DOOM Day

by Joshua The Evil Guy

YAHP/GHF. Harry is repeating the worst day of his life over and over again. Department Of Mysteries Day.

14. Chapter 14

Chapter 13: Divination

Harry was working on his Occlumency now. He'd finished that book by Professor X, whoever that had been, and had managed to figure out a multitude of tricks to keep Voldemort from even wanting to read his mind. However he'd discovered, through oversight when he'd forgotten to send a particular note at a certain time on several occasions, that those same ways did not automatically block everyone else from entering his mind. If anything, the simple illusionary defenses he'd been using against Voldemort only gave Snape more reasons to mock him.

According to the book, the next stage involved segmenting and organizing one's own mind, and eventually working towards creating a full and interactive mindscape. This was a lot harder in practice than in theory though.

Currently, Harry was just sitting and meditating in the Room of Requirement, taking a break from the Twins' Beater training for as long as he could. The Room had appeared as a simple cushion on the stone floor, and the ambient lighting dimmed to near-blackness as he sat upon it. Closing his eyes, he began by, as the book suggested, sorting through his memories, the oldest he had, and then building everything else from that, using it as a foundation for everything else he was going to build. Unfortunately, his oldest memory was also one that he had repressed until his Third Year. Still, focusing on that night and then trying to remember further back, he became aware of more pleasant feelings. Not true memories, but emotional memories. He used those as his foundation instead, and worked his way forward through time, organizing each and every memory, both according to when it happened, as well as the emotions and things that happened in the memory itself.

At first it was harder than studying for the OWLs had been. Then, as he progressed and organized things more and more, it became easier and easier, until pretty soon he found that he was able to recall just about everything from his early childhood, down to the number of drops of his blood on Dudley's fist, to the color of all the students clothes in his elementary class on the first and last days of school. After that, he went back several times through all those memories and found he remembered a lot more than he'd thought he had, as he could soon recall a level of detail to those memories that surprised him more and more with everything he discovered. It wasn't that suddenly he could remember everything like those people with photographic memory, it was more that he finally started paying attention and was learning how to remember what he paid attention to.

It didn't all happen in a single reset either, and after even one day with the Twins, he needed at least one day off, otherwise he feared he would go homicidally insane. Again.

Still, he was making good progress, managing about a year's worth of memories per reset/meditation. At least that was his level of progress for the first ten or so years of his life. And then he got to the point in his memories where he met Hagrid and learned he was a wizard and about magic. Most everything happened much the same as he remembered it normally, save that a lot of small details that he hadn't paid any attention to the first time around ended up being all the clues needed to forewarn him about a whole lot of the crap he ended up having to deal with near the end of the school term. He also could recall everything he'd ever read, but only because he could remember reading them, and recall what his eyes saw as part of his new way of remembering. A few other details also made themselves known. Things that weren't ever part of his life or memories prior to Hogwarts, such as magic, added a whole new dynamic to the memories he was re-experiencing.

For example, his experience with the Sorting Hat, now that he knew what to pay attention to, he could actually remember feeling the magic of the Hat probing his mind and sorting through everything in his mind and more in a matter of seconds. And then his first time intentionally casting magic in class, now that he was so much more sensitive to magic and the elements, he could recognize a host of information that he previously had not even been aware that he'd been aware of! It slowed his progress down from a whole year per reset to at least five or six meditations just for his first year, and then twice that for the next year, and double it again for the year after that, and then double that for the previous year, and triple that for this past year, not counting the time after the Time Loop began. Of course these meditations happened in between his Beater lessons with the twins, and in the end didn't even cover a quarter of the amount of time the Twins were working him over for.

Why it took more time was not because he had more to sort through, it was simply that Dumbledore had lied to him yet again. He also discovered that Memory Charms did not erase memories, the magic simply buried them. How they were buried is why it is believed that just countering the magic of the memory charm will not restore the memory. Truthfully, it was just like retrieving traumatic memories. Hard, difficult, and often times painful, but still possible for those willing to work at it. Which is why everyone said that there is no way to restore memories once they've been wiped. Harry, however, was definitely willing to work at it.

The Headmaster had been honest enough to give him the broad strokes, but he'd neglected the minor stuff. Lockhart, for starters, had not been lying when he said the only spell he was any good at was the Memory Charm. Judging by the number of classes the man had 'changed' from the true disasters they had been to 'more ego-driven quizzes and tests' or the occasional 'reenactment of scenes' from the same ego-driving books, Harry wasn't surprised that Lockhart hadn't been caught before his own spell backfired on him. Some of those 'disaster classes' had been along the same lines of that first disaster of a class, with Harry, Hermione and Ron countering whatever creature Lockhart unleashed in the classroom while all the rest got assaulted or run over. Sometimes Hermione asked some key questions that probably had her disillusioned much sooner about Lockhart's fame than what had happened in the end, and seeing that those same questions had simultaneously disillusioned all the other young witches in the class, Lockhart would immediately correct the oversight with a room-wide Obliviate and then they would all be adoring fangirls again.

But that's skipping ahead slightly. Every weekend of his First Year, Harry had been taken by Professor McGonagall to the Hospital wing, usually for the hour immediately after lunch, where he was then subjected to all manner of magical and physical tests, and then the Headmaster wiped his memory and sent him to the Library to join Hermione and Ron in searching for clues about the Third Floor Corridor and Nicholas Flamel.

The few times Hermione or Ron came with him, their memories were wiped too, which explained why Hermione 'forgot' about that book she'd borrowed for some light reading where they finally found Nicholas Flamel's identity, several months after she'd had it in her possession. And then there was the "first time" Dumbledore told him about.

He hadn't been asleep for even a day after he faced Voldemort in the Third Floor Corridor hidden room. He woke up in a slight delirium, but it quickly passed. No one was in the room save for him, and the mountain of presents had already been started, though wasn't as large as it would soon be in another few days. He wasn't able to get up yet, his magic was at an all time low, lower even than what Harry with all his recent intensive training had ever allowed it to get to. In fact, he had hardly been able to move so much as a finger, and his eyelids were heavy and could hardly open. After a few minutes of silent thought, he heard some noises, and came to the realization that someone else had entered the room. He'd tried to move his head, open his eyes, even to speak, but he could do none of that.

Soon enough, the person stepped over him and revealed it to be Madam Pomphrey. "Good, he's still out of it. Bring them in," she ordered. There were more noises, and among them he heard Professor Dumbledore's voice and that of an elderly man's, but one he did not recognize.

"Nicholas, I doubt there is any other way. I've told both of you the Prophecy. Can there be any other interpretation?" Dumbledore was saying.

"I've met your Divination Professor," the old man, Nicholas Harry presumed, replied. "There are as many interpretations to what this 'Power The Dark Lord Knows Not' could be as there are stars in the sky and the points of view you may see them from. Perenelle, my dear? Do you agree?"

"Save the drama for your private discussions, you two," a mean sounding old lady snapped, she sounded much closer than the men did, like she was right next to his bed. He still couldn't open his eyes all the way and so everything was just shaded blurs. The voices were clear in his memory though. "This has only been done three times before. Never to one so young though. The protection young Lily gave for Harry has been expended. It was expended that very night so long ago. Whatever it was that Harry did to destroy the husk and free the wraith, if it could even be blamed on Lily's protection, it too has expired. That much I can see. The wraith also took nearly all of the boy's magic."

That at least explained why he'd been so drained.

"If we're going to do this, we need to do it in the next hour at the latest," the old woman, Perenelle, said. "His magic is already regenerating. I expect him to be back to normal within the next day or so at the most. After we do this though, it will be at least a week."

"On behalf of the whole world, I thank you for your sacrifice, my friends," Dumbledore humbly spoke.

Nicholas scoffed, a croaking laughter came from him before he spoke rather breathlessly, "Hah! Whole world, my wrinkled ass you goat-wanker! And what sacrifice? I've been making Stones for centuries. As complicated as it is to make those things, do you really think I would have let you have our only one? Or that I wouldn't have already had another made the moment you had your lackey pick up that one from the Goblins? Never really understood why you wizards started trusting those creatures. Safe bet one of them let slip about the drop vault where I put that so you could pick it up. Probably why it was broken into in the first place. Oh wipe that silly stunned look off your face. Do you really think I'm going to let you or your nurse here know that I have extra Stones? I'll be Obliviating your memory just as assuredly as you'll be wiping the boy's memory of this little experiment. Or did you think he wouldn't wake up from the pain of having the Philosopher's Stone implanted into his body?"

What followed was the seventh most painful experience of Harry's life. Well, it was ranked seventh now, but before those others it had definitely been the most painful. He woke up screaming and begging to know why they were doing it to him. He begged for them to stop. He swore never to trust Dumbledore again when the man kept whispering meaningless platitudes to him. And then they Obliviated him and he was conscious only long enough to witness the Flamels Obliviate both Dumbledore and Madam Pomphrey, who had participated, however reluctantly, but still participated.

After unlocking this memory, Harry took an extra day off.

Before and after that day off though, he carefully, with the exactness of a scientist not knowing what he was looking for but knowing it was there all the same, went through every aspect of his magic and even his body with all manner of diagnostic spells he learned just to find out what had been done to him. The Stone, apparently, hadn't been physically inserted into his body, but rather had been converted to its pure magical form and that magic forced into joining with his own Magic Core. Seeing how seamlessly it had been accomplished, Harry suspected it had been done through a ritual he'd been too out of it to notice the details of. In going back over the memory, he realized that the ritual had probably already been done beforehand and all that was required was putting it in him with all the participants of the ritual. Upon reflection, he began to recognize what the addition of the Philosopher's Stone to his magic had done for him.

For starters, he healed faster than before. Well, after that week where it was integrated he started healing faster. He also realized that his ability to commune with all four elements rather than just one came from the Philosopher Stone. Also, his magic had gotten a rather significant boost. And another thing, which he was only just beginning to recognize, his body could now be changed by his magic. The adjustments after his accidents with Apparating being his latest clue, another half a dozen also sprang to mind. He figured that he had only just begun to uncover what all that little 'addition' of Dumbledore's had done to him.

After his day off, he started trying to figure out what all the Philosopher Stone had done, as well as moving on to the other event Dumbledore had told him about. His summer with Hermione and Ron. The days and days he thought he'd been cut off from his friends were much the same as he initially remembered them, but after not getting a response to his initial letter, he now remembered deciding to find Hermione in the phone book and taking a taxi to her place if needed. Turns out he didn't need to as she came and got him after he called, and thus he packed up his trunk and walked out on the Dursleys the day after Vernon told him not to let Hedwig out of her cage anymore. He spent roughly a week there and sleeping in the Granger's spare room before he noticed that Ron still wasn't sending any letters back. Hermione, being the stickler for rules that she was at the time, sent a letter detailing the trouble he was having to Professor McGonagall. She showed up that very night with Dumbledore in tow and the next thing Harry knew, he was back at the Dursley's and the very next evening was when he had that memorable conversation with Dudley and when Dobby showed himself. There were bars on his window before the weekend.

Not as bad as what he was still to uncover, he was sure, but bad enough that Professor McGonagall had been part of it at all. He was seriously starting to lose trust in just about everybody he'd ever put his trust in.

Harry was amazed that he even remembered his Second Year at all, as he came to realize how many times he'd been Obliviated. Between Lockhart, Dumbledore, and his continuing weekend appointments in the Hospital Wing, his mind was being erased practically once a day for the whole year. No wonder everything was in such a haze half the time. And now looking back at everything, he could see all the clues that he had missed. Things that Hermione had caught onto, and undoubtedly Dumbledore had as well, became glaringly obvious. Ginny's "crush" as well, now that he knew her so well, while cute, was also quite clearly not the behavior she displayed during her First Year. He recognized that she was bothered by something, but he hadn't paid enough attention at the time to realize that her nervousness came from fear, not a crush. Something that was all too obvious in hindsight now.

By the time he got to the basilisk fight in his memory, he realized that the times he'd spent the weekend being tested had dropped off to once a month for a while, and had stopped after Hermione had been petrified. And then after freeing Dobby from the Malfoy family, he of course went to the Hospital Wing to get patched up. That night, after everyone had gone to sleep, he found himself awoken and in one of Pomphrey's beds. Dumbledore was asking about a taint. Professor McGonagall was curious about the bite he'd survived thanks only to phoenix intervention. Pomphrey was answering their questions straightforward and with a clinical detachment. Harry was pleased to note that he was apparently immune to most poisons and in fact his blood could be used as a poison component if used in the appropriate way. The only other information they discussed in his presence was Pomphrey noting that the power of the Philosopher's Stone had fully integrated with his core, and had undoubtedly helped in him surviving the Basilisk poison.

The reason why he hadn't remembered hearing about that before now was quite simply that he'd sort of lost his temper when they got to the part about the Stone and shouted at them and demanded answers. McGonagall transfigured his bedclothes to restrain him, Pomphrey then came along with two vials, one filled with a familiar black substance (basilisk venom) and the other a mostly clear fluid that had a golden shine to it (phoenix tears). Dumbledore wanted to know how good his immunity was and had Pomphrey force the venom down his throat before pouring in the phoenix tears. She then pricked him with a manufactured poison and he never felt a thing. Dumbledore then Obliviated the entire experience and sent him back to bed.

That summer was almost entirely as Harry remembered it. Except for that day that "he spent gardening", as Dumbledore said, he remembered no such thing. Marge was even more vindictive than normal on that day, and that bulldog was constantly snapping at him. He wrote the letter and smuggled Hedwig outside so she could deliver it. He remembered being surprised at the rapid response his missive had garnered, but even now felt grateful for it. The Ministry showed up with Dumbledore at the lead and the Minister right behind him. It more or less went just like Dumbledore said, save that he was there from the beginning rather than 'after the fact'.

