Harry Potter and the Hermetic Arts

Chapter 10: Running the Shadows

"Fun?" asked Hermione.

"Yeah," said Harry. "Fun."

"I read."

"You only read? You don't play games?"

"Games?"

"Battleship? Cluedo? Monopoly? Chess? Dungeons & Dragons?"

"Not really," said Hermione. "And what's 'Dungeons & Dragons'?"

"It's a role-playing game," Harry said. Seeing the confusion on the girl's face, he elaborated. "Basically, it's a game where you pretend to be somebody else, with their knowledge and skills, and there are rules to determine whether you successfully do things based on their ability."

"But why?" asked Hermione.

"Look, I like to read, but reading is pretty passive," said the boy. "With role-playing games, I can be given a problem and have to figure out how to solve it with only what my character has at their disposal; that makes me think critically and try to find a solution on the fly.

"Besides, it gives me a chance to spend time with friends."

"I wouldn't know anything about that," Hermione whispered, so softly Harry almost didn't hear.

"Wouldn't know anything about what?" asked Harry.

"Friends," admitted the girl, seeming to shrink into herself.

"You don't have friends?" asked Harry. "What am I, chopped liver?"

"Are we friends? All you've done is criticize what I think."

"I thought that's what friends are supposed to do," said the boy. "I mean, besides spending time with you because they enjoy your company, aren't friend supposed to point out your flaws so you can fix them and make them no longer your weak spots?"

"I don't know," said the girl. "I've never had friends."

Harry turned towards Hermione's mother. "C'mon, help me here."

"Friends should be supportive," said Elizabeth. "They shouldn't be afraid to be honest and tell hard truths, but being trustworthy and supportive is the more important."

"I'm sorry," apologized Harry, as he turned back to Hermione. "I don't have any friends my own age, so I'm used to being friends with people much older than me, and I guess they're more amiable to overlooking my social ineptitudes."

Hermione nodded solemnly. "I accept your apology," she said, smiling weakly. "I'm willing to try playing a game, if you think it'll help me with my critical thinking."

"That's great," said Harry. "We're playing Shadowrun tonight, so let's start by making you a character to play with."

"I was thinking more of a board game to start with," Hermione protested.

"We can do that too," said Harry, "but I bet you'll really love playing Shadowrun. C'mon, let's make your character first, and then we can play some board games until the evening."

~ooOoo~

It took a few hours, but with Harry's help, Hermione was able to create a character she could be proud of: a former wage mage skilled in analysis who had left the employ of an Aztechnology subsidiary when she discovered the company's corrupt practices, Helena had quit her job and set out to balance the scales. Even though she had not dived into the complicated character generation system included in the rulebook and had simply chosen to work with a character archetype, Hermione still felt like she had done something interesting.

"You'll still need a street name for your character," said Harry, as Hermione filled out the sheet used for tracking her character's details.

"A street name?" asked Hermione.

"An alias for your character's professional life, like a military callsign," the boy explained.

"What's your character's?"

Harry smiled, and for a moment, Hermione didn't understand why. Then, she heard him speak.

"Miss, Ah'm Whiplash Hunter, from Louisiana," said Harry as he adopted the familiar drawl once again, tipping an imaginary hat as he did so. "Whah, itsa plehshah ta meetcha."

"Hunter Whiplash is a character from a role-playing game?" asked Hermione, visibly surprised.

"Of course," said Harry. "Think about it: a character you play in a role-playing game has a personality you're familiar with, a backstory you wrote yourself, and mannerisms you know because you've pretended to be that character before. It's really a perfect cover identity, if you think about it, so long as you can acquire the proper identification documents."

The girl considered it for a moment. "That makes sense, I suppose. So, what do you think my street name should be?"

"Wells Danger," said Harry, after a long moment of consideration.

"Wells Danger?" asked Hermione.

"Your initials are H and G, which makes me think of H. G. Wells," the boy explained. "And Danger just rhymes with Granger."

"That just silly," said Hermione with a smile. "I like it."

"Well, with that done, let's go over the basics of the rules so you'll be familiar with them before you play with the group tonight."

~ooOoo~

A fast learner, Hermione had grasped the basic rules of the system by mid-afternoon, giving the children just enough time play a few rounds of Battleship before the other regulars began to filter into Bourne's Comics and Games. Introductions were made, hands were shaken, and small talk was had as they waited for everybody to arrive.

It was only just before sunset that everyone had settled in with their refreshments of choice. Romy sat at the head of the table, a few notebooks spread out on the table before her, while around her, the other participants were in various states of relaxation.

Taking a long sip from the highball glass besides her, Romy raised a hand and brought silence to the room before she began her narration.

"It's twenty-one hundred hours when you receive a message from Adona, your fixer," said Romy. "She has a job for you, but as usual, she wants to meet in person.

"When you get to the Ragdoll, a mid-end club in downtown Seattle, you find Adona her usual back booth, sipping on a steaming cup of soykaf while scrolling through a digital organizer; as soon as she sees you, she waves you over, and you all gather around to hear the job specs.

