[The chapter is edited by my Editor: Alan_Loo/AlanL]
Quinn started the first weekend of his fourth year at Hogwarts by visiting the Room of Requirements to begin the first motive of the year.
"Oh boy, it's been a while," Quinn rubbed his hands together as he looked around the Room of Requirement with delight in his eyes. "Haa~, now, let's start immediately."
He took out a small glass pane from his robes and gently set it down on the floor before walking a few strides away from it. As soon as Quinn was at an appropriate distance away from the glass, the glass expanded till it was back to full size.
The glass pane lying on the floor was the glass wall from the A.I.D office. He had brought it to the Room of Requirements to make some changes to it.
One of the main objectives for his fourth year was to fortify the A.I.D workshop, and the first step to achieving that was to strengthen the glass wall that separated the office from the workshop.
"Okay, let's create tempered glass," Quinn said as he squatted at the edge of the glass pane and looked at the surface and the thickness of the glass. "First, I have to thicken the glass. This one is a bit thin, I think."
Quinn took out a cloth pouch bag from his robes. He opened the string binding the bag and scattered shards of glass all over the glass pane, expanding the glass shards back to their original size.
Wisps of wavy magic flowed from Quinn to the glass, and the glass turned into a state of transformation and then a liquid. All the liquid glass mixed with each other to form a giant blob of liquid glass. Quinn applied transmutation magic to reform the glass into one uniform pane of glass and molded it to appropriate shapes and dimensions.
Tempered or toughened glass was a type of safety glass processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with traditional glass. Tempering sets the outer surfaces into compression and the interior into tension. Tempered glass was about four times stronger than conventional glass. The higher contraction of the inner layer during manufacturing induced compressive stresses in the glass's surface balanced by tensile stresses in the glass's body.
The result of tempering the glass was that it had four times the strength and durability of the previous one.
"I have to make cuts and mold the glass into shape," Quinn said as a tape measure came out of his robes and started to measure the glass. A felt-tip pen also came out from his robes and made markings and shapes to help the cutting that would be done afterwards.
The tempered glass had to be cut to the appropriate size or pressed to shape prior to tempering. Besides, it couldn't be re-worked once tempered. Polishing the edges or drilling holes in the glass had to be carried out before the tempering process started. Due to the balanced stresses in the tempered glass, damage to any portion would eventually result in the glass shattering into thumbnail-sized pieces.
Of course, magic could overcome that problem, but Quinn wanted to do it the traditional way and prepare the shape and layout of the glass wall before tempering the glass. He hadn't done this before, so Quinn wanted to do the tried and tested way.
"Okay, let's do this," Quinn put on his trusty leather gloves and levitated the glass that had been cut, polished, frosted, and molded in a uniform shape.
"First step of tempering a glass. Heat it to a temperature of six hundred and eighty-three degrees Celsius," read Quinn from the small notepad in his hand.
Quinn's approach for tempering the glass was the thermal approach. He would heat the glass to compress it and form an interlayer of tension between two compressions.
The only good thing that had come out of the sin curse was the time Quinn had spent in the library. He spent hours every day voraciously reading books, and a topic of study that he had covered during his readings was fire, or more specifically, the concept of heat.
Taking a deep breath, Quinn channeled his magic into the glass and flooded the entire thick pane of glass. Closing his eyes, Quinn triggered a change in his magic and heated up the glass. Quinn needed a fast, uniform thermal temperature throughout the glass.
After the temperature reached six hundred and eighty-three degrees Celsius, Quinn opened his eyes and immediately changed the magic from hot to cold.
The glass immediately went from molten to frozen... but it promptly shattered.
Quinn didn't look discouraged and walked to the shattered glass, which was still levitating in the air, and observed what had happened. After a minute of studying the failed result, Quinn judged,
"I need to heat it faster. Again!"
The shattered glass returned to its unbroken state through transmutation, and the process repeated over again.
This time, Quinn raised the temperature of the glass faster. He channeled magic and used a different heating spell design to increase the heat more quickly and with higher efficiency for heating glass.
"Shifting to cold," Quinn murmured. The heat switched off, and cold reigned supreme in the glass, quenching the glass uniformly.