Harry had no true understanding of what Dumbledore was up to in all this, but those conversations between him and the Minister right before the children and muggles were 'modified', were highly enlightening. Dumbledore really did think of Sirius as a threat at that time. He was genuinely concerned for everyone's safety, and was there purely in an advisory capacity. Harry had never seen him order an Auror, or even look sideways at the Minister. In fact, save that Dumbledore was the first one through the door, he was entirely submissive for the entire encounter, keeping quiet and speaking only when asked direct questions.

His Third Year was much more active. Beginning with his summer spent on Diagon Alley, when he intentionally ran away, this time without the big production of the others coming to get him. Thankfully, other than recalling a great more detail than before, he discovered no hidden memories and as best as he could tell he was not Obliviated at any point. He wasn't called to the Hospital Wing every weekend, and everything else happened exactly as he remembered it beforehand. It still took him close to twenty-five resets to sort through his entire Third Year at Hogwarts though.

Finally, he came to the summer before his Fourth Year. He was particularly anxious about what he would find out, as it was during the Yule Ball that Dumbledore admitted was the last time he'd been Obliviated. Something having to do with Fleur apparently. Still, there was a process to this, and he had to take it one day at a time and build up to it, otherwise it would all collapse and he'd be right back where he started. Looking back at the World Cup, he found whole new things to be amazed and impressed with. The skill and sheer tenacity displayed by all the players was inspiring, and the play itself was equally impressive. Doubly so because he could now recognize a lot of the moves they were using, and knew he could even pull them off himself just as well as they could, if not even better. At least as far as the Chasers and Seekers were concerned.

He could also now remember the feel of his wand being picked from his pocket during the middle of the game. He also caught a few other clues that should have raised alarms, but didn't at the time, all leading up to the inevitable conclusion of what happened that year. Having heard it from Crouch Jr's own mouth, Harry knew the day Mister Weasley had left in a rush that was when they'd replaced the real Mad-Eye Moody and when the switch was pulled off. Mister Weasley could have saved Moody and stopped it all, but no one could have known. Though the clues were there, they weren't enough on their own to act upon. Even in hindsight, he could not see how it could have turned out any differently.

The first two months of school had been busy and full of excitement, especially after the two schools arrived. And then Halloween night, when his name came out of the cup. He really should have just stood up and said he declined right then and there, but honestly the idea had never even once occurred to his 14 year old mind. He'd been too overwhelmed to have any real reaction at all, except maybe his usual brand of fear and confusion.

After that, it was just one bad experience after the next, with very little good to outweigh any of it. Ron not believing him. Moody's lessons. Hermione and her S.P.E.W. campaign. And then Malfoy and those pins. On top of all that, he had to deal with the completely unwanted fame that came with the Tournament. He wondered why he'd been such a patsy when he was younger. Explained his temper problem he'd had this year though. Repressed feelings and all that.

Looking back at the dragon fight, he was amazed he hadn't been killed in those few minutes before his broom finally arrived. The aftermath was worse by far, but he'd been rather high on having his best friend back, so he hadn't been paying attention at the time. With one broom ride, he'd proven to the world that he deserved to be in the Tournament and that he was as good as three 'adult' magic users. It made it all but impossible for him to bow out gracefully or anything like that. Following that, for the entire month of December, there was the build-up to the Yule Ball, and Harry regretted more than anything the trouble he'd put the Patil Sisters through that night, it really had not been fair.

Finally, after close to thirty resets, he got to the night in question in his memories. He began with when he woke up that morning and...

DOM_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ DOM

...Harry found himself waking up at 7 as his alarm clock went off. He waited and realized it was the start of a new reset. Searching his memory, he recalled the day leading up to Yule Ball with perfect clarity. He remembered getting ready for it. He remembered waiting for Pavarti and then meeting Hermione and Krum in the front hall, and then walking into the changed Great Hall, the first dance where he really had no clue as to what he was doing, and then...

DOM_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ DOM

...Harry's eyes snapped open as the alarm clock went off again. Except it hadn't. He'd reset. As soon as he got to...

DOM_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ DOM

... OK, what the bloody hell? He wanted to scream, but instead he Disapparated from his bed and bounced all over the place before finally managing to get to the Headmaster's Office, Apparating just inside the door. Without hesitation, Harry ran over to the alcove where it was kept and pulled out the Headmaster's Pensieve.

He quickly identified the six hour block of the actual Yule Ball that he was prevented from remembering in any significant detail, though any time before and after that he could recall with the same perfect ease that all his other memories now came to him with. Latching onto the blocked memories with his wand, he drew them out from his temple and then dropped the silver strands into the Pensieve and waited for it to mix before sticking his head into it. He honestly wasn't surprised to find himself in the same room he had just left, but a year and a half sooner in time. Dumbledore was seated in his chair and was alone in the room, save for a comatose version of his younger self, still in his dress robes.

"If you're seeing this particular memory again, Mister Potter," Dumbledore was saying, "it is most likely due to your moving further ahead in your Occlumency lessons than I have planned for you. Therefore, I have placed protections against you moving any further along with..."

Harry tuned out the man's drivel and started analyzing everything else in the room. The book by Professor X had mentioned these kind of protections. Mostly as a warning against, as putting these sorts of magics in any mind could potentially destabilize said mind. It also talked about the ways, or way rather as there had only been discovered one way to remove such protections. For each moment of blocked memory and/or ability, there was a key placed on the outside, or rather in the defense of the protections themselves. In this case, Dumbledore had left a message, warning Harry from trying to breech them, and so objects in this room, at this moment, during this play of false memory were the keys to unlocking it and freeing his memory.

Seven objects immediately caught his attention. Those were the obvious keys, and could be combined to form the first lock. There were always three locks on these kinds of protections. Break the locks, the protections get removed. But before he could break the first lock, he needed to identify the six other more subtle keys that made up the second lock, as well as the untold number of keys that made up the third lock. That was when Harry looked up and noticed six portraits were missing from their frames.

"Clever, old man, very clever," he sighed and rewound the Pensieve back to the beginning of the false memory. Those six were there and left immediately upon Dumbledore beginning to talk. That was the second lock. Harry rewound the memory again, and touched the seven obvious objects and locked the portraits in their paintings. The memory stopped playing and suddenly it became interactive.

"What are you doing Harry?" the fake Dumbledore asked in the suddenly darkened room.

"Using your Penseive to unlock the memory you're protecting," Harry answered easily, otherwise ignoring the false memory, instead trying to find more of the keys to the third lock. So far he'd found three of them. "Nice socks by the way." Those were first two keys.

"You have learned too much. I'm sorry Harry," the false Dumbledore then pulled its wand and pointed it Harry and whispered, "Obliviate!"

Nothing changed or happened, though Harry did find another four keys.

"What have you done, Harry?" the false Dumbledore whispered in mock-shock. Harry could hear the undertones of anger in the man's voice after all this time in dealing with him.

"Wow, over ten keys," Harry commented rather than answer. "Hope you didn't go over thirteen. The prime numbers after that get ridiculously high, and the third key only allows for prime numbers."

"How are you...? Who has taught you Occlumency?"

"Self-taught. Though I found a really interesting and helpful book that talked about these kinds of protections. Hope you didn't put any on Fleur. I heard they... degradate the mind they're placed in."

"Poppycock," the false Dumbledore scoffed. Harry shot the fake memory protection a look, and suddenly found the last of the keys.

"I sincerely hope the real you doesn't react like this when I tell him about this," he commented as he activated all the remaining keys and suddenly Harry was kicked out of the Pensieve, rather violently.

"Ow," he looked up and saw the real Professor Dumbledore standing over him while Mad-Eye Moody had him by the scruff of the neck. "Unnecessary, by the way."

"Harry, I..." Dumbledore started to say something, but Harry was already diving back into his memories, the keys to the locks firmly in mind. He set about organizing everything once more and within moments had filled in everything that he'd been missing about those six hours. About how he and Ron sat there, making Padma and Pavarti miserable, and then going out to the gardens, overhearing Hagrid's confession to Madame Maxime, Ron making Hermione run off crying, and then...

"Whoa," Harry's eyes snapped open as the missing twenty minutes of what he'd done on his way back to the dorm room were finally answered. Turned out it was Dumbledore who informed the Beauxbaton Headmistress, and not the other way around. "So, Fleur claimed I was some kind of male Veela and then proved it to me, huh? Good thing you stopped us when you did, Headmaster, otherwise I wouldn't have been a virgin when I thought I lost my virginity. Then you took me back here and lobotomized me with some ancient mental protections you didn't even know about, before having me stumble my way back to the dorms. Man... I really have to make up for that night to the Patil Twins."

"I'm so sorry, Harry," Dumbledore raised his wand and put it to Harry's forehead and whispered, "Obliviate!"

Harry felt the magic flow through his memory and try to suppress the targeted memories, but the way Harry had structured and organized his memories now, the magic kept slipping around them, not able to touch them at all, and told to ignore the more recent memories, save for those from today. Except 'today' in Harry's mind covered quite a bit of ground and what Dumbledore was trying to erase was only a few hours old. So when he removed his wand, nothing had changed at all.

"Now, Harry, tell me, what are you doing here?" Dumbledore asked, assured that his spell had worked.

"Well, I was trying to remove the protections you had put on my memory of the night of the Yule Ball, when Fleur showed me that I have some kind of male Veela attraction. Now that I think about it, that explains what happened after that damn Slytherin ritual those two got me into. Also explains why the mobs of girls came after me like they did. Come to think of it... it wasn't Pomphrey's purification at all! I just finally reached the necessary level of magic control! That, or she put a binding spell on me instead of a purification ritual. Well, no wonder!"

Frowning, Dumbledore put his wand back on Harry's head and said a little louder, "Obliviate!" Same result.

"That's getting annoying," Harry remarked as he reached behind him and put one finger on Mad-Eye's wrist. The man crumbled like a sack of potatoes. "Don't worry," he said to Dumbledore's sudden alarm, "He's only stunned. Now, obviously Headmaster Black up there informed you that I was here, and I've long since learned about the Headmaster's Access in the wards, so safe to say you either Apparated or just used a Portkey to get you and Moody here as soon as you did. Care to tell me where the Heart of Hogwarts is? I'm curious about getting Headmaster Access for myself and my friends."

"Stupefy!" Dumbledore cast a red jet of light at Harry. Harry didn't even bother saying anything, instead leaving his wand in his pocket and holding up both hands, further powering the silent-remote-cast Protego shield with his wandless magic as a booster.

After the spell had broken the shield, Harry stepped back and shook some feeling into both of his hands. "Wow, quite a lot of power in that. You've always held back on me before. But then again, the few times where I actually challenged you, I was using Elemental Magic, so I suppose that sort of forced your hand, didn't it? I know where I stand against Voldemort. I wonder where I stand against you, Professor." Harry's wand was suddenly in his hand and pointing at the Headmaster.

"Harry, don't do this. It's not too late to come back to the light!" Dumbledore begged.

Harry frowned, and then Disapparated, or to be more precise, he Streamed all over the room before reappearing where he'd stood before. His trail was as solid white as it had ever been. "You were saying?" he remarked, still frowning. "Being against you doesn't automatically make me a Dark Wizard, Albus Dumbledore. It just makes me an adult who does not appreciate being manipulated."

"You are not yet an adult, Harry. There is still much for you to learn before you earn that responsibility," Dumbledore shot another jet of red light at him, silently this time.

Harry dodged to the left, using his magic to boost his natural reflexes, and shot three stunners in reply. Dumbledore merely raised a shield that blocked all three. Dumbledore cast another spell, one Harry recognized as a Transfiguration type, aimed at the ground. Harry didn't bother dodging, instead using his connection to the stones beneath his feet to negate the magical changes. Unfortunately, that had not been Dumbledore's target. The spell bounced off of the floor and ricocheted to Harry's clothes. His pajamas and bathrobe became animated and started trying to restrain him. Harry remained unmoving for all of two seconds before shrugging and vanished the clothing right off his body.

"Now don't go getting any ideas, you old pervert," Harry teased, "I'm straight as the day is long. What else you got?" He then shot off half a dozen stunners, while using a variety of Leviosa, Banishing, and Summoning charms to send all the objects in the room flying straight at Dumbledore all at once. When books started flying, he used precisely targeted Incendios to light them aflame, and then 'bent' a few minor curses and jinxes to go around the Headmaster's back and sides, attacking him on all fronts.

Dumbledore's wand was a blur as every last one of the flying objects was stopped mid-air, the fires put out, and a full body shield protecting him from every one of the other spells.

"Hn," Harry snorted, impressed in spite of everything.

"Harry, please, explain to me what has happened..." Dumbledore begged once more, clearly not even trying to go on the offensive.

Harry shrugged again and replied, "I have. Many, many, many times. I'm defending myself. What's your excuse for wiping the memory of children and friends? Don't bother answering, it's a rhetorical question." Harry tossed his wand into the air and then changed into his Frost Giant form. It was basically still him, just in a much larger body, roughly eight feet at the shoulder, with translucent blue skin, and red eyes and skin ridges along his face and around the joints on his skin. He caught his wand and held it tightly in his fist. The Frost Giants could naturally manipulate and control ice, the same way wizards could Apparate. But they could also use magic as magic. They just hadn't learned how to make foci that worked for all of them as a race yet. Or at least they hadn't the last time any had seen them around.