"As it turns out, Adona has a client who wants to hire some runners to hit a warehouse in Penumbra tonight, raid the cargo and deliver it to a drop site in the Barrens."

"Harry, you didn't say anything about stealing," Hermione said, alarmed. "Stealing is wrong!"

Harry shot Romy a look. "What other details can Adona give us?"

Romy flipped a couple pages in one of the notebooks, then wrote something down in another. "When you press her for more information, Adona relents and tells you the client is a street doc who is struggling with the influx of patients in her street clinic who have contracted a new strain of influenza; she managed to ply a guard who worked at the warehouse with enough alcohol for him to let slip they had received a shipment of antiviral medications that the corp is planning to sell for huge profits. The client is hoping to get her hands on the merchandise and distribute it for free out of her clinic to the SINless who can't afford to buy the meds from a retailer."

"See, we're hooding," said Harry.

"Hooding?" asked Hermione, frowning at the term she did not recognized.

"Like Robin Hood," said Karen. "Stealing from the rich, to give to the poor."

Hermione frowned, and Harry caught it. "Sometimes, you have to pick between bad choices, and if you don't, somebody will else will. At least if we do this, we'll do it right."

"Do it right?"

"We go in quiet, secure the site and get out with a minimal body count and zero exposure," Shaun explained. "Another team might try it guns ablazing, dropping bodies unnecessarily and damaging the merchandise."

"All right," said Hermione reluctantly. "But we don't hurt any innocent bystanders."

"We can dae 'at," agreed Jack with a nod. " What's th' offer fur pay?"

"Adona offers you 600 nuyen per person for the job," said Romy, before rolling a handful of dice. "However, with some time and cajoling, you manage to negotiate the fee to 700."

"All right," said Harry brightly. "Let's get on the legwork."

"Legwork?" asked Hermione.

"The preparation for the job," clarified Harry. "Before going in, we have to prepare, or else everything will go bad because of bad intelligence or some other factor."

"I'm going to meet up with some of my street contacts, see what I can squeeze out of them," said Karen before rolling a fistful of dice. "Two sixes, three threes and a two."

~~ooOoo~~

It took two hours to complete the legwork for the mission, mostly because partway through the preparation for the job, Kip the Ear, one of Marilyn's—Karen's character—contacts was abducted by a group of thrill gangers looking to get their rocks off beating and torturing the homeless SINless youth while high on psychotropics, leading Karen to rally the team to the youth's rescue, charging into the warehouse with weapons and magic firing at full force. Though she was philosophically opposed to violence, Hermione had found the experience thrilling and cathartic, and being the savior to an oppressed teenager made her feel good about herself, which in turn made her question what she really believed she was capable of.

After the rescue, the rest of the legwork proved to be fairly ordinary; by the end of it, the players had managed to secure plans to the building, the duty roster for the evening and even janitors' kits as disguises and a few keycards for access, yet most of it had flown by Hermione's head. Even though she had managed to help with the legwork by using her Clairvoyance spell, Hermione felt lost in a lot of the flow of the game as Harry and the other players spoke in jargon she had no understanding of; she was only able to get the jist of what was happening through Romy's colorful narration, and the confusion was not a feeling she appreciated.

Nonetheless, the job seemed to be going well; the team had been able to enter the facility under the guise of a cleaning crew, quickly and quietly subduing the guards on site by threatening them with weapons before handcuffing and gagging them, then going to the central security room and disabling the CCTV feeds. Once that had been done, they loaded the crates of medication into the box van Zero Day—Jack's character—had stolen for the job.

Unfortunately, that was where the job had went sideways, with a crew of heavily-armed mercenaries blowing through a wall with a breaching charge and coming in with smoke grenades and overlapping fields of fire. Outnumbered and outgunned, the situation looked grim for the crew under the players' control even as they took cover and exchanged gunfire with the newcomers with the big guns and heavy body armor.

Desperate to help the group but with a character not particularly skilled in combat, Hermione was trying to figure out what she could contribute in such a situation when her eyes fell on the Chaotic World spell listed on her character sheet. Though it was a gamble, she chose to risk it, and after Harry's Whiplash Hunter and Shaun's Nero had successfully flushed their attackers into a small area with a combination of bullets and grenades, Wells Danger cast Chaotic World with as much Force as she could without killing herself, and though she did not resist the Drain from the casting, their attackers also failed to resist the effects of the spell, and thus found themselves blinded, deafened and overwhelmed by olfactory and tactile sensations as the magic took hold of them, rendering them defenseless even as Nero and Whiplash Hunter carried Wells Danger to the van before the team made good their escape, depositing the van at the designated spot before returning to Adona to be paid for the mission.

In the aftermath of the game, Hermione felt a sense of elation she had never experienced from just reading books; even though she had mostly sat and listened, she somehow felt she had managed to accomplish amazing something despite having not left the game shop all day, like she actually had a hand in helping people who needed it.

