The fall of Dolores Umbridge was a satisfying, if temporary, victory. The immediate result was the swift repeal of her most draconian Educational Decrees. The long-term result, however, was less encouraging. Cornelius Fudge, terrified and politically wounded, doubled down on his denial of Voldemort's return. The Daily Prophet, now under new, more cautious editorial leadership, carefully towed the Ministry line. Harry Potter was no longer a dangerous liar, but he was treated as an eccentric, slightly tragic figure, his claims of a dark lord's resurrection the sad fantasies of a troubled boy. The wizarding world, desperate for peace, chose to believe the comfortable lie over the terrifying truth.
The new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, a nervous, perpetually flustered Ministry functionary named Tiberius Stump, was utterly powerless. He was too terrified of Dumbledore to act as a Ministry stooge and too terrified of his students to exert any real authority. His classes became a study hall, a pointless but harmless placeholder.
For Ariana, this new status quo was a logical, if frustrating, stalemate. The Ministry was a lost cause for now. The wider wizarding world was a non-factor. The war would be fought not in the press or the halls of power, but in the shadows. With the immediate political threats neutralized, she saw no further value in engaging with them. It was time to return to the real work.
"The political variable is stagnant," she announced to Hermione and Daphne in the secure quiet of the Room of Requirement. "Further attempts to influence it are an inefficient use of our resources. We will now re-allocate our focus to Project Chimera." This was the codename they had given the spaceship project—a hybrid of magic and science.
They returned to the blueprints, to the complex equations and arcane theories. And they immediately hit their first, most fundamental wall: the material.
"We are trying to contain a magical, pressurized atmosphere within a non-magical, absolute vacuum," Hermione said, pointing to a complex diagram of magical stress fractures. "No purely magical shield can do it. The pressure differential is absolute. The magical energy required to sustain a ward against a true void would drain a wizard's core in minutes. We would be a ship of ice, dead in space, before we even passed the orbit of the moon."
"And no purely physical material can do it either," Daphne added, consulting a goblin treatise on enchanted metals. "Even the strongest dragonhide or goblin-wrought steel would eventually succumb to the stresses of space—the micrometeoroids, the unfiltered solar radiation, the extreme temperature shifts. It would become brittle and fail."
For weeks, they were stuck. They were facing a problem that neither magic nor science, on its own, could solve.
It was Ariana, with her unique, dual-world perspective, who finally broke the deadlock.
"We are approaching this as a binary problem," she said one afternoon, looking at the frustrated faces of her friends. "We are asking if the solution is magical or physical. That is the wrong question. The solution must be both."
She took out a new piece of parchment. "Muggles have already developed materials for space travel. Alloys of titanium and aluminum. They are light, strong, and designed to withstand the rigors of launch and re-entry. They are, however, magically inert."
"So they're useless for enchanting," Hermione pointed out.
"Not if we don't enchant the material itself," Ariana countered, a new, brilliant idea sparking in her eyes. "What if we use the Muggle alloy as the physical superstructure—the skeleton—for its strength and resilience? And then, we don't enchant it, we infuse it. We create a magical-molecular bond."
She began to sketch a new design. "We take the titanium alloy panels for the hull. On the interior surface, we etch a matrix of containment runes, designed to hold the magical atmosphere inside. On the exterior surface, we etch a different array—the passive energy-siphoning runes we designed for the werewolf bracelets, but modified."
"But there's no ambient magic in space to siphon," Daphne argued.
"Not in the way we understand it," Ariana agreed. "But space is not empty. It is full of solar radiation, cosmic rays, gravitational forces. It is full of energy. These external runes will not be designed to draw in magical energy. They will be designed to convert other forms of energy into magical energy."
Hermione gasped, her mind reeling at the concept. "You want to turn solar radiation directly into magical power? That's… that's alchemy on a level I've never even read about!"
"The principles are sound," Ariana said calmly. "It is simply a matter of finding the correct runic grammar to translate one form of energy into another. It solves our power source problem." But that led them to the next great wall.
"Even if we have a power source," Hermione said, her mind already racing ahead, "how do we generate the magic needed for propulsion and life support in a place where there is no magic to draw upon? The power from the hull runes would need to be channeled somewhere."
"We would need an onboard generator," Daphne mused. "A magical engine."
"Precisely," Ariana said. "A contained, pressurized runic core. A magical reactor. It would take the raw magical energy converted by the hull and use it to power the specific systems we need—the propulsion charms, the atmospheric generator, the shields."
The idea was breathtaking. They were designing a vessel that would be a living, self-sustaining magical ecosystem. It would wear a Muggle-designed skin for physical protection, while its heart and soul would be pure, applied magic. It would literally drink the light of the stars to power its journey.
The next great challenge immediately presented itself. To design such a magical reactor was a task of immense complexity. But it was the next logical step.
"Our next objective," Ariana declared, her voice ringing with a new, profound purpose, "is to find a way to streamline the generation of controlled, stable magic in a contained, non-magical environment. We need to build the first-ever magical engine core."
She looked at her friends, her two brilliant partners in this impossible, magnificent endeavor. They were no longer just studying old magic. They were inventing a new kind. The quiet of the Room of Requirement was filled with the furious scratching of quills on parchment as they set to work, their minds united in the shared, audacious dream of touching the stars. The politics and petty squabbles of the world outside faded away, irrelevant in the face of a challenge so grand, it would redefine the very limits of what it meant to be a witch.