7

You need a bigger area to really let loose in for practice, but first you really need to learn how to apparate. It'll be faster and safer if you can just pop from one place to the other—real wizards don't have to wait for a bus.

Rather than attempting to conjure hoops you transfigure some trash into chalk and make four circles in your apartment—one by the front door, one in the bathroom, one in the 'living room', and the final over by the window. You also take the time to silence the walls, floor, and ceiling before standing in the door ring and concentrating.

You had prepared for this when you woke up this morning and did your normal Occlumency by going over what information and wisps of memory you had on apparition. The official Ministry of Magic way involves both a wand in your hand and a twist of the body like you're about to pirouette. You…. Nah, you don't want to have to do that. A dignified standing teleport will be just fine. There'll be time to learn flashy smoke-teleports or the like later.

Five minutes and plenty of determination and deliberation later you still haven't gotten any closer to actually apparating. Frowning, you take out your wand and hold it. If this doesn't work you'll be forced to twirl around like an idiot and that just isn't acceptable in the slightest.

The wand seems to be the missing part—most likely you're not quite in tune with your magic enough to do it wandlessly. Now you need just a moment of concentration before you find yourself jammed through a tube and over by your window, a loud crack echoing in your ears. You turn and focus on the circle in the living room and try to apparate slower. The noise is a bit softer but the twisting feel is even worse, you need a moment to breathe deeply and work on not throwing up. As soon as you feel okay again you apparate without looking to the bathroom changing it up by not pushing as hard. You arrive with a soft pop and smirk at yourself in the mirror.

You proceed to use apparition to pop over to the open trunk and summon out a beginning primer on warding, as well as one called A Wizard's Home is His Castle by Gundolf du Bec. Popping to your chair, you crack the warding book open. It explains how runes are used to prepare either the area to be warded or markers that defined a warded area—commonly known as runestones. Those runestones capture a spell cast and spread it out either radiating from a single stone or in an area defined by multiple stones. Skipping ahead a bit, you see that this particular book's only going to be showing some very basic spells to turn in to wards but they'll still be super useful to you. The muggle-repelling charm and the notice-me-not are the major draw, but fire-suppression, room-sealing, and intruder detection aren't shabby either. A bit of reading tells you that you probably shouldn't put the muggle-repelling stuff on your apartment, the effect of the ward radiates out from the stones so there would likely be leakages into the surrounding apartments and that would definitely draw attention. Nevertheless, some of the other spells will work.

You flip back to the runes primer and pull out a notepad, spending an hour going over the very abbreviated syllabary used in the book. You're not going to be able to do anything other than make runestones for the few wards in this particular book, but that's enough for now, and you can use this bootstrap to expand your runes knowledge later.

A half hour or so before you need to meek with Derek you gather all your stuff and apparate to an area you had noticed near the cafeteria yesterday that held a backup generator. The enclosure was facing away from any paths and occluded vision from all directions except directly in front of it. Peeking your head around the bushes shows you a few people walking farther down the path so you stroll out and head to the Library.

Derek is already set up at a table even though you're both early and there's a woman with him, the two of them chatting quietly as they worked. Walking up Derek gives you a nod before gesturing over to the woman. "My cousin Erica, she's a sophomore." She raises a hand in greeting, her sunglass-covered eyes (even indoors?) turning towards you even though she doesn't say anything.

The two of you get stuck into Derek's report—like he had said, the short paper is done, but he clearly talked around some of the subject matter in a way that makes it obvious that there are some gaps in his understanding. You go over things and chat in between, even getting a couple of comments out of the otherwise silent Erica. At one point when you respond 'TANSTAAFL' to one of his arguments and then break down to explain it—'there ain't no such thing as a free lunch'—Erica stifles a snort and swats him on the back of the head.

"He was homeschooled like me, but like most boys from our clan never cared about doing any reading for fun. Your Heinlein quotes won't mean anything to him." She smiles at his scowl and dismisses him with a flick of her fingers.

