The day passed in a haze. Even with her prodigious multitasking, Taylor missed on conversations around her, barely paying attention to Luna, too distracted working on her re-educational project: if she was going to do this, she was going to do it the right way. She wasn’t going to set all her bugs on the bullies in a fit of rage, that would probably get her expelled or arrested or something; she hadn’t read about wizards’ laws yet.
So, while Taylor followed Professor Sprout’s explanation and mixed soil with thestral dung, Whomping Willow dry leaves and flobberworm mucus, she also experimented with webbing and weaving inside The Hive. She found out that the rainbow-silk spiders weren’t limited to the colours described in Hagrid’s book, nor that she needed to be mean or give a food overdose to the critters to have them weave coloured silk. A bit of prodding and pulling and dragging sideways with her power had her figuring out the mechanism behind how that worked, which in turn, let Taylor weave silk like nylon: transparent and almost invisible to the naked eye.
Her power felt more cooperative than ever for some reason. It was like an excited puppy watching and barking and wagging its tail. Why she made that comparison, Taylor had no idea. She was neither a dog or cat person, if anything, she was an owl person.
Another part of her workforce was busy with other preparations: the pixies dashed to and fro out of sight, gathering mud, dung and other annoyances, then stashing it webbed to the undersides of the decoration, ceiling corners above eye level, behind tapestries where her bugs had scouted the out of the way corridors and places where bullies congregated.
After suffering a double dose of Slytherin through Herbology, Taylor marched to the Great Hall for lunch, still working on her new project. That was pretty much her state of being for the next few days, at least during the day. At night, she tried to catch up on the days’ events with Luna.
Detention with Flitwick on Monday had him teaching her (and Luna, who had decided she had a detention to attend), the Expelliarmus charm. It was a bit of a let down, because it was a charm Taylor already knew (even if she couldn’t use it yet) from spying on the third year charm classes.
Private lessons with Flitwick, Taylor learned, were a lot more intense and productive than general classes. She left her two hours of detention able to use the charm, and with instructions on how to practice, what to practice and how to improve further.
Detention with Snape on Tuesday wasn’t that bad, all told. Snape had her clean spilled potions, scrape stuff from cauldrons, organize the ingredient cabinet and all those things that would have been annoying and gross if she didn’t find it interesting instead. The other side of that was that Callun was there as well, even if his detention was Snape instructing him on potion creation.
Taylor guessed that Snape was trying to say something here. It didn’t matter.
Days passed in a blur of work, homework, practice, dodging Slytherins and stealing quiet moments to talk with Luna whenever possible. Preparations progressed apace too. It took Taylor the better part of the week to work everything to her standards: She had Dee procure parchment and a quill, and through him, she kept a log of everything she heard and saw happening over the week.
By then, Taylor's anger had cooled down somewhat. She still felt like swarming the whole of Slytherin with her bugs, but only rarely.
It was the next weekend when Taylor decided it was time to start the plan. She was in the library (another place she had to come back again soon, soo many books!) with Luna working on another History homework. A desk across from her sat Harriet and Mira. Scattered around the many tables were other students: Nneka and Ginny (who looked even more tired than before), an older Slytherin who thankfully was doing his best to ignore everyone else, and a few excited Hufflepuffs, gossiping about quiddish of all things.
The first subjects to her re-education program had just volunteered themselves. On a corridor on the third floor in the opposite direction from the library, a pair of older Slytherins accosted a second year Hufflepuff, calling him names and barring his path. The hufflepuff tried to push past them, but one of the bullies stuck his foot out tripping the smaller boy.
Back in the library, Taylor noted yet another detail about the goblin rebellion, then turned and whispered to Luna. “Why do you think the goblins rebelled this many times?”
In the corridor, both Slytherins laughed, and congratulated themselves, walking away and leaving the kid sniffling on the ground.
“Daddy tells me it’s all a huge conspiracy,” Luna reported, whispering closer.
“Really?” Taylor asked eagerly.
In the corridor, her bugs dragged the invisible silk on the duo’s path: They were too distracted to notice the silk closer to the ground. The first one tripped and windmilled trying to regain balance, then the second one tripped as well and both sprawled onto the ground face first. In a rare instance of fate, they both fell not unlike the Hufflepuff boy they just bullied.
The sniffling kid, who had just sat up, was gawking at the two.
The bullies got up looking angry, and cursing, but there was no one nearby that could have tripped them, and the hufflepuff had no wand in hand. They seemed ready to attack the younger boy, but he was smart enough to skedaddle.
