Chapter 9

"…and can you tell me what sort of magic is on the entrance to the platform?" the older man asked calmly, ignoring the odd looks he got from the passing travelers for both staring at a brick wall between platforms nine and ten with clear interest and for having a white owl perched on his head regally.

"In order," The black haired boy replied, now also staring at the wall and leaning on the staff he carried, "The answers are 'Ambient magic concentrated in magic reservoirs' and 'Of course I can, who do you think you're talking to?'."

Harry gave a laugh as he glanced back to see Nicolas' face twitch slightly, "I'm just joking- give me a few seconds to figure it out."

Harry stepped forwards, adjusting his glasses before closing his eyes and running a hand over the bricks, following the invisible lines of magic.

'It's not an illusion-' Harry figured to himself, '-there isn't actually anything active here until the magic recognition ward triggers… a gate? No, that's not right… more like a portal? Yes, that's closer… a portal to a pocket of subspace. It can't be like the mouth of an undetectable extension charm though, since…'

"Hmm" Harry hummed to himself as he concentrated on sensing the twists in the magic.

'… the opening isn't really an opening is it? The portal is actually a continuous teleportation array to that subspace pocket but it's underneath the surface of the bricks. The bricks just turn intangible for a few seconds as the students and their luggage walk through the stones covering the array.'

Harry opened his eyes as he spoke to Nicolas, his hand still drifting around the wall.

"It's a teleportation array coupled with a subspace shift rather than an actual 'entrance', isn't it? The platform isn't actually in this station."

His eyes widened as he made another connection. "That must be why those redheads from before were telling the youngest two to run through! Because piecemeal teleportation feels terrible if it happens too slowly!"

"Correct. Not too bad." Nicolas said with an approving nod, "You need to pick up on your speed a little, but that comes with experience. That was a nice connection you made to the Weaslys' comments- I missed that myself. Now go through. We still need to do the last check to make sure you have everything before you get on the train."

"Sure dad." Harry rolled his eyes as he adjusted his grip on thehis staff and started to push the trolley, "It's not like we haven't gone through the checklist Mom gave us twice already- once before we left home and once after we arrived out front of the station."

The pair walked through the barrier, appearing inside the bustling hubbub of platform nine-and-three-quarters as Nicolas snorted and grinned.

"After nearly ten years with us I would be more surprised if you didn't have her pegged." His expression softened, "She really did want to be here, but there was an emergency at Gringotts and one of us needed to go and sort out the mess. I just won the coin toss. I'll actually be going over to help her after I see you off."

They approached the train together and Harry turned to ask Nicolas to cast a featherweight on the trunk when he saw the man pull a piece of paper out of his pocket.

"Wait, you were serious?" Harry asked with incredulity, eyeing the paper.

"No, I'm Sirius." Sirius chuckled, sideling out of the crowd with the impeccable timing of a master prankster. "Hey Prongslet."

"It's not funny Sirius!" Harry complained, causing Sirius to merely grin as he continued. "We went over the list together not ten minutes ago! I have everything I could conceivably need!"

"Perenelle?" Sirius asked Nicolas with a raised eyebrow.

"Perenelle." Nicolas sighed in response before turning back to Harry, "Let's just get it over with so we both don't get yelled at for being complacent. 'Constant Vigilance' right?"

Sirius went pale and ducked, looking around wildly and causing the other two males to glance at him in confusion.

"Yeah, Constant Vigilance." Harry grumbled, causing Sirius to spasm violently. "Fine, let's go over it. Again."

"We'll make it fast- let's just do the big categories." Nicolas conceded easily, "If it's only one or two things I'll be able to mail them to you or you'll be able to owl-order them in."

"Fine." Harry sighed.

"Staff?"

Harry rolled his eyes and thumped the ground with the ceramic-cased black staff once, causing Nicolas and a recovering Sirius to snort.

"Sword?"

"Yep."

"Clothes?"

