The Weasley's entertained their guests with a hearty dinner, or rather it was hard to be glum when such a large group of people were eating together, no matter what they were eating.
No one at the table talked about the current situation in the Order of the Phoenix and the wizarding world, and it was clear that no one wanted to talk about formal matters in this relaxed atmosphere.
It was Charlie who lanted the fact that the Quidditch World Cup wouldn't be held this year, he had always been a good Quidditch player and was a Seeker for the Gryffindor Quidditch team at a ti when Hogwarts Castle hadn't fallen.
Arthur was also particularly interested in the chanical side of Muggles and asked Hermione and Jon for a lot of insights into cars and planes.
Jon felt that if Sir Stoker was still alive, then Arthur would have had quite a lot to share with him; they both ca from pureblood families and similarly shared a great interest in a wide range of muggle things.
After dinner, Molly brought them to their rooms, the Burrow may seem crude, but there was no shortage of room, and there was more than enough room for Jon and the rest of them, while Gabrielle shared a room with Ginny.
Subsequently, the days in the Burrow were largely spent playing.
George and Fred did ntion that they were going to tinker around with so joke magic props, but after Ginny took Jon and Gabrielle on a surprise raid to their secret workshop in the basent and looked at what they had made, Jon noticed what they were making was not just for jokes.
When the secret was discovered and Ginny threatened her two brothers with telling their mother what they were up to, Jon picked up one of the black orbs the size of a baseball and got the distinct feeling that there was sothing unnatural harbouring in it.
"This ball won't blow anything up, will it?"
Fred, who was trying to appease his sister and make a deal with her on various terms so that she wouldn't tell on them, was startled when he saw Jon pick up the ball and hastily snatch it out of his hands.
"That's not ant to be touched! It's an immature experint that George and I ca up with, it's not perfected yet, and it's too dangerous."
Jon could of course see that the ball was carved with ancient runes all over its surface, he had dedicated so ti to study these things after he had got the stone slab full of ancient runes from the tower, although he wasn't exactly well-versed, he could at least read certain inscriptions.
"So you guys know how dangerous it is, isn't it a bit too much to have fun with sothing like this in your own ho."
George and Fred froze and then laughed at each other, they too could see that Jon had figured out exactly what it was.
"Don't worry about it, we designed it with a very light force since we first started the experint, probably sothing like the dynamic of a firecracker."
Jon looked over at their whole basket of 'firecrackers', knowing full well that sothing as powerful as a firecracker at the mont could be very different with a few additional strokes of runes on it.
The twins could see that Jon was not going to be easy to fool, so they looked at each other and coaxed Ginny and Gabrielle out of the room, then dragged Jon to show him "Weasley's real secret workshop".
It was a workspace hidden behind a cupboard where the black orbs were kept, and as soon as they opened the door, a worktable full of material craved with various ancient runes and enchanted with so kind of magic was presented to Jon.
"This is our biggest personal secret, just take a look, Jon, and don't tell anyone, especially not Mum and Dad."
George clearly had sothing on his mind and tried to drag Jon along with them in a whisper.
The display of these things in the small workshop further convinced Jon that the two bold twins were not working on so simple Joke props.
So of those ancient runes were too complex for Jon to recognise, and the vast majority of them had sothing to do with dark magic!
The basket of black balls he had found at the beginning had been inscribed with the runes of a blasting curse, but it was clear that George was so rusty that they could only create sothing that could only produce about a tenth of the effect of a normal blasting curse, or rather a "cannonball" as they called it.
This is not a trivial thing; in the grand sche of things, the two brothers are privately researching dark magic, and in Britain during peaceti, they could be imprisoned in Azkaban and fed to dentors.
Even if it seed to be on a more or less trivial scale, they were doing this kind of stuff in the underground storage room of their own ho, and if they were not careful, they could potentially set the whole Burrow on fire.
Jon picked up a small piece of iron with runes inscribed all over it, and instead of reprimanding them first, he asked suspiciously.
"Where did you guys learn all this stuff?"
Fred coughed lightly, a look of pride creeping over his face.
"We're geniuses too! Jon, we learned it without a teacher!"
"Oh, that's fabulous, I'm going to tell Mr and Mrs Weasley the good news so that they can be happy too."
"No, no, no!"
George and Fred stopped what would equate to murder by hastily grabbing one of Jon's arms in unison.
"Okay, let's be honest." George raised an eyebrow, "You know, we worked on so really aweso magic props back in the day at school."
"Of course, I know that." Jon looked at the expression of pride that he actually managed to put on with a blank look, "Very aweso indeed, aweso enough for Professor McGonagall to punish you guys with detention for getting your dorm room into a state of complete shambles."
"Hey, it's not like we have ever used it to play pranks on people, at most we scare Ron at ho." Fred waved his hand, "Those things are a source of pride for George and and a great exercise for our hands-on skills!"
"You guys know the point I want to hear."
"Don't rush it, you've got to give us so bragging ti, don't you? Later, when we set sail on Hogwarts, we didn't have much energy for that, but in between we invented a 'repelling rod' for a fishing tournant and tried to give it to Justin, tricking him into thinking it was a good rod that would catch fish whenever it was swung, but he caught on our the whole trick straight away."
George picked up on Fred's words.
"Yes, but it was Fred's fault, he didn't stop Justin from putting the hook into the bucket of water that was full of fish at the ti, and those fish would rather jump out of the bucket than be in a bucket of water with the hook. Then, we made no new inventions until we reached Durmstrang, though, we stayed honest for a fair number of days, until after you disappeared from that castle when we-"
"A return to your old ways?"
