For Those Who Came In Late:
Harry Potter got taken to Cyrodiil as a baby by forces unknown, brought up by one of my other protagonists, was found, and is back in Hogwarts taking his classes.
Having met Severus Snape, and taking a cannon to canon, he recently did something no native of Cyrodiil has ever done before.
By the way. I never said it explicitly before, but Ms. Rowling and Bethesda Softworks have nothing to fear from me or this drivel. Call off your lawyers, you fools!
Revision: Rewrote Trelawney's cameo to be canon-friendly. Still wasted good ASCII on the drunkard.
Anyway, the following morning:
Draco watched the Parkinson and Zabini show over his breakfast. Whatever Snape had done or said to them during their detention had apparently worked, since the two were very ostentatiously not looking at each other. Their respective cliques were less circumspect.
The blonde boy just knew that meant they were plotting. No doubt there'd be an extra pair of owls heading out of Hogwarts today. The Parkinson girl didn't know who she was dealing with. And he said as such to those around him.
"You're betting on Slytherins fighting?" Oh, yes. Weasley. The blood traitor's grasp of the obvious was as lacking as his table manners.
"Well, they are." Draco repressed a sigh as the redheaded moron looked over at the green and silver tables.
"No they ain't." Just as he'd expected.
"They are, Weasley. They're just not doing it openly... yet."
Meanwhile, on the fourteenth floor of the Parkinson Building:
Paul Edward Parkinson was something of a mystery to his investors and shareholders. A rather nerve-wracking one, as it happened.
Having portraits of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts on the walls of his office didn't help.
The reason for their combined admiration and anxiety was his predilection for what he called 'speculative ventures'; capital-gobbling forays into markets and technologies that, often as not, put swathes of red ink on the books instead of, or too long before, producing healthy returns. There had been talk, time and again, of having the CEO of Parkinson Industries replaced with someone less adventurous, but 'PEP', as he signed himself, was able to nip that in the bud.
Paul Edward Parkinson was not a 'money man'; indeed he used that term as an insult. He saw himself as a technologist, a tinkerer, and an explorer.
Bankers and accountants aren't the future, he had written once, it's stuff. You can shuffle numbers all over the place, but you need stuff, even just clay tablets and an abacus, to do so. We owe our success to DISCOVERING and MAKING stuff that people WANT and BUY.
Expressing the same sentiments in a stockholder's meeting speech gained him a standing ovation.
Right now, he was leafing through a fat binder that held a number of articles that would have made any investor's faith in him drop sharply. There were several sheets of parchment in plastic sleeves, and clippings from back issues of newspapers called the Daily Prophet and The Quibbler. The articles in question, complete in places with the inevitable animated photographs, mostly revolved around politics, especially the edicts of the so-called Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge.
A sheet of paper held Mr Parkinson's notes on him and his Ministry. They were not flattering.
There were other notes as well, written recollections and a transcript of the interview with the Professor sent to explain Pansy's ability. Paul's annotations were mostly questions.
A divider indicated where various interviews with staff members began – members who also knew about Diagon Alley and Hogwarts and Minister (hah! More like King) Fudge, or who had relatives who did.
From what he had been able to learn, the so-called 'magical world' was a potential market just begging to be tapped – if obstacles, such as magic's interference with electronic devices, and centuries of isolationism and stagnation, could be overcome. And there were whole realms of medical, chemical and biological marvels to be discovered, before being branded with the Parkinson logo.
Pulling up a yellow legal pad he used for brainstorming, Paul Edward Parkinson closed the binder and began to plot.
He couldn't wait for his daughter's first letter. He hoped his little astronaut was okay.
Later, just outside the library:
"I cannot believe I've been banned for a week!" Hermione looked, if anything, even more horrified than during her first broom flight.
"Well, you should have kept your voice down," Harry shrugged, "left the arguments for later."
"But how could anyone not know about the moon landings?"
"I didn't until a month ago."
"But it's impossible!" Ron looked rebellious. "How could Mugg..." Harry and Hermione were glowering at him in stereo. "Mun...danes fly to the moon? Even with these rockers–"
"Rockets," Hermione groaned. She was beginning to realise that one of the reasons wizards were behind the times was because they were rather... ...slow to accept new ideas.
"And why would they bother anyway?" Draco snorted, "The moon's the moon."
Hermione's face cycled through an interesting sequence of incredulous white and infuriated red while doing a fairly good impersonation of a gaffed fish.
"And that's why the Mundanes got there first," Harry said at last.
Draco, Ron and Neville all stopped dead and started doing gaffed-fish impressions at him.
"Seriously, the Mundanes have made huge strides in their tech... um, technology and sciences. So why is everyone here still faffing about with candles and quills? Why no electricity?"
"Because it's the way things are," Draco echoed his father – minus the inevitable slap or hex.
"They won't stay that way forever," Harry retorted, "Do... um..."
He decided a crash course in modern Tamrielic history wouldn't help.
"...Notice-me-not charms work on cameras? What about someone on an airplane way up in the sky?"
From the others' expressions such questions had never occurred to them. Hermione's was rather different. In a sudden flash of insight, Harry saw a 'joint research project' looming in his future.
"And why do you lot all hide anyway?"
"I thought it was obvious!" Draco found himself sneering at the boy's ignorance. "The Statutes of Secrecy are vital to protecting wizard-kind from the Muggles' persecution and have done so for over three hundred years."
"At what cost though?" Harry wondered aloud.
Befuddlement was the only response he got from the four of them.
History of Magic had been no help at all. The professor, Binns, blithely ignored any questions and lectured on in a soporific drone, repeating what turned out to be the preface to Hogwarts Through the Centuries, exactly as he, Cuthbert Binns, had written it in 1703.
Hermione was rather put out to learn that.
While Divination was only started in the second year, it appeared that Professor Trelawney had 'received a vision' that she would take lunch for once with the rest of the staff in the Great Hall. Harry didn't like her put-on spiritual attitude (sentiments shared by the majority of the staff), nor her histrionics as she proclaimed, pointing dramatically at him, that Death was near.
"Apparently she had a prophecy in Dumbledore's office," Draco drawled as they left for their first lesson of the afternoon, "That's why he keeps her on the staff."
A pair of eloquent snorts were his response.
Defence Against the Dark Arts was, in Harry's eyes, a complete loss. The room reeked of garlic, and Professor Quirrel was so neurotic that he stuttered throughout the lesson, and at one point actually fainted. To make matters worse, Harry felt an unpleasant aching all throughout the lesson, which got worse whenever Quirrel looked in his direction.
It wasn't until he regained consciousness later that night that he realised the ache was located in his scar.