I got inspiration from that statement. I don't really have to use 'magnets' as the way to make it float, that was a clutch I was using. If I just tell the coin that gravity has no effect of it, then I can just control it like a spaceship. Granted it did take me another month to figure out how to do that, exactly, but I had extra time due to winter break. 

Since I was an orphan or at least since I had no place to go back too, I stayed in the castle over the break. I've been told repeatedly by the head of the horned serpent house that I would have a place to go over the summer, but I don't consider a small apartment and no magic allowed to be fun. Still it was marginally better then most of my winters with no guaranteed roof over my head, with frigid weather, but the no magic rule would be new. 

When winter break ended, people came back and surprising to me, sick. Sniffles and coughs could be heard hushed down corridors, and a lot of people visited the nurse wing for medicine. Everyone seemed to be on edge but that was partially because the ministry sent an inspector to come to the school right as class began again. Being sick while an inspector was here was not a good look. 

All of the teacher were writing it off as a simple cold, but I doubt it, since the medicine isn't curing people. We're in a magical society, colds should be simple to cure, but it just seems to be coming back constantly. 

And another note, I've gotten pretty close to my roommates and even Tom, you know, the chatterbox. The four of us are often together listening to some story Tom is going off on and interjecting occasionally, and it's kinda nice to have friends. Recently I've been getting into enchanting, as I've read that greatly helps magic control and I've made an awful invention. I got a baseball and was trying to test out enchanting all the magic I know on it and I've essentially made a small bludger. 

The way enchanting works is similar to typing on computers. Set some boundaries and with a little magic to power it it'll execute the action. It took a chunk of time to figure out how to add homing but it was a new way to view magic so I appreciate it. I spend an hour on enchantments and an hour on battle magic. I mean, all I do is repel a baseball flying at me but it's making me more flexible in dodging and stopping projectiles. 

Due to working with enchantments I've been trying math and by magic I hate it. I'm fine with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but anything more complicated I avoid like the plague. Since this is a magic school I don't need to even learn it but it makes enchanting so much easier I can't not learn it. 

So now I have a baseball that when I say "base" it'll fly at me 20 mph trying to take my head off. While I didn't specify it somehow knows how to curve around things instead of heading in a straight line but I figure that out. I set a bunch of keywords on it to do different things. The runes themselves can hold power so it acts like a battery that lasts about 30 minutes fully "charged", there's only two keywords "base" and "light". Light causes it to glow like a lightbulb but since there's no limits on brightness I use it to judge how much the runes are charged. 

Also I've been allowed to work with elemental abilities now, as Professor Lyness has judged I have enough control to work on it. I'm only allowed water right now, but she said she'll let me try other elements if I figure out how to stop using my body as a focus. 

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"I don't get why you're so happy with tutoring, I mean were already onto the Avifors spell in transfiguration. With actual teachers." 

"Col, I get to find cooler ways to use magic, I might be a little good at dueling even." Colbolt sighed and another voice chimed in.

"But Nate, and take this the right way, why do you think creating a death ball makes you a dueler?" 

"Obviously El, I can learn more flexible uses for basic spells. And the enchantments don't make it a death ball it's just a successful experiment." I reply, knowing more was to come. 

"But you know the bare minimum with spells, don't you want to learn something cooler, like what are you using now, a little stream of water out of your thumb? Don't you want to learn how to Fix things and slice things invisibly?" 

"Of course I do, I just can't yet, and I'll probably stumble upon it on my own. I'm making steady progress." 

"You shouldn't have to 'stumble upon it yourself' We're in a school that teaches and you should be... well taught." Raphael interjects again. 

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Tom was eating silently knowing the argument would go nowhere. The whole argument came from Nathan himself, As Colbolt and Raphael wanted to help tutor Nathan in the spells they were learning. Nathan kept refusing, for no good reason. Nathan kept saying it'd be dangerous for him to learn them but Tom believed how could a locking and unlocking charm go wrong? Best to just let Nathan do his thing and not bother him unless he came to them about it. 

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As dinner ended I could see Tom sweating, and looking a bit pale. He hasn't been talking much lately and that worries me a bit, Because I'm starting to believe this illness must be magical in nature and no one has discovered it yet. Or they have and the cure isn't working well. I set up a study group to look through magical illnesses and diseases just because it seems to be getting out of hand, and every time we ask the school nurse we get the "Don't worry about it we've got it all under control," adult saying. 

Unrelated to that I hit a breakthrough with magic in general after finding out the limits in enchanting. After I found I could just control the coin like a rocket ship in space, I found that how much a persons perspective changes the affects of magic. Every time I hit a 'breakthrough' of my own thoughts with magic it changes the way it works. 

Like through all my tests with Leviosa I can only make it move as fast as if I dropped it. My own perspective changed and I realized two things, Leviosa is the control of gravity, and physics applies to magic. Since while I did not like using math with magic, I did like physics, having used it before.

So now anytime I practice a spell, I ask myself what are the physics I can use with it, and I get a lot more flexibility. Although it also brought up another question, Why does Leviosa have a limit in it's speed if brooms can go much faster? At the end of the day I'll just study more to figure that out. Or I'll ask Raphael, since he's from a non-magical family and might get what I'm talking about. 

And probably one of the reasons it's mentally tiring to cast magic beyond a certain measure, like I said before with the speed, lifting heavier objects starts to make my head hurt and my eyes water. I can expertly maneuver coins, quills, clothes and even books with Leviosa, but anything heavier it's much harder to move at all. I can hover multiple things now simultaneously, and I managed to get them to spin and move in any direction I choose, but the concentration needed is like double for every new object I add. The maximum number of coins I can do efficiently is two. The maximum number of coins if I push myself into controlling is 7. 

For some reason it's easier if I just set a coin do a single thing and then focus on another instead of trying to control more then one at a time, since using the space idea I was able to orbit three coins around me and still have good control over two. Still had to use my hands for a focus but it's getting easier to stop using them to maintain magic. 

With all of these new ideas to test I'm only a 'little' jealous of everyone else can now practically reverse time.