"Can't be helped." Andros sighed. "Since he wrecked me, I've got to make it up somewhere, don't I?"
"..."
Grindelwald let out a cold laugh and turned his head stiffly. "And what about you? You already beat this bastard senseless. Why come after me too?"
Tom spread his hands, all innocence. "Because I wanted to share the joy with you. Besides, it wouldn't be fair to only pick on Andros, would it? Don't worry, everything's equal around here."
Grindelwald drew a long breath.
What kind of Dark Lord was he, surrounded by two lunatics who were each darker than he'd ever been?
But the strength Tom had just shown genuinely unsettled him. The boy could probably take both of them on at once, him and Dumbledore together, and even then the two of them combined might only stand a fighting chance, and that was being generous.
A monster was a monster, in the end. The moment the brief calm broke, Tom had shot straight past everyone else without looking back.
It took Tom and Andros a good while of coaxing before Grindelwald finally agreed to climb out of the crater. Sulking, he told them both what he'd learned that day.
"A prehistoric civilization, really..." Andros looked genuinely moved. "I dug one up myself once, made out quite well from it, though it sounds like nothing next to whatever's sitting in North America."
Tom's strengthening potion had come from Mopsus, from the tomb Andros had excavated years ago, though that site had actually been built over the remains of an earlier prehistoric ruin.
A great deal of the ancient magic used to commune with heaven and earth had likewise leaked out of ruins just like this one over the centuries.
In a real sense, such places had quietly shaped the entire framework of modern magic. None of it was as foreign or as self-contained a system as people assumed.
"Just keep an eye on it. No need to pour real effort in." Tom sipped his orange juice, waving off the idea of Grindelwald getting too invested. The board was already crowded enough as it was, with the world's ultimate task still looming over everything. Whatever civilization this was, nothing outranked the priority of staying alive.
"What do you think, should we pass this along to Dumbledore?" A new idea occurred to Tom.
What was he best at, after all?
Aside from mooching off other people, it was delegation. Anything that was his problem, his responsibility, anything he could possibly hand off to someone else, he did.
From Ravenclaw all the way down to Nicolas and Newt, every one of them had been roped into his schemes more than once.
Now that his own people were all busy, the only name left on his list was Dumbledore.
Grindelwald caught the intent behind it immediately and, after a moment's hesitation, agreed. Giving Dumbledore something to chase might not be the worst idea. Better that than have the man watching him too closely all the time. If Dumbledore found nothing, fine. If he actually turned up something he wasn't supposed to know, that would be a real headache.
Before long, Grindelwald signed off to go charm Dumbledore into it. Andros, feeling considerably lighter, headed off to the meditation chamber to keep improving himself.
Tom made his way to Ravenclaw's garden villa. He kept no fixed residence of his own within the study space; when he wanted to study or think, he came here, to Ravenclaw's house, and when he wanted to unwind, he went to find Ariana instead.
Tom had decided it was time to reorganize how he divided his mental power.
Now that his will had grown stronger, his command over each individual portion of that power had improved as well, and dividing it the old way would only waste potential. After several rounds of experimentation, Tom had split his mind and consciousness into twelve separate strands. Under normal circumstances, only one stayed active at any given time, kept ready as a defensive baseline in case of emergency.
His maximum single Apparition range was fifteen hundred kilometers. Each strand of mental power could manage three jumps. Adding it all together, if he pushed hard enough, he could just barely make a round trip from the South Pole to the North Pole.
The odds of pulling it off were good. But if anything unexpected happened along the way, it wasn't nearly as safe a margin as he'd like.
So Tom's mind began turning, as it always did, toward mischief.
He decided that starting tomorrow, he'd feed Fawkes something a little difficult to digest, just enough to throw off his condition on the day of the competition. If his opponent wasn't feeling well, that wasn't really Tom's fault, was it?
Creak.
The door swung open, and Ravenclaw walked in looking utterly exhausted.
Tom opened his eyes, still slightly disoriented from having just finished splitting his mental power, and for a moment everything doubled in front of him.
Two headlights became four, blinking and glaring.
Ravenclaw didn't so much as acknowledge Tom's presence in her own house. She simply threw herself onto the sofa and let out a long, heavy sigh.
"Rowena? Something wrong?"
Tom asked, puzzled, once his vision had settled back to normal.
"I think there's something seriously wrong with my memory magic." Ravenclaw's voice came out thin and distant, and what she said next actually caught Tom off guard.
Memory magic was Ravenclaw's own specialty, the field she'd built her entire reputation on. For her to doubt herself now, to question her own mastery of it, that was new.
Tom hurried over, shoved her legs aside to make room, and settled in close, ready to hear the rest.
Ravenclaw stared up at the ceiling, silent for a long moment before she finally spoke.
"That girl, Joan. She's something else entirely."