“The Ministry of Magic is trying to cover their secret experiments throughout the years,” Luna confided. “Daddy found evidence, more than once, that some of those wars never happened…”
Taylor lapped all of Luna’s theories, while she had her bugs pull the silk away and leave no evidence of her meddling. She’d have to work on the response-protocol and threat-assessment for the next subjects. It wouldn’t be good if her intervention made things worse for the victim, after all.
Those two were the only subjects that day. She wanted to start slow and avoid too much attention.
Taylor kept a few fliers on the Hufflepuff kid and allowed herself a small smile when he barged into the common room of his house. There were a few students playing that snapping card game, others reading, a few just gossiping.
“You guys won’t believe it!” he said to the room at large.
“What is it, Stephen?” A girl close to his age turned around and asked.
“I got ambushed by two Slytherins,” he started. “One of them tripped me when I tried to walk past.”
“Are you well? What did they do to you?” Another boy asked.
“No, forget that,” Stephen waved the question away. “They hadn’t walked more than a couple of steps when they had their comeuppance.”
By now, the whole common room was listening.
“One tripped on empty air and fell face first,” Stephen was grinning now, a few others laughed. “But that wasn’t it, the other tripped on air as well and fell on top of the first!”
The room exploded in laughter.
Taylor smiled as well. It was a job well done.
In the following days, she ramped up her efforts: someone badmouthing and name calling would suddenly swallow a fly and had to cough the bug out. Throw something, a pixie hidden near the ceiling would drop dung on the thrower’s head. Her favorite, Slytherins calling people mudblood found their things all doused in mud. She also tried, when possible, to prevent students from cursing others by pulling on wands with threads of silk. Oftentimes, she managed to yank the wand away, on even better times, she managed to make the bullies curse themselves. She couldn’t do that often because it took time and preparation and luck.
She also had to consider discovery. It was one thing to trip someone, another to yank a wand away.
For those that Taylor had no feasible way of targeting in an ironic fitting manner, the itchgnats were her preferred method. As such, she took the few remaining around the castle and started breeding more of them.
Just in case.
Time marched ever onward. October arrived and brought with it a damp chill over the grounds and castle. Taylor woke up with her nose stuffed up and feeling worse than she had in years.
“Let’s go to the hospital wing,” Luna said, helping Taylor out of the bed and into morning clothing.
It had become routine at this point. If Taylor didn’t sneak into Luna’s bunk, Luna sneaked into hers.
Taylor let Luna guide her toward the hospital wing which was crowded with an influx of sick students. The matron had people drink a potion that left them with their ears smoking. It sounded fun until Taylor drank it. Then she had to spend the whole day recovering from the cold with her ears burning because of the potion and embarrassment.
It wasn’t worse than Ginny, however. With her ears smoking and her red hair, it looked like her head was on fire.
That snag on her day gave Taylor room to think of the past month and the things she’d done and seen.
In the first weeks of her re-education plan, there wasn’t much response to Taylor’s efforts. People often blamed bad luck, or the victim. One of the unintended consequences of her plot was that not every victim was smart as Stephen had been. Some stayed to watch, others took the opportunity to retaliate then and there.
In one particular nasty case, both boys ended up in the hospital wing. One had boils all over his face while the other almost drowned in mucus.
It was another point of failure that Taylor chalked up to things out of her control. Unless she started trying to teach the victim as well, there wasn’t much she could do when they decided to stay and find more trouble instead of running away. It still left her feeling disgruntled and annoyed.
But people were learning and whispers spread. More than not, things that hadn’t been Taylor’s action at all got attributed to the “curse”. Other times, people fighting back would blame the curse as a way of getting away with it.
She had started focusing solely on Slytherin, but three weeks in, Taylor learned it had been a mistake: Fred and George had noticed the pattern of bad luck from the students in green and decided that the castle had given them permission to teach the snakes a lesson.
Consequently, Taylor had to get creative and stop the twins from bullying Slytherin students, even if part of her didn’t want to do that.
Now, she had the whole castle under close watch, and what an eye opener it was. She learned that, more often than not, Gryffindors were just as bad as Slytherin: they just thought their racism, bigotry and bullying was fun instead of cruel. Even Ravenclaw wasn’t immune to those sentiments. More than just a few students considered themselves better and more intelligent than the rest of the school and their attitude reflected that.
That left a sour taste in her mouth.