"Depulso," Harry's voice had deepened and changed timbre in conjunction with his size shift. From his right fist, a wave of raw force was unleashed and knocked Dumbledore back into the wall. "Your turn."

Dumbledore's eyes were wide, disbelieving. "How did you do that?" the old man demanded to know.

The Frost Giant shrugged his massive shoulders and replied in a deep resounding base, "I'm a magical creature. I have roughly twenty magical creature Animagus forms. Frost Giant happens to be the only one where I have a humanoid form and vocal cords as well as lips. The only difference between normal creatures and magical creatures? Magical creatures can use magic. It's just most don't have the proclivity to developing foci and learn how to use them. Give a wand to a centaur and teach them a spell, they can cast as well as any wizard. Don't confuse a magical creature's natural ability as its sole use of magic. I'm a Frost Giant, so I can magically control ice, but that doesn't mean I can't still use magic itself."

Dumbledore just continued to lay against the wall, staring in disbelief.

"So... are we done?" There was no response from the old man on the floor. "Guess we are then." Harry changed back to his natural form and then immediately Disapparated and made his way through the wards to the Headmaster's Access once again, and from there he just went back to his bed and crawled back in to get some more sleep. Maybe even organize the rest of his memories of his Fourth Year while he was at it. After he woke up, he decided to take the rest of this reset off as well as the next before he went back to the Twins for more Beater training, and then alternate days organizing the rest of his memories pre-Time Loop after that. Maybe try and make up for the Yule Ball to the Sisters with his extra off day.

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Thankfully, Harry discovered that there were no more inconsistencies in his memories, no more protections left by the Headmaster, and no unexpected Obliviations. There was maybe one or two times Snape got him, but they were very minor things overall, the most recent example being the Occlumency lessons neither one of them enjoyed. Apparently, after Harry had accidentally reflected the Professor's Legilimency probe in what he thought was their last lesson, Dumbledore gave Snape orders to get back to it after hearing from the grapevine that they had quit. Snape had cornered Harry after their next class together and pretty much forced him into one last lesson, where the younger boy gleefully repeated his previous success and got into even more private memories. Snape erased the whole lesson from his mind afterward and the stolen memories along with them.

Since they weren't his memories, Harry unfortunately could not recall or organize them into his mind, but he did remember that his reaction had been one of sympathy and understanding for his menace. Not enough to keep him from continuing to blame the bastard for his kidnapping/death on 'Room' days and get him shipped to Azkaban on every other, but enough to make him curious. Just not curious enough to go and try to find out any time soon.

After getting his head organized, he started working on his more recent memories, the memories of the Time Loop. To his everlasting shock, as he set about organizing his mind, every last one of his remaining unorganized memories went whizzing about in his head and automatically organized themselves amongst what he'd already accomplished. And memory number one, the first day, Day Zero of the Time Loop, stood out like a shining beacon amidst the rest.

Harry remembered making his wish to the odd grandfather clock in Dumbledore's office.

The next step in Occlumency training was to take the organization of his memories and use them to construct a mental landscape, a mindscape, where he was creator and sole occupant. It was recommended it be a safe place, but Harry didn't really have any places like that amongst his memories, so he used Hogwarts itself as his mindscape instead. It may not be safe, but it was the most familiar place he could identify, and he was learning more of its secrets than anyone else had ever discovered with each new (or repeated) day.

He remembered making his wish to the odd grandfather clock in Dumbledore's office.

It took him about half an hour to construct his mindscape, and using that as his 'secret place' he went crazy with the imagery and created three different Hogwarts in his head. The outer layer, what any Legilimens would run into, was surrounded on all sides by the Forbidden Forest, and the Black Lake was now a moat around the castle, well either that or the castle was on an island at the center of the lake instead of a cliff overlooking it. All the dark magical sea creatures, especially the giant squid, that Harry knew to be in the Black Lake remained very active and very dangerous in that moat. There was no drawbridge.

Once inside the castle, provided anybody could get that far, they had to get to the Room of Requirement. Only the Room now shifted from any flat surface it damn well pleased, but still was marked by being opposite that painting of the nitwit teaching trolls to dance. Another catch was that instead of walking in front of it three times, he made the requirement be that they had to "strip naked" and then do a hundred jump-n-jacks in front of it while saying "Dumbledore is an ass! Snape is a pussy! Umbridge is a Toad Bitch! Fudge is shit!" over and over again.

Once inside the Room of Requirement, they would find themselves on the other side of the Black Lake, but this time with Hogwarts on the other side, with the Forest/Outer layer behind them and the lake stretching from horizon to horizon in front of them. The same monsters were in this lake as the first one just double the amount and increasingly more aggressive, so swimming it was not recommended. And there were no boats. If they ever actually managed to get to the castle across the lake, the moment they stepped inside they would discover themselves on the ceiling and would then have to navigate the completely reversed layout to get to his trunk, which would be under his bed in his dorm room, which was now located where the Chamber of Secrets used to be, which now had as the password a complicated lecture about the difference between magical creatures and normal creatures, but done in the same language aka Parseltongue. Since no one but he and Ron now knew the way to the Chamber of Secrets, he felt confident in this level of security.

If they ever made it past that, they would then find themselves in Diagon Alley, stepping out of Gringotts bank. From there, they would have to navigate a number of Apparation/Portal points that went to everywhere Harry had ever been, before finally ending up in Hogsmeade, where they could then climb five or so mountains in order to get to Hogwarts, which then was surrounded by another Forbidden Forest, another lake, another moat past the lake, and then if they ever managed to get inside the front door itself, let alone past the gates and tower challenges he'd erected, they would find themselves in his hall of memories. Harry remembered seeing a painting, several of them actually, that cast optical illusions about endless staircases and labyrinths that went nowhere and where gravity and spatial logic did not apply. The inside of this Third Hogwarts made those paintings seem like finger paintings by comparison. And it was constantly shifting along with his every thought.

He remembered making his wish to the odd grandfather clock in Dumbledore's office.

After constructing his mindscape and its defenses, Harry sat at the center of his inner-Hogwarts, deep in meditation, both physically and mentally. The final step of Occlumency training, the book said, was constructing an "Inner Self", an avatar of one's own consciousness that could interact with the mindscape on the mindscape's level. Right now, he was just a formless presence of power, a part of everything and focused equally on everything all at once, rather than just one point. That is what he was attempting to do now, change that formlessness into a focused shape, a body, his body to be specific.

It was similar to his Animagus and Apparation training, but he found that it was harder as well. While he could 'imagine' himself standing there in his mindscape, it would just be an imagining, it wouldn't be... "HIM"! Harry had a feeling it would take him a while to complete this portion of his Occlumency training.

He remembered making his wish to the odd grandfather clock in Dumbledore's office.

Harry had finally gotten to the point where the Twins' Beater training had gotten to the point of self-study. Or rather, they told him, after he explained what he wanted from them and what he could do and had learned from them already, that they had nothing more to teach him and if he wanted to go any further, he would have to figure it out on his own, develop his skills beyond the basics they had shown him. He planned on going back to Madam Hooch his next Quidditch Reset, to see if she had anything she could show him or help him with. In the meantime though, he was still working on his Occlumency training for the rest of his current reset.

The only problem though, was he was continuously distracted by one recurring thought.

He'd finally remembered what had started this time loop. And it was all his fault.

His eyes snapped open and for the next little while he just stared at the stone wall of the actual Room of Requirement, not doing anything else, just staring... and blaming. Or perhaps the correct term was brooding?

Yeah, he'd been hurting, confused, angry, and mourning Sirius being dead, but to actually wish for Voldemort to never be a problem again, or that nothing bad would ever happen to him or his friends, or that nothing like Voldemort ever could happen again? He must have been INSANE!

Distracted as he was, he knew he would get no further in his Occlumency until he had resolved this. Laughing to himself suddenly, he voiced his quiet thought, "So much for the theory that I needed to find my one true love to get out of this time loop." He sighed and closed his eyes again, trying to meditate on appearing in his mindscape as himself.

He entered his mindscape as easily as he'd created it, easier even, but he did not appear in a form. He was just there and everywhere in it all at once. A random thought occurred to him. The thought took the form of Hedwig delivering a letter. The letter was a map, pinpointing the outermost point of his mindscape defenses. It also showed the route he'd constructed for actually getting to his innermost mindscape.

Harry's eyes snapped open and he said out loud, "No way. Not happening today. Nuh-unh!" He got to his feet and left the room, neglecting the fact that he'd already started the ball rolling on a 'Get-Snape-Arrested' reset. Thankfully, it was after noon, so the horrid man had already been removed from the castle.

Not wanting to deal with all the drama though, Harry did at least make sure to get under his Invisibility Cloak.

He made his way to the Great Hall and sat at his place at Gryffindor table, still under his Invisibility Cloak. It was an interesting experience he discovered. Thankfully not too complex, it was the same as eating in any ordinary cloak, he just had to make sure the hood was pulled down so nobody saw his face. After lunch, he didn't bother going to the OWL test, he was supposed to be dead or missing after all, so instead he made his way to the Library. Right on time, which was unusual for a Snape-Arrested Reset, the Vision came knocking at his outer defenses. He felt Voldemort knocking and trying to force the false vision through, but it didn't even make its way out of the forest. Right as it ended, or rather when the bastard finally stopped trying, Harry remembered that he had written the note in hand, rather than have it delivered by Ministry Owl. Snape had already reported in to his masters by the point word started spreading of what Snape had 'done' hence why the vision still came.

Harry, sitting at one of the tables in the Library still under his Invisibility Cloak, started drumming his fingers on the table, annoying the other occupants to no end, until they looked up and saw nobody there.

Now that his Occlumency was further developed, these mental attacks by the bastard, (that was a good name for him seeing as he was, technically speaking, a bastard), were more annoying than any worthy kind of challenge to overcome like it used to be. Also, breaking into the Ministry had become rather... monotonous. He needed to start taking out the Bastard before he even sent the vision. Sure, he'd discovered the way of using the Protean charm and animating that doll to walk into the Veil, but that was rather painful to be doing day after day, everyday. Especially seeing as the wound never stopped bleeding after he'd gathered the blood. He needed to assassinate him, or attack him, long before the Death Eaters went to the Ministry of Magic, preferably before two o'clock when the Bastard sent that annoying false vision.

The problem then became, how to attack him, and where to attack him at? He knew he could draw him to the Ministry after the ambush failed, but beyond that, he had no clue as to where to find the Bastard. The how to attack him merely became a matter of devious imagination and maybe asking for occasional bits of advice from certain parties, but that still left figuring out where the Bastard was, and how to find him?

He decided to go to one of the two people he went to, these days, for advice on things he had no clue about. Seeing as Hermione would immediately freak out over his sudden appearance after supposedly being killed or kidnapped by Snape, that left him with just one other to go to.

"Excuse me, Madam Pince?" he asked from beneath his Invisibility Cloak. The Librarian didn't bother looking up, she merely hissed a 'shh' at him and continued her work on the card catalog.

"I'm trying to find someone that is not in the castle, or Hogsmeade, or anywhere that I can ask people about where to find this individual. What books would you recommend I begin with in finding ways to locate this individual?" he asked, even as he placed a sugar quill for each word spoken in front of her, all different flavors.

"Shh," she hissed again, took one of the quills and hid the rest away before walking away from her desk. Harry quickly followed, invisible and as silent as he could possibly move.

She took three left turns, four right turns, and went down two flights of stairs, each at opposite ends of impossibly long corridors, and then took him down a long, twisting, maze-like path amidst shelves that had several sharp turns, but seeing as there was only the one path they weren't technically turns. The path was incredibly dusty, in fact Harry could see no footprints or signs that anyone had been down here or touched the books on these shelves for half a century or more. They came to the end of the corridor where a single reading desk and a stool sat with an empty candle holder on the side for reading light. Madam Pince dropped a fresh candle into the holder and muttered, "Divination Section. Start with the book there, put it back when you're done. All the books are in order and I will know if you've put them out of order." She then spun and left, taking the only other source of light, her wand, with her. Harry waited until the light had disappeared all the way back up the path before reaching his hand out to the candle and lighting the wick with his fingertip. He pulled the indicated book from the shelf and sat down on the stool, still under his Cloak (hey, it was cold down there!), and began to read by candle light.

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Harry felt cheated. Not nearly as cheated as he and every student for the past one hundred and fifty years had truly been, and certainly not as cheated as Professor Trelawney had been for her entire life. That he didn't feel as vindictive as he properly should, he took it as a sign that his recent Occlumency training had actually improved his overall demeanor toward life and everything else. He still felt cheated though!

Divination magic, contrary to popular and accepted belief, was not 'magic that lets you see the future' or even know the future for that matter. Divination magic, quite simply, in the simplest terms Harry could define it by, was magic that gathered and displayed information. Nothing more complex or mystical than that. Divination magic was about knowing things! Not just the future, but anything and everything!

The Divination Section of the Hogwarts Library started at the desk Madam Pince had lead him to, and from his browsing he soon discovered that it covered every single book along the winding twisting path of completely filled and in some instances over-filled bookcases, went all the way to the last staircase they came down. As near as he could tell, this corridor was at least as long as the same Third Floor Corridor he and his friends had fought their way down in their First Year. Not counting how many steps it took with all the twists and turns, but instead counting it as actual distance inside the Castle itself. With all the twists and turns, as far as walking distance it was roughly three times as long as that corridor. The real kicker that drove home just how cheated everyone should be feeling was that every single last one of those books covered, in entirety, every possible avenue of the subject of the Magical Art of Divination.