"Yeah."

"Ink, Parchment, Quills and-" Nicolas leaned in and spoke quietly, "-the fountain pens that you definitely don't have since the School Board banned them?"

"Yeah." Harry said, this time fighting a grin. Those fountain pens would make his homework many times easier since he wouldn't have to worry about dripping ink everywhere out of a poorly-cut quill tip. "As are my schoolbooks, potions' ingredients, and the cheap wand that I won't be using except for meeting the requirement to have one."

"Emergency broom that you again, don't have?"

"Bottom of the trunk, under everything else."

Harry shuddered. He didn't want to know how excited his yearmates would be if they found out he had a broom. Quidditch fans were crazier than football fans during the World Cup!

"Extra reading and the homework schedule I drew up for it?"

"Yeah."

"Emergency pack?"

Harry snorted.

"Yep. I still don't think I need any of it though. I seriou-" Harry's eyes flicked to Sirius, "sincerely doubt that I'll get into any situation bad enough to warrant using any of that stuff."

"That mirror I gave you?" Sirius interjected.

"Yeah, right on top of everything else so I can talk to you tonight."

"Your House heir rings?" Nicolas continued.

"House Potter is on my finger." Harry said bluntly, raising a hand and causing the ring in question to fade into and then out of visibility, "Slytherin and Peverell are in that lockbox you gave me along with copies of my important documents."

The whistle on the train blew, spurring Harry into a flurry of movement as he struggled to lift his trunk into the closest car as quickly as he could while juggling his staff and Hedwig's cage. A quick featherweight charm by Nicolas nearly sent Harry sprawling backwards as he straightened suddenly under the lighter load and almost leapt up the stairs.

"Oh! Almost forgot!" Nicolas yelped as Harry turned to enter the compartment, digging a brown envelope from his pocket and handing it to Harry. "Give this to the headmaster please. He said he wanted to take me up on an offer I gave him earlier and since you were already going that way I figured I'd save myself a trip."

Nicolas smirked.

"Do keep an eye on what he does with it will you?"

"But what is it?" Harry asked, frowning as the train started to move oh so slowly.

"Why don't you try and figure out?" Nicolas smirked, "I know how you love puzzles- just be sure to keep me updated on whatever goes on in the castle! And if you need anything, just send Hedwig with a letter."

Harry heard Nicolas call quickly as the train accelerated out of the station. "And don't get yourself killed! Constant Vigilance! Perenelle would kill me if anything happened to you!"

Harry stuck a thumbs up out the door as the train left the station.

Harry hummed in curiosity, bouncing the package in his hand as he weighed it for a moment before tucking it away in a pocket. He'd focus on it later, if his classes were too boring.

For now he just had to find a compartment.

Nicolas turned back to Sirius and eyed the pale and twitching man.

He opened his mouth to ask the question he had been growing more and more curious about when Alastor Moody apparated in, screamed "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!", shot a stinging spell at Sirius' bum (which Sirius barely managed to deflect) and disapparated out.

Nicolas blinked, then asked a different question than he had originally planned to.

"Moody has heard that you are on track to be the next Senior Auror appointee, I take it?"

"Yes," moaned Sirius, "and he thinks I need 'toughing up'."

Luna sat in her compartment and stared blankly at the wall.

'Daddy sent me away. He sent me away.' Her thoughts echoed over and over as she struggled not to cry.

Oh, she knew the real reason why she was being sent to Hogwarts this year and she could, quite frankly, agree intellectually that going to Hogwarts this year instead of the next would provide more monitoring and professional care than staying in an empty house, but she just couldn't accept it emotionally.

Luna was firmly of the belief that, while her father had the right motives, he hadn't quite thought all the way through what sending her off to Hogwarts implied.

'Mummy sent me away.' Her traitorous thoughts whispered, 'And look what happened when I went.'

