After Hermione's unexpected visit, everything went according to plan.

In the end, feeling uncertain how she should spend her point, she decided to invest equally in magic and craft, augmenting both by 1 for the cost of 3 audience points and keeping her last point for later.

As for the return on her investment, she did fine with the Lumos spell in the charm. However, she could tell that her score of two on her magic attribute was somewhat under average.

Unlike the other kids, she came to every class prepared and knew the dictions and wand movement beforehand, so only Hermione beat her in terms of speed. However, she could tell that her Lumos was dimmer than Hermione's before the others caught up and confirmed what she had already guessed.

Then, she went to transfiguration, just as prepared as she was in charm. And not only did she not manage to transform her matchstick into a needle, but on the contrary, she felt her magic strongly rebelling, like a sickening wave coming from her hand and going down to wreak havoc in her guts. And like an instinct, she cut off her magic before the pain made her pass out, hugging herself as she gasped from the shock.

Then, the same happened when Flictwick decided it was time for them to learn the levitation spell. And so she knew the definition of a harmful spell, according to her spell. She could stab someone with a needle; the system would not let her transfigure one. And she could not levitate things cause though the spell's reputation was to be harmless, Ron managed to weaponize it.

So she now knew that 'any spell she could weaponize' counted toward the harmful spell she could not cast. But, on the contrary, she could cast the Lumos spell because it only produced light. And unlike variants of the spell, it never made blinding light that she could use for self-defense.

And so, while the others were learning spellcasting, she was learning to suppress her magic while pretending to do the same, so she could stop hurting herself every time she tried.

Only in potions was she able to lower her guard. The grouch of a potion master did not want to see them use their wand in his class anyway. And if you got past his snark remark and prepared for brewing in advance, first-year potions were reasonably straightforward.

Even more, after the first class, which went to the letter of what happened in the novel, she started paying attention to Snape's reprimand while doing her best not to take it personally. That's when she noticed the pattern. Except for Harry and occasionally Neville, Severus Snape, through the disguise of insults, was only giving sensible advice to Gryffindor while he was showering praise the Slytherin with praise but never truly helped them improve.

When the Slytherin asked for help, he effortlessly demonstrated how to do the job at his blinding fast pace that no one could follow or imitate. Then, should he want to see the snake do any better in his class, he would explain or guide them step by step.

But in the end, only Gryffindor receives those tips, though he delivers his advice through a heavy amount of verbal abuse. The ingredients and their preparations were crucial for a good potion, and so he demonstrated by always letting the Slytherin pick first.

Then, he delivered a lot of sensible, common-sense pieces of advice that Megan took to heart. For example, always work on a clean table, keep your hand steady and your sleeves, roll up and clean, prepare everything in advance, unless the recipe specifically says not to, never ever take your eyes off your cauldron during the actual brewing, and finally, the golden rule: always follow the damn recipe.

For the last part, Megan knew that Severus Snape consistently improved upon the recipes with outstanding results in his time as a student. And Megan hoped she would be able to do the same one day. But it would take a lot of studying in her free time and plenty of experiments that she knew she could never do in classes.

So when she got two additional audience points for no reason, she decided to invest two in craft and save the last one for her innate talent. It was a long shot and a bit of a gamble, but with both her magic and craft costing her four audience points each to improve them by one, she felt like paying ten to unlock new features was not that ludicrous anymore.

And she opened her character sheet and made her will known to the system:

Character Sheet

Character ID Character ID: Gryffindor Side-Character #6. Name Megan Jones Birth February 14th 1980 Blood status: Half-Blood Attributes Might Magic Will Craft 4 (1p) 2 (4p) 6 (1p) 4 (4p) Innate Talents Locked (10p) You have 1 audience points to spend. 26% left to the next one. Build an audience to get more. You have -39 story points. Current curse: You cannot cast any harmful spell. Create new content for the main character to get more points and alleviate the curse. Stealing more of the main character content will result in further points losses and worsen the curse. Magical Characteristics Wand

10.3, willow, phoenix feather

Known properties: healing.

Affiliation House Gryffindor Loyalty

None

Character Sheet Library Questlog Backlog

She sighed as she saw that despite investing six points in her attributes already to shore up her weaknesses, Magic was still her weakest stat by a long shot while her Will, whatever it was suppose to do, was still ridiculously high. At least, she was satisfied that her Craft finally caught up with her Might.

If she kept investing in magic up to four to even them out, she would have to invest no less than twelve point in what was likely her dump stat. In the other hand, if she saved everything to unlock her innate talent, it was a huge gamble. Maybe it would pay up, maybe not. But she did not felt like putting all her eggs in one basket.

But she did not felt like she should invest more in Craft before she felt like she needed it and there was no point raising her Might and Will stats until she knew for sure how it would help her. So she was back to square one, asking herself what she should do next. It was counting her chicks before they hatch as she only had one point left for the time being. But since she got two more points attending classes or whatever, there was a chance she could get more.

Then was the question of how she would clear in new quest before Christmas. She got the passing grades covered. The one friend conditions was about to be cleared, though she was not sure why it wasn't already. Making second best in on one subject was trickier. Potion was her best bet but would be trickier. And with her handicap, Astronomy or History of Magic were her second best options.

But getting mentioned, in the story, before Christmas, only left her with two choices: the Midnight Duel or Halloween. And since there was no way she would get anywhere near a troll with zero self-defense capability, her choice was made for her. And so, she just had to wait for the blond git to make his move.