Hermione had guessed correctly. The woman speaking with Tom was none other than Griselda Marchbanks, a living legend of British magical education. The stooped old witch had just celebrated her hundred and ninetieth birthday the year before, an occasion significant enough to make the papers in its own right.
That was largely because so many towering figures of the British magical world had turned out for the celebration, Dumbledore included.
Her purpose in coming today was to invite Tom to serve as the examiner for Ancient Runes across both major examinations, potentially even as head examiner overall.
Once Communication Runes had come to light, Tom's standing within the field of runic study had rocketed into a tier entirely his own, and not a soul in the field could argue otherwise.
The logic was simple enough. Everyone else was still digging through existing runes, uncovering whatever secrets remained buried in them. Tom was creating entirely new runes for the rest of them to study. The two pursuits simply didn't belong on the same plane.
Unless some other prodigy capable of inventing runes from scratch suddenly appeared out of nowhere, everyone else in the field had no choice but to look up at him from below.
With a talent of that caliber living within Britain's own borders, Marchbanks needed Tom's name attached to the examinations to preserve their authority and relevance. If even the man who'd invented the runic system in question said this material mattered, who could possibly argue it wasn't worth learning?
So even with Tom's age and standing making for an awkward fit, Marchbanks pressed the issue regardless.
In the end, Tom, half worried the old woman might actually run out of breath mid-sentence and collapse on the spot, gave in and agreed.
Serving as examiner wasn't without its perks, honestly. It would raise his standing across both the educational and academic spheres, and by extension boost the influence of every paper he'd already published.
These days, the royalties alone from his published papers brought in more than two thousand credit points a month. A shame none of it converted into Achievement Points, or he'd have been rolling in wealth by now.
Her goal accomplished, the old woman departed in high spirits, Dumbledore trailing after her along with a cluster of other elderly officials he clearly had to keep carefully entertained. Watching him go, Tom thought Dumbledore's posture looked faintly servile, almost eunuch-like.
"Professor McGonagall."
Tom called out to her before she could follow the group off, which worked out well since he'd actually been looking for her in the first place, just got waylaid by the crowd. "Professor, I have a suggestion. The other schools will be arriving soon, won't they? You and the other professors should put together a pre-tournament training program for our selected students."
Professor McGonagall's eyes lit up. "That's actually a fine idea, Mr. Riddle. I'll give it proper thought."
"No trouble at all, it's for the good of the school. Although, you can leave Hermione's training to me. I trust that won't worry you?"
McGonagall let out a startled laugh. Tom's achievements had long since eclipsed those of the Heads of House by now, and as for raw ability, the incident where he'd single-handedly held back Grindelwald's fiendfyre spoke for itself. What could she possibly have to worry about?
If anything, she'd have been far more anxious if he'd offered to personally train every single student. She knew exactly the kind of trouble this boy's playful streak could cause if left unsupervised.
Watching McGonagall vanish down the spiral staircase, Tom finally turned back to Hermione and teased her. "I'll help you catch up this weekend. No complaining, understood?"
The girl wrinkled her nose, adorably stubborn about it. "I wouldn't complain even if it were twice as hard."
Tom, for the record, wasn't nearly as warmhearted or team-spirited as his offer to McGonagall might have suggested. He possessed neither quality in any real measure.
Truthfully, it came down to pettiness. The other schools clearly didn't want him competing, so if Hogwarts's overall strength climbed a little, their odds of taking the championship climbed with it. And if a clean victory still wasn't in the cards by the end, well, he had other, less honorable tricks up his sleeve to fall back on.
He was quite good at that particular skill set. Just ask the Thunderbird he'd once fattened up on purpose, or Fawkes, who these days waddled around too stuffed to properly fly.
Hermione asked him about what had just happened, and Tom summarized Marchbanks's proposal briefly. The young witch turned out even more excited about it than he was, dragging him off to the Room of Requirement for a runes tutoring session on the spot.
Tom genuinely wanted to cultivate a handful of top-tier talent in the field. When he'd first created Communication Runes, he'd only been thinking about his own use for them, never accounting for the actual state of the wider magical world's understanding, and the result was that most people couldn't even clear the entry threshold to begin studying it.
He was counting on a steady stream of future collaborators to help him develop new "apps" down the line. Doing it all himself would work him half to death otherwise.
He had, in fact, considered simply force-feeding qualified talent into existence through memory magic, the way he had with the little Lucys. But the two cases weren't remotely comparable. Creating a little Lucy was painting on a blank canvas. Continuously implanting memories and dreams into an already-formed mind was more like restoring and revising an already complex painting, an entirely different order of difficulty.
And a dangerous one besides, workable only on minds as sharp and resilient as his own or Ravenclaw's, minds built to absorb and process at an abnormal rate.
Otherwise, he'd have already used memory magic to fast-track every girl in his life up through the ranks of magic, rather than bothering with this laborious, honest method of teaching.
The tournament drew steadily closer, and the professors grew tenser along with it. What mattered to them wasn't so much the final ranking as how the wider world would judge Hogwarts as a whole. This was as much a chance to prove themselves as it was to be scrutinized.
So every class, without exception, began drifting off topic. Professors would be mid-lecture and suddenly veer off into the strangest tangents entirely unrelated to the material.