Ginny stiffened. It was in the middle of the Halloween Feast, and Hailey was in the middle of a bathroom break.
“The Monster of Slytherin is on the move,” Hailey announced.
She shivered, listening to the distant sound as she searched the room. Once the whole management team had been outfitted with minicoms, Bonbon had declared them no less than ‘genius’ and offered Ginny a position on said management team. She’d postponed for a month or so, but once Hermione and Silver were both outfitted with Obelisks (without telling anyone else), she’d finally let in and joined the team… to find out that Hailey had been given the top slot as Management Team Lead.
Unbeknownst to the Management Team, the minicom host had already been migrated to a communications module in the Chamber of Secrets, even without any sort of database to attach it to. That module relayed them to Hailey, but it was an independent address on her Obelisk Network, so the whole network no longer relied on her… and she didn’t have to personally pass messages from one management team member to another. Should something happen to it, the minicoms would automatically connect first to Ginny and then to Hailey as backup hosts. When she expanded the Database to actually be a database, which she had the Astrium for now that she thought about it, it would take over that information-relay role, without the need for anyone to pass messages around; they’d just find their way to their destinations automatically.
In other news, as much to Ginny’s surprise as anyone else’s, she’d actually managed to find other friends, not just Hailey’s friends. Well… one other friend: Luna Lovegood. They’d only met three times before Hogwarts, in three short visits, but two weeks after the year started, they ran into each other in the Castle… and it was like they were old friends.
She also had a new acquaintance and, exactly as she’d suspected some time after the murder, there was a lot more to Myrtle Warren- more frequently called ‘Moaning Myrtle’ behind her back- than was visible at first glance. She’d managed to cheer the girl up and, while she didn’t exactly count as a friend to Ginny, Myrtle obviously thought of her as such. Ginny was also helping the ghost to solve the problem of the constant bullying- through reincarnation, of course, the easiest way she knew of short of casting Unforgivable Curses on the entire student body. Unfortunately, much of that process was waiting for a decent candidate to appear; Myrtle was very specific about who she wanted to be born to.
Not as specific as Ginny had been, though. Or at least, not that the girl realized; Myrtle had originally told Ginny she wanted to be born either directly to her birth parents, but that was basically impossible, even without considering their age: Her father was five years deceased, and her mother had been on her deathbed. Myrtle had been heartbroken to learn that her death had shortened her parents’ lives but, with some creative magic, Ginny had been able to arrange a visit between the ghost and her mother’s muggle hospital room.
Mrs. Warren had died happy, knowing that her daughter was still alive, if a little alarmed and perhaps frightened by her form.
After that, Myrtle had told Ginny she’d be satisfied with any magical family; she didn’t want to be seen as a ‘mudblood’ again, and wanted the benefits of cosmetic magic as well. Two days later, in the course of her research, Ginny had discovered that Myrtle’s non-magical sister had married a squib and given her a niece and a nephew, both muggles and newlyweds to other muggles. Myrtle had laughed herself silly at the idea of being her own great-aunt, and had accepted them as options, but she still preferred to be born to a magical family.
Ginny had carefully not mentioned that Lord Voldemort had, before becoming the Dark Lord, sired one child out of wedlock: Molly Prewett. A special little spell had kept the baby girl from inheriting things like parseltongue, but she was her own grandfather! And her own granddaughter!
That had been something she hadn’t realized until after she’d found Myrtle’s niece and nephew, having simply not thought about it.
But whereas that had been Myrtle’s only stipulation, Ginny had added a few more to her search without telling the girl.
She was going to ensure that not only would Myrtle be reborn as a girl, and she’d do so to a family that wouldn’t just accept her but care for her. To a family that would help her to accept her new appearance, whatever it was, without cosmetics, as Ginny had, rather than modifying herself.
She was going to make sure Myrtle’s second childhood was a happy childhood… and, as she had told her parents she wanted a sister and was carefully suggesting to them that they could afford to give her one, it might even be as Ginny’s younger sister. By a pretty large margin, but so? Their souls were the same age, and that was all she really cared about.
But aside from all that, she scanned the room- the Great Hall, in response to Hailey’s warning. Hermione and Silver did the same, and all three of them sent all the information they gathered straight to Hailey; for some reason probably related to her random acquisition of new powers every month or perhaps her ability to be in multiple places at once, Hailey had some truly insane processing skills to go with her perfect recall.
It took Ginny about a second to positively ID every other member of the Management Team in the Great Hall, along with most of the school’s staff and several hundred other students. She matched it with a psionic biosign scan of the room and all nearby spaces, covering around half the Castle- and immediately sent the scan to Hailey. Unexpectedly, she’d detected the Monster in her scan- and what looked like someone in a passage near it, though they were at the very edge of the scan, so it was hard to tell.
Seconds later, Hailey’s voice returned. “Found the victim. Mrs. Norris, outside Myrtle’s bathroom. Petrified.” There was a pause, in which Hailey sent Ginny, Hermione, and Silver a picture, showing Mrs. Norris- the caretaker Argus Filch’s pet cat- hanging from a torch bracket by her tail, a threatening message written on the wall underneath in scarlet paint. “Suspect escaped too quickly, identification negative.”
‘Suspect?’ Morning sent- but she was using a minicom, so the message was lacking in voice and tone, only carrying her meaning.
“Someone was near the Chamber entrance the Monster returned into,” Hailey promptly informed them. “Detected via Ginny’s powers. They got away before we could identify them.” There was a pause. “Myrtle says it was a girl, but she didn’t look.”
