After her warning, Professor McGonagall ignored Adrian and started the day's lesson. Today they would use Transfiguration to turn any personal item into a button.
This was easy for Adrian. His transformation spell were already at Level 3. He flicked his wand casually and turned his quill into a perfect round button. It even had detailed ring patterns on it. He'd pushed his Transfiguration skills as far as they could go to get extra points.
Professor McGonagall nodded when she walked by. She gave him one point, though she didn't look too excited about it.
The other students weren't doing as well. The ones who managed any Transfiguration at all were doing okay, but their results were all over the place.
Seamus Finnigan, sitting a few rows up, blew up his ink pot completely. Black ink splashed all over his neighbor's face.
Adrian even saw one student quietly pull a button off his robes, trying to pretend he'd made it himself. But Professor McGonagall wasn't stupid, she could tell real work from fake. She made the cheater stand by the door.
After seeing Adrian's perfect Transfiguration, Professor McGonagall expected more from everyone else. Only Hermione managed to turn her paper into a decent button. The rest were pretty bad.
Professor McGonagall clapped her hands. "Everyone, stop trying. Can someone tell me the main rules for successful Transfiguration?"
"Professor, Transfiguration is advanced magic. You need to clearly picture what you want to create. The more the original object looks like what you want to make, the easier it is. And changing living things is much harder than changing objects. Only really skilled wizards can transform creatures..."
"Mr. Blackwood, I thought I told you..." Professor McGonagall started to scold Adrian out of habit, then realized he was sitting properly with his hand up, looking somewhere else.
"Miss Granger? How did you...?" McGonagall saw that Hermione Granger had actually answered, usually the most well-behaved student in class.
Miss Know-It-All was shaking a bit, but she kept her chin up and looked confident.
"Professor, was I right?"
"Yes... very complete. But since you spoke out of turn, I can't give you points." McGonagall looked shocked. It took her a while to tell Hermione to sit down.
Hermione looked disappointed, but when she saw Adrian's surprised face with his hand still up, she smiled.
Adrian slowly put his arm down, totally confused. Was he dreaming? Or was this someone else wearing Hermione's face?
Like Adrian, Harry and Ron were just as confused by Hermione's behavior. Ron couldn't wait to complain after class.
"What's wrong with Hermione? I saw her answer without raising her hand in McGonagall's class today. I think Professor McGonagall was completely shocked."
Ron expected Harry and Adrian to agree with him, but when they didn't answer, he turned around. Hermione was standing right behind him.
"H-Hermione..." Ron stuttered.
"I just want to earn back all the house points I lost. This doesn't break any school rules anyway. Professor McGonagall will understand!" Hermione glared at Ron, then turned to Adrian, looking a bit unsure.
"Adrian, Ron and Harry told me you only ran into that troll because you were looking for me yesterday. So... thanks!"
"Don't worry about it. We're friends, right?" Adrian smiled.
Adrian was a bit annoyed that Hermione had shown up and messed up his troll fight plan, but he knew he'd picked a bad place to fight it. Since everything worked out fine in the end, he didn't care about this small problem.
"Yeah..." Hermione smiled and nodded. "I'm going to work really hard to get back those lost points as fast as I can!"
Adrian felt a headache coming on. If Hermione started competing for points by answering questions in class, wouldn't that hurt his plans to upgrade his potions?
"But you only lost ten points from Professor Dumbledore, right? You could get those back in just one class."
Adrian was confused. Why worry so much about losing a few points? This was nothing compared to all the house points Hermione had earned by answering questions in the first half of the semester.
"Actually, I've earned sixty-seven house points so far," Hermione said, staring at Adrian meaningfully, like she was saying there could have been way more if a certain someone hadn't hogged all the question-answering chances.
"Then why..." Adrian wondered.
"I remember you saying I should earn back points ten or even a hundred times over," Hermione said with a smile.
Adrian had nothing to say. He mentally cursed his big-mouthed past self from a few weeks ago.
During their talk, Adrian tried to convince Hermione to give up her plan to challenge the teachers, but it didn't work. Miss Know-It-All had made up her mind and wasn't going to change it.
As they kept talking, somehow the conversation turned to school subjects. Adrian was surprised to find out that Hermione's amazing memory made her better than him at theory in several subjects.
Of course, this was partly because Adrian had spent half his system points in the Room of Requirement's training areas over the past few weeks, focusing on spells instead of pure book learning.
Even so, Hermione's knowledge was really impressive.
Harry and Ron tried to follow along but couldn't really add anything, they understood the individual words but not what they meant together.
Is this how smart kids talk to each other? Harry and Ron felt pretty dumb.
[Ding!]
[Through study and discussion, your Basic Magical Theory skill has improved slightly.]
Adrian, who had been talking about spell theory with Hermione, suddenly stopped when he heard the notification in his head. He checked his system interface and confirmed that his Basic Magical Theory skill had actually gotten a little better.
This gave Adrian a crazy idea...