Early the next morning, Charles went to find Dumbledore to discuss the matter of the breeding house.Dumbledore readily agreed, though he made a suggestion of his own.
"There's no need to place the breeding house at the edge of the Forbidden Forest," he said with a twinkle in his eyes. "Why not build it directly inside your office instead?"
Using the Extension Charm wasn't exactly a difficult task.
"Unless you're willing to use that Elder Wand of yours to make a space like Newt's suitcase," Charles replied with a grin, "I still think the Forbidden Forest would be better."
He clearly didn't intend to miss this chance to make Dumbledore do a bit of the heavy lifting.
In truth, Charles's Rainbow Wand was immensely powerful—almost on par with the Elder Wand—but there was still a considerable gap between his mastery of magic and Dumbledore's. Besides, two wizards working together would always produce better results.
"I'd be delighted to help," Dumbledore said cheerfully.
He was, in fact, a little concerned that Charles's Pokémon might disrupt the ecosystem of the Forbidden Forest. When he'd visited Newt before, relations between Pokémon and magical creatures hadn't always been harmonious.
After all, most Pokémon loved to battle, and many large magical beasts could unleash devastating destruction once provoked.
For instance, Charles's Charizard had once challenged Newt's Thunderbird.To Charizard, it had been a friendly sparring match.To the Thunderbird, however, it had been a threat to its very life.
So Dumbledore ultimately proposed modifying Charles's office instead. He picked up his wand, and the two of them got to work.
Under their combined effort—though mostly Dumbledore's, who handled at least sixty percent of the workload—Charles's office became something entirely new: a two-layered structure.
The outer layer still looked like a normal office, but once the inner door was opened… it revealed a completely different world.
Charles, not wanting to waste Dumbledore's "free labor," expanded the interior many times over.
By the time they were done, Charles had no doubt that the inner space was at least ten times larger than the entire grounds of Hogwarts—Black Lake and the Forbidden Forest included.Forget a breeding house—anyone who saw it would call it a nature reserve.
"All that's left is to create the various environments," Dumbledore said with delight. "Imagine how wonderful it would be if students could take lessons in such a place."
He smiled wistfully. "It's a shame this class didn't exist when I was a student. If you don't mind, may I sit in sometime?"
Even Dumbledore found Pokémon to be a great mystery, and he was deeply intrigued by these strange and fascinating creatures. Though he had learned a little from Charles before, that knowledge had been rather superficial.
"Of course," Charles replied warmly.
He welcomed the idea—seeing Pokémon from a magical perspective was a rare and valuable approach. His own Rainbow Wand was a product of years of such experimentation.
If a magic master like Dumbledore could offer ideas or guidance, the research would advance by leaps and bounds. Who knew? If Charles managed to discover a dozen magical applications for the blood of Dragon-type Pokémon, he might even end up featured on a Chocolate Frog Card.
Once the main work was complete, Dumbledore left Charles to handle the finishing touches himself, storing away his wand before departing.
After Dumbledore left, Charles received the Breeding House reward.
Instantly, the door leading to his office's inner layer transformed—it now opened into a small log cabin. Though still a simple cabin, it looked far tidier and more refined than Hagrid's.
When Charles stepped inside, he found that the place resembled a shop. Shelves lined the walls, each filled with rows of eggs of various shapes and sizes. None of them, however, were labeled.
Alongside the eggs were piles of Pokémon food—Berries and Pokéblocks of every kind.
It felt as though someone had merged a Poké Mart right into his office.
Further inside stood a long counter. Beside it were two large machines—an incubator and a healing machine. Somehow, they functioned perfectly fine despite Hogwarts's usual resistance to electrical and technological devices.
Behind the counter was another door, which led into the massive habitat space he and Dumbledore had expanded earlier.
At this point, Charles's office had essentially become a three-tier complex:
the outer office,
the middle floor—a hybrid of a Poké Mart and Pokémon Center,
and the vast inner sanctum, a space ready to be transformed into a true natural environment.
Charles planned to remodel it over the summer break into a nature reserve where newly hatched Pokémon could live and roam freely.
But for now, it was still empty.
He decided to begin by hatching a few Pokémon—helpers that could assist in caretaking, like Mr. Mime, Chansey, or Miltank.
On the incubator's digital display, a list appeared showing all species currently available for hatching.
So far, Charles had unlocked data for ninety Pokémon in his Pokédex—but two-thirds of those were evolved forms. In reality, he could only hatch about thirty base species.
The rarer the Pokémon, the fewer times it could be bred.Common species like Raticate could be hatched almost without limit, but rare starter Pokémon like Charmander only had a handful of breeding attempts available.
That thought led him to consider the "breeding talents" of Hagrid. But Pokémon had their own egg groups and didn't produce new species through hybridization, unlike magical creatures.
"At the moment, the Pokémon I can hatch and later use as helpers are Mime Jr., Mr. Mime, Miltank, and Audino, right?" Charles muttered, taking out those eggs and placing them into the incubator.
Though Mr. Mime was the evolved form of Mime Jr., it could also be hatched directly.
The incubator screen lit up—estimated hatching time: 3 days.
That would give him just enough time to start shaping the reserve's environment. Right now, the entire area was still a blank slate.
"These three Pokémon don't have high environmental demands," Charles mused. "A simple grassland biome should do nicely."
He decided to begin designing the prairie layout—but not just yet. It was almost time for his meeting with Hagrid at five in the afternoon.
Creating such a massive spatial expansion had taken both him and Dumbledore quite some time, and even now he could feel the lingering magical fatigue.
"Lunch first, then Hagrid," he said, heading toward the Hogwarts kitchen.
…
At exactly five o'clock that afternoon, Charles arrived outside Hagrid's hut by the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
There stood Hagrid, proudly wheeling out a massive two-seater motorcycle.
Of course, with Hagrid's size, there was no way Charles could fit into the tiny passenger seat beside him.
(End of Chapter)