fire was high. Percy Weasley sat stiffly, fingers worrying the prefect badge at his chest and glancing repeatedly toward the boys' staircase. The Weasley twins and Lee Jordan were huddled on a sofa, whispering conspiratorially, their faces already alight with expectation.
When Alan's silhouette appeared in the stairwell, conversation cut off like a snapped string. Four pairs of eyes swivelled toward him as if trained spotlights. He smiled slightly and crossed the room to stand before them.
Without fanfare, he reached into the inner pocket of his robes and produced the first "official" product from their Hogwarts Maker Workshop.
"I call it the Logic Light Pen," he announced.
He opened his palm to reveal an object resting there. The shaft was slightly thicker than any ordinary quill, fashioned from a translucent crystal through which a faint luminescence drifted. Where a feather would normally sit, a simple, ordered metal tail-piece had been fitted, bold and futuristic in its simplicity.
Percy adjusted his glasses, eyes narrowing with appraisal; the twins craned forward as if they might snatch it from Alan's hand.
Alan's finger pressed a rune engraved mid-shaft. A whisper of vibration, barely audible, escaped the pen. A soft green beam emitted from the crystal tip, not threatening, just a calm, steady light illuminating the air before them.
With a small movement of his wrist, Alan began to "paint" with that beam. What happened next made everyone hold their breath.
The green light did not vanish. Instead it left behind tangible, three-dimensional trails, solid, suspended streaks of luminous matter. As Alan drew graceful arcs through the air, the light tracks extended, intersected, and layered. The light in his hand became a precise, obedient building material.
A tower sprang into being.
An arch formed from nothing.
Intricate window tracery appeared at a stroke.
In under a minute, Alan had sketched a complex, delicate, softly glowing three-dimensional model of Hogwarts itself, hovering in midair. Every detail was crisp; the light-constructed walls glimmered like captured starlight.
"This… this is…" Percy's mouth formed an "O." He stared at the floating castle, feeling the foundations of his knowledge about charms and transfiguration tremble. "…an architect's dream!" His voice shook with genuine astonishment.
"It does more than that," Alan said, bringing them back to attention. "The light-trails themselves carry a faint, interactable magical signature. In other words, treat it as a three-dimensional, visualized magic-circle drafting platform." Other spells can interact with, attach to, or be amplified by the tracks.
As Alan demonstrated this epochal invention to his friends, an owl called outside with a crisp, penetrating hoot. A stately German snowy owl swept in and landed on the windowsill; amber eyes focused on Alan with uncanny attentiveness. It brought a letter from Helmut Volk.
Alan felt the strict, orderly magic still clinging to the parchment, a craftsman's touch. Inside the envelope was the first tranche of the Ancient Archive translated by Volk himself. Its value was incalculable. Alan tucked the letter away with proper reverence, knowing he had another sleepless night ahead.
He did not expect, however, that the Logic Light Pen's first practical test would come so soon, and in such a chaotic, humiliating way.
Late that night, the twins' dormitory was in uproar.
"Oh no! Merlin's beard!"
"Quick! Use Scourgify! Fred!"
"It's spreading! George, it's eaten my sock!"
Amidst panicked exclamations and thudding feet, a foul-smelling green slime poured like a living thing from an overturned bottle, the twins' new prank product, the "Super Stick 'n' Stay." The concoction had gone horribly wrong.
The slime slid across half the dormitory floor, expanding visibly; it corroded wood and clothing as it engulfed them. Ordinary Scourgify charms fizzled and were absorbed, utterly ineffective.
Filch's heavy, resentful steps sounded down the corridor, accompanied by Mrs. Norris's thin mewling. The twins went pale.
"We're doomed," Fred whispered, white as a sheet. "Filch will have us in detention until we graduate!"
At that moment the dormitory door slammed open. Alan was there.
He said nothing. His eyes swept the mess; his mind mapped the problem in an instant.
"Back!" he commanded, then produced the Logic Light Pen.
The green beam flared. Alan's hand moved with inhuman speed and precision. He traced a sequence of rapid straight lines and curves, and in the air outlined a compact, classical-looking alchemical sigil, carefully designed to disrupt organic adhesive matrices. The three-dimensionality of the glyph made it structurally stable in a way a flat design could never be.
"Now!" Alan called. "Cast Scourgify at this symbol, together!"
Without pausing to think, trusting Alan entirely, the twins raised their wands and chanted.
"Scourgify!"
"Scourgify!"
The two ordinary cleaning charms hit the luminous alchemical lattice Alan had drawn. The structure acted as an amplifier, absorbing, reorganizing, and exponentially magnifying their energies. The glyph brightened like a suddenly powered engine and sent out a visible shockwave.
The sticky slime, which had swallowed charms like a living sponge, was struck by that wave and disintegrated as if hit with acid. It hissed and vaporized in an instant with an ear-splitting sizzle, gone without residue. A faint ozone tang replaced the nauseating odor.
Bang! Filch burst in, Mrs. Norris at his heels, expectation writ large across his face for a caught miscreant. Yet his triumphant grin froze. The dormitory was immaculate; the three boys were standing in plain sight; the floor reflected Filch's shocked face.
He sniffed suspiciously, scoured every corner with oily eyes, found nothing, and left muttering and defeated. His steps receded down the corridor.
Silence fell like a blanket.
Fred and George turned slowly. They glanced at the spotless floor, then at the now-quiet crystal pen in Alan's hand, and finally at Alan himself. Their usual mischief was gone from their faces, replaced by a blend of shock, confusion, and, most deeply, profound reverence.
That flawless crisis management was a revelation. For the first time the Weasley twins truly realized what kind of disruptive power their friend had created, something capable of overturning the common-sense rules of the magical world.
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