Inside the Room of Requirements before the first gathering of the 'club' Hermione had founded, Loki was sitting with his eyes closed as he sipped on some rejuvenation tea occasionally.
'That child that no one knew about…'
'No it would be wrong to think about it like that.'
'That wasn't a child.'
'It was likely a Beyonder of the White Tower pathway…someone who had worked closely with Spectator Pathway Beyonders because he was able to skillfully manipulate the Body of Heart and Mind of everyone in the room without their notice through planting suggestions like I do using the Sea of Subconscious.'
'That child didn't even exist and yet everyone felt like he did when he was talking back to Mione.'
'He had it all, a Body of Heart and Mind, a spirit body, an astral body…that was enough to fool nearly all the Beyonders in the room.'
'The one other person he failed to fool was Luna who could immediately tell the boy didn't have a soul, but even I had to do a double take and doubt myself for a second when I saw that the person had a spirit thread. It was only when I realised that the boy had no soul that I stopped second guessing myself to figure out what exactly the boy was…'
'An illusion…'
'But not like the ones I make all the time. No, this illusion was one made by manipulating everyone's minds. In the exact opposite way a Spectator's Psychological invisibility works…like a Virtual Persona of a Sequence 4 Manipulator's Virtual Persona.'
'But given the boy had a spirit body thread the person behind it clearly knows about them…since he went to the extent of creating a fake fate for the boy so that information about him could be divined just as he wanted it to be.'
'...who could it be?'
'For someone to know about spirit body threads they have to be either a Fool pathway beyonder or an Error pathway beyonder. Everyone else only has access to fate through visions…not even the monster pathway can see spirit body threads directly…'
'But the knowledge about these pathways is concealed by Salazar…'
'So either the 'person' behind it all is a demon and 'She' is trying to cook something up, or… the person behind all of it is someone that knew about them before Salazar concealed them all.'
'A person that has survived through at least two epochs.'
'That is a very wide net of time to cast to narrow it down to a single person…'
'Are there any other clues regarding the matter that I can extrapolate?'
Loki thought hard.
'Could it be a demon?'
'If it were a demon what would it want to achieve by aggravating a bunch of children rebelling against a teacher…?'
'This matter is too small for 'Her' to have interfered. Unless she wanted to delay its formation…but is there really anything for her to achieve if a bunch of students learn to defend themselves against minute threats?'
'...no that feels too far fetched.'
'Maybe it is a demon's personal vendetta? But neither I nor Luna noticed any corruption in its 'soul' or rather the lack of one…and given how all the other 'good' demons are still hiding it can't have been one of them too.'
'So it's a person…'
'A person that has lived two epochs…'
'...again, that doesn't narrow it down by much…'
'But what about another angle?'
'A person from the White Tower pathway that has close relations with a member of the Spectator Pathway, who is patient enough to explain to him his abilities so that the White Tower pathway member can replicate them…?'
'Grindelwald?'
Loki frowned since the conclusion was a little unsettling.
'He's a member of the fool pathway and has lived through two epochs?'
'....'
Loki didn't know what to say or think.
'Wouldn't the Black family have some records about him if they did?'
'Well they didn't have records of Merlin now that I think about it…'
'Or do they? And they're just not in the house?'
'Perhaps Grandma knows more about them.'
'Hmm…alright, I'll send her a letter to ask her about it.'
'Why do I feel like I'm forgetting something I promised Grandma about?'
'....well if I don't remember then it's probably not that important anyway.'
Loki quickly penned a letter but paused before he was about to send it through Sunny.
'I'll send it in the morning.'
He didn't want to be informed of having to pretend to be the fiancé of some other girl now.
Loki stole the letter, transforming it into a rune before turning to the one task he had to accomplish tonight.
He got up from his chair and walked up to a simple wall in the room.
"Alright, reveal yourself.", Loki said as if he were casting Revelio on the room, but he was just being dramatic, yet the room obeyed his orders and opened the same cupboard that he had been frequenting in the past few days.
The cupboard that held the room's runic circuitry.
After several nights of studies, Loki had a rudimentary understanding of what the runes did and how they functioned.
It wasn't that the runes were too advanced for it to go into his head or that Rowena was extremely skilled at it all, but it was because there were too many runes involved in the circuitry, enough that they even troubled Loki very much.
Also, the fact that Loki couldn't damage anything while experimenting with what each section did played a large role in why understanding them was a slow process.
Loki had managed to make a simple map of the room at any given time by hacking into its runic circuitry, it was a rudimentary map that worked much like the Marauder's map.
It was useless ordinarily, but it was helpful for Loki in the sense that it could let him spot any mistakes he would've made with his edits to the runic circuitry of the room.
It helped him see exactly which parts of the rooms he might have snuffed out of existence by editing the wrong runes.
As such, the knowledge he currently had was enough for the small modification Loki wanted to make to the circuitry.
Loki pulled out his wand and began carving runes in the air with his spirituality.
Each movement was slow and precise as Loki took care not to let anything already existing get damaged.
His runes slowly floated away from the tip of his wand and gently landed on the circuit in front of him.
The outer section of runes slowly dissolved into the circuit in front of him as they formed the connection points that he was going to use to hack his own little modifications to the grand architecture of the room.
Once the outer layers dissolved, the inner layers stopped moving, they hovered above the circuit like they'd been frozen in time.
Loki examined the room around him with his spirit vision, trying to find any abnormalities in it and once he was satisfied Loki clapped his hands to praise himself.
"I knew it wouldn't fail! I'm a genius after all!"
Loki flicked his wand and closed the cupboard before he froze as he heard the room tremble a little.
"Huh!?"
"Don't tell me I missed something!" Loki panicked and quickly flicked open the cupboard to hack into it a slightly complex runic circuitry which gave him the map of the room.
But as he did his brows rose in surprise.
'...so I was just in time.'
The three-dimensional map hovering in front of Loki showed his room in the Room of Requirements, but at the same time he could see a second room right beside the one he was currently in.
And in it were a few other people, starting with-
Hermione Granger.
---
A/N : Four chapters delayed. One uploaded.