Disclaimer: I own nothing. I'm broke. I don't even have lemon drops. Please don't sue!
Spread Your Wings
By Ebona Nite
Chapter Seven: Settling In
Harry was finally released from the Infirmary in the morning with a fading headache and firm instructions to drink a nutrient potion with each major meal. He just as firmly refused to eat the hospital food for breakfast and took his morning dose with him to find Luna and something that didn't taste like cardboard.
The dreamy-eyed blonde met him outside the door with a centaur in tow.
"Good morning Harry! This is Amber Oakensdaughter, she's from America. Amber, this Harry Potter, my friend I've been telling you about."
"Er, hello."
"Nice ta meetcha Harry!" If Harry had known the differences between American dialects, he would have caught the Texas twang in her voice.
Amber was small as centaurs go, though her head was still nearly two feet above their's. Her equine half was along the lines of an Arabian, with chestnut brown coat and tail, and a faint dusting of white speckles on her flanks. Her human half had long matching chestnut hair and fair skin but with so many freckles she looked light brown with pale speckles, similar to her horse-half. She had twinkling hazel eyes and a wide cheery grin.
Centaurs typically wore no clothing even on their human half, but Amber wore a short olive green cargo-style vest. She said it was because she "liked the pockets."
The Infirmary was a building on the Academy's main campus. The dorms were spread out around the periphery of the campus. Harry and Luna were given rooms in the Inter-Species Dorm 7, or ISD-7. Someone had spray-painted "Thunderbirds" and a black-and-gold stylized bird, in traditional Native American style, on the front side of the building that housed the humanoid species students of the ISD-7. Apparently this was their unofficial dorm name, and probably their dorm's intramural sports teams' designation and mascot too.
Harry found his room easily enough, his name printed on a brass plate on the door and his trunks and things already inside. Everyone had their own room, locked to magical signature. Or stall, in the case of centaurs, with attached field. Or large cave in a cavernous hillside next to the field for the sphinxes. The merfolk in their dorm area had a pond with flooded underground caverns beneath the hill and field carved out. Being an inter-species dorm, the building for the human and humanoid students was surrounded by natural habitats for the non-humanoid students. It was actually quite beautiful, Harry thought.
The building was in front, with the centaurs' stable and field towards the left. There were three centaurs, including Amber. The hill, rather more like a mound, with carved out caves for the two sphinxes in their dorm was around the back, the large pond for the eight merfolk and one naiad to the right of the building. A low fence marked the perimeter. Most non-human students preferred same-species dorms, so the rest of their dormmates were mostly humans, werewolves, and vampires, along two veela, on the first and second floors, four goblins in the basement level rooms, and a harpy and two brownies (who insisted on being allowed to do general house-cleaning, though they promised to leave personal rooms alone; Luna said they were called 'house-elves' in Europe and their magic derived mainly from housekeeping) in the attic rooms. There were no fae, elves, dwarves, leprechauns, giants, satyrs, or nymphs (other than the naiad) in the Thunderbirds dorm though. Altogether, there would be about 50 students of various species in ISD-7, the humanoid species making just over half of their group, once everyone had arrived.
Harry's next door neighbor was a vampire, from a clan that lived on Atlantis. He was tall and pale with sharp and aristocratic features, and had straight black hair and dark blue eyes. He introduced himself in a soft, smooth voice as Orlando Araceli, and offered to show the other three around.
Their first stop was the cafeteria for breakfast. Harry took his nutrient potion with a grimace; it tasted like stale unsalted peanuts. And cardboard. Why did everything healthy from hospitals taste like cardboard? Blech!
Orlando had bacon and eggs and buttered toast, along with a goblet of cow's blood. Harry and Luna learned from him that born vampires, which was what Orlando was, as opposed to Turned vampires could eat human food and stay in the sunlight for a few hours without repercussions (Orlando had an amulet that would allow him to stay out the whole day for classes, though he preferred being indoors for those times as his eyes were still sensitive to strong light). His canines were only slightly pointed, hardly noticeable, unless he lengthened them to feed. He did still need blood, just no where near as much as Turned vampires, who could not stomach much human food and consequently needed to get more of their nutrients from drinking blood.
Amber chose multi-grain pancakes for her breakfast. A lot of pancakes. Her stack was almost a foot tall! Centaurs, she told them, ate a combination of human and horse food, though they were vegetarians, since they had a separate stomach in both halves and had to keep both filled. Things like baked oat-and-honey cakes and multi-grain pancakes were great since they filled both stomachs at once, instead of eating separate portions. Besides, she was addicted to pancakes slathered with berry jam.
