Chapter 32.2- Doom Days

Or as fair as it could be with someone like me on the board. The threats to my life were not limited to schoolyard foes and rivalries, and that was enough to make it clear to me that this didn’t mater. I’d still win, because Doom would never lose, but I’d do it with the understanding that the gap between me and them meant nothing because they weren’t the yardstick I would measure myself against. That yardstick sat calmly on the judge’s table, not even decent enough to openly declare himself my enemy— just satisfied with trying to make others do his manipulations on his behalf.

In the original task, Potter had used gillyweed to cover the distance and had made it there first because of the advantages of the substance. In this world, beyond being tested, we had been searched for magical substances of any nature so I doubted something like that would have been appreciated very much. It mattered little though. The task switched focuses too quickly for me to agree to being relegated to only living beneath the sea for an hour. What if I finished in less time? Sure, I could take a lesser dose, but then what if I needed more because the black lake ended up being much more troublesome than anticipated.

Either way, it was less than suitable for my purposes and so I had to settle for an alternative. In this case, that alternative ended up being transfiguration. While I hadn’t ended up having an animagus form, my studies with Sirius ha taken my human transfiguration skills to a level where even Tom Riddle would have been jealous. The canon rang out and both Cedric and Fleur used bubblehead charms like in the books while Krum transfigured his head into a shark in a feat that I could have easily replicated if not for the indignity that doing something so inelegant and imprecise.

Instead, I took my time to make something beautiful. The first transfiguration began in my lungs. Sirius had been the one to plan out and do the studying for this on account of his infinite free time so I was essentially just copying his work. I transfigured my airways next, and then came my neck, to create a set of gills that would take in and expel water, a set of airways that would accept that water, filter it and take out the oxygen before sending the rest of the water out through the gills. The biology didn’t make complete sense, but he had Manton’s law— the basic rule that it was nearly impossible to kill yourself with your own magic and if you tried to do something otherwise suicidal, your magic would step in to bridge the gap rather than letting you die. Once he finished with that, he transfigured his feet into a set of flippers before looking at the clock to note that two minutes had passed. The others had a lead on him, but nothing insurmountable.