Chapter 120: Chapter 120: Do unto others as they do unto you (Edited)
At Hogwarts there are four Houses, and all classes, except for a few special ones, are taught in two houses together. A course such as Defense Against the Dark Arts was taught twice a week.
Therefore, by a simple calculation, a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher would be giving eight lessons a week to first and second year wizards. The good news is that third and fourth years only have one lesson a week, fifth years go back to two lessons a week due to the pressure of the Ordinary Wizard Level Exams (T.I.M.O.), and sixth and seventh years are optional, with only one lesson per house, one lesson a week.
So, a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher has to teach 18 classes a week - eighteen classes! What in God's name is going on? Tom was devastated when he saw the schedule, he had never paid much attention to the lives of the teachers, and when he took over the job at Lockhart, he found that the teachers seemed to be having a pretty hard time, especially the ones who took their classes seriously.
If you put those eighteen classes together in a week, Tom would have to take two classes in the morning and two in the afternoon, that's four days, and only half a day of classes on the fifth day.
Tom felt his blood pressure shoot up.
Suddenly he looked at the desk and an idea occurred to him. He immediately sat down on the edge of the desk, pulled out a pen and began to Enchant it: he hoped to give this pen an automatic dialing function.
As a skilled apprentice alchemist, and with a similar structure, the pen was easy for Tom to modify; it was just a simple program to recognize ABCDs and accumulate additional marks.
For the next week, Tom spent his days in class, and at night, in Lockhart's image, he was in the office preparing the teaching content for the new semester, modifying the quill and brewing the multijuice potion....
He got a lot done, but not the homework, because if his plan worked, he wouldn't have to do it himself this term.
It had been a quiet, uneventful week, and Snape had been silent about the theft, only subtracting points from Gryffindor much more frequently.
"Potter, you've made your potion too dilute, five points off for Gryffindor!"
"Potter, your potion is too thick, five points off for Gryffindor!"
"Potter, your tablemate Ron's potion was too thick, and you didn't warn him, minus for..."
"Potter, I can't believe you're talking in class..."
Snape had dumped almost all of his deductions on Gryffindor house, which in turn made Potions class much better for Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff: because Snape needed to spend his precious deductions on Gryffindor.
Because of Snape's sudden outburst, Gryffindor was firmly at the bottom of the four-house table in the first week of classes.
...
The spacious office was decorated with several mirrors and a fluffy rabbit.
"Hiss!" A huge, brightly colored snake appeared in the office, its flashlight-yellow eyes riveted on the rabbit's, which made a terrified expression before collapsing to the floor, stiff as a board.
As horrible as it looked, the rabbit didn't die when it looked directly into the eyes of the snake Tom had become.
"Indeed, the eye ability of the etched basilisk is weaker than the original.". Tom sighed, the ability of his Boggart's Soul Ring was to engrave magical creatures and then adopt their form, inheriting some of their abilities.
In general, the rarer the ability, the weaker it became; the immortal bird's Nirvana, the phoenix, was reduced to accelerated recovery, the basilisk's Killing Gaze was reduced in a layer of lethality and has become permanent petrification.
Tom pulled out another rabbit and let him see the basilisk's eyes in the mirror. This time, the rabbit only stiffened for a while before regaining its ability to move. If the basilisk's eyes had been reflected in the mirror once, there would have been no petrification at all and it can only cause panic.
Tom remained calm, it was to be expected and there was nothing to regret. After studying his newly acquired powers, he sat down at the table, pulled out a piece of parchment and began to write. It was already Sunday, and he was preparing his lesson for the coming Monday.
During the week, Tom had also been researching the teaching aids available to the professors at Hogwarts, and had found some great things, like the magical photocopier he was looking at.
It was a combination Muggle printer and photocopier, and helped Hogwarts professors print their work. But it was only used by the professors at the end of the year. As such, Tom had asked Filch for it; it was in storage anyway, So why not give it to me, Lockhart, for safekeeping? And he transferred a few dozen pounds of parchment from the school's storage room.
