"Sir!"
"Mumph?!" I jerked awake and immediately came face to face with a pair of huge gray eyes. "AH! …Damnit Paddy, how many times do I have to tell you, not so close!" I complained loudly as I threw off my covers and jumped out of bed.
"As it is remarkably effective in getting you up at the time you specified, at least once more." Paddy drawled before vanishing from my bed with a soft sound that really couldn't be described as a pop anymore.
I groaned and scrubbed my hands over my face before dragging them through my hair to get it into something that resembled order. I didn't bother combing it since it was Saturday and I had no intention of braving the outside today.
Too much to do and not enough time.
If Lys came around she would just have to deal with my scruffiness.
I yawned hugely as I pulled on a pair of pants and a sweater, no need for robes today, before exiting my bedroom. My workshop was dark due to the early morning and the cloudy sky. The illusion on the ceiling provided some modest lighting, as did my plasma globe, together it made my modest place of work look bot magical and slightly sinister.
"Cue the Sun!" I commanded.
At the verbal command, the starfield above started to quickly lighten turning first a bright blue before exploding into shades of red, yellow and pink as the sun crested the horizon before again fading back into a crisp blue. I stopped, closed my eyes and just enjoyed the sunlight for a moment. This was, without a doubt, one of my best ideas, particularly during the winter. I had to set some on the windows as well, to complete the illusion.
I god damn hated the winter, not because of the cold, but because of the damn darkness.
Illusions were awesome.
Anyone that didn't agree was a moron.
It didn't speak well for the wizarding world.
I chuckled a bit to myself as I wandered over to the storage section and worked my way towards a specific bookshelf that rested against the sidewall. Once there I reached over and ran a finger along its left side until I felt a knothole, which I promptly stuck my finger into before pulling it out. The shelving unit in front of me promptly retreated into the floor revealing an opening.
The opening leads to a secret room, obviously. But it was a secret room that I myself had created way back in my second year. I'd created it as a test of the space expansion charm, both my mastery of it and to see if it was actually possible to modify something inside Hogwarts. Turn out it was more than possible, it was actually easy. So long as you knew the correct charms of course. That part wasn't so easy. It also made plausible a little theory of mine, that being that most of the secret passages in this place weren't necessarily created by the founders, but by students, and possibly faculty, after the fact.
I say students because a lot of the passageways I'd found (rediscovered?) actually lead down to Hogsmeade. I doubt the faculty would need a sneaky way to get down there.
I hadn't had a use for it at the time since the Room of Requirement served well enough for all my needs, now though I felt that I needed a dedicated space. Not just for my big project, but also for a smaller one that I'd been planning for some time, but hadn't been confident in starting until my enchanting skills were good enough.
The room I'd created was a perfect cube in shape, with each side being roughly twelve meters across. The ceiling was of course covered in an illusion of its own that was tied to the same array like the one on my workshop ceiling. For now, it was mostly bare save for several barrels of materials, a large worktable and five slabs containing five humanoid shapes, four male and one female in shape. All of them jet black from the crown of their bald heads to the tip of their toes.
My three companions were ever only meant to be prototypes, proof of concept, for this, for them. A lot of work had gone into their physical form. They all had skeletons, actual ones, that I'd found in the Room. Bit morbid perhaps, using human remains like that. But it had been easier than making replicas. I'd gone the extra mile in identifying the gender of each skeleton before taking them here, just for the sake of symmetry.
I'd decided to not do what I'd done with my other companions, which was just big blobs of silicone covered in recovered animal skin and bird feathers (though I was quite proud of Quoth's wings, that had been a labor of love. Instead, I'd gone through a painstaking process of actually building up the bodies from the ground up, creating ligaments and musculature and even internal organs. I'd even managed to add a rudimentary circulatory system. Transfiguration magic was truly frightening sometimes.
Why had I done this?
It was mostly because I could, really. And because I was curious if it would have an effect on the finished product. Probably not, but it would be interesting to see. Also, I had way to much free time so why not, right?
Today I was going to give them their minds.
Now, to start creating an artificial mind (AM, very punny, thank you) you have to make a mold of sorts. It's the magical equivalent of making a plaster cast of your head. But instead of filling it with… whatever, you fill it with magic. This gets you something that is kinda sorta shaped like a mind, but like with the muggle equivalent, it's not really that, it just somewhat looks like it. So you have to do the charms equivalent of touching it up, add some nice coloring, an eyeball or two and a wig of course.
After that, you just have to teach it how you want it to act and such, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, one that can take a while if you want a good result. Headmasters of Hogwarts have their portraits painted years ahead of time and spend a lot of time teaching them how to act and filling them with useful information and insights so that they act like they are supposed to. Fortunately for me, since I'm not trying to create carbon copies of anything I'm free to let their minds grown in a more organic fashion. This saves time and effort on my part, and if Quarth, Maurice and Gaspode are any indications, the results can be quite nice.
