Harry got to Hogwarts for his second year with only a tiny bit of trouble pushing through a rather unusually stubborn barrier at Platform 9 ¾. In his first week back at Hogwarts he made a new best friend. He sought out a new first year Ravenclaw named Luna Lovegood, after people kept telling him they were a lot alike with their love of imaginary creatures. She understood him better than anyone else, and was sure all his theories were right. She listened patiently to his plans to master wordless and wandless spellcasting, reveal all the magical "laws" as being more like recommendations, and one day make his own Pokémon out of thin air. She placed an order with him for a pair of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, nattered to him about the strange and wondrous creatures of the wizarding world, and happily spent an hour with him every afternoon doing meditation and visualisation exercises.
While Harry and Ron remained friends, he and Hermione began drifting apart that year. For the more she read up on magical theory, the less time she had for his wild theories about willpower being the only thing required to break every law of nature and magic. He also further lost her respect when he stopped going to History of Magic classes so that he had more time for his own personal studies.
Aghast at his rebellion once she found out that skipping class wasn't going to be just a one-off occurrence, she went into a rant and tried to persuade him to change his ways. "You just can't do that! It's a required class! You'll lose Gryffindor hundreds of points, and maybe get expelled! You'll definitely fail the class for sure! You can't simply refuse to show up!"
"Sure I can. Binns doesn't even notice when I am there. He doesn't even know my name – he calls me 'Perkins'," Harry pointed out. "And if no-one tells him I'm wagging class, he won't know enough to take points. Gryffindors should stick together, yeah?"
"You'll get a T! You will fail the class! Fail the class!" she repeated, in a horrified tone that suggested it ranked up there with death-by-troll as something to be feared.
Harry shrugged indifferently – he'd failed classes before to make the Dursleys happy. It wasn't the end of the world.
"I'm getting an O in Charms and Transfiguration, and the others are all pretty good too. I don't need top marks in everything. I can't think of a single job I'd want to do that needs me to have a NEWT in History of Magic. I'll read the textbook in my own time and learn any interesting bits that way, but the class itself is a snooze-fest. I'm quitting."
She was even more cross with him once a couple of other Gryffindors (including Ron) decided to follow his rebellious example and stopped showing up to class, or used it as a self-study period where they ignored the teacher and caught up homework.
*pokemonpokemonpokemon*
Just before Christmas Harry discovered that talking to snakes was considered unusual. By people who thought turning a mouse into a snuffbox was an essential spell to master and not at all an unusual thing to do, he pointed out. But only the Muggle-borns seemed at all swayed by his arguments. Many purebloods speculated on whether his prodigious talents stemmed from being the Heir of Slytherin or not, and took a "watch and wait" attitude towards him. A lot of the Slytherins and Ravenclaws in particular seemed to be acting a bit more respectfully towards him these days.
Even though Draco and he disliked each other, Harry gathered up his courage and went to ask him how to cast the serpent-creating spell. It sounded amazing. Could it be adapted to create other animals?
At first Draco thought Harry was making fun of him. "Perfect Potter needs to learn a spell from me? Get lost, Potter."
"No, honestly, I want to learn the spell. It was an awesome spell! At least tell me what book it's from."
"No."
"I'm going to bug you until you tell me, so you might as well. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Teeeeeell me!" Harry bounced up and down around him like a hyperactive squirrel. Luna had been a bad influence on him with her recommendation for a "guaranteed" way to get Draco to co-operate.
Draco sighed. "If I tell you, will you leave? Because this is just embarrassing."
Harry grinned at him. "Yup."
"Fine," Draco said grumpily, and told him the book it could be found in.
It turned out that the Serpensortia spell unfortunately didn'tcreate a snake, it just summoned a wild snake (away from humans) from another location somewhere else in the world, preferably close by. One theorist speculated that its popularity as a spell in the United Kingdom was why their country was so lacking in snakes, and why the spell had in modern times become a more magically challenging spell to cast. For while casting Finite did end the spell and return the snake to its original location, most were killed as part of the duel. Muggle zoos were apparently covertly warded to prevent the disappearance of their snakes, as a precautionary measure.