It may seem like a lot, but since Hogwarts parchment is generally thicker, a single piece of paper has a mass of about ten grams, and a pound is only fifty papers, so an exam for seven years would take seven pounds, and Tom would probably run out of paper in a month.
Tom stuffed the paper into the opening at the top of the magic printer and said to the printer, "Make three hundred copies."
"Okay." The printer accepted the assignment and quickly went to work. He swallowed a sheet of parchment and turned it into a piece of test paper.
While the printer made copies, Tom took out a small bottle, filled with a bubbling, syrupy, thick multijuice passion, to which he added his hair.
The decoction made a loud noise, like boiling water, and after a second the noise ceased, almost like a chemical reaction.
Tom opened the suitcase and stepped inside. Lockhart was sitting on it, eyes dazed, hair dry and disheveled, chin deflated and features haggard.
He looked up at Tom, his eyes downcast.
"Mr. Lockhart, please take some." Tom handed over the vial of multijuice potion.
Lockhart winced, "Wait, I'm not drinking, I..."
Tom squeezed his cheek and poured the multijuice potion into his mouth. After pouring the multijuice potion, Lockhart collapsed to the floor, convulsing like a boiled prawn. He felt his skin melting, bubbling rapidly, and he lay prostrate on the floor, gasping and moaning loudly. His skeleton was shrinking rapidly and his hair turned black.
The pain came and went as quickly as it came, and when the transformation was complete, everything stopped. Lockhart lay on the cold floor, his robe drenched with cold sweat.
But the next moment he saw something that made his heart and lungs stop: his other self standing in front of him, looking down at him with a smile.
"You're much nicer to look at now." Tom took Lockhart's form and approached Lockhart, who had taken Tom's form, and their identities had switched.
"You, you!" Lockhart was too shocked to speak.
Tom grabbed him by the collar and pulled him up, "You should have been prepared for this day the moment you took someone's memory and claimed their honor. Your identity, it's useful to me, so I'll take it."
"Tom, ahhhh~" Lockhart let out a roar like a beast, but the next moment it was as if he was caught in the throat, and the roar was stifled in his throat: he saw something that made his hair stand on end.
As he looked into Tom's eye, Lockhart felt his heart stop beating, his blood run cold in his veins, as if he had seen a natural enemy, as if a rat had been touched by a cat.
His memory began to surge.
Lockhart's mind went back to his childhood, his mother was a witch, but none of his sisters had magical talent, so when he showed potential as a wizard, his mother had no qualms about favoring him among all his siblings, and for a while he thought he was a genius, unique, until he entered school and entered Ravenclaw....
Lockhart had thought he would be the subject of discussion and attention, for he had always considered himself a genius with great magical powers, but the truth had disappointed him: there were more talented, gifted and hard-working children at Hogwarts than he was, and no one had been impressed by him. He was indeed talented and smarter than most of his peers, but he just wanted to be the best.
Everyone, of course, has to learn to accept their own mediocrity, and Lockhart clearly hadn't learned that.
In the first transfiguration class, Lockhart's matches didn't change at all, but he had the ingenuity to find a brooch instead, something for which he would have received much praise and admiration if Professor McGonagall hadn't seen it.
Memories of him clowning around again and again surfaced: standing at his desk, proudly announcing to his classmates that he would be traveling the world after graduation; that he would be taking home the Quidditch World Cup; that he would be the youngest Minister of Magic....
What a wonderful day at school, Lockhart couldn't help but think.
"These memories, I don't need them." A cold voice rang in his ears, and Lockhart turned his head to see the cold snake pupil, devoid of human emotion.
He was horrified to find such an eye in a corner of his memory: the eye that had been in the chandelier when his mother had given him the best chicken drumstick; the snake pupil that had been on Professor McGonagall's forehead during her transfiguration class, the eye that had been somewhere in the crowd, staring at him emotionlessly every time he bragged...
Lockhart broke down and shouted.
"I told you I'm not interested in those memories of yours." The cold voice rang in his ears again, "Change it!".
Lockhart's mental defenses instantly shattered, his memories flipped uncontrollably, a mass of memories that had lain dormant in the back of his mind were rescued, then tossed aside as if they were trash, and so on ...
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