*Crunch!!*
The glass cracked into rough shards, and countless glass pieces floated in the air.
"I can try to keep the same heat and cool it slower," speculated Quinn and hypothesized, before saying, "Again!"
There was a smile on Quinn's face the entire time as he heated the glass and cooled it down. The smile even remained when the glass deformed, shattered, or didn't come out tempered.
'Ah, this feels nice,' that thought encompassed Quinn's state of mind.
Doing magic that he found compelling felt nice to Quinn. It didn't have the exhilarating feeling of blasting objects with destructive magic that he felt last year.
This was different.
Watching how the wisps of flame danced on the glass's surface or when the ice relaxed down the glass and sizzled brought joy to Quinn. Changing the temperatures, heat, cold, the timing of heating and cooling, small changes that just made sense.
All of it was mesmerizing to Quinn.
It was fun, it was calm... It was magic.
After an hour and a half of shattering glass, making changes to the process, and trying dozens of times, Quinn finally produced a perfect pane of tempered glass.
"Done," Quinn raised his hands and admired his new glass wall that would be in his office.
He shrunk the glass wall down to a pocket-sized version, put it inside his robes, and exited the Room of Requirements to have lunch before going to the A.I.D classroom and set up the wall.
- (Scene Break) -
A well-fed Quinn entered the empty A.I.D classroom with his suitcase in hand. He turned the key twice in the keyhole and opened the door.
The classroom was bare and empty. Not a sign of the room being ever occupied.
After last year, he had taken every single thing inside the office and the workshop. After losing control of his magic, Quinn wasn't in any shape to fortify his workshop, so he just packed up everything home with him.
Tables, workstations, desks, cupboards, cabinets, raw material, tools, and everything there was in the classroom went home with Quinn.
Quinn set down the suitcase on the floor, and opened it with a couple of clicks. The owner descended into the expanded suitcase and entered the room with all the stuff from the A.I.D classroom.
A powerful wave of magic slammed into every single object in the room, and the entire inventory shrunk down for Quinn to levitate and bring out of the suitcase. After thoroughly cleaning the room, Quinn set up everything where it belonged and got back to setting up the wall.
First, Quinn widened the wall to wall indent in the roof and floor to accommodate the increased thickness of the glass wall. He then pulled out the shrunken glass wall and expanded it slowly so he could line it into the indents that were on the top and at the bottom.
The wall fitted snugly into the indents at its regular size. A moment later, the wall and the floor were transmuted to grip the surface of the glass wall, and the building material Quinn had taken out to increase the size of the indents also went to the roof and floor to create more support for the glass wall.
Quinn stepped back and admired the glass wall and double-checked if it was firmly in its place before making a beckoning gesture and pulling a barstool for him to sit on.
He touched the wall with his right hand, resting his palm and fingers snug against the cool glass. After eyeing the wall for a moment, Quinn injected magic into the glass wall.
Purple waves of magic went through the glass every few seconds, reaching every corner of the wall. The purple waves of magic were the unbreakable charms being imbibed into the glass.
Unbreakable charm wasn't the correct name for the spell because it didn't make an object unbreakable. No, it only strengthened objects so that they would become more resilient to external forces.
Quinn was increasing the resilience of the glass so that it would become difficult to break.
Why not do this to a regular pane of glass instead of a tempered pane of glass? Well, the stronger the base material, the stronger result after placing the unbreakable charm. Tempered glass was naturally tougher than regular glass. So if you put unbreakable charms on it, the result would be much better.
Quinn sat there for five minutes channeling magic into the glass before the charm saturated the glass and could no longer make it any stronger.
The next step of fortifying the glass wall was to make it resistant to transfiguration and transmutation. The strengthened glass would be useless if you could just create a hole in it through transfiguration and pass through it.
There wasn't a way to fully disable transfiguration and transmutation as it was not feasible to isolate every single spell type and individually disable them one by one. So the next best thing Quinn could do was to make it resistant to magical changes.
The concept behind achieving something like that was easy.
'Using transfiguration and transmutation to defend against transfiguration and transmutation,' smiled Quinn, in thought.