"It's called a montary itch!" Fred called out, "But we also knew it wasn't our own property by any ans, so we researched with restraint and basically made things around that frozen lake."
"But one always has to find ways to progress, George and I couldn't make things out of thin air no matter how genius we might be, so then we set our sights on Durmstrang's library, which wasn't off limits to us, and we found a lot of different magic books there than in Hogwarts' library."
George rubbed his hands together.
"It was around that ti that the old librarian who was in charge of the library noticed us; after all, we couldn't always avoid him if we wanted to borrow the books out. He spotted our oddities from those books we were borrowing, and then once sneaked up on us and found us working on sothing near the lake."
"At the ti we had just learned the ancient runes related to the blasting curse and made our first Weasley orb, which was what you found in that basket. Fred and I talked about our intention to test and blast it a little further out, we already knew by that ti that it couldn't be less potent as a couple of failures had shattered the ice of the lake and nearly got us caught by that Deputy Headmistress of Durmstrang."
"The old man called Alpha caught us red-handed and got his hands on the Weasley Orb we had just made, and he was well aware of our research."
Fred slapped his forehead a little helplessly.
"I suspect he actually started to follow us way early on, but he didn't give us a hard ti, just took the orb and asked us a few questions before offering to give us permission to enter and leave the school and go off-campus to conduct our experints, so that we could not only avoid being discovered by the professors at Durmstrang but could also circumvent accidents."
"George and I were not misled by his words and thought he must have had ulterior motives and were thinking of just ignoring it until he approached us again later on saying he could fund us in the na of the Headmaster of that school."
There was a distinct tinge of excitent in his tone as he said this.
Jon, on the other hand, frowned slightly.
"In the na of the Headmaster? That Headmaster Bagshot?"
"Yes, it's him." George said, slapping his thigh, "He gave us a permit to enter and leave the school freely, and it was signed with that Headmaster's na on it - Gellert Bagshot. He also gave us so ordinary and rare magical materials and promised that whenever we needed them, they could provide us with any normal help. Even the forbidden section of the library on the upper level was open to us, so we could consult it as much as we wanted in there, except that we couldn't borrow it."
"And all we need to do is to keep a copy of the complete research data and hand them together with a sample of the finished product whenever we have any."
Fred said in a whisper with his eyes darting around.
"At first we planned to superficially agree and give them random materials of so prank prop after we got all the benefits. But then the librarian, as if reading our minds, pulled out a magic contract and told us to go back and think about it, and if we decided to agree to all the terms, then we had to sign my na and George's na on that contract."
Jon stared at the two genuinely ballsy twins, not expecting them to even think of doing sothing like eating Grindelwald dry and then turning the other way.
"And after that, you signed the contract?"
George had a matter-of-fact look on his face.
"Why wouldn't we sign such a good deal? We're not working on ordinary magic joke props, Jon. You should be able to see the potential of these Weasley Orbs, once we've finally perfected how to inscribe the runes of the blasting curse on them intact without any conflict within the Orb itself, each one of these Weasley Orbs is a perfect blasting curse!"
Fred was also holding up a small wooden stick on the workbench that looked exactly like the wand as if a treasure to be presented.
"And this thing, the 'Anti-Disarm Wand'! This is also our latest creation, this wooden stick, of course, can't cast spells like a real wand, and George and I don't have the skills to make a real wand either, but in this stick, we have inscribed a special confundus charm ancient runes. These runes were specially made to deal with the disarming charm, so as long as the wizard carrying it is hit by the disarming charm, even if the wand is hit by the disarming charm, only this fake wand will fly up and the real wand will not be affected at all!"
Intrigued by his words, Jon took the fake wand in Fred's hand, knowing full well that it really could no longer be considered a joke prop, and if it really worked as well as Fred said it did, it would definitely qualify as a strategic item.
"You have finished it completely?"
George shook his head as if with great reluctance and told the truth.
"Ninety percent done, I think, we have perfected the confusion charm inscribed on top of the fake wand specifically targeting the disarming charm well enough based on what we learned from Durmstrang, but during the real test we found that if it is a disarming charm with normal potency, the fake wand can indeed work, but if the enemy's magic becos a bit too intense, then it will take the real wand along with the disard fake wand."
Even so, this thing is already considered a finished product.
The fact that it had no way of resisting a powerful disarming charm could only an that the runes inscribed on it by George and Fred were a little weaker, and the root cause lay in the fact that none of their own magic and skills had grown to their peak yet.
This is a problem that can be solved later.
"And this!"
The twins didn't treat Jon like an outsider at all, and Fred pulled out another iron bar that resembled a television antenna.
"This is still only half-finished, but it's good enough for the functions we expected at the beginning, it's called the 'Broom Hunter'."
By the na, Jon could probably guess what this would be used for.
"Specifically designed to target flying brooms?"
"Yes! The idea was that by simply extending this thing, it would render any nearby flying brooms useless. But the difficulty of making an item with such a function was a bit too great, and we broke several flying brooms in our tests, all of which were provided by the Durmstrang side, and it turned out that it could only damage the oldest Cleansweep series magic brooms, the ones with simpler enchantnts on them. And the distance it could radiate was just too short, probably a circular area with a radius of about three tres around its centre, and there is simply no way for that distance to affect brooms flying high in the sky."
The more he heard their account, the more serious the look on Jon's face beca.
What the Weasley twins were working on couldn't even be described as joke props intended for pranks, these could create an entire arsenal of the magical world if they could actually create them exactly the way they wanted and mass produce them!
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