Ravenclaw's smile, when it came, was the kind that could have melted the frost off castle windows. Surprise and something warmer underneath it.
Tom had walked her road and quietly built a branching path off to the side. It wasn't quite a divergence yet, not a full parting of ways in the study of mind and memory, but the seeds of one were there. Someday, when Tom had fully caught up to her and then passed her, that would be the moment he could truly be called the founder of something new.
"Any discomfort?" Ravenclaw asked. She was asking about him, but also about the spell.
"Honestly? None."
Tom shook his head. "It's a spell. Once it's cast and released, it runs on its own. The avatar's subsequent behavior isn't controlled by me at all. If it were, what would be the point of developing it in the first place?"
"That's correct."
The second Tom spoke this time. His voice came from behind the door he'd just emerged from.
"Don't think of me as Tom. I'm a condensed phantom formed from a spell and thought, a materialization of memory. When the magical energy runs out and the task is complete, I return everything I've gathered to him."
Ravenclaw studied the two of them. They were actually easy to tell apart once you looked. The second Tom's face was slightly blurred, his body carrying a quality of lightness, as though he might drift if the air moved. But the manner, the cadence, the presence: pure Tom, which was what made him recognizable at all.
This was what Tom had been burning through nearly ten thousand Academic Credits to develop over recent weeks. The Mind Avatar spell.
The concept was to separate active thought and memory from magical energy, peel them apart, and give the resulting construct a temporary physical existence. The avatar could fight, research, assist. When it dissolved, the final traces of its magical energy carried a seed of memory back to the original body, delivering everything it had experienced to be absorbed and integrated. The closest parallel was the Shadow Clone technique from a certain other world's ninja mythology.
Shadow clones, upon dispelling, returned their exhaustion along with their memories. The Mind Avatar didn't. The only cost was the mental load of digesting the memory seed, and that could be handled cleanly inside the learning space.
Combat was the least interesting application. Tom had spent this much effort developing the Mind Avatar precisely because he wanted to stop being pulled in every direction at once. Trivial tasks had a way of accumulating until they crowded out everything that actually mattered. The avatar handled the noise. Tom handled the magic.
Alchemy, potions work, experimental research: all of it could be delegated.
The Thoughts Unbound talent meant the avatar still operated at a respectable efficiency even without access to Transcendent Mode or Thought Leap. When a real problem arose, Tom could fold back in and crack it himself.
"Want to learn it?" Tom dismissed the avatar with a wave of his hand; it compressed into a streak of light and rejoined him. "Reading speed, exam efficiency, research output. Everything goes up considerably."
Ravenclaw gave him the particular sideways look she reserved for when he was being insufferable.
He actually wanted to be her teacher now. The nerve.
She would absolutely not be learning this from him.
"Of course I want to learn," she said, her voice tilting into something that was unmistakably a performance of helplessness. "Professor Riddle, I'll be in your capable hands from here on. I'm a slow student, so please be patient with me."
Tom inhaled sharply. The learning space obligingly dropped a few degrees.
She was terrifyingly good at that.
He had spent considerable time around Ravenclaw and still couldn't fully predict her. Some days she was remote and clinical, running experiments with a focused coldness that made Tom's own methods look sentimental. Other days she was warm and knowing, the kind of steady older sister that Ariana had apparently called "mum" on more than one occasion. And now, apparently, she could do this.
A slow student. Right. If Ravenclaw was slow, the current students at Hogwarts were single-celled organisms.
Having one Ravenclaw was, he reflected, starting to feel like having an indeterminate number of very different women who all happened to share a face.
"Come on then," Tom said, already steering her back toward the villa. "Lesson starts now."
The theoretical groundwork wasn't much of an obstacle for Ravenclaw, given that the foundational principles had come from her own research in the first place: partition the mental energy, separate a portion of stored idle consciousness, achieve temporary division without destabilizing the core. The number of avatars one could produce was a function of how cleanly the mental energy could be segmented and how resilient the original mind was when the memory seed returned.
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