After breakfast Orlando led them back to the wand shop, where Luna picked up her finished focus rod. It was beautiful, a 12 inch pearly spiraling unicorn's horn with a tiny moonstone focus stone tip, a handle of carved silver birch holding the wide end of the alicorn and fitted to her hand. Luna's blood and the siren's hair as its core. The wandmaker told her it was good for bardcraft, divination spells and rituals, and healing.
Neither vampire nor centaur needed a focus at this point, and Harry was still sticking with his first wand.
Next on the agenda was the ocularist the Healers insisted Harry see.
Harry eventually picked out a stylish pair of glasses with oval lenses and thin white-gold wire frames. They were charmed unbreakable, water-repellent, and anti-fog as a matter of course. The note from the Healers allowed them to be charged against his medical portion of his student account, though Harry chose to pay 15 galleons extra out-of-pocket for an additional anti-summoning charm.
He decided to forego any other additions, at least for now. While the ability to see auras or wards or through invisibility spells sounded interesting, he'd rather learn how to do that on his own, if it was possible, so he could turn the ability on and off and not have to walk around seeing nimbuses of colors everywhere.
That last week and a half before classes was an enjoyable and enlightening experience for one Harry Potter. More and more students arrived, of varying species, and Harry was learning more than he'd ever imagined was in the world. And he had friends. That was perhaps the biggest change for him. He'd always known he was different from his mundane relatives… but he'd never had friends before.
Now he had Luna, the centaur Amber, the vampire Orlando, and the werewolf Chad. Chad had arrived from Australia a few days after Harry and Luna.
His full name was Chad Tyson of the Red-Coolibah Pack.
Of course Amber just had to ask, "What's a Coolibah?"
"Eucalyptus tree that grows near a billabong… and a billabong is a cutoff riverbend that's like a lake. Sheesh, do I have to tell you everything?"
"Yes. Especially about the soil. And the rocks. And the plants. And the trees."
Which was how they learned that Amber wanted to be a geologist and a herbologist. This got her teased by more star-minded centaurs, but made her much more interesting to the group.
Chad had sandy brown hair, blue-and-amber eyes, a tan, and an out-going attitude. He made it his mission to get Harry up to date about werewolves.
"It's not 'werewolf' unless you're bitten, mate. If you're born, like me, you're a lycanthrope. I mean, there's so much difference! Werewolves, they transform in the light of a full moon. That's it. And a lot a them don't accept the wolf, try fightin' it off, makes 'em crazy. The wolf side, that is. So the wolf side's trying to hurt 'em back when they transform. Lotsa them don't live too many years, tearin' themselves apart.
"Now if they can learn to accept the wolf, then they won't have all the pain and a lot more control when transformed; even if the wolf instincts take over they don't go crazy murderous. And that wolfsbane potion! Poison! Crikey, I tell ya mate, whoever made that had a real grudge against werewolves. Gives 'em their mind back, sure, but slowly poisons them. Couple years takin' it and suddenly the wolf's gettin' too sick, and starts to affect the human body, and then a few more months an' you're gone. And take it more'n twice in a row an' you get addicted too, makes for horrible withdrawal.
"Lycanthropes are born with the gift though, and it ain't a curse for us. We have just one mind to deal with, wolf instincts and human instincts all meshed together. We can transform anytime, and have a hybrid form, though we gotta stay all-wolf under the full moon. The wolf's just part of us, yeah? No curse about it."
Chad was the chatty and rambunctious one, as opposed to Orlando's quiet nature. Oddly, the two got along just fine.
So while Amber had dibs on the ground and growing things, Chad got caught up in sports, Luna named the creatures only she could see, and Orlando carved his niche out by being the quiet bookworm of the group, not to mention the designated tour guide while the others got used to the Island, Harry watched and learned and wondered what he'd be good at. He was quickly learning that stereotypes were a sure way to get something wrong. None of his new friends were at all close to what he had thought centaurs, werewolves, vampires, or even witches would be.
He was still waiting to find out what his own niche would be. He didn't feel very wizardy. But perhaps that was not such a bad thing after all. Here he had no pre-conceived notions about the Boy-Who-Lived nonsense to try and live up to, no one would stare at his scar, and there were so many choices he was free, at last, to make!
The five were fast becoming an inseparable group. Classes were just around the corner. And best of all, Harry never had to return to the Dursleys!
Author's Note: I'm not the best at writing accents, especially when they aren't ones I hear too often. So you'll just have to imagine Harry and Luna with British accents, Amber with Texas-American accent, and Chad with an Australian accent (he probably sounds more American from my writing, oops). And I'm American myself, so British and Australian slang, idiosyncrasies, and general ways of talking are not my forte. So if I mess up something in they way they are talking that doesn't sound like it comes from their part of the world… blame it on the universal language pendants.