No, she couldn't accept that she just needed a change of scenery and new friends to help break her out of the depression and shock. She had fully believed her mother when she promised to 'Be right behind you', and she had walked out of the magical gateway her mother had created in the absolute certainty that her mother would be following.

She couldn't accept that the memory of watching her mother scream in agony and dissolve into a pile of dust after she obeyed her mothers' command to 'Go' would just go away with some new food and a few lectures a day to distract her.

She wanted to stay with her father and continue her mother's work, studying the creatures they had managed to attract to their house over the years that only the pair of them could see.

She wanted to go on the expeditions they had always taken as a family, looking for those creatures in their natural environment.

She wanted to find the Crumple-Horned Snorkack and interview it for the Quibbler.

She wanted to help her father piece together the real news that he would then hide inside their paper under the guise of lunacy- the Rotfang Conspiracy, code for Lucius Malfoy's continual bribery and attempt to control the population by controlling what the Minister said- the Aquavirius Maggots, a DOM invention invented and designed to provide completely truthful answers to questions for court interrogations in leu of Veritaserum (and summarily buried in red tape by several interested criminal parties, again including Lucius Malfoy) and many others.

She wanted her Daddy to hold her tight and promise to never leave.

Luna looked down at her copy of the Quibbler, trying not to cry. It was the last copy her mother had helped write before the Accident. She heard the door open and glanced up.

Then she gaped in disbelief.

The person who had entered the compartment shone with power and fire and light.

'That's a heliopath.' Luna's mind provided dumbly, comparing what she saw to her memories.

'Mummy talked about seeing one once in China during one of our trips, she said that the one she saw seemed very lonely, even though he was surrounded by people at the time. She said that none of the people in the crowd actually saw him, they saw somebody else.'

Luna eyed the boy for a moment.

He didn't seem like he was anybody besides himself, but he was definitely lonely.

She could fix that.

She smiled, basking for a moment in the warm feeling that seemed to radiate off of the heliopath like a star, even if the heliopath did seem to be slightly banking his flames with wariness and caution.

'Maybe I can continue Mummy's work of investigating all the creatures we could see at Hogwarts… maybe he would let me interview him? He'll make a great new friend either way.'

Maybe Hogwarts wouldn't be so bad after all… even if he wasn't a Crumple-Horned Snorkack.

The first two compartments were a bust, the first filled with prefects and the second with a bunch of sleeping upperclassmen, but the third compartment only had a single occupant. The waif-like blond seemed focused on the front cover of her newspaper (which was upside-down) and was certainly small enough to be a member of his own year, but she seemed to have some sort of undefinable weight around her that made her seem far older than her physic seemed to suggest… although that weight was seemingly mitigated by a pair of radish earrings and a cork necklace.

"Excuse me, can I sit in here?" Harry asked as he opened the door.

The blond looked up, then raised her eyebrows slightly in an expression of surprised interest as a faint smile slowly crossed her face, seeming to lift the melancholy she had been oozing.

"I don't know." She said with a curious head-tilt, "Do heliopaths have problems sitting on chairs? Or perhaps only combustible ones?"

Harry blinked at that, struggling to decipher the far longer answer than the 'Yes' or 'No' he had been expecting.

"Er- I don't know what a heliopath is... and I actually meant to ask 'May I sit here?'" Harry said, stressing the word change.

"A heliopath is a spirit of fire," The odd blond explained as she watched him with silver eyes, "and you seem to be one, even if you are stuck in human form at the moment. Do you think we could be friends?"

"Sure?" Harry hazarded after a moment's pause, deciding to take the offer of friendship as an okay to move his trunk into the compartment and sit down. After stowing his luggage he sat and faced the girl, who appeared to find him far more fascinating than her magazine.

Harry suddenly realized that she was looking AT him in a way that was somehow more real than the manner that most people looked at him. Most people saw 'The-Boy-Who-Lived' when Harry introduced himself but Harry realized, in that moment, that she seemed to really see 'just Harry' instead of 'The-Boy-Who-Lived', exactly like Sirius, Nick, and Perenelle did.