The house with the fewer cases of bigotry was, to no one's surprise, Hufflepuff. People there just wanted to be friends and have fun.
As for her own bully troubles, Taylor had lost patience with Callun just after one of the Herbology classes had ended. He was calling her names and throwing things at her hair, all while holding Luna at wandpoint. Being called names and picking bogies out of her hair she could deal with. Having him threaten Luna was something Taylor couldn’t abide by. She had him swallow a fly (which sent him on a fit of coughs); trip on invisible silk (when inevitably he tried to back away). Expelliarmus did the rest of the job, his wand flying away from grubby fingers.
That ended up being a mistake.
Taylor had gone to lengths to always be visible and not tied to any of the other instances of the curse acting around the school. Now, in a single moment of anger, she’d become a focal point to it and the students still filing out of the class saw the “curse” hit a bully before Taylor disarmed him.
Up until that point, the curse had often targeted isolated students in out of the way corridors. Now, it had marked her as someone who spread the “Comeuppance” curse, which had people avoiding her even more so they wouldn’t be targeted. And thus, the overt bullying toward them had reduced, in part due to Taylor’s efforts, but they were even more isolated than before.
Snape was still the same prat as always. He wasn’t overtly singling her out like he did at the start of the term, but the man still took points away from her more than anyone else in the castle, maybe except for the Weasley twins and Magic-hero Harry.
For some reason, the potions master really hated Harry Potter.
Unfortunately, Taylor didn’t act against Snape. It was just too risky trying to punish the man when she didn’t know what he could do and what magic he had at his disposal, even if her distaste for the man grew with every act of bullying that went unanswered and ignored by the school faculty.
Aside from her re-education project, Taylor had also been busy with normal school spying and activities.
There wasn’t ever enough hours in the day. The professors all doled homework like there was no tomorrow. Every night, Taylor had to spend hours nose deep into parchment and books writing up essays, researching potions, working soil composition, copying historical data from books, or creating poems about Lockhart’s adventures.
With the rest of the hours, she had to practice spells for the normal classes, practice useful spells from older years, and keep chipping at the nonverbal casting lessons the sixth years were still having.
Professor McGonagall had them memorising a transfiguration alphabet, but no matter how Taylor looked at it, each symbol corresponded to an English letter. Unfortunately, the words in that language weren’t the same, so it took forever to translate from one to the other. She couldn’t find a reason for that and when questioned, McGonagall just said it was part of the formal transfiguration education.
Maybe it was something they’d need as adult wizards.
Apart from that, they were now working on a switching spell. Taylor could already use the charm, but the homework with the manual calculation between the difference in mass to switch two objects was hell.
Aside from basic magical theory, Flitwick had them practice a fire making spell. It wasn't a fireball and Taylor wouldn’t be blasting off enemies with it anytime soon, which was a shame, but she could see many uses for that charm.
Lockhart, on the other hand, was completely useless. All that Taylor’s spying told her was that older girls went gaga near the man for some reason. A few even got blushes when he smiled at them. Taylor didn’t see it. The man was too posh to be pretty and the smile was too fake. It made her cringe instead.
Complaining to Flitwick about Lockhart resulted in the the DADA professor asking her to stay after class one day, where the man regaled her with tales of his adventures, and how important he was and how his smile won him the witch weekly most charming smile five times in a row. Still, Taylor didn't know how that helped her if she ever had to defend herself from someone, like Callun or Snape.
After the first two weeks, most of those complaints were only vented in letters to her mum. Taylor didn’t want to be labeled a downer by her still only friend in the castle, even if she was certain Luna wouldn’t do that.
There were three last things of note regarding that first month:
The disappearing room had appeared once more. Taylor had been busy with Charms class at the time and had no way to investigate this new occurrence. Luna looked as disappointed as Taylor felt. A disappearing room, that was a good mystery they really wanted to solve.
After almost a full month of practicing, deep into the night while Luna slept on the other side of the bed, Taylor managed her first ever nonverbal spell. She had woken up from a dream about the other Taylor and still half asleep, grabbed her wand and willed it to produce light. Surprisingly it did. After that, Taylor could do it maybe two out of ten tries, but it was confirmation she could do it, and that left her too excited to sleep again that night, much to Luna’s amusement the next day.
The last point of interest was Nap.
The lazy owl was getting really fat. Taylor guessed it was all the food in the castle. There was no other explanation. Nap had doubled in size and it was becoming too heavy, not to mention big, to nest on top of Taylor’s head. Not that it stopped Nap from doing it.