Ha77y P0Tz and the Xenos Rosetta

Adapted from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Page 140-141

"Are your sensors picking up anything?"

Ha77y scanned the combat zone again, and his olfactory outlets detected a bacteria-laden atmospheric stream.

And then the team had aural contact –heavy, resonant footfalls that registered ripples in their seismic indicators. R0N pointed – at the end of the hallway to the left, an organism of sizable mass was approaching them.

"Evasive manoeuvres," team leader H3rms sub-vocalised. Ha77y and R0N leaned into the shadows and activated their cloaks. The slight blip in the corner of Ha77y's HUD indicated that H3rms had flicked off the safety of her plasma rifle. He saw R0N ease his monomolecular combat blade in its sheath.

The xeno-form was hideous to behold. It towered above them, even in their power-suits. Its skin was a granite-grey, and its torso was spherical. The xeno-form's bulbous head rested on its misshapen shoulders. Its legs were short, which possibly indicated limited mobility, but the long, multi-jointed toes on its flat feet suggested advanced dexterity and agility. The atmospheric streams wafting off of it were so infested with bacteria that the autoimmune dispensers of Ha77y's power-suit began their preliminary protocols.

His IFF systems locked automatically onto the creature. A split-second scan was all it took for a torrent of data to flood into Ha77y's mind, unlocked by auto-hypnosis triggers.

"Troll," he sub-vocalized, feeling completely redundant as he did so. H3rms and R0N would already have identified the creature, with H3rms possibly being the swifter one, given her greater auto-hypnosis proficiency.

"We could withdraw and lock it in this chamber, avoid conflict," he went on.

"Agreed," R0N replied, his voice raspy with fear even over intra-suit comms.

"Negative," H3rms growled. "Our orders are to seek and exterminate. This thing dies today."

She lifted her rifle to her shoulder. The troll heard the weapon's rising ambient hum and turned its head, just in time to catch a full blast of plasma in its face.

"Damn it," R0N's muttering was surprisingly lucid over comms. He drew his combat blade and pistol and charged in. His Wingardius boosters lifted him into the air and dropped him onto the troll's back. R0N began carving huge chunks of flesh from its neck and shoulders.

H3rms had switched over to solid fragmentation rounds, and she pumped shell-burst after shell-burst into the troll's torso. The creature shrieked in agony and flailed its unnatural arms. It could not dislodge R0N.

Ha77y flicked off the safety of his own rifle, but he did not lift the weapon. He canceled his suit's attempt to dose him with combat narcotics. He watched as H3rms systematically dismembered and disembowelled the troll with deliberate shots and R0N cut out its phlegm-filled eyes. The creature's screams soon became impotent, wheezing gasps. It fell to its knees, and R0N drew his blade across its throat. He hissed with pleasure as he did so.

Greenish blood poured from the wound. A few drops splattered H3rms visor, and Ha77y thought he saw her tongue flicker, as if to lick the liquid off. Her optical implants were flashing red, and her biometric sensors indicated that her nervous system was awash with adrenalin and other combat drugs.

"Target down," R0N announced. H3rms ejected the spent magazine from her rifle with a practiced movement.

"I would murder a hundred of these things to become a full Initiate of H.O.G.," she said as she glared at Ha77y. "I have the conviction to do so, unlike some others."

R0N shrugged as she turned on her heel and stalked away, her suit hydraulics creaking with the violence of her motions.

"Try to keep up." R0N nodded to Ha77y. Ha77y returned the gesture wordlessly. He followed in the wake of his team members.

With the deconstruction and recreation of the troll scene from the original Harry Potter, the creation of a sci-fi Ha77y, R0N and H3rms allows us to analyze the characters and recreate them. Hermoine is imagined as a zealous and gifted over achiever, much like her character in the books. In a feminist point of view, H3rms (Hermoine) naturally took a dominant role in a science fiction setting. Ha77y is the focal character, in a science fiction environment, he would be the bridge between the values of the 21st century and those of the dark, far, future.

(feminist, postmodern)