They each spent a further few moments examining the other before Harry finally decided to break the silence.

"If we are going to be friends," Harry started cautiously, "I think you should introduce yourself. You haven't told me your name yet."

"Oh my, where are my manners? My name is Luna Lovegood Mr. Heliopath." The girl said airily, picking up a bag from the floor and starting to root through it.

"Maybe I left them at home?" She hummed after a few moments of digging.

Harry laughed.

"I don't think you can leave your manners behind like that. I think they sort of go with you wherever you go, like your hands."

She looked at him with something like surprise.

"Daddy always says that I should never give someone a hand because they might walk off with it."

Harry's face split into a responding grin.

"I suppose that he also says that if your head wasn't screwed on you'd lose it too?"

She nodded with a tiny, near unnoticeable twitch at the corner of her mouth, signaling a hidden smile that Harry would never have noticed if he hadn't been matching her stare with his own.

"Exactly. Now… what's your name?"

Harry blinked.

And then blinked again.

"You don't know who I am?"

She shook her head.

"Then why did you ask to be friends with me before I even sat down?" Harry asked suspiciously.

"Because you seemed lonely, because I don't know anybody at Hogwarts this year and wanted a friend, and because I wanted to interview you about other heliopaths." She responded happily.

Harry sat, slightly bewildered as he watched her speak and realized that she was telling nothing but truth.

"You want to interview me…" Harry started slowly, prompting Luna to nod, "…not about Voldemort or my life…" Another nod, "…but about these heliopath things instead?"

Her head bobbed in confirmation.

He… hadn't expected that.

He had expected everyone to merely want to be by him for his fame, money, power, or some combination, and he had already resigned himself to that fact.

After all, almost everyone he met started fawning all over him as soon as they heard his name, requesting marriage contracts, political support, donations, and anything and everything else they could think of.

"My name is Harry Potter." Harry said carefully, praying for her next words to not be the sycophantic drivel he usually got.

She blinked, then spoke.

"I think there's another boy coming to Hogwarts this year with that name, it will be very confusing if the two of you are in the same class."

Harry gaped dumbly for a moment, then smiled at her as a sudden and unexpected feeling of happiness caused a warm feeling to surge in his stomach.

The blond-haired girl blinked and squinted, as though the sun had suddenly appeared from behind some clouds and nearly blinded her with its' intensity.

"I think I'll enjoy being friends with you." Harry said, smiling at his first real friend.

Harry sighed with minor exasperation and worry and began rubbing his headache away as he stood in the entrance hall, waiting for the sorting to begin.

'Fighting a troll? Really? Do none of these people have any concept of how low the entry level requirements of this school are?' Harry thought sarcastically, eyeing the crowd, which appeared to be growing more and more uneasy as the redheaded boy continued talking about what his brothers had told him about the 'sorting test'.

'How can they expect a muggleborn to keep up with a class four magical creature? No, they won't be making us fight trolls. Maybe they'll ask us to perform an entry-level spell? I'm a bit worried that they'll do that and I'll fail though because of my fire. I wonder what happens if somebody does fail the sorting? Is there a House for-'

A sudden shriek yanked him from his thoughts, causing him to whirl around and see a few ghosts floating through the back wall disregarding them instantly as a threat and continuing to scan for enemies.

After a few moments, he realized that they were afraid of the ghosts, rather than any real threat, and he snorted.

They had just proven his first point. If they couldn't even deal with ghosts, then how could that redheaded boy expect them to deal with a twelve-foot high lump of muscle and bone?

Professor McGonagall appeared, leading them into the main hall just in time for a hat to start singing.

Oh you may not think I'm pretty,
But don't judge on what you see,
I'll eat myself if you can find
A smarter hat than me.