In fact, just from the one primer he read, that first book on the first shelf, Harry discovered that "reading the future" was no more a part of Divination than Elemental magic was a part of Charms!

In contrast, diagnostic spells, medical, menial or otherwise, THOSE were divination spells! The Point Me Charm was a divination spell. And more importantly, the Art of Scrying was divination. And scrying was exactly what he needed to track down and kill the Bastard.

The primer on divination was actually the first of twelve books that covered the whole of all the Arts of Divination Magic. Harry felt it was a good idea to go through all those first before he sought out the books on scrying specifically. Thankfully he managed to finish the first book before what remained of his afternoon had even ended. He moved on to the next book, which actually covered diagnostic and general information-providing spells. It wasn't just a list of spells and how to use them, but a full on educational manual that would best be covered in the First Year at Hogwarts for all students. Unfortunately, this twelve volume set appeared to be the only copies in existence, and for all Harry knew, they were the originals.

When Harry's stomach started growling at him, he'd reached roughly halfway through the third book, which was a level up from the second book and was more on the theories behind divination spells, still along the lines of a book made for Hogwarts Education, but for Second Years. His hunger was distracting him from continuing to read however, so he remembered what page he was on and put the books back on the shelves, in the right order, and then invisibly made his way out of the Library and back to the Great Hall. Dinner was already well under way, but the only subject on anyone's lips, save for the food they were eating, was Snape killing/kidnapping him.

Staying under his Invisibility Cloak, he sat on Hermione's free side at his usual spot and began to eat, still making sure that the hood of the cloak covered his face at all times. Remote-cast Accio and Leviosa charms took care of the rest. Once his hunger was satisfied, he made to get up to leave and head back to the Library to finish the rest of those books on divination, but in his haste he wasn't paying attention when the foot of his Cloak caught on the bench and for just a few moments, Harry's head was uncovered and lay bare to the whole room. Fortunately, he noticed soon enough that he uncaught the cloak and pulled the hood back over him so it was only for those few moments. Unfortunately, people were watching and saw him.

The whole school being in an uproar over the floating disembodied head, while amusing, made it very difficult to get anywhere while under his Invisibility Cloak undiscovered, let alone the Library. Half the student body insisted that Snape had killed Harry Potter and the boy was now a ghost. The other half, the surprising half, likewise insisted that Harry was still alive and either hiding out in plain sight, or was trying to send a message. The Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws were the ones insisting he was dead, and it was the Slytherins and Gryffindors insisting he was alive, but it was his friends that were insisting he was hiding while the Slytherins mostly said he was trying to send some message about where he was being held captive.

When he finally made his way out of the Great Hall, he had to stay out of the corridors and was stuck taking secret passageways to get back to the Library, instead of the fast way via the Grand Staircase. Once back in the Library, he had to duck out of the way of a whole lot of Ravenclaws, and it took him the longest time to get to the staircases, and even longer to get down them as there were students going up and down them at completely random intervals. And here he was thinking this section of the Library was unused!

When he made it down the last flight of stairs, he saw that the dust along the floor only had a few footsteps going back and forth through it. Most likely only Madam Pince's and his own. Or so he hoped. At the end of the winding corridor, a fresh candle had replaced the old one, but other than that there was no indication of anyone other than him having been here in a century. He picked up the book he'd been in the middle of, re-lit the candle, and continued where he left off. He never actually went to bed that night and did manage to get through most of the primer books there. The last four books were actually specialized books, covering in extreme detail the following Arts of Divination; Forecasting, Divining, Scrying, and Psychomancy.

Forecasting is where people get confused in thinking that divination was all about telling the future. Forecasting was actually all about using the information present in the past as well as the world around them. In other words, they were spells that gave you information about past events, and current status of nature and other random bits of things so that one can make an Educated Guess as to what will happen next in various respects. It's exactly the same thing as what muggles use to predict the weather and who knows how many other natural events, it's just they use specialized tools and advanced technology to do what this branch of divination used magic to study and discover.

Divining was something else muggles already knew a lot about, although they had sensationalized it so it was as mystical to them as magic. The actual magic of it was far more simple in fact. The Point Me Spell belonged to this school of divination. As did a number of other basic charms that Professor Flitwick taught as ways of finding useful things. There was even a water-finding spell that he'd taught Harry in his Third Year. Divining was all about locating nearby objects or basic materials or needs or sometimes even people, but again they had to be nearby as the spell would only lead you to it so you wound up walking towards it rather than just knowing where it was.

That's where Scrying came into play. Scrying was about knowing where to find what it was you were looking for, without leading you on a chase by playing hound dog. Scrying involved using maps, or representations, or sometimes pools of water, crystal balls, tea leaf remains at the bottom of a cup, pretty much everything that Professor Trelawney had been teaching them, although she was trying to teach them Forecasting rather than Scrying. The difference made all the difference in the world.

The last, Psychomancy, was the other aspect of Divination that had been rather sensationalized by the world at large, and the other thing that Professor Trelawney had, mistakenly, been trying to teach her students. Psychomancy were spells and magical skills that dealt with learning more about humans, gathering data and personal information from them through magical means and then ways of studying that to come to a result that made it look like you were either reading their mind, or their future. Palmistry, Tarot, and all manner of divination magic skills involving individuals and determining their past, present, or predicting their near future fell under this art. Harry wasn't particularly interested in it, but he read the book anyway.

Thanks to reading the books though, he now had a better understanding of what Divination was, and more importantly, he knew which books among the hundreds around him to look for and to read so that he could start tracking down Voldemort and figuring out ways to kill him at the start of the day, rather than the end of it. Before he could start studying up though, he just needed to get some sleep. So he curled up under the desk, using the next book on the shelf as a pillow, and his Invisibility Cloak as a blanket, and slept until time looped once more.

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Scrying had a whole host of methods that could be used, and just as many interpretations behind using each of them. As far as he could tell in the literature he read there in the Divination Section of the Hogwarts Library, for most people scrying was about seeing something that provides insight into either the future, one's personal life, or a way to find what one was seeking from life in general. Harry quickly moved past all the romance based applications of the art. Ever since he rediscovered his Veela-ness with the Patil Sisters, romance issues were the least of his worries.

The most practical, and therefore the most useful methods he had discovered involved using a variety of crystals in differing forms, or elemental scrying. Most people used water, but Harry, with his multi-element affinity, found that using fire, clouds, and sand worked just as well.

With a crystal ball, or shining a light through several crystals all at once, what you got were images of what you were scrying, seeing them and their surroundings, identifying them by sight. But if you included a map, or a globe, or some other means of identifying location, the light of the crystals focused on one spot, and if you dangled a crystal from a cord or chain, it would be drawn to a certain point on the same map or globe.

With the elements however, well there was really only one way to use it for each element. Water was like a crystal ball, in that you could see what you were looking for, as well as the surroundings. With fire, you saw the face of the person you were looking for, and then suddenly just knew where they were. With air, or clouds, the clouds shaped themselves to the person or object you were focused on, and for as long as you were scrying, you could see and hear what was happening around them in real time. With earth, or sand, you poured the ground up rocks in random patterns, and the resulting overall pattern gave you the vital clue needed to find what you were looking for.

Again, there were hundreds of thousands of ways to use each of these methods, depending on the wizard or witch, or even the circumstances. There were, however, five methods that Harry found easy to use and were more reliable than most. Using a map and a quartz crystal on a string, he could find exactly where Voldemort was at any time, down to the housing address. Using a crystal ball, he could confirm that and get everything he'd need for making a Portkey to the location. Using a bowl of water, Harry could see which room of the building he was in. And then by scrying the wind and air, he could see and hear what was going on around him without the painful necessity of their connection. The fifth, scrying by fire, Harry didn't use very often, but he did note that it was an extremely effective way of making sure his Apparation coordinates were spot on.

Now that he finally had his method of tracking down where the Bastard was in the mornings, he could start to look into the fun parts of the plan, coming up with ways of killing him. Hopefully more permanently than the ways he'd found of doing it so far.

He spent a few days relaxing and getting his head in the game, learning from Ron about how to be a Keeper, working on some alternative means of completing his Occlumency, before finally getting to some nitty gritty planning on ways to assassinate a Dark Lord. His first idea, do it in person, was admittedly not his best idea. It was also why he held off on scrying through fire afterward. The times he'd tried it hadn't been pleasant, with what had happened as he Apparated in right behind the Bastard and was going to blast him with an explosion curse before Hyper-Apparating back out. Of course he'd expected there to be Anti-Apparation wards around Malfoy Manor, so before anything else, he Ward Bounced the place and that took down all the wards rather effectively and got inside before they'd even finished failing. He still died before he even knew what had happened, let alone before he could blast the Bastard into his component atoms.

He tried Portkeys and flashing in via his Athene Owl Animagus form too. He was dead before he'd even fully appeared no matter what. So he tried appearing a bit further out and then making his way in. He kept running into guards of one form or another. He did at least discover what kept killing him so quickly. Seems that Malfoy had more House Elves than just Dobby, and those little buggerers took exception to wizards coming in to kill guests of their master. Harry got Dobby to get the other elves there to back down or at least be distracted for a few precious minutes and tried again. He managed to last ten seconds before the Death Eaters that were always, always, around the Bastard got him. He never managed to land an instant-kill shot on the Bastard either.

So, first idea was tossed because of those few failures. (Like he was going to do it more times than that!)

His next idea was to try sending some kind of dangerous, lethal animal, but he had trouble thinking of one that the Bastard couldn't immediately tame anyway. So that was shelved until he found one that fit the bill.

He tried a few more ideas, and unfortunately not much came of them.

And then, after spending a whole day practicing his Keeper skills against Ron and the rest of the Gryffindors, he happened to glance one of the younger muggleborns with a magazine. On the cover was an unmoving picture of a nuclear explosion with some movie actors standing dramatically in front of it. Harry grinned at the ideas that gave him, and then he stopped entirely as the idea fully filtered through his brain.

Explosives. And not just any explosives. BIG explosives! He only had to get his hands on some of them and then he could turn the bombs themselves into Portkeys. Disguise it as 'mail' to the 'important guest' and the elves wouldn't stop it. Hm... maybe get Dobby to evacuate the elves, just in case?

A bit of scrying, using alternative and some divining means, he located the nearest source of military-grade explosives he could find and then spent a few resets learning how to make bombs, mostly from the instruction manuals that came with the explosives themselves. He tried all sorts of things and tried to figure out what worked best. Grenades, he discovered, were not really a good idea. At least not when he was still in range of the blast. Mortars, mines, and rockets had their own complications, even after he learned how to use them. Straight up bombs of dynamite or C-4 with blinking lights just plain didn't work because the moment that Voldemort, or any of the Death Eaters around him saw it, they would vanish it on the spot and it would do absolutely no good whatsoever.

That's when Harry came across a rifle with a scope on it in one of the stockpiles he was raiding. A little bit of reading and some spy-scrying showed Harry that it was a sniper rifle and what it was used for. Not having any clue about where to go, who to ask, or even how to load the thing let alone shoot it, he hesitated in taking it, though it was extremely tempting. On one particular bomb raid, Harry took it just to see if he could figure out how to at least shoot it. Using scrying spells of the real snipers as a visual manual, he managed to get it loaded and learned how to position it and himself while holding it. He set up some targets, non-living, out in the forest and learned the hard way how difficult it was to use a gun, let alone a sniper rifle! He couldn't imagine being able to control it well enough to take out anyone with it, let alone Voldemort!

Seeing that ordinary military ordinance wasn't working for his assassination attempts, Harry decided to change tactics. If he couldn't take the Bastard out like he was an individual, he'd see if he could take him out like he was a city.

It took longer than expected, but eventually Harry managed to find what he was looking for. And all it took to use it was learning how to type in military coordinates for where Voldemort was at.

Harry was surprised that the biggest bombs the British Military had available were so poorly protected. But then again, he was kind of cheating, but still he was surprised the Ministry of Magic didn't throw it's own protections in with keeping the world from being blown up with nuclear weapons. After all, once Harry knew where to go, he just Apparated right in, walked up to the first available computer terminal in a completely empty room, cast an Alohomora Password on it and then typed in the coordinates and then launched it. Harry then went back to Hogwarts and used a scrying pool to watch what was going to happen. The Bastard and all his cronies never even knew what hit them. They always started out at Malfoy Manor, but if Harry attacked with a Portkey bomb, they immediately moved to Riddle Manor in Little Hangleton. Not wanting the innocent muggles of the small town to be punished for Voldemort's sins, he wanted to make sure that the Bastard was still at Malfoy Manor when the bomb landed.

The spell failed the moment the bomb hit, and Harry was pleased to find that it wouldn't work again if he tried to open it based on Voldemort, so instead he opened it based on the location, and immediately wished he hadn't as soon as the image clarified. It was a burning crater, and the crater was several miles wide, much larger than the Malfoy estate had been. Unfortunately, Harry realized, seeing movement in the pool, they had had neighbors as well.

Harry's plan had been to see if this worked and then maybe drop the same bomb three or four more times before trying something else in order to keep from getting bored. But seeing... this...

He canceled the spell and vowed never to do that again!

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Harry focused entirely on his Quidditch training for a while, doing nothing but the basic magical exercises he'd gotten into the habit of doing daily now for training, and just enjoying the freedom and fun that came from playing Quidditch. As such, he was playing Keeper against all the National and International Teams on a regular basis before finally getting back into the mood of killing Voldemort. Unless Harry went into hiding and blamed Snape for his "death/kidnapping" to the point where Voldemort would definitely hear about it, the Bastard kept knocking on his Occlumency defenses day after day after day!