Parseltongue was an interesting skill, and Harry was proud to be so unique. It did make him wonder why one couldn't talk to other animals too, and Luna agreed with him that it made sense and would be a lot of fun to learn more animal languages. Trevor the toad didn't have much to say, and Ron's rat didn't seem to want to cooperate with his experiments for some reason, but Hedwig turned out to be quite the conversationalist with a bit of focused encouragement. In fact, she was getting smarter by the day. Harry decided that if he wanted to create some Pokémon that it would be easier to modify existing animals rather than trying to create them from scratch. So far he'd only managed to create plush toys out of thin air – he had no idea what their insides were supposed to look like, which seemed to be a big stumbling block in trying to visualise them as living creatures. Ron's rat must've been smarter than it looked, because it seemed like it avoided him more than ever after Ron (with Scabbers in his pocket) listened to him chatting one day with Luna about trying to transfigure a rodent, and what would happen to its insides. It had let out a couple of terrified little squeaks at some of Luna's more gory speculations in their brainstorming session.
Ginny Weasley seemed shyly interested in making friends with him and Luna (whom she insisted she'd been friends with for ages, somewhat to Luna's surprise). As an overture of friendship Ginny smuggled him a female white mouse out of her first year Transfiguration class for him to experiment on. With a couple of months of effort, he managed to slowly and carefully turn it permanently yellow with brown stripes, enlarge it to the size of a small cat, enhance its intelligence, and give it a zig-zag tail. All without a single official spell. He called her "Pikachu", which perhaps wasn't terribly original of him, but then, Harry figured that Ash never bothered giving his Pokémon original names either. It just wasn't something you did.
Some of the students had starting getting panicky about him ever since hearing him speak Parseltongue at the Duelling Club over Christmas, but it got worse as the mysterious petrifications continued. He even got attacked a couple of times in the halls with minor hexes and jinxes, before people learned that he was surprisingly good at defending himself, despite being only a second year. He started getting nervous about someone hurting Pikachu, who couldn't defend herself yet. He took her everywhere with him, except Potions class where Snape had banned him from bringing her, and Transfigurations, where Professor McGonagall seemed to make her nervous. Professor McGonagall seemed to like to pick Pikachu up and bounce her from one hand to the other. She never dropped his Pokémon or hurt her, but it made Pikachu twitchy. Harry figured her inner cat found Pikachu irresistible.
Professors Flitwick, Sinistra, and Lockhart seemed to like Pikachu the best. Though during one particular class, Lockhart wasn't keen on how she disrupted his storytelling.
Harry was busy focusing his intent on Pikachu, ignoring Lockhart as he droned on again. "…So there I was, surrounded by werewolves in the middle of the town, and nothing but an ordinary Muggle phone booth to take cover in-"
"Pikachu," he whispered quietly to his pet. "Pikachu."
It squeaked back softly at him, and it felt like it was saying, "Me?"
"Yes, that's you. Pikachu. Say your name – Pikachu."
"Pikachu!" it squeaked quietly, and Harry let out a loud whoop of triumph.
"That's right, Pikachu, you're so clever! Say it again!"
"Pikachu!" it squeaked a little louder. To Harry's ear, like its previous squeak it still carried the meaning, "Me!"
"Ahem!" said his disgruntled teacher. "Mr. Potter you are disrupting my story."
"Well, it's in the book. I've already read it," Harry said dismissively, earning a very boring detention helping deal with fan mail for his backtalk and disruption of the class. Pikachu was only allowed back in class with a promise they would both behave better in future.
After a little more effort he could understand Pikachu every time she squeaked at him or said "Pikachu", though not yet as well as he could understand snakes or Hedwig.
He wasn't the only one training his magic now though. Using Harry's magic-focusing techniques Luna was sure her spellcasting was improving, and she'd managed to make her Dirigible plum earrings repel Nargles better than ever – none of her possessions were going missing anymore. Harry noticed a couple of older Ravenclaw girls turn around confusedly in the middle of the corridor when Luna approached them, and wander off elsewhere.
"Those girls have a Nargle infestation," Luna explained. "Things always go missing when those two and their friends are around."
Ginny seemed to be having a tough year and was often out of sorts, but it took her a while to break down entirely. She eventually took them out to the lake to show Harry, Luna, and Ron an interesting diary that could write back to her.