You can keep your bowlers black,
Your top hats sleek and tall,
For I'm the Hogwarts Sorting Hat
And I can cap them all.

There's nothing hidden in your head
The Sorting Hat can't see,
So try me on and I will tell you
Where you ought to be.

You might belong in Gryffindor,
Where dwell the brave at heart,
Their daring, nerve, and chivalry
Set Gryffindors apart;

You might belong in Hufflepuff,
Where they are just and loyal,
Those patient Hufflepuffs are true
And unafraid of toil;

Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw,
if you've a ready mind,
Where those of wit and learning,
Will always find their kind;

Or perhaps in Slytherin
You'll make your real friends,
Those cunning folks use any means
To achieve their ends.

So put me on! Don't be afraid!
And don't get in a flap!
You're in safe hands (though I have none)
For I'm a Thinking Cap!

Harry grinned.

Nicolas had been going on incredible fantastical exaggerations about how incredible 'IT' was for so long that he had actually started to believe that it was actually going to be a test of some sort. But he only had to try on a hat? He'd have to prank Nicolas somehow, this inequality couldn't stand!

Professor McGonagall stepped forward, holding a long roll of parchment.

"When I call your name, you will put on the hat and sit on the stool to be sorted," she said.

"Abbott, Hannah!"

A pink-faced girl with blonde pigtails stumbled out of line, put on the hat, which fell right down over her eyes as she sank onto the stool. There was a moment's pause before the hat suddenly screamed: "HUFFLEPUFF!", which spurred the table on the left into cheers and applause as Hannah went to sit down at the Hufflepuff table. Harry noted that a few of the ghosts which had drifted through the entrance hall were now seated at the house tables, and the one at the Hufflepuff table was waving merrily at her.

"Bones, Susan!" "HUFFLEPUFF!"

"Boot, Terry!" "RAVENCLAW!"

Harry tuned out the shouts and applause as he examined the hall in greater depth than the combat-ready once-over he had given it when he first entered.

The ceiling was a masterpiece of charmwork, showing the clear evening sky with a clarity that made Harry wonder why they reportedly had classes outside for Astronomy when they could probably set up in this room and remain indoors. Below the ceiling, he noted hundreds of floating candles (which apparently didn't drip wax, judging by the pristine state of the students' dress) lighting a cavernous feast hall with an oddly gothic architectural design, given that the castle had been built nearly two hundred years before gothic architecture became the norm in Europe. There were four tables taking up the majority of the floorspace, with Gryffindor on the far left, Hufflepuff just left of center and Ravenclaw just right of it, and Slytherin on the far right. At the front of the hall there was a head table, seating the majority of the teachers (sans Professor McGonagall) as well as the headmaster.

Harry eyed the man.

'Old. Probably very old if I take into account the fact that magic slows the signs of aging. His horrible purple robes suggest he's a bit eccentric, and maybe a bit barmy, but perhaps that is just what he wants me to think.' Harry evaluated, before turning away and continuing his evaluation of the room.

Grey stone walls descended downwards, meeting a stone floor that-

Harry almost gasped as he felt leyline energy flowing through the floor of the castle. His respect for the the four founders of Hogwarts skyrocketed.

'They somehow integrated the worked stone of the floor into the natural leylines?!' Harry realized with shock, 'I didn't even know that was possible!'

As he extended his senses outwards through his feet, trying to feel if it was just an illusion or if they had actually fixed one of the biggest flaws of leyline-magic, he vaguely noted that "Lovegood, Luna" was sorted into Ravenclaw.

Several minutes later, a call of "Potter, Harry" shocked him out of his mental explorations and into walking silently for the hat, unhearing of the whispers and pointing that his name generated as his mind whirled with the ramifications of being able to integrate leylines into the floors of buildings.

As the hat settled over his eyes, he shoved his thoughts away under a 'consider later' label and focused on the present.

"Hmmm?" suddenly hummed a small voice in his ear with a tone of surprise, making Harry jump, "How odd…you don't… no, you do, but only part of… maybe it's for the best?"