Still, as bad as it got, Harry wasn't ever going to go Nuclear on the Bastard again. But that didn't mean he couldn't still find other ways of blowing him to Kingdom Come.

Recalling that Dumbledore believed Voldemort had created Horcruxes, and what exactly a Horcrux was, Harry adjusted a couple of his scrying spells and started looking for some hostages to use against the Bastard. He found five of them in his first pass over the British Isles. One of them, he was surprised to find, was in Hogwarts itself. He went to the Order's HQ and took the Locket from the pile of dark objects they'd discovered from the previous summer's cleaning, and wasn't surprised to realize it was indeed a Horcrux. He went back to Hogwarts and using the Locket, set up a Divining spell that lead him to the Room of Requirement. Focusing on the Horcrux he wanted, he paced in front of the door and was surprised to see the Room of Hidden Things instead of only the Horcrux. Shrugging, he continued using his Divining spell and soon found the Diadem. The Diadem of Ravenclaw, he recognized.

"Bastard," he growled, realizing that he'd forever corrupted one of the most prized artifacts of the Four Founders.

The next one was in Little Hangleton, and thanks to the fact that he had yet to attack the Bastard, it was safe enough to go there. He started at the Riddle Manor, and then realized he'd missed the mark, as the scrying spell pointed a few miles away. Once he was sure he was at least on the right street, he used the same Divining spell as before and quickly found a rundown old house that looked... bad. Frowning, and knowing better than to risk going into such a place unprepared, Harry called upon the Lesser Spirit of Air and asked a favor. For retrieving the Horcrux from the house in front of him, he would pay whatever the Sylphs asked of him. They giggled and then asked for something inconsequential, at least as far as Harry was concerned. They wanted a kiss. Harry promised a kiss for the Queen of the Sylphs, and his love for the rest. That was more than they had expected, but less than they asked, and it fit the bill just the same. While her children went and collected the Ring, the Queen appeared before Harry as a young girl. Harry knew better, and didn't bother letting his discomfort at kissing a physically younger girl show as he laid one on her, no tongue of course.

With the Ring in his possession, Harry thanked the Lesser Spirit and all her children and then moved on to the next. The Sylphs all privately agreed that they would retrieve that Ring as many times as he wanted them to if it meant they could bask in that aura he was unleashing.

The last two were both at Malfoy Manor. Considering he was planning on blowing it up, Harry didn't bother with collecting them, though he did water-scry to find out which room they were in so he knew where to drop the extra bombs.

Now that he was back in a homicidal mood, as far as the Bastard was concerned, he rather enjoyed learning how to make bombs. It actually wasn't that hard to do when you got right down to it. It was simpler than making potions that's for sure. After all, the pieces were already all there, thanks to the military, he just had to put it together in the right order. That some pieces were smaller than others was easily handled by fine-controlled Leviosa spells, and as for all that talk about 'bomb-making signatures', that really only applied to enthusiasts or terrorists. Harry went with the most basic designs he could find, not bothering with trick wires or motion sensors or other anti-tampering parts. His targets were wizards, and they were not likely to call the bomb squad.

But they were likely to vanish it, which meant he had to look into some security against that. There was a number of defenses, mostly found in runes and warding, but the most effective Harry found was to simply make it so that whatever it was they were trying to vanish was more complicated than they understood, or could vanish at all in the first place. Just to see if it could happen, Harry tried to vanish one of the Horcruxes. It wouldn't vanish, no matter how hard he tried.

Grinning, he began constructing his bomb, with the Horcruxes themselves being part of it. And just because he didn't plan on using them, didn't mean he did not bother learning those anti-tampering techniques all the same. They actually became rather useful as he made it so that if any part of the bomb got removed, the Horcruxes, which held the actual explosive material, would automatically explode. Wasn't easy, but he felt oddly satisfied when he succeeded in pulling it off. The only thing remaining to do after that was to turn the Horcrux Bomb into a Portkey and send it to Voldemort.

The first time he tried it out, he anxiously awaited, seeing what would happen via his scrying pool. The bomb appeared under the table the Death Eaters were having their meeting at. In his experimentation with Portkeys, he had eventually come across a method of making it near completely silent as it appeared, and after Ward Bouncing through the protections of Malfoy Manor as many times as he had, he'd long since found the 'secret path' they had put in for certain Portkeys, specifically those that Voldemort made. Unfortunately, for the Death Eaters, there was the same exception in this Portkey hole that there was in Hogwarts Anti-Portkey wards, IE if the person keyed into the wards was coming in, no matter who or what made the Portkey, they still got through with no warning to the residents of the house, let alone the House Elves. Thanks to the Horcruxes, which essentially counted as "Lord Voldemort" to the wards, the bomb made it through and was in place with no one being the wiser. He'd also made sure there were no blinking lights or noises that it would make at inconvenient times. With any luck the only way the targets would know it was there would be after it went off, blowing them all to Hell!

Watching through his scrying pool, he listened in as Malfoy read Snape's report from this morning and assured his Lord and Master that all the proper Ministry people had been paid off and the entire Ministry would be abandoned at closing time, and his team in place. Harry listened on as the Bastard made a few changes to Lucius's plans, changes which were more in line with what actually happens. To be honest though, Harry might have preferred Lucius's plan on top of how things actually went. At least, if he'd been in charge and wanted the raid to succeed that is. Voldemort's way just guaranteed that the Order came to the rescue and the Ministry would be alerted to his actually being alive again. Lucius's way, there was a chance that Voldemort could've remained hidden, although all the freed prisoners would be back in Azkaban with new charges of murdering and kidnapping school children added to their rap sheets.

Right as the Bastard shooed them away so he could "concentrate" on the first phase of the plan, Harry glanced at his watch and held his breath. He let it out as the bomb exploded right on time, at eight o'clock on the dot. The rest of his breath left him in a rumbling growl however, as he continued watching and saw Voldemort standing there with a shield around him. Less than half of the Death Eaters had also managed to react in time and shielded themselves as well. The rest... well, they were so many stains and so much well-done meat across the walls.

Hissing a curse between his teeth, Harry tapped his wand against his second slightly larger bomb. The first was a whole lot of dynamite. This was ten pounds of C-4. The first had been connected to the Ring. This was connected to the Locket. In the pool, the solid block of clay-like material appeared, the Locket wrapped on top of it like a bow. There was a ten second count-down, done with a mechanical timer so as to cut down on glitches. Harry watched as the survivors stared with suspicion at the seemingly harmless Portkey.

Lestrange, Bellatrix's husband, made to vanish the thing. Right as he was about to, Voldemort stopped him with a silent Crucio and a scream, "NO! It has...!" he was interrupted as the timer finally ran out and the scrying spell cut off, before automatically reforming to outside the mansion. The entire top floor, and more than half the house ignited in flame and the force of the explosion ripped nearly everything else that was standing to pieces. Harry immediately refocused the spell and let out another growl. Bastard was harder to kill than a cockroach!

Harry immediately sent in his last Horcrux Bomb. It was Napalm.

If THIS didn't get him, he was going back to nuclear. Just... smaller nuclear.

Watching patiently through his scrying pool, Harry waited for the fires to die down, until he realized they weren't dying down. Frowning, he shrugged and started a fire and cast the Flame Scrying spell. It failed.

Harry blinked in surprise and dared to grin. He cast it three more times and even tried Wind Scrying for a bit. With wind scrying, he'd found that even with the bastard as a wraith, he could find him, no matter where he was in the world. After he failed to find him entirely, Harry actually laughed out loud, and then he kept laughing for the rest of the day. And it was barely eight fifteen in the morning, still plenty of time for Breakfast even!

Harry spent pretty much the whole rest of the day just laughing at the most random things at the oddest times, and when two o'clock came around he was laughing so hard that he couldn't stop no matter what anyone did. He got thrown out of the OWL test, but that was fine because he'd gotten in the habit of just filling in the answers as soon as he sat down and with his magic boosting his hand-eye coordination he had it completed and turned over inside of five minutes, essay questions included.

After Hermione and Ron got out, he calmed down, slightly. He still burst out in random bits of laughter here and there, doing more to his reputation as being completely insane than his walking around naked ever did. Luna suddenly walked up to him and asked him point blank, "Harry Potter, what did you do?"

She asked it the same way Professor McGonagall used to ask the same question to the Twins, and that was just too funny in and of itself simply because Harry knew that Luna didn't have a strict bone in her entire body. And so he told her, amidst laughter, "Ahahahaha! I, hahaha, I killed You-Know-Who, *snicker*, with a BOMB! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Everybody around froze on the spot at those words. Half the school was holding it's breath, the other half were hyperventilating and well on their way to a full out panic attack.

"And the best part?" he laughed even louder, "Gah-hahaha! Guess who's house he was staying at? AAHahahaha! Oh man, Malfoy is going to be super pissed! I hope I'm there to see it!" He started howling with laughter at the very thought of the look on Malfoy's face.

"Harry... what have you done?" Hermione whispered, shocked.

He shrugged, down to constant chuckles now rather than uproarious laughter. "I did what I was raised to do, by Dumbledore. By the whole damned Wizarding World." He sat so he was more or less laying on the stairs behind him, "I killed Tom Marvolo Riddle, aka Lord Voldemort. With a bomb!" He started laughing again.

"I tried dueling for a while, and I once used a nuclear bomb. Never doing that again by the way. Finally just hit him with bomb after bomb after bomb. It was the Napalm one that finally got him it turned out."

"N-n-nuke... Wait, NAPALM?" Hermione suddenly screamed at him. "Harry, where was You-Know-Who hiding out?"

He shrugged, grinning widely, "Malfoy Manor."

"Harry... how did you know that? Aside from the obvious, I mean," Ron asked.

Harry shrugged and then looked about. Leaping to his feet, he went over and grabbed something out of a Fourth Year's hands and then called out, for the benefit of Hermione and a few others, "Accio water!" He didn't bother using his wand, but nobody made mention of it so he figured he was in the clear for the moment. Water came streaming in from the Great Hall and even down the stairs. The water all pooled in the ceramic bowl that apparently had been a Transfiguration project. Once the water had gathered, Harry kept it level and then put his hand over the water and whispered the scrying spell. Images appeared in the water and once they were there, Harry used his Water magic affinity to draw it out of the ceramic bowl and then expand it until everyone looking on could see it. It was an overhead aerial view of what remained of Malfoy Manor. The fires were still burning.

"Oh my God!" Hermione gasped, her hands going to her mouth.

Harry shrugged again, but he was no longer laughing.

"You've changed... everything Harry," Luna whispered, her eyes wider than normal, her tone filled with as much horror as Hermione's had been.

"Unfortunately... no, I haven't," he answered with a sigh, the depression starting to set in now that the high had started to ebb. "I'm stuck in a time loop. I'll wake up tomorrow morning and Voldemort will still be here. Snape too, by the way. But the Bastard, uh, the snake-faced bastard that is, was seriously getting on my nerves with his constant mental attacks. So... I got rid of him before he could attack me today. Much better than waiting till the end of the day in the Ministry."

"Harry... have you lost it mate?" Ron said, horrified. "How many people did you kill? Innocent people?"

"Two House Elves, Narcissa Malfoy, a snake named Nagini, and probably got a lot of people at that British Military base where I got all the parts from fired. Beyond that... none. As for Death Eaters and the dark creature calling itself Lord Voldemort? Well, I lost count of how many times I've killed all of them. But if you're talking bodies burning there? Hm... sixty three," he answered matter-of-factly.

"What is everyone doing lollygagging about?" Draco Malfoy stormed down the stairs and then stopped and stared at the image displayed on the water. He went even more pale than normal, and his eyes, if possible, went wider than Luna's ever did. His jaw dropped open and would probably be hanging somewhere down by his ankles if he could actually unhinge it.

Harry smiled and started laughing again. "There it is! Haha! So worth it! Wow, I so wish I could take a picture and frame this!"

"Oh, and Malfoy, congratulations! And, you're welcome," Harry added as a remark, slapping his school enemy on the back, probably harder than strictly necessary. "You're now Lord Malfoy. The last of your line to boot! All your dad's cash and responsibilities and everything that you relied on him to take care of for you? That's all yours now!"

Malfoy fainted on the spot.

"So worth it," Harry smiled and then dispelled the image of former site of Malfoy Manor.

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Harry wanted to see what else he could do, besides just blowing him up, that would keep the Bastard out of his hair. Fun as it was to blow up Malfoy Manor again and again, and seeing Draco's face after being informed of the fact never got old, he felt like he was starting to fall into a routine about it, and routine was just the first step to boredom. He preferred to stave that off for as long as he possibly could and so started looking for new ways to kill the Bastard.

He still hadn't come across any Magical Beast that was lethal and dangerous enough Voldemort wouldn't immediately tame it. As good as he was getting, and much as he kicked ass against them in the Department of Mysteries, if he wanted to do anything else for the day, going in to kill them himself wasn't an option as all the Death Eaters were naturally nervous in Voldemort's presence anyway, putting them on high alert. It was the only explanation he could come up for why they still managed to kill him even when he got the drop on them!

The second, (or first, depending on who you ask), most common way to assassinate someone was through poison. And oh boy were there ever a lot to choose from! And not just magical poisons either!

Not far from the building where he got the explosives on the military base, was another building and therein Harry discovered a whole new side to warfare. Biological warfare!