Pushing more magic into the wall, Quinn commanded his magic to transfigure the glass that made up the wall to stay the same. Quinn was forcing glass matter to stay as glass. He was making his magic to freeze/jam the state of matter so that when someone tried magic against the glass, it would be difficult to budge as Quinn's magic was forcing the glass to stay the way it was currently.
- (Scene Break) -
After the wall was done came the turn for the door.
The thing about doors in walls was that people went for the door when trying to break in. No one tried to break the actual wall when you had a door in it.
The doors were thinner than the walls they were fitted in and were made from a relatively weaker material. Quinn's wooden door was no different, and it clearly showed when Ivy Potter kicked the door down to enter the workshop.
So to make sure his door wouldn't be the hole in his defense, Quinn decided to make sure it would be a hassle to break.
Quinn started with the door's wood. He used the hardest wood available to him and bought a few logs of Australian Buloke wood. This wood had a very strength-toughness level on a pound-force scale.
"I have to stain it in a hardening solution," uttered Quinn as he took out a bucket of a red potion solution that he had finished brewing yesterday. He looked at the viscous red liquid and chuckled, "This baby took three days to brew. Oh, this is going to be good~."
The red solution would strengthen the wood fibers when absorbed into the material.
"Plus, it will give the wood a nice red sheen."
Quinn looked at the Australian Buloke wood logs and levitated them over the center island. Slowly, he turned the wood into sawdust by breaking down the wooden logs into a coarse powder. He made sure that the wood powder didn't fly over the room.
He separated the sawdust into multiple trays and poured the red hardening solution into the trays. As he poured the liquid over the sawdust, the sawdust started to move and mix with the red potion liquid.
Quinn had converted the wood into sawdust so that every fiber would get exposed to the potion, strengthening the wood at a deeper level.
"Okay, done." Quinn finished pouring the liquid over the multiple trays. Now, he just needed to give it time for the solution to get mixed and get completely absorbed into the wood. Quinn continued mixing the wood using magic and moved along.
"Now, where is that high-carbon steel plate," Quinn looked around the workshop and found a sheet of high-carbon steel. "Alright, this will do. This will do very well."
Quinn laid the metal sheet on the floor and punched ten holes in the sheet; two rows of four holes and one row of two holes. The metal sheet was going inside the door, and the holes were there so the wood could go through them and really bind the metal with the wood.
The next part of the door was the lock. Quinn used the same high-carbon steel to craft a lock system with a regular lock opened with a key.
The other part of the lock was a system of thirteen steel cylinders that would enter the door from the frame around the door. And these cylinders couldn't be released from the door with the key. They had to be released by magic, and if no one knew about the cylinders, no one would figure out how to disable the cylinder system.
Ten minutes of unbreakable charms into the metal finally saturated the metal with magic. It couldn't be made any stronger by the use of the unbreakable charm.
By the time Quinn was done, the wood was prepared. It was ready to be turned into a wooden door with a metal plate inside.
The punched high-carbon steel sheet along with the lock system floated in the air as Quinn directed it with his left hand. He pointed his right hand towards sawdust trays, and around three-quarters of treated sawdust flew towards the metal sheet.
The wood fibers gathered around the metal and formed a red door made from treated Australian Buloke wood and a high-carbon steel core and locks. The completed door also went through the same treatment of transfiguration and transmutation resistance.
The remaining quarter of the treated sawdust flew towards the rectangular opening in the glass wall and formed a wooden frame for the door to fit in. The rectangular opening in the glass wall had notches around it for the wooden frame to fit on the glass wall.
Quinn fitted the door in the frame and entered the thirteen cylinders into the wooden frame, five on both lengths of the door and three on the top breath of the door.
"Done," celebrated Quinn as he opened the door and went back and forth. When he closed the door, the steel cylinders were inserted into the door in such a way that the cylinders were door and frame at the same time, jamming the door with the frame.
"Now, let's put some charms to punish anyone who touches the door." Quinn shot spells at the door that would shock and burn anyone who would touch the door and an anti-unlocking charm on the regular lock.
"Yeah, try to break this door, Ivy Potter," smirked Quinn.
Quinn West - MC - Fortifying the A.I.D classroom.
FictionOnlyReader - Author - Don't know why I wrote this chapter, but I did. So... thanks for reading.
