[attr="class","mouths1"]Though his "friends" and his classmates had started to tease and playfully mock him for it, Matthew Williams' second year at Hogwarts was beginning to find him situated in the library much more often than anyone had expected. He had only lurked here once or twice for his first year, making sure to note all the sections that contained books pertaining to his interests, and then had left as silently as he had come.

He hadn't wanted, back then, to throw himself in too quickly. The moment he began staying and reading up on subjects related to the Dark Arts, he was certain that his behaviour would be marked down as unusual and concerning. The sudden shock of at finding himself in a completely new school and a totally new crowd had left him paranoid; he was sure first years hardly had many reasons for foraying so deeply into that area, and he wasn't going to take unnecessary risks and compromise himself too soon.

And anyway, Matthew wasn't about to let on that he was sharper than those around him immediately assumed. If they were going to look at him and think "ah! One of those shy, nice types — no need to worry about him," then he was less than interested in correcting them. It helped his plans move along more smoothly, anyway.

Luckily, he found that in his new environment, he was hardly a noticeable character. In fact, it had become even easier fade into the background now that he was at Hogwarts, where one student would hardly be missed among hundreds and hundreds of rowdy, excitable witches and wizards. He could have spent that time slipping away into the library to start learning what it was he needed to look for, but he held back. Staying out of the place was a strategic decision, more than anything else. He had been poorly adjusted, anyway, and had been clumsy in his information-collecting. Had he started off searching in the library last year, there was no doubt that the time would have been mostly wasted.

Instead, he spent it all acclimating to his new home and school. And keeping an eye on any student that he believed was of value or of interest to him... That alone had been far more than enough to keep him busy until he filtered the useless ones out of the list and whittled it down to a few trustworthy information sources, some gossipers who just couldn't keep their mouths closed (they could be more useful than most people thought), and some intelligent and ambitious students who turned out to be of excellent help when Matthew found an area of weakness in his classes.

All was going well, so far. Handling his list and his sources was at last manageable, and Matthew found himself more than up to the challenge of browsing the library this year. He had spent all summer at the Jones home thinking over how he was going to go about it.

The first step, he'd reckoned, was to spend more time there just studying.

He'd worked exclusively in the dorms last year, having been careful (maybe overly so) to avoid the library. Now that his workload had increased considerably and the boys in the dorms had grown noisier and more prone to troublemaking than before, he found it easy to excuse himself and head out to his new study space.

It was a good idea not to expand beyond his current materials to matters of his own interest just yet. He had established himself last year as a very, very dedicated student, though, and soon enough he could use that as an excuse to move on to other topics, claiming that they were an extension of what was being covered in his classes.

The further he moved throughout the years, the more advanced classes he took, the more he would be able to delve into the Dark Arts and other less-than-savoury practices.

Or, well, that was the plan, anyway. Matthew wasn't expecting any interference, and he was counting on his paranoia to have paid off... hopefully, no one would have noticed anything was off about his behaviour.

This was his second week into studying in the library, and Matthew was wondering how much longer he should hold off before he started searching through the Legal section for some information on trials about the Dark Arts, under the guise of it being for his History of Magic project. He had spent up to five hours sitting at this table everyday now (even on the weekends... well, it wasn't as if he had anything else important to do), and he was starting to get tired of it.