"Do you know why my Chinese chomping cabbage seems so listless? I've tried fertilizer and water but it didn't help at all." Sofia asked while holding the planter pot with the leafy green and purple cabbage that had a maw of sharp teeth it was lightly grinding without much of the energy the plants were known for.
I looked it over carefully and considered for a minute before summoning on of the schools house elves and asking for a live mouse or rat. A few minutes later the elf returned with a plump rat being held by the tail and very unhappy for it. I grabbed it and calmly dropped it into the maw of the cabbage and the plant immediately perked up as it killed the rat under the grimacing gaze of everyone in the room.
"These plants were created originally with the purpose of ridding a garden of pests. If they don't occasionally satisfy that purpose they can grow listless. A tad gruesome I know but that is simply how it is." I explained as the cabbage happily chewed up the rat from it's pot.
"I would have never thought of that. Thank you." Sofia said honestly.
"Happy to help. I suggest a small mouse once a week to keep the plant in good spirit. No need for larger things like this rat." I said helpfully.
"I have no idea how you weren't repulsed by that gorey scene. I felt faint just looking at it." Felicia said with a pale face.
"I already knew what to expect so there wasn't much shock factor for me. Personally I think the plant is an unusual one for casual house ornamentation but to each their own I suppose." I said with a shrug.
"It's quite pretty. A lovely royal purple with verdant green." She pointed out.
"Oh i'm not denying that. I was referring to it's predatory nature. There are more than a few cases of the plants eating household pets and causing painful injuries to their owners." I said casually.
She paled even further at that as she definitely understood exactly what that meant in a school with pets that roamed mostly unrestricted. Still that little interlude in our lives was nothing all that special honestly. Beyond checking up on the realm and bazaar's development occasionally I mostly spent my day in class, completing homework and then working on my magics.-
No one had heard from Flammel since he kicked me out but that was hardly surprising since he had a lead on a possible way to fix the population issue of the wizarding world. The man might be a kindly old fellow in person but at heart he was a researcher. This was research that if he succeeded would change the wizarding world irreversibly. He was proud of his stone of course but that was a personal achievement all but restricted to himself. This on the other hand was something all of wizardkind would benefit from.-
Thanks to my study and practice I myself had finally started moving into the "late game" magics of the black and white magics I had gotten from Auron. I had the third tier elemental spells from the black tree finally capable of being used at the lowest level while the same was true of the healing spells of the white tree. Honestly I had to commend the actual creators of the magics. They were so structured that progression through them was only a matter of magical reserves and building a more complex magical structure than the previous tier. It was almost like the creators had started with the highest tier spells and dumbed them down twice over to create beginner and intermediate levels.-
One spell I had been really focusing on recently though was [Haste] from the white tree. In the game the spell increased your characters movement speed so you got more turns and thus more opportunities for things. In reality the spell accelerated your localized time by a factor of two. For the rest of the world everything was normal but under the spells influence every true second felt like two for you.-
In the game the effect ran out once you felt combat but in reality there was a time limit. Not terribly dissimilar to an advanced transfiguration but on time itself. In this world time magic was incredibly unrefined because a single slip up meant aging or deaging yourself by an unknowable amount. Soul magic and space magic by compare were much further explored and those were NOT well explored. In fact the only known piece of time magic that was stable and "relatively" safe was the time turners that allowed time travel. Even that came with serious dangers because terrible things happened if you didn't follow the rules.-
[Haste] and it's inverse [Slow] on the other hand were far more stable and safe without the same need for those rules. There was a slight issue with them but it was honestly something that made perfect sense. Aging. Under the effects of [Haste] you actually aged at twice the rate of real time. You were actually experiencing an actual extra second per the one true second after all. Honestly though this was hardly a problem at all as the spell ran out of juice right at the fifteen minute real time mark so each use only aged you by another thirty minutes. Hardly an issue unless you spent most of your time under the effect.