The "Hogwarts Maker Workshop," founded by Alan himself, had finally earned a permanent corner in the Gryffindor common room after the dazzling debut of the Logic Light Pen.
Firelight from the hearth flickered warmly across the walls, gilding the room in gold and amber. The air carried the fragrance of fresh parchment, the sharp tang of potion-ink, and something subtler, an undercurrent of arcane resonance born from what Alan called "magical programming."
That little corner had become an open secret within Gryffindor House, a place where magic and logic intertwined.
Alongside the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan, the group's founding members, three of Gryffindor's Quidditch Chasers, Angelina Johnson, Katie Bell, and Alicia Spinnet, had joined the effort with infectious energy. Now they were clustered around a shifting, light-projected tactical table, arguing heatedly over a new "Spiral Eagle-Head Formation." Tiny light-points darted across the board, reenacting the dizzying flow of a Quidditch match.
Even Hermione Granger had taken up residence at a separate desk in the corner. Instead of textbooks, she pored over pages dense with runic notation and logical glyphs. Alan's dream of systematizing magic had struck her at the core of her scholarly soul. She had become the workshop's theoretical consultant, grounding their wildest inventions in solid magical law.
Their current challenge: to stabilize and expand the prototype known as the Light-Matrix, a programmable lattice of interactive magical projections.
"It's stuck again!" Fred groaned, ruffling his hair and slapping two instruction cards onto the table.
The lattice, a grid composed of hundreds of tiny luminous modules, flickered violently, then froze solid.
One card read: "All modules move three units left."
The other: "All modules move three units right."
George sighed, prodding the inert grid with his wand. "That's the seventh meltdown today. Give it two contradictory orders and it just, panics. The whole system collapses."
Lee Jordan folded his arms. "If we can't fix that, every complex setup will be useless. We'll be stuck with 'one-step-at-a-time' sequences forever. That's dull."
Hermione thumbed through Advanced Runic Studies and Principles of Spell Construction, but no text in wizarding scholarship discussed logical contradictions in magical systems. Magic, as it was traditionally taught, overcame weakness with greater strength, not with elegant resolution of paradox.
For the first time, the workshop fell silent in frustration.
Alan rose. Quietly, he crossed to the massive slate they used as a whiteboard and took up a piece of enchanted chalk.
The dry, steady scrape of chalk on stone filled the stillness.
"We've been thinking about this the wrong way," he said, his calm voice carrying across the room.
"Our instinct is to avoid contradiction. But what if we teach the system to decide?"
He drew two arrows on the board, one left, one right, and between them, a diamond-shaped decision node.
"What we need," he continued, "is a mechanism I call a voting algorithm."
"Voting?" Fred raised an eyebrow.
"Exactly." Alan nodded, chalk flying again, sketching symbols that combined logic notation with runic sigils. "Each command can carry a hidden attribute, an invisible priority weight. Some instructions may be more critical by design, or more efficient in magical cost. When the matrix receives conflicting orders, it doesn't freeze, it conducts an internal vote, automatically choosing the instruction with the higher priority."
"In other words," he said with a faint smile, "the one that wins the election gets executed."
The concept was unprecedented in magical design, power determined not by strength of magic, but by structured logic. Cold, impartial, and rule-bound.
The idea struck the group like a spark in dry tinder.
Hermione's eyes lit instantly. "Of course! It's a built-in arbitration protocol! You're giving the enchantment itself the capacity to think!"
"Brilliant!" the twins chorused, already imagining the pranks this could revolutionize.
Energy returned to the workshop in a flood of new ideas. Where there had been silence, there was now creation.
The Forbidden Proposal
Just as they were wrapping up, a gleam of reckless inspiration flashed across Fred's face.
"Hey, Alan!" he said suddenly. "If we've got a voting system this advanced, we should make a special card, a legendary one! The ultimate boss card!"
He leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. "A card that represents… Voldemort!"
The name fell like a stone into still water. The warmth in the room vanished. Even the girls stiffened; Hermione's face paled.
"This card should have the most terrifying power of all," Fred pressed on, undeterred by the tension. "Play it, and bam! Every light module turns deathly green, like the Killing Curse, wiping the entire field clean!"
Alan did not rebuke him. Unexpectedly, he nodded.
"That's… an interesting idea," he said evenly.
The others stared, startled. Alan's calm tone carried the weight of a designer evaluating the world he was building.
"But," he continued, "such a card must never be easy to activate."
He raised three fingers.
"It should start powerless. Only when three other base cards are in play and their logic aligns in a special voting cycle should it awaken."
He turned to the group, explaining with quiet precision:
"The three cards must represent, 'Pure-blood Ambition,' 'Might and Power,' and… 'Fear of Death.'"
The phrase cut through the air like a lightning bolt. Understanding dawned across every face.
This was no mere game mechanic.
Alan had just encoded, within the rules of their creation, a living allegory, a reflection of how the Dark Lord's power was truly born.
The design was beautiful in its depth and chilling in its truth.
To the players, it would be an elegant system of layered conditions and strategic complexity.
But to those who looked closer, it was a mirror, a game that taught, through logic itself, the ugliest foundation of Voldemort's rise: ambition, power, and fear.
And in that moment, the Hogwarts Maker Workshop ceased to be a student hobby.
It became a forge for philosophy,
a place where magic learned to reason.
~~----------------------
Patreon Advance Chapters:
[email protected] / Dreamer20