To be more specific, old canisters of what was said to be Sulfur Mustard, or bis-chloroethyl sulfide. More commonly known as Mustard Gas. He had no explanation as to why there were canisters of this just lying around unsecured (well, that wasn't entirely true, it was behind a gate with a rusty padlock on it) on a military base. But he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth either.

He took one of the canisters and instead of starting with a roll of dynamite, he setup something that the handbooks called an "aerosol bomb", sometimes more commonly called a bug bomb. He Portkeyed it over and set up the scrying spell to watch. He turned it off less than a minute after the gas was released... and he skipped breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. And pretty much avoided putting anything in his stomach at all for fear of just throwing it back up. Furthermore, he made sure to seal away the memory of the images behind a door in his Inner Mindscape's "Malfoy Manor" Location, marking the spot with lots of warnings to not approach no matter what! Thankfully, that took the edge off enough that he could eat once again without the danger of puking instantly.

The next reset, he went back to Quidditch practice, but not until after raiding the military base and throwing a few other biological agents that he'd found just lying around at the Bastard. He kept that up for a while, until he'd pretty much gone through everything that was just lying around in that biological warfare building. After that, he tried to think up some magical poisons to throw at the Bastard that would be just as effective. Unfortunately, while he wasn't outright immune, he was resistant, as much as Harry himself was to all but the most lethal magical poisons available. And for the rest, he was as paranoid as Mad-Eye Moody, perhaps more so, seeing as Moody was rather heavily scarred, and all the scarring that Voldemort had was, if any, self-inflicted. Which made giving him any kind of poison rather difficult in the first place.

Then an odd thought occurred to Harry one afternoon while practicing one of his new Keeper moves. Voldemort had reacted rather... negatively to being inside Harry's head the very first time around. Sure, he'd taken over for a minute or so, but Harry had felt it when he'd started focusing on his friends and his feelings for them, and his words to Voldemort, that he pitied him. And then the initial ways he'd kept Voldemort out by picturing images and scenarios in his head that actually repulsed the dark creature.

Because that's what the Bastard was, Harry realized, a dark creature! He wasn't human anymore. Not since long before that night fifteen and a half real world years ago. He was a dark creature now, same as any lich or inferi or vampire. Contained within a body that he'd made from a bit of Harry's blood, his father's bone, and Wormtail's hand. A homunculus body, created through alchemical means. Which made him vulnerable.

Harry gave it some thought, and realized that all dark creatures had one weakness. Some more than one, but always a fatal weakness. Vampires, it was sunlight primarily, light itself in other words. Dementors, the only thing that could drive them away was the Patronus charm, a spell based on the purest and happiest feelings the caster can come up with. Inferi, fire destroyed them same as most other dark creatures. Fire was a source of light and magically was considered a part of life itself.

With all that in mind, Harry just needed to figure out the weakness of the dark creature Voldemort had become. Didn't take him long though. Dumbledore had already given him the answer; Love.

Personally, Harry thought that was a total load of bullshit, but while 'love' might not be the key to taking the Bastard out for good, it might still be a potential weakness. He went straight to Snape's special cabinet and found a saved brew of Amortentia. He went to the twins and bought half their stock in the lower quality, but no less intense, love potions they sold at their store, and just to be thorough about it he hit all the other shops on Diagon Alley and Knockturn as well before putting together a new aerosol bomb. This one he privately dubbed the 'Love Bomb'. The end results were just as disturbing as the Mustard Gas incident, though thankfully somewhat more tolerable. Provided he didn't look over at Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle. He really didn't want to find out if the apple didn't fall far from the tree with those three's families.

He could, however confirm that love potions did have at least some negative effects on Voldemort. And more than just mental as the man watched everyone in the manor fall in love with each other right before his eyes, and there were less than a handful of females present to begin with. Unfortunately, while it worked the same as Holy Water would on a vampire, the most it did was create a rash and give the Bastard a nose bleed.

Although, Harry did wonder why it was the nosebleed didn't start until after Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle Seniors decided to show their love for one another on the table right in front of their fellow Death Eaters. Malfoy was, of course, in the middle.

After that, Harry went a bit crazy and started sending all manner of stuff just to see how well, or how poorly it worked on offing the Bastard and his Death Munchers. (… He tried his best to hold back the bile in his throat as his subconscious made a nuisance of itself as that insulting term took on a whole new range of unpleasant connotations...)

After the Love Bomb, he got a whole case of cherry flavored Chocolate Frogs, making them a vivid pink color, and adjusted the enchantments on them just so, not by a lot but just enough so that they would swarm Voldemort wherever he was no matter what. And just to be extra cruel, he dosed them with the same combination of love potions as he'd put in the Love Bomb. Now that was funny, watching the Bastard go running around being chased by bright pink frogs everywhere and screaming at everyone around him to do something about them. Part of the original enchantments of the Chocolate Frogs was that they couldn't be vanished, only eaten.

Even long after that reset was done and gone, remembering the image of Voldemort swarmed by 'Umbridge-Pink' Chocolate Frogs while screaming for Malfoy and Bellatrix to "Get Them Off!" was always guaranteed to bring a smile to his face. It may not be pure enough for a Patronus charm, but for Harry just recalling it for a few moments worked better than a Cheering charm!

Hm, speaking of which, Harry thought he might as well try various spells that were meant to conjure or cause 'light' emotions, such as happiness and laughter among other things. Just to see what would happen. It was an interesting experiment that was for sure. Unfortunately, Harry had no way of casting those spells from long distance, at least not yet. And his enchanting was still amateurish at best. So he put that off for a time when he felt up to fighting the Bastard face-to-face again.

After having a bit more fun, not to mention repeating the Pink Frog Plague as often as possible, Harry was needing to spend more and more time on Quidditch practice, as he felt he was getting really good and he wanted to prove, albeit just to himself, that he was the absolute best. So he started working on more moves and skill sets for all the different positions, and also several ways so he could actually, and successfully play multiple positions by himself against a standard team. He began with the other school teams to try his skills on.

Unfortunately, the Pink Frog Plague and some of the other more elaborate assassinations took time to set up, time that he'd rather spend on his Quidditch Training, and if he didn't kill Voldemort, then the Bastard kept up his mental attacks all day! And that was worse than spending extra time on killing him!

So, he went back to explosives for a bit. But then after he got good enough to beat all the School Teams, going all the way to the military base got to be rather... cumbersome. So Harry spent a reset looking around Hogwarts for other means of offing the Bastard and his Munchers... (Harry took a brief moment for himself, trying not to throw up after that thought)

One of his ideas for explosives was to just send a Portkey right into Voldemort's Homunculus body and watch the mess from afar. Unfortunately, as he discovered the hard way, even using the Horcruxes to 'let them in', it was not possible to Portkey anything inside a living creature. Vice versa, sure, he could make a Portkey that would send a person or whatever into the side of a mountain or a wall or even the moon! (Sadly, Voldemort was so extremely paranoid that he never let anything touch him without knowing exactly what it was and where it had came from)

As for why one cannot Portkey an object to the inside of a living creature, or even an unliving creature, it took some experimenting on his part, but Harry soon figured out it wasn't just the spell. And yes, the Portus spell did include aspects that prevented one from doing just that. It was more than that however, since the spell components should have allowed for sending Portkeys into zombies, Inferi and vampires, but that was just as impossible. Which made Harry reconsider what his own magic did for him, what everyone's magic did for all of them. After all, Neville's magic made him bounce instead of die when he was thrown out of a window. How much of a leap was it to say that everyone's magic worked the same way and thus prevented the Portkey from appearing inside the body?

Oh well, fun as it was to think about, Portkeying explosives inside someone just wasn't possible.

Still, he paused to consider the concept yet again, just because he couldn't Portkey something dangerous inside of his targets... didn't mean he couldn't switch out ordinary objects for Portkeys to exceedingly dangerous places. Like the surface of the moon, outer space, Antartica, or perhaps even the bottom of the ocean.

It took a couple of resets just to properly observe how the Bastard and his Munchers behaved every morning. Since there was no way for Harry to interfere or change things prior to sending in the Portkeys, all he had to do was figure out what individual objects they all touched at what times that he could easily switch out with a Portkey to the aforementioned hazardous locations. Unfortunately, Voldemort was still paranoid enough that he really didn't let anything touch him that wasn't vetted thoroughly through his personal inspection prior to contact. The only exception that Harry could even fathom was the floor he walked on and the chair he—oh, wait, the chair!

It was sheer elegance in its simplicity to hide the Horcruxes inside of various objects and then switch them out via Switching spells for identical objects that Harry targeted through a variety of divination spells, but not before charging them with a Portus charm to places like the tracks along the Northern Line of the London Underground, just in time for the morning rush. He was particularly pleased that he set up a number of the Portkeys to appear in timed sequence so that one would appear right after the other in the train's path right after it had already run over the previous. That was for the ones that didn't have a Horcrux hidden inside them. Those special people that deserved an extra special punishment, well the other hazardous locales seemed fitting. Unfortunately, it would seem the Sun was just a bit out of range for Harry's skills with the Portus spell. Still, he could certainly get the Bastard and his pet snake sent well on their way. Would only take a few years for gravity to bring them close enough to burn up in the corona, but the cold vacuum of space did its job just fine. The others got sent to the heart of a volcano, bottom of the ocean, middle of a nuclear reactor in Russia somewhere, and other places like that.

Something else that he thought of in his plotting was trying to figure out some way of replicating the effects of the damage Hyper-Apparating had on a body that was unprepared for such stress being put on it. It had killed him twice and nearly killed him more than that. Not to mention, experience told him it was, albeit quick, quite a painful way to go. Unfortunately, Portkeys were not able to go to more than one destination at a time. They went to one point and if you wanted them to take you somewhere else, they needed to be 'recharged' to go to that other location.

On the other hand, he considered, slamming into a ward with a Portkey was actually worse than Splinching yourself because it... well, according to Bill Weasley, it could get real messy. It had been discussed between them when he'd been getting Bill to help him figure out the Headmaster Access to Hogwarts' wards, about what was actually supposed to happen when somebody tried to Portkey into Hogwarts, who was not the Headmaster. From the intentionally vague descriptions Bill gave him, Harry guessed that it looked a lot like somebody who Hyper-Apparated a few too many times.

This time, Harry just changed the targets from particularly painful places to die to... well the most securely warded places that he could think of and then some. Gringotts, the Locked Room in the Department of Mysteries, Azkaban, and even Hogwarts since pretty much none of the Death Eaters would even remotely have anything like the Headmaster's Access, and Harry's Portkeys, without the Headmaster going along, could not get past the wards, despite him being a current student. For Voldemort however, well, he had something special planned for him.

During their investigating resets, Bill had revealed to Harry quite a bit of the Curse Breaker's adventures over the years. In particular was this one place in Egypt that no one, for the hundreds of years that they'd been trying, had ever been able to open! Bill showed him pictures and even gave him precise coordinates. They were described as some of the nastiest wards Bill had ever seen and probably ever would see for the rest of his career.

It usually made the Evening Prophet when shredded blobs of Death Eaters showed up at the various locations. As for Voldemort, well, that location in particular happened to be under the seventh Egyptian Pyramid, which was still buried in sand and again was so heavily warded that nothing could get through. Anything that ever tried, well, no trace has ever been found. Nice way to get rid of the Bastard for a day at a time, but still, he felt he could get even more imaginative than that.

There were still some Mandrakes in the Greenhouses, Harry discovered in his searching. Curious as to why it wasn't completely illegal to do so, Harry got all of the nearly-full-matured Mandrakes screaming together as one and recorded the sound into a Howler. He then had Fawkes himself deliver the Howler in the midst of the meeting and (with the earmuffs still on) then watched the results from the lot of them letting the Howler explode rather than be opened. All of the Munchers died instantly. The Bastard, it seemed, was resistant or no longer human enough to be vanquished so easily and maintained enough of his faculties to blast it, stopping the noise. He didn't get away unscathed, but he still lived, albeit weakened. Which was enough for Harry to get a reprieve from the Bastard's mental attacks, which was something at least.

He did that for roughly a week or so, until it got to be more trouble than it was worth. Sure, it took him less than twenty minutes to grab some parchment, go to the Greenhouses, and then record the Howler just in time for Fawkes to show up and take it off, but there were some resets where Harry was in enough of a rush that he forgot the earmuffs, ergo resulting in an abbreviated reset. And so he started looking for something else.

Hagrid had some enchanted bear traps, although he said they were for "trolls, lethifolds an' other nasty, but interestin' things", not bears. They were rather generic, and Hagrid, despite being cleared of all charges three years back, could not enchant them himself and thankfully they were made so they didn't go off on any living creature that walked by. All one had to do was incant what the target of the trap was and then use an enchanted hammer to nail them into place.

Harry used the Hammer to attach the things to the Horcruxes, which he'd managed to negotiate the Lesser Spirits of Air and Earth into getting for him so he didn't have to go around himself every day. After designating anything with a Dark Mark or the same dark magic as the Dark Mark as the target, and then turned the lot of them into Portkeys sending them to Malfoy Manor. It was as good as the Pink Frog Plague... just more gruesome. And just for the hell of it, Harry modified the enchantments just enough so that the teeth of the traps spun round and round, like chainsaws. Made it that much messier, but that much more awesome just the same. Thanks to the Spirits delivering the Horcruzes within a few minutes of each Reset starting, it only took him the time to go down from Gryffindor Tower, swing by Hagrid's Hut on the way to the Quidditch Pitch, and roughly ten minutes to hammer the Horcruzes, modify the enchantments, and then Portkey the lot of them to Malfoy Manor to begin their daily slaughter.