She was reflecting on the experience so intensely that she didn't even notice Harry speaking, and it was only when he touched her lightly on the shoulder that she jerked to attention. "What?"

"From the look on your face, I can tell you're trying to process the experience," said the boy, offering Hermione a store brand bottle of lemon-flavored fizzy drink.

"It's like I was reading a story, except I was part of it too, and because I was part of the story, what I did affected the outcome," reflected Hermione aloud. "It's different than just reading."

"That's role-playing," said the boy, taking a pull from his drink. "It's exhilarating, imaginative, downright addictive and most importantly, wish fulfillment. You get to be your best self, or the best version of an aspect of yourself, when you're playing a role-playing game, and you get to do with your friends."

"I think I like it," said Hermione.

"That's good," Harry said. "You should do things you like."

~ooOoo~

The next two weeks fell into a kind of routine: Saturday and Sunday, Harry would catch the train to London and walk the High Streets and markets where he could find them, visiting bookstores and specialty shops, acquiring more material possessions that he thought would make his life at boarding school easier. Then, he would make a list on Monday morning of the projects he wanted to start on during the week, often of items he wanted to enchant with specific magics that would make the object more useful to him or books he would want to finish reading, and spend the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday in the library doing research for each project. Wednesdays and Thursdays were then spent on enchanting the objects he wanted to create, before Friday came around, bringing Hermione Granger back to Bourne's Comics and Games to discuss the schoolbooks he was reading and she was re-reading and to ask questions about Shadowrun and other role-playing games before spending the evening playing Shadowrun with the regulars of the hobby shop, even though her attendance reduced them to only hooding.

While Harry had many enchanted objects he wanted to create in preparation for attending a school where electricity was not readily available, he ultimately failed in producing workable solutions for most of his ideas. Radio and television to keep in up with the happenings of normal society was beyond the scope of what he could manage with his lack of specific knowledge on how either device worked, and his attempts to simply use runes and sigils to generate power for the devices he was trying to create always ended in them frying when the magic inevitably produced electricity at too high a voltage. It also meant the Discman he had purchased for listening to music could not be powered by magic, and he bought a case of double A batteries to power the device and other similar small electronics he had acquired.

He had, however, managed a few successes. First was an ice chest he had enchanted to maintain freezing temperatures even in the absence of ice; this has been the easiest project to complete, as it had only required the carving the ancient viking rune isa into all of the interior walls of the container, then inlaying the negative space with seraphinite, a gemstone found in only Siberia, and infusing the inlaid stones with magical energy. Once he had realized how easy it was to construct such a self-cooling ice chest, Harry had made an additional one.

The second was a more complex creation. Taking a meter long length of gidgee, Harry had shaped it into a two-inch diameter rod before removing a half-inch of its core with magic, filling it with finely powdered coal he packed in as tightly as possible before transforming it into a solid cylinder of diamond and adding diamond inlays to the ends of the wood, fusing the end pieces with the dowel running through the heart of the pole before using magic to warp one end into a large hook, a tricky task because it required him to manipulate both mineral and wood at the same time, something that took him a dozen attempts to get right, with each failed one destroying the rod he had previously made, though he learned to simultaneously warp mineral and plant matter with magic by the time he achieved the result he wanted, so he had gained something despite the wasted materials. From there, he engraved runes along the length of the wood with the point of an industrial grade diamond before filling over the etchings with a plaster created with a combination of ground amber, powdered diamonds (created from coal) and resin, then polished the surface of the rod until smooth and painted the wood with a fine layer of varnish while leaving the diamond ends untouched. When Harry channeled Astral power into the rod, it became impossible to move, and he intended to use it in his daily calisthenics, though he imagined he could find other uses for it as well, since it was shaped like walking cane.

His final project, however, was the most important one, and he had devoted a good deal of energy, including several sleepless nights, to seeing it through. It had started as a vague idea after he had come upon a goods lift at Ikea and slowly grew in complexity as it niggled away in the back of his mind until he could no longer ignore it, particularly if he wanted to keep his head down at Hogwarts and not stand out. That Jason had been able to sell another two hundred gold pieces had been extremely beneficial to the project, as it gave him resources to purchase the materials needed to produce the final product, an enchanted redwood platform that could bear weight while moving freely around the interior of his haversack's main pocket, and though the materials he had wasted to reach the final product had been costly in his mind, it in truth would be barely noticeable besides the bulk of his inheritance, something he kept reminding himself as a consolation.

Author's Note: I know the last section doesn't really feel like it belongs with the rest of the chapter, but I really wanted a clean break before sending Harry off to boarding school, where things are really going to accelerate.

If you enjoy reading this (or if you hate reading it, though I don't know you'd stick around 10 chapters in if you hated it), feel free to leave a review. I may have went to school with a young lady who said, "Enthusiasm makes me exhausted", but luckily, I'm not her.

Once again, credit to Shinshikaizer for the original story treatment, and goalie12345 for copy-editing.