To create a mind mold, for lack of a better term, you have to do something that's quite similar to how you copy a memory in a pensive. But instead of focusing on a memory you instead had to copy your consciousness and place it in the desired object. Of course, unlike something like a memory, there was no way to copy something so vastly complex as an entire personality. The best magic could do was to create general shape, with nothing of the donor really carrying over, except for certain small things, like the ability to talk and read whatever languages the donor knew.
In a sense, a newly created AM could be compared to a person suffering from amnesia. Though it wasn't entirely accurate since it would imply that the minds created were actually human. They were close but didn't quite get there in the end. They lacked certain… complexity, in certain ways. The biggest thing I'd noticed was that they didn't really get bored. They could fake it if it was something they were told to do. In the same vein they didn't get excited either.
That wasn't to say that they didn't feel emotions, it was just that the emotions they did feel tended to be the more primal emotions humans experience. Emotions like fear, anger, surprise, happiness, sadness, and disgust. But they didn't seem to be able to combine them in any complex manner. In some ways, they reminded me of children in that way, very young children.
Another thing was their focus, not to mention their memory, which were both entirely inhuman, which probably tied into their inability to feel boredom now that I think about it.
I'd already made the basic preparations yesterday with the Help of Nel, she had also kindly supplied the mold for the female… I really had to figure out what to call these things. Anyway, Nel had provided for the woman shaped doll. The only thing I needed to do now was to essentially supply the juice and tie their mind into the enchanter's wheel that would connect their minds to their bodies, and a lot of other things.
I smiled and pulled out my wand, for something like this I would need the advantage a wand could give when it came to freeing up a spell casters focus. I could probably do it without a wand as well, but it would be chancy. With a wand, I was certain of successes.
"Alright," I said to myself, psyching myself up for the task at hand. "Stand back, Snape. It's time for some wand-waving!"
I raised my wand and started casting on the female first. She was the more complicated because I'd used a mind template, oh nice term, have to remember that one! Since I'd used a template of someone, not me I'd have to be a bit more careful with it. I could feel sweat starting to bead on my forehead as little balls of colored light shot from my wand into the doll? lying prone before me.
Once I was done I didn't wake her immediately, instead, I decided that I wanted to wake her up alongside her brothers, and with that in mind, I started on them. In the end, I don't know exactly how long I was working, but once I was done I heard someone clear their throat behind me, almost making me piss myself in sheer fright.
"Lys! What the hell!" I complained.
Lys snorted from where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor watching me work. "You done then? About damn time."
"When the heck did you come in?" I asked irritably as I tried to get my heart to stop trying to escape my ribcage.
Lys shrugged. "Eh, maybe twenty minutes ago, give or take. You were so focused on your little toys you didn't even notice."
"Thank you for stating the obvious." I snarked in response.
"You can stop being dramatic now," Lys told me with an eye-roll before she heaved herself back to her feet and came over to where I was. "So you are finally finished with these over-engineered lumps of plastic?"
"They are not over-engineered." I protested indignantly. "They are just… I'm just being thorough."
"I think the word you are looking for is fussy," Lys told me bluntly.
"I'm not being fussy, this is not being fussy. How is this fussy? That's not even a word that fits here!" I told her plaintively.
"Sure it isn't," Lys muttered dryly, loud enough for me to hear of course.
"Haha, you're a riot, Shortstack."
"Right back at'cha, Bonehead." Lys retorted. "So are you gonna wake 'em up or just stand her whining like a four-year-old and wasting both our time?"
"I might do that once you tell me how the armors are going." I snapped back.
"Haven't started, not done with what you want for your other little project. Have you any idea how long it will take to produce that much Orichalcum? Don't answer that, because you don't." She growled at me. "It will be at least another two weeks before I have everything you asked for. And that's only for the outer shell."
"Hull." I corrected quietly.
She waved it away. "Whatever you want to call it. Two weeks."
"But that's so long!" I complained.
"You can always try to make your own." Lys challenged. "The Atlantians did after all, and you're always telling me how smart you are."
"No, I don't." I denied hotly. "I've never said anything like that."
"Not in words, no."
"Oh! Oh, so you are a mind reader now, are we? That's strange, I feel like I would know if someone tried to take a stroll through my noggin."
"Don't have to read your mind to figure you out," Lys told me smugly.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I demanded.
Lys gave me a smug smile. "It means you are not as mysterious as you think you are."
I barked a humorless laugh. "Missy, I have more mystery in my big toe then you have in your whole body."
"Yeah, I'm really seeing the humility here." She snarked back.
I rolled my eyes. "Oh aren't you clever."
"Condescending." She sang at me smugly.
I grit my teeth and counted down to zero in my head quickly before taking a calming breath. "Let's just get this show on the road."
"Finally."
"Now who's being impatient?" I told her.
"The difference being that it's your own fault for asking for the world, whereas I'm just waiting for you to stop wasting time and just do it." Lys served back without hesitation.
Okay, so she might have a point there. A small one.
"Fine…" I muttered darkly before raising my hand and snapping my fingers.
As one ten black eyelids snapped open revealing equally back eyes beneath. As one the sat up, and as one they turned their heads and looked at us standing there with neutral expressions on their black faces. It was more than a little creepy. I smiled in spite of that.
"Good morning, and welcome to the world."