"I just don't know what to do," said Ginny, crying gently. "I keep forgetting things, and then it's like I wake up, and there's blood on my hands, or feathers everywhere, and I don't know what's going on." Ron put his arm around his little sister's shoulders comfortingly.
"I think it's infested with Wrackspurts, that's why you've been having bouts of forgetfulness," suggested Luna, placing the blame on the little invisible ghostly creatures. "Wrackspurts can be a real problem for some people. I haven't heard of a book being behind them, but they have to come from somewhere. Maybe they lay eggs in books! And that's why sometimes you'll pick up a book and settle down to read for just ten minutes, and then you blink and you've been reading for hours! Maybe books are how they spread to new people!" She waved her hands excitedly as she expounded upon her new theory.
"Huh, that would make sense," agreed Harry thoughtfully.
"I dunno about Wrackspurts," Ron said dubiously. "But I think it's evil. Maybe cursed. You know that Dad always says that you shouldn't trust something if you can't see where it keeps its brain."
Luna nodded sagely. "That's why you should trust mummies. They keep their brains in jars where it's easy to see them."
"Umm… I don't think that's quite what dad meant," Ron said, and then tried to drag the conversation back on track.
While they discussed whether to burn the diary or turn it into the Headmaster, the ghost of Tom Riddle manifested to boast about his "unstoppable power" as Ginny crumpled to the ground on the lake's shore. Ron panicked and fussed over his sister trying to wake her up, and Harry burnt the evil book. It took a while to catch, while the ghost laughed and boasted, but he just needed to concentrate harder. Why Ron insisted that the spell Harry had used at the end was "Fiendfyre" he had no idea, but it certainly impressed people when Ron eagerly retold the story later. But it didn't always impress people in a good way. Some people, those who'd never coped well with the idea that Harry could talk to snakes, seemed to decide he was evil for using such dark magic, and avoided him whenever they saw him. The Headmaster on the other hand praised him for destroying something enchanted with a piece of Voldemort's spirit. What kind of a name was "Tom" for a Dark Lord? No wonder he'd changed it.
Sadly, while she was initially very grateful and clingy, the more Ginny saw Harry's friendship continuing to blossom with Luna the more she drifted away. Until one day she wandered off in the middle of their discussion about whether unicorns were the result of wizards modifying horses to have a narwhal horn to match the description in stories, or naturally evolved creatures that the Muggle myths were based on. They didn't even notice she'd left, which was the final straw for her, and the friendship fell away. Their little group now consisted solely of Harry, Luna and Ron.
Professor Lockhart left at the end of the year, under investigation about his so-called "heroic adventures". It seemed he'd had a run in with a seventh year Slytherin, Terence Higgs (the Slytherin seeker), who'd taken great offence to Lockhart's attempt at Obliviating him when challenged about the veracity of his books. He'd swiftly cast a Shield Charm, then disarmed and stunned his erstwhile professor. Some people whispered that he'd been trying to blackmail Lockhart, accidentally provoking him into attacking, while others lauded him for his brave confrontation in the name of justice. Whatever the reason for it was, most people were happy to see the incompetent teacher go. Slytherin won the House Cup that year, to great jubilation on their part and polite clapping from the other houses.
Unlike Ginny, Luna never got bored with Harry's enthusiasm for strange creatures, and she just generally loved having a real friend she could actually see. On the train ride back to London, she spontaneously invited Harry to visit for the holidays. So when he saw them at the station he told the Dursleys not to bother about him as he'd stay elsewhere for the summer, which was fine by them (though they abused him verbally about the wasted trip to London), and he went off with her and her father. It was the best summer he'd ever had, until Dumbledore showed up at the Lovegoods' house like a cranky, elderly probation officer. He insisted Harry needed to spend at least a fortnight every year with the Dursleys, but refused to explain why, or what gave him the authority to set such rules in the first place. And after all that fuss, he showed up again at the Dursleys to remove him after two weeks were up to stay with the Weasleys, because allegedly it wasn't safe at Privet Drive either – for Sirius Black had escaped from Azkaban.
The Quibbler was full of articles slyly poking fun at Dumbledore, that summer.