“Psionic signature looked like a possession,” Ginny observed.
“How many did we get?” Morning asked.
The silence held for almost a whole minute after that, during which the deserts appeared, and Percy asked Ginny if she was okay; she was still stiff from the announcement her brother hadn’t heard. “Y-Yeah,” she answered Percy. “I’m okay.”
Finally, as Hailey entered the Great Hall from her bathroom visit, she answered. “We’ve positively identified one thousand and twelve safe, leaving three thousand, three hundred seventy-two possible. Most identifications are Gryffindor and Ravenclaw house, but we’ve confirmed the Instructor Program’s management team to be safe.” She paired it with the upload of a large block of data that Ginny reflexively saved to her Seed without transferring it to biological memory.
She let out a sigh, and queried her Astrium down in the Chamber… then started directing the formation of the Obelisk Network Database through its own connection to her Obelisk. “We’ll have the database in two minutes,” she informed everyone, then sent just to Morning’s minicom. ‘And Morning, if you want to meet me in the Chamber of Secrets this Saturday, I can get you an Obelisk too.’
She could almost feel Morning’s raised eyebrow from across the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw tables. ‘Are you sure you want to offer me something that permanent?’
She allowed her lips to quirk in a smile as Hailey sat next to her and immediately started serving herself some dessert. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ It was kinda funny how she could tell Morning wasn’t objecting to it at all, merely confirming that she was making the offer.
“No doubt about it, Lockhart’s an idiot,” Ginny broadcast grumpily, while glaring at Lockhart. Once the feast had ended, someone had found Mrs. Norris, and everyone had stopped. Seconds later, Filch had arrived, and started accusing the people that had discovered the scene of killing his cat.
Seconds after that, while Filch was still making mild death threats in the direction of the twins that had just happened to be at the front, Professor Dumbledore had followed the sound of panic and arrived with Professors Snape, McGonagall, and Lockhart in tow.
Lockhart had offered the use of his office for the investigation, so Dumbledore had accepted it. He’d sent most of the students off to bed, while having the Twins follow him and the other Professors to Lockhart’s office… and asking Bonbon to summon the rest of the management team to the same office.
So they had come… and while Dumbledore bent over Mrs. Norris, examining her closely, Lockhart had started talking about the various things that had probably killed Mrs. Norris, without even waiting for confirmation that she was actually dead.
‘He did warn us Lockhart’s a fraud,’ Bonbon conceded through her minicom.
Ginny scowled at the difference. Wasn’t there a way to let the rest of the management team, or even the Professors, take advantage of the communications capabilities of the Obelisk… without making it permanent, nor requiring ACM installations? She called up the blueprints for the Obelisk and the minicom, and compared them. The difference was quite startling- but if she stripped out the Obelisk’s soul transfer capabilities, and replaced the psychic network with a psychic link between user and Obelisk and made it an electronic network directly between Obelisks… then she could also remove the ACM, which the Obelisk primarily used to link itself to the user’s soul.
Which would enable her new system to be installed and uninstalled on a whim. The device- a communicator, she decided, as a larger version of the minicoms- would be only a little bit bigger than the minicoms, as much of the Obelisk’s volume was spent in the hardware necessary for soul transfer, rather than that necessary to form a psychic link with the mind, which she’d omitted in her original design for the minicoms. She could easily run multiple separate networks simultaneously; one for the management team, one for the investigators, and one for the Hogwarts staff, for example. The full Obelisks would be compatible with such a network, just like they were with the minicoms- and unlike the Obelisk Network, it would be simplicity itself to simply assign identities to people in these networks, and in so doing, keep people from realizing who and what she was.
The main challenge would be that it would require twice as much Luminous Astrium as a minicom, though still not nearly as much as an Obelisk.
But… she had enough. She could do that. Especially now that the management team was confirmed safe, and she could tell Bonbon about the true extent of her Astrium production infrastructure.
Finally, Dumbledore straightened up suddenly. “She’s not dead,” he announced.
Lockhart immediately cut off in the middle of all the murders he’d prevented.
“Not dead?” Filch asked disbelievingly, looking up suddenly from where he’d been crying in the corner. “Then why is she all- All-?”
“She has been petrified,” Dumbledore informed him, and went on to tell Filch about Professor Sprout’s mandrakes.
They all ignored Lockhart’s declaration of “Ahh, I thought so.”
‘How hard would it be to connect senior staff to this network of yours?’ Bonbon asked suddenly.
Ginny blinked. “Easy,” she answered promptly. “I’ve also just come up with upgraded communicators that’ll expand the network capabilities significantly, eliminate the reliance on a hub location, and let us run multiple separate networks at once- ‘channels’, if you will. They’ll be just as easy to install as the minicoms.”
‘Expand the network capabilities?’ Bonbon queried.
“Yes- to make it a true telepathic network, rather than mental mail.”
“Sounds like it could be useful,” Hailey observed calmly, but Ginny noticed the amusement she poured liberally into her tone… none of which would make it into the message relayed to Bonbon’s minicom by the new database, as the minicoms just weren’t capable of it.
“Shall I let you suggest it to Dumbledore?” Ginny asked. “I don’t want him to know who I am.”
‘Predictably,’ Bonbon answered. ‘I’ll take care of the offer. When can we expect the upgrade?’
“First thing in the morning,” she answered. “I’ll have enough Communicators ready by then for all the Hogwarts staff as well.”