Derek's no idiot, though, and after finding an explanation that works for him he's pretty quick to fix the issues with his paper. They convince you to join them in the cafe for lunch and you're introduced to half-a-dozen other cousins of various stripes. All are sophomores or older, split between business and chemistry majors. There's an interesting combination of accents at play as well, some speaking like Derek, some with perfect diction like Erica.

You do manage to slip away to the bathroom and cast the emotion-sensing version of Legilimency. Unfortunately it doesn't tell you anything you couldn't figure out yourself—they all seem fairly fond of each other with no obvious signs of anger or irritation.

All of them leave as a big group, heading off to some kind of 'family thing' that they had mentioned a few times. You watch them go before finding the your new apparition point and popping back to your apartment. You'll need actual stone or gems for long lasting wards, but wood will work fine for short-term emplacement. You find a broken desk in the seventh compartment that offers decent material and you sketch out a combined room-seal and intruder-suppression ward and place the markers at the edges of the walls. Once stuck to the walls and bounding the area to be warded, you cast the spells in order, sweeping your wand and pushing the spell out to each corner. There's a click in your spellcasting and you feel the spell pulled away from your control as it snaps into place over the room.

Flush with success, you gather a hoodie and a plain gray scarf to wrap around your lower face and apparate to Cooks Ave with the softest pop you can manage. After a look around to verify no one saw you you feel out with both mind and magic to verify no one's around, you slip out the back and head towards the docks. Once you're off the major roads you wrap the scarf over your face and pull your hood up.

Yes, the Docks are cliche but there are a huge number of abandoned buildings of all sizes here from small shacks to warehouses. The Undersiders' base is somewhere central-Docks related, so you stay on the outskirts and look for a building that's in decent condition. The first likely building you run across is a corrugated-steel blue-green building with a couple of garage doors on the north and south sides. The street-side is blocked by a upended dumpster and a shoulder-high bunch of bricks from the partially-collapsed building across the street. You walk the length and make sure nothing comes up on your scan as human, then find the single access door on the side and pop it open with an alohamora. A look around the interior doesn't tell you what was done in here—there's a few milling machines and lathes so it may have been some kind of machine shop. Even with the high ceiling it's only a single floor, with two overhead cranes hanging down. Smaller equipment seems to have been removed, leaving the skeleton of the building largely intact. Some puddles on the floor point to roof leaks and you use air freshening charms liberally. There are no interior windows, giving this a very Fallout vibe. You levitate some junk from outside in and prop it against the door before popping outside and making sure no one will be able to get in.

The next decent building is almost the opposite of the metal one you'd found previously. This is a three-story building, arched doors and windows on the first and third floors, regular windows on the second. Inside one side of the building has what were probably offices on all three floors with the remainder being an open warehouse area. Nothing is blocking entrance to the building, and it even looks to have been looted previously, but the cross streets near it are choked with burnt-out husks of cars and rubble, making it difficult to get to in the first place. Again the shell of the building is in great shape, although you only see one window with intact glass, all the way on the third floor.

Unfortunately when you're looking around most other areas seem to have squatters either living inside or nearby, or have gaping holes somewhere where patching it would be pretty obvious. Making your way up to a roof you look over and see a clear, sheltered area off in the Trainyard and apparate over to it.

Stalking towards the Boat Graveyard side of the Trainyard you finally manage to find a train shed that's completely intact and has a couple of old coal cars tipped over along one side, blocking all of those windows from view. There's enough debris around that you could block the other side and the two entrances on either side as well. The tin roof is patchy in a few places but fixable, but like most places, the glass windows are a loss.

You apparate back to your apartment and spend the evening going over the Castle book. It contains both charms and transfigurations for buildings, focusing mostly on stone. It would take practice, but you should be able to take random debris—and there's plenty of stone for a like-to-like transfiguration—and turn it in to seamless fixes for any structural issues you may have missed. Similarly, the book offers some suggestions of transfiguration with glass and glass shards, all you'd need to do is summon glass shards and use a mass transfiguration to meld them all together into fixed panes. The glass can even be controlled to ooze up into place and cover existing muntins.

Tomorrow you'll have to start dealing with classes again, but with apparition down you just need to find a few more safe spots to cover most of campus and your travels should be pretty simple.