As long as they're not having anything saucy for dinner.

Fortunately, dinner is kneazle-petting friendly! Very excellent. 

Most efficient.

Anathema loads up her plate with things she can eat one handed, so Scarlet doesn't suffer an unfortunate disruption in pats.

Still... Eventually they should probably head in a general bedwards direction...

Farewell, Scarlet.

They sigh, give Ellie one last headbutt, then jump down to head off into the corridors.

And off to their own tower for Ellie and Anathema.

The next few weeks of school pass well, and Anathema's accepted as the Ravenclaw Quidditch reserve after continued recruitment attempts fail to find any older students eager for the position, though the first fully official Quidditch game of the season - Gryffindor versus Slytherin - isn't until the middle of November. Ravenclaw's first match (against Hufflepuff) won't actually be until January - the second match of the year, but apparently most of them are spread out over second semester.

Classes remain rather easy for both girls, but their professors and the TAs are fairly universally amenable to recommending more challenging side projects or reading. Dumbledore caves rather quickly to complaints about keeping Snape through the end of the year, announcing he'll be stepping down at the beginning of the Samhain holiday. (Samhain is, as promised, a massive holiday, with events spilling out all week. It's dedicated to remembering and honoring the dead, mostly, with some traditions treating it as the new year.)

The Potions Master who replaces him requests that everyone attend at least one class with her. She's a fairly old woman with laugh lines carved deeply into her face and a propensity for cheerfulness, who introduces herself as "Professor Alethea McGonagall - though for the sake of disambiguation you all may use my maiden name, Cleary. I likely won't stay until next year, as I'm currently taking leave from my work at Minerva dear's request, though perhaps fortune will bring strange tides." She sets up heatless lights all around the potions classroom, gives them all new Potions textbooks ("Your old one isn't exceptionally terrible, but I do think it works better as a reference manual once you have already learned the craft, but before you have mastered it."), and overall establishes a cheery atmosphere. She strongly encourages the students to question her, and actually allows their class to vote on which potion they'll start on the next week.

Professor Quirrel moves into the Roman period of Britain, and actually offers Ellie and Anathema a research project - one he believes is more at their level.

Ellie likes the new Potions Master much more than the old. Professor Cleary actually wants to be teaching.

She gets the hang of balancing school work around Quidditch practice and the extracurricular reading she wants to do, some at professorial recommendation, some not. Her notepaper mockup of a day planner is helpful in this regard, and she resolves to buy a real one the next time muggle shops are available to her.

And even though she still gets a headache from being around Professor Quirrell too much, even outside of his classroom, she's interested to know what kind of research he has in mind.

"My generalist knowledge base is fairly broad," he says, "If you want to branch outside of what we're covering in your current classes - either into another time period, or into another region, though I'll admit I know the most about the British Isles, and the second most about mainland Europe as a whole, and that my true specialties are in the Founders period and the pre-Roman period."

"The sort of project I think you two would benefit most from is a deeper rather than parallel investigation, though - wizards are rarely antiquarians, sadly, so there's an exceptional amount of history that no one's investigated in suitable depth, or that if they have investigated, they have not compiled for the edification of people outside their narrow field. You could contribute rather greatly to the field just by reading and summarizing articles - and learn more than a bit of interesting things yourself, of course, especially if you want to stray into experimental archaeology based on your findings. There's some very interesting work being done on magic from the Founder's era being done there, actually - we have enough evidence to say what results many of the lost workings from that time should produce, and to say what magical technologies we think they may have had access to... But the actual details are currently obscured to our sight. An experimental project there could involve trying to recreate plausible workings and seeing if any match what evidence we have."

"Experimental archaeology, huh..." she says consideringly.

"That sounds kinda fun. Like learning spells and inventing them. At the same time."

He laughs. "That's one way to portray it, yes."

"Do you have any good resources to start with on the Founders' Era, Professor?"

"A few, yes..." He makes a few book recommendations from the library, "And once you feel like you have an overview, I have quite a few articles that dive into actual evidence, as well as copies of primary sources and translations of them into modern English."

"That'll be quite helpful, thank you."

"I'll start putting those together, then."

Nod.

"Thanks Professor!" Anathema says. "C'mon, Ellie, let's go check out those books..."

Off they go.

It's interesting stuff - Anathema thinks working in a research project's probably worth it... And experimenting with stuff the Founders could do sounds so cool.

One of the books describes some of the lost workings, in fact, from minor - old witchcraft-based medical treatments that they probably have better versions of now but that are still of historical and possibly medical interest - to moderate - such as the shapeshifting technique Slytherin used, which has since been lost - to major - including basically everything about Hogwarts and its actual construction. No one even knows all of the protections and workings laid upon Hogwarts, let alone how they were done. (A few things did survive - the current spell to make buildings unplottable is probably related to Hogwarts' version, and making parts of a building move around is still possible, though not with the same responsiveness or complexity Hogwarts exhibits. They also still have anti-apparition wards, though modern ones aren't as thorough as the ones on Hogwarts and cannot be made permanent. Still, they don't know how the space warping around the Forbidden Forest is anchored, how the castle is able to respond dynamically to the people in it, and how the castle's myriad defenses work.)

Slytherin's shapeshifting could be a good project- challenging, potentially achievable, also might help with Animagus studies.

Yeah! Also it sounds like they know more about the process than, like, mystery Hogwarts protective enchantments.

So they'll start there.

Yeah. They can reverse engineer Hogwarts next year.