After the first time he didn't bother watching it anymore, as all he cared about was that Voldemort was too occupied to bother with any mental attacks for the entire rest of the day. And for the time being, that was all he cared about.

And then Harry came upon a particularly nasty thing to do to the Bastard. Honestly, he was surprised he hadn't thought of it sooner. Although it was more of a prank idea than an assassination ploy, but if done the right way there was no reason it couldn't be both. The best part, as far as Harry was concerned, all it took him to take care of it was the time it took him to walk down from Gryffindor Tower to the Quidditch Pitch. Especially since all it took was him calling Dobby and asking for a favor from the excitable House Elf. None of the other House Elves apparently had a problem with it, since Dobby managed to pull it off every morning that Harry asked him to do it.

This was one particular killing of the Bastard that Harry totally refused to watch even one moment of, but the complete and total lack of mental response from said Bastard was enough to tell him that it worked. All Harry did was have Dobby take the entire contents of the Hogwarts sewer system/cistern/or whatever it was they used to send 'waste products' from wherever it was to Malfoy Manor, starting in that same conference room where Voldemort held his meeting. Harry didn't want to know and did not ask how it was that Dobby did it, but the facts remained that for the rest of the day the toilets in the castle worked better than they had in nearly a thousand years, and by dinner time it was revealed to everyone in the world what had happened to Malfoy Manor and all those inside it.

The term "Mountain of Shit" took on a rather humorous literal meaning for Harry after seeing the Wizarding photograph of Dobby's handiwork in the Evening Prophet. Taken from a long way off of course.

During those conversations with his little friend, Harry found himself getting curious about how he was doing the things that he was doing. Eventually his curiosity got better than his common sense, which knew better than to ask, and he posed a question to Dobby.

"So Dobby, you know what it is I'm asking you to do, right?"

The little elf's ears flopped from his rapid nodding of his head. "Dobby knows, Harry Potter Sir. Harry Potter Sir would like to hire Dobby to snuff Dobby's evil bad former master, and evil bad former master's master, the Who-No-Poo wizards do not talk about." At the House Elf's name for the Bastard, Harry really struggled not to burst out laughing. It was a close thing.

"And then cover it up by putting 'loads of crap' so no one will be finding it out," Dobby finished his statement rather succinctly.

Harry nodded, they were almost down the last few flights of the Grand Staircase by now. "I'm just curious Dobby, but how is it that you can do it in the first place? I mean, no offense, but you're just one elf and I couldn't expect one elf to do so much just by yourself. Are you using magic, or are the other House Elves helping you?"

"Oh, Harry Potter Sir is truly a great and powerful wizard!" Dobby was literally bouncing now as they made their way down the last flight of stairs. "Dobby is using special House Elf Vendetta magic against Dobby's evil bad former master, but can only use it if a wizard asks Dobby to use it. And Harry Potter Sir has asked Dobby and Dobby is so pleased that Dobby will put on special House Elf Vendetta clothes for the special occasion!"

Harry blinked and did a brief double-take as they exited out the Main Hall to the path toward the Quidditch Pitch. "Special House Elf Vendetta clothes?" he repeated. As though in reply, Dobby stopped where he stood, and put his hand on the dirty pillow case he wore, as though about to tear it off, only instead it transfigured into a solid black full-body stocking, complete with gloves, boots and a hood and mask for the House Elf's head. It even covered his impossibly large ears and nose without bending them down.

"Dobby go snuff evil bad former master's master now!" the little Ninja Elf squeaked before popping away. Harry could only stare in stunned disbelief at the spot for several long moments before finally shaking his head and cursing the Magical World for all its weirdness. Although 'Dobby the Ninja Elf' had an odd ring to it that gave Harry the shivers each and every time.

DOM_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ DOM

Harry had just defeated every team in Britain and several International Teams from Europe, in every position Quidditch had to offer. If nothing else in the world did, that definitely deserved a day off!

But before that, which he had planned for next reset, he had to work on a few more of his more... esoteric skills. Yes, he'd just spent the whole day playing Quidditch, but after humiliating them in so thorough a fashion, nobody was offering him any deals today, and the Harpies weren't interested for some reason, and he'd kinda been counting on their... entertainment for the evening. The sudden opening that all the Teams leaving at sunset left gave him a unique opportunity. An opportunity for something that he'd been putting off for one reason or another.

The Teams had just left, and most of his friends had long since gone back up to the Castle, so that just left Harry alone on the Quidditch Pitch, just standing there at center field, ground level. Once he was assured of his privacy for the moment, Harry took a deep breath and let it out slow, and then sat down there on the ground and closed his eyes, entering his mindscape with the same breath. He appeared there just outside his Innermost Hogwarts. In addition to the moat that was between the Lake and the Castle, he'd placed an impossibly high wall. Inside this wall, he'd placed areas. Areas such as Hagrid's Hut, the Owlery, and the Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch. He'd put in a couple other areas as well, but that was neither here nor there. Right now, he was focusing on the Quidditch Pitch area. And his Inner Self that he had just created there.

Filling his consciousness into the Inner-Harry, he opened his eyes and was suddenly IN his mindscape without being the mindscape at the same time. He was aware of it, he was even, peripherally, aware of his physical body, but he was actually in his mindscape now, like the book described.

"Wicked," he grinned and looked down at himself and all around.

Somehow, everything here seemed more...real than even the real world was. But it was just as clearly part of his own mind, part of him, which is what made it so much more real, he realized. He began to walk towards the castle itself, then realized he wasn't really getting anywhere, so he just willed himself there, working from the inside out instead of the outside in as before. It was just like Apparating, except smoother and far more comfortable. He appeared in front of the doors to his Innermost Hogwarts, naked as the day he was born, not even glasses, but he could still see perfectly well. He put his hands on the doors and pushed them open and then entered the Maze of Memories.

Normally, he might spend a few resets just going through it all, browsing along, reliving all his memories the same way one would look at paintings in a museum, but he wanted to get this done! He ran up stairs, he ran down walls, he walked the hallways, he jumped across windows and climbed through doorways. It felt like it took longer than he'd expected, and he'd made the place, so he was at least confident enough that his defenses could definitely keep out any unwanted trespassers after giving him so much trouble, but finally he made it to the center of his mindscape, the middle of his mind where he kept all his secrets and everything he didn't want anyone to touch. Once there, he sat down in the futuristic looking throne, which conformed to his body like it was made for him. Or perhaps, he mused as his InnerSelf took one final look around the mindscape, like he was made for it.

The moment he sat down in the Chair, his InnerSelf's eyes closed, and his real eyes opened on the Quidditch Pitch. The last rays of the sun finally dipped below the mountains and true twilight began. He couldn't have been sitting there for longer than a few minutes. He wondered why it had taken him so long to actually... no, that's not entirely accurate. He knew why it had taken him so long to finally develop an InnerSelf that could interact with his mindscape. Part of it was fear of vulnerability, part of it was ignorance of what he was trying to do, but the biggest part was his lack of confidence, his belief that first of all it could not be done and primarily that even if it could, he couldn't do it.

After beating every Professional Quidditch Player in Britain and Europe, in every position one could play Quidditch, Harry knew better by now. If anyone could do it, he could do it! And so with that thought and new found belief driving him, he sat down and did it immediately, and in only a couple of minutes, where he'd been expecting it to take hours.

"So much for filling in the opening to my schedule," he said to himself. He started making his way to the locker room, when a sudden impulse overcame him. His InnerSelf, still in his mindscape and still sat in the Chair, quickly tracked the source of the impulse, quarantined it, and then began to analyze what the origin was. In the real world, he blinked and continued on his way to the showers.

That's different, he thought, but it also made a kind of sense. What he'd done by creating the InnerSelf was give form and consciousness to his subconscious mind. Something he could interact with almost. But it was still him. Just his subconscious mind, the Id, the ego and the Superego sort of all rolled into one, running things from the inside of his mind, but on a far more 'real' scale than what was naturally done. Harry could, at any time, join with this InnerSelf and consciously control things. What things could be controlled, the book had only hinted at, so he figured he would have to figure most of it out on his own. Apparently controlling his impulses was one of...

He stopped walking as the results of the analysis of that impulse came up. He blinked a few dozen times, taking some time to fully process what this meant.

"Uh... what?" he asked himself and shook his head. "I wanted to... what?"

Another dozen impulses suddenly swept through him, and he almost acted on one before they were all fully quarantined by his InnerSelf. He hurried to the showers before anything else happened. What was up with him wanting to use his re-discovered Veela-ness to build himself a harem anyway? Or to fully extend it to the point where every witch in the castle would come running to him and help him shower? How was he even supposed to...?

His InnerSelf pulled up a few of his previously protected memories, in particular was Fleur's side of the conversation, and the shouts he'd heard coming from the closed door where Fleur was actually fighting with her Headmistress to get to him while Dumbledore was erasing his memories. Some of the things she shouted at him even as Dumbledore Obliviated her were particularly memorable.

He reached the showers and turned them all on cold. He gasped as he cleaned himself as quickly as possible, but still stayed under until he was shivering uncontrollably and his lips had turned blue. He hadn't needed a cold shower in a long time, but apparently he'd start needing them again as whatever Pomphrey had done that bound his Veela-ness was starting to wear off.

Oh yeah, he'd gotten way past believing the matron was any paragon of virtue. When he came to her speaking of needing some extra cleansing rituals, she'd seen the truth of it, that it was his Veela-ness breaking out uncontrollably and whatever ritual it had been that she'd used, had instead bound it so that all the girls weren't so irresistibly drawn to him enough to actually fight over him! Good God, how had he ever thought that sort of behavior was just cause he wasn't wearing any clothing?

Looking back on it, he can recall several times when he'd witnessed wizards behaving the exact same way in front of the Veela at the World Cup, and to a far lesser degree around Fleur when she was here at Hogwarts. The biggest question on his mind though, was how he could control it.

It was fairly obvious that his own arousal contributed to it, but it wasn't the only factor, as he could remember quite well that when they'd been chasing him through the halls, he hadn't been the least bit aroused, but still more and more girls joined in the sudden twist to the Harry Hunt. He thought it might have something to do with his use of magic, or his magic power, but he'd been working on his magic control to the point that...

He had his InnerSelf run a sort of self-diagnostic on his magic. The results, when they came up, were exactly what he'd expected. It explained his impulses certainly. His magic control was nearly perfect, so he wasn't leaking any more ambient magic than the average wizard, perhaps a little less even. His arousal was the spark, but his ambient aura was the fuel. So long as even a little bit of his magic came from him, his Veela... aura would affect any and all around him the same as it did your run of the mill Veela, except that it would be females attracted to him rather than males, seeing as all Veela were female and therefore only attracted males, while repelling other females.

Recalling some of the more... intense days during his Naked Time, he knew he wasn't about to go and experiment with his aura all on his own. There might be days where they would literally tear him apart! And as temporary as that would no doubt be, he didn't even want to risk the memory of what that would be like!

So, he sighed as he made his way, fully dressed, back up to the castle, that leaves me with the option of either going to Madam Pomphrey for another binding ritual... or take Fleur up on her original offer.

Well, that was for next reset, he decided, forcing a smile on his face and walking into the Great Hall for Dinner. Tonight, he was still riding the high of what he'd just accomplished.

"Hey guys!" he called as he sat down between Ginny and Hermione. Ron was sat across from them, next to Neville and Angelina, with the rest of the Quidditch team spread around on either side of the table. "Can any of you believe I actually managed to do it? Finally learned everything there is to learn in Quidditch! Only thing left is to gain a bit of experience here and there. Hey Ron, get loads of autographs this time?"

"Actually no, Harry, we can't believe it," Angelina snapped at him.

"Huh?" he was confused, more by the scowl Ron had given him than by Angelina's snap.

"Who are you and what have you done with Harry Potter?" Hermione asked him. But not in jest, nor in anger. She was asking like she was... like she was afraid of him!

He pulled back slightly. "What's going on here?" he asked, confused and concerned by their reactions to his success.

"Harry can't do what you've done," Ginny growled. "He's good on a broom, no doubt, but he's a Seeker! I don't know who or what you are, but we want our friend back!"

Harry blinked, and replied, "I am Harry, and I can do what I've done. I've had a lot of time to practice, that's all. I took the time to learn each position and I've been training until I finally got good enough to beat all the Professionals. I spoke with you and the girls, Angelina, about learning to be a Chaser. Ron, I went to you personally to show me how to be a Keeper! I went to your brothers to learn how to be a Beater, and oh how I regret it."

"That's impossible!" Hermione exclaimed. "If you've been doing so much training and if we've all been helping you so much, why don't we remember it?"

"I don't know Hermione, why don't you remember it?" he asked her in turn.

"What?" she shouted, her eyes jumping around as her brain raced to accept the implications.

"Oi, Luna!" Harry called, "Need your help with something over here!"

The blonde virtually bounded over to Gryffindor table and once there latched onto Harry's neck and asked, "What can I do for you Harry?"

Hearing the familiar purr in her voice, Harry turned and looked her in the eye, well as much as she would let him that is. "Yeah, not like that Luna. I'm planning on taking the next today off as it is, so maybe later. Right now, I need you to prove to Hermione that I've been training my Quidditch skills for a really long time now. And that you 'remember' seeing me train."

"Oh," Luna nodded her head, still latched around his neck, she turned to face Hermione and said, "Harry has indeed been training very hard. Off and on again. He's incredibly good. Why, not too long ago I watched as he absolutely thrashed every Seeker in the world! He even went to London to get the Twins to help him for most of the today's I can remember. One today, he even came back after killing Voldemort, without dying at the same time, and..."