'What's for the best?' Harry thought hard at the hat. There was a slight hesitation as the hat formulated a response.

"I'm required to give a checkup on whoever comes beneath my brim to make sure that dopplegangers and the like don't get into the castle." The hat said slowly, "You're fine in that regard and plenty healthy, you just happen to be a bit stranger than what I am used to is all. Don't worry about it. I'll get on with the sorting now."

"Er… Could you lower your Occulumency barriers please?" The hat asked sheepishly after a few moments pause. "Normally I don't have to ask since eleven is rather young to develop complete mind shields so I can usually just go through the unfinished areas."

'You won't tell anyone what you find?' Harry sent back.

"No I won't. It's a part of my magic that what I find inside your mind is locked away."

Harry weighed that statement for a moment.

'If it anything in there gets out I'll incinerate you.'

The hats' low chuckle died away as the hat flicked through Harry's now unshielded mind quickly.

"Interesting. Plenty of bravery, but not in the sense that Godric meant. Wonderful loyalty to individuals, but very little to groups and almost no sense of fair play. A fine mind and a keen desire to learn, creativity and- Oh? What's this? A deeply rooted ambition and plenty of cunning exploitation of what you have instead of yearning after what you wanted? Determination and a burning need to keep advancing towards your goals?"

The hat considered for a moment before continuing.

"It seems you'd fit well in Ravenclaw, with your drive to learn and your analytical mind, and you'd probably be happier there, but with your focused mindset I can only put you in-"

"SLYTHERIN!" Shouted the hat.

At long last, the promised chapter comes!

Seriously though, sorry for the wait. Real life hit me with the job-search and delayed it, but it wouldn't have been delayed this long if the scene I had intended on writing had felt right the first time I wrote it.

I had been intending to do a bunch of mini-scenes revolving around Harry's training and adventures, but after I wrote four or five different versions of this chapter and it never felt right I scrapped the whole idea and just skipped straight to Hogwarts.

Luna actually references one of his adventures that I had planned on writing- her mother saw Harry at a distance in China a few years before this scene getting mobbed by a crowd of fans who wanted to meet 'The-Boy-Who-Lived' and labeled him as a heliopath.

I feel I should make an explanation here regarding Lunas' creatures- Pandora and Luna can sense/see souls and emotions as well as a whole range of invisible and intangible species. The ability doesn't actually use their eyes, but it takes up the same 135 degree field of view as sight does- they can 'see' someone coming in total darkness or through walls as long as they're looking that direction.

Unfortunately, a regular human mind is not meant to have a clearly defined and powerful seventh sense in this manner (five normal senses plus a sixth, magical sense for wizards), and it causes some issues for them. Their minds attempt to compensate for the confusing mass the information by hallucinating the souls and emotions as phantasmal creatures.

This causes Pandora to be confused when she couldn't see Harry's physical body because his soul seems different from everybody else's even though he's completely human. Luna just accepts what her mother said as true and immediately re-labeled Harry as a heliopath based on what her mother told her.

(Harry's soul seems to burn like a lower-end star/red dwarf most of the time to them, and when he's pushing out magic or positive emotions his soul lights up like the sun.)

This is why Luna talks to people under invisibility cloaks or polyjuice- you can't design a cloak or potion to conceal yourself from a sense that you don't know about. It's also why she sometimes calls people by odd nicknames- (e.g. 'Umgubular Slashkilter' Dolores Umbridge, 'Old Lion' Rufus Scrimegour, 'Mr. Heliopath' Harry Potter) she sees them as a talking version of that animal rather than as a person with a soul that is that shape… of course, this means that she isn't afraid of large predators… because she's seen some of them that are very nice and invite her for tea.

…the predators are usually confused by this and so they try to ignore the strange girl climbing all over them.

Anyway, I'll try to start posting more often now that I have a job.