"Yes, thank you Luna, that was a little bit more than I was hoping to share at the moment," he interrupted, quickly putting his hand over her mouth. She immediately started licking his fingers and he started to worry that his aura might start leaking at any moment, provided it wasn't already that is!

"That doesn't prove anything," Hermione huffed, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Luna," Harry removed his hand and then patted the blonde's head with it, "How long have I been training my Quidditch skills? In number of todays that is."

"Hm..." her wide eyes rolled up in thought and then she answered, "Oh at least several thousand todays, ever since that today where you asked us what we would do if we were stuck in today like you are, and Ron suggested becoming the greatest Quidditch player alive. Can I go next, the next today where you ask us what we would do with today?"

Harry smiled and rather than answer he just gave his friends a 'Well? Your turn' look.

"What are you lot talking about?" Angelina asked.

"I'm stuck in a time loop," Harry answered, straight-forward. "And I really have been training to be the best Quidditch player that I can be. But it's so hard finding new challenges. Now that I've beaten, well just about everyone, I'm thinking of giving it up for a while. Well... not until I've ironed out my skills that is. I've got a couple of new Keeper moves that I want to develop a bit more, and my Potter Pinball still isn't quite complete."

"Potter Pinball?" Ron exclaimed.

"Yeah, that move where I sort of hit the Bludgers so that they hit each player in turn before I even had to hit it again?" Harry reminded them of the Beater move he'd developed and used earlier that afternoon during the scrimmage game against all the Professionals.

Ron recalled seeing it and was soon nodding his head. "Yeah, that was wicked cool. But why do you call it Potter's Pinball?"

Harry shrugged and said, "Potter Pinball, since it's just me, see? And, because I came up with it. Why else? I've checked. Every single last one of my moves are completely original. Nobody else in the League; Regional or International, has ever done anything like any one of my moves. Heck, I barely got to show any of them today, had to stick to the quick ones and the heavy hitters."

"So how did you do that trick where you were actually in front of all three hoops at the same time?" Ron asked, sounding intrigued despite of himself.

"Ah, I call that one the Potter Split. Very different from the Potter Splitter by the way, which is another one of my Beater moves. And it's not easy to do. I'll teach you if you'd like, but it'll take you like thirty years to be able to pull it off. Give or take."

"Thirty years? You're joking!" the redhead shouted.

"No, I'm guessing," he admitted. "First step is, you need to be able to Ramp, and second through seventh steps involve being able to handle Ramped speed. As well as not caring about the after-use quality of your broom, because if you play a game using that move, or any of my moves, the broom is going to be all but useless as soon as a day afterward. And that's provided you have a top-of-the-line high quality broom. So... assuming you put in the typical twelve hours of work a day, doing nothing but Quidditch with minimum breaks, and getting enough money to buy and keep buying a Firebolt quality broom for each training day and any official games you might play in... Yeah, about thirty years, give or take an extra five to account for any unknown factors."

Ron blinked owlishly at his best friend and then did a sudden reverse from his earlier behavior.

"How long did it take you to learn how to do it?" he asked, eager to hear the answer.

Harry shrugged and answered, "I didn't learn it at all. I came up with it on my own. So considerably longer than it would take you to learn."

"Harry—if that is who you are—please answer Ron's question," Hermione pressed, "How long did it take you to learn how to do what you did, and claim to be able to do, on a broom?"

"Like Luna said, several thousand todays, IE resets, so... I don't know, some five hundred years. I lost track after the Twins Beater training. I swear, those two are more sadistic than Snape and Umbridge put together sometimes! Besides, it's not worth it to keep counting, just makes me depressed. Oh, strawberries! And cake! Yay!" Harry quickly grabbed the favored items of food before anybody else could.

"But... that's impossible!" the bushy-haired witch insisted.

"Time loop, magical time loop at that," Harry reminded her. "Considering you used a Time Turner in your Third Year, giving you extra hours every day, don't you think it's possible that I might accidentally come across something that would stick me in a time loop where I keep reliving the same day? You don't usually have a problem with this when I mention it first thing in the morning."

"But... You... Harry can't do the things that you did today! Nobody can do some of the things you did today!" she kept insisting.

"And whose fault is that, you think?" he argued, letting some of his frustration show. "Why is it that we all hear these amazing stories about Merlin and other magical heroes that did all of these amazing things, and nobody else can do them? Huh? Look far enough back in history and you see that for a time, these... miracles that everybody lauds as impossible were as common place as Apparating or flying on brooms are today! And all I did was fly recklessly on a broom. You haven't seen me doing what else I've been training in!" He angrily tore into the meat he'd put on his plate as an after thought to the other delicacies he'd procured.

"Like what?" Ginny asked, sounding more curious than afraid in the face of his irrational anger.

"Wandless magic," he mumbled around the bite he'd take. "Elemental magic. Apparating inside Hogwarts. Not easy to do by the way, but not impossible either. Still working on making portals. Oh, and multiple Animagus forms. Got close to six or seven hundred by now. I decided to keep adding after I got my first couple hundred, roughly one every few resets. Still only have less than thirty magical creature forms though. Oh, and that's the other thing, I can turn into a dragon, along with a variety of other magical creatures. And a dinosaur. A couple of dinosaurs actually, and surprisingly those are not magical."

"You can do all of that?" asked Neville. They were all surprised, as everything Harry had just described was up there with the common stories you heard about Merlin's adventures in the Wizarding World.

"Well..." Harry hesitated, drawing out his answer by taking a long slow drink from his goblet. Ugh, Pumpkin juice again. He really needed to find some way to get the elves to liven things up in the drinks department.

"My wandless magic isn't that impressive, I can use it without my wand, but it's not actually casting the magic. Best I can do is create the effect through touch. Elemental magic is getting better. Don't even need my wand for most of that, but it helps, especially if you're casting actual spells rather than just magically manipulating the elements themselves. As for Apparating inside Hogwarts..." He Disapparated, was gone for a couple of seconds and then Apparated back in on Hermione's other side. He then Disapparated again and reappeared back where he was originally. He just smiled at the shocked looks he received.

"I love showing off for you guys," he laughed, enjoying the attention for once, if only because he felt he actually deserved it this time around.

"And your Animagus forms?" Luna whispered into his ear.

"Not at dinner," he grinned.

"How?" gasped Hermione, "How is all this possible? Harry?"

"Gryffindor could do it apparently," he answered, "And because of that, Slytherin and Ravenclaw worked together to figure out a way to keep him from destroying the wards every time he did. So, for someone like me, I sort of just... bounce around the wards here and there and if I time it right, I can reappear just about anywhere I want. Took me a really long time to learn the layout of the castle though, at least when bouncing around the way I do. Seems only the Headmaster can actually Apparate anywhere in the castle that he wants to. I can get to the Great Hall, the Room of Requirement, and almost anywhere in Gryffindor tower without difficulty, but anywhere other than that and I'm shooting blind, sometimes appearing in the complete opposite place of where I was shooting for."

"Where did you learn that Gryffindor could Apparate inside Hogwarts?" Hermione instantly asked him.

"From the Grimoire of Gryffindor," he answered honestly. Hm, really good potatoes. He hadn't had them in a while. Probably why they tasted so good now, his InnerSelf mused. He quietly agreed, completely ignoring how weird it was to independently agree with one's inner voice.

"The what?" everyone that heard him shouted.

"It's in the Room of Requirement, and it doesn't leave the Room of Requirement," he told them. "I needed to learn how to Apparate out of Hogwarts. It showed me a single entry in Gryffindor's diary explaining how he did it. Good luck to any of you that care to try getting it. I haven't been able to get it back since."

"This is, this is, this is," Hermione kept repeating until Luna slapped her on the back, "IMPOSSIBLE! Harry, what you are claiming is, is, well it isn't done! Nobody, not even Professor Dumbledore can do all that!"

"Dumbledore is the Headmaster, he can Apparate anywhere in Hogwarts that he damn well pleases," Harry informed everyone around him. "He's also practicing the Fire Element, or did nobody ever notice that he never needs his wand to light the candles in here?" He gestured to the 'chandeliers' of candles floating above their heads. "And the man was the Transfiguration teacher here at Hogwarts for how many years? Professor McGonagall has her own Animagus transformation, why wouldn't he?"

"But multiple Animagus forms?" Luna prompted, a familiar twinkle in her eye.

Harry shrugged and finally admitted something he'd only ever admitted to his girlfriends, and only his girlfriends before now. "My father, who by the way discovered his own Animagus form by his Fifth Year of Hogwarts, discovered that the spell that's used as part of the Animagus discovery process actually locks it so the wizard only has a single form. In his Seventh Year, he started experimenting with creating a new spell that would allow for multiple forms, and even the ability to change between those forms with enough practice. Unfortunately, he never got a chance to try it for himself."

"And you discovered this spell—how?" prompted Hermione.

Harry just smiled softly, but otherwise didn't respond. He finished his meal, fielding some questions, answering those he didn't mind or didn't care about either way, and after desert he took them all to the Room of Requirement. Since he did have to retrieve his broom earlier that day, as nobody would play against him if he used any of his specialty brooms that he remade from the school's old brooms, that meant that Umbridge was not going to be a problem. Neither was Snape or Malfoy, mostly because Harry had, over the course of the resets, found ways of ensuring they were otherwise occupied and so he wouldn't have to deal with them while learning from the Professionals. Since no Umbridge meant Snape couldn't be arrested, which also meant that there ran the risk of Snape trying to steal him away for Occlumency lessons when he didn't respond to Voldemort's false vision, he needed some other way of getting him out of the castle. Therefore, after he learned how to bomb the hell out of Malfoy Manor, he likewise discovered there were other letters that Hedwig could deliver for him that would ensure those two pains in his side were out of his way for the rest of the day.

For Snape, it was a letter from 'Malfoy Senior' asking him to come to his home at once on a matter of family business, delivered a few minutes before the bombs went off. For Malfoy, well, it was a letter to the Ministry informing them of the destruction of Malfoy Manor and little Draco was summoned out of the school before even the first of the Professional Teams arrived. As such, it left Harry and his friends completely free to go anywhere in the school without worry, especially the Room of Requirement. Filch was not even an issue.

Once there, he really did show off. He started by succumbing to Luna's wishes and showing them a fair amount of his Animagus transformations. He kept mostly to normal animals, especially birds, as he seemed to have a proclivity for them, (he had even recently gotten a couple of penguin forms!). While he did show them some of his magical transformations, he only showed them the ones he'd already let slip he had, as well as his first form. When pressed by Luna to show them his strongest form, he quietly insisted that his dragon form was his strongest form, despite it being much smaller than most of the dragons they had seen before.

After the Animagus display, he showed them a couple of his Elemental spells, and the exercises he had to do so he could properly manipulate them. Hermione asked where he'd learned how to do all that, and right in front of her appeared the very same book he'd learned it out of. It was only when he did the really spectacular stuff that he was able to pry her nose out of it after that point. Although when Luna and Ginny both commented that they'd love to see what else he could do with those water whips of his, he wasn't the only one with a blush to match Ginny's and Ron's hair.

He showed them a couple of his magic control and magic power enhancing exercises. He held off from calling forth the Rolling Death, but the old Bludgers were easy enough for him now that he could do it without anyone getting injured. The mazes were complex enough that even Hermione was shaking her head in disbelief, while the rest just stared with their jaws on the ground as he expertly manipulated a couple dozen iron rings, which were so heavy that even all of his friends combined couldn't lift, let alone budge them (with or without magic), through a three dimensional maze in only a few minutes, all done simultaneously.

Once he'd shown them all that he hadn't been lying about his skill level, or how long he'd been training for, they started treating him differently from before, although he wasn't quite sure if that was better or worse. Before, they had all been thinking that he was either some kind of monster that had taken the place of their friend, or worse a cheater. As bad as that had been, now they were treating him like he saw everyone treat Dumbledore. He really didn't like the thought of that. Dumbledore had done just as much to screw up his life as Voldemort himself had done, perhaps more. The last thing he wanted was to be treated the same as the man that could do no wrong. He wanted his friends to be his friends, not his followers.

"Harry... could you... teach me, what you know?" Hermione asked him out of the blue as he was letting everybody out of the Room.

The question caught him more by surprise than their reactions to his current skill level. "Whuh?"

"I know you have almost unlimited time, but... if you could, I don't know, maybe find some way of bringing me, or just my memories with you when you reset? I... I don't want to get left behind," she whispered, her kissable lips pouting out adorably.

Harry frowned. It hadn't been the first time he'd had the thought, and honestly, he would appreciate the genuine company of Hermione being able to remember the Resets with him. And not just her but all of his friends. And Luna, blessing that she was, her memories were incomplete at best. While she had just demonstrated she could certainly remember more that just the past ten or so resets, he had actually worked with her on one of his 'dating Luna' resets, before he'd started his Quidditch training that is. The days where he walked her through remembering each consecutive day, one after the other as he remembered them, had put her into a coma.

Well, actually the term Madam Pomphrey had called it was a "Non-Responsive State", because it was the exact opposite of what a coma typically was, but the end result was the same. His 'helping her to remember' had basically put her inside whatever visions she was seeing, enough that she couldn't do anything but be in those visions. He left her alone for a couple resets, observing her from afar, and was pleased to note that she showed no signs of a fugue state and was back to being normal. So while Luna was still 'aware' of the time loop, he wasn't going to have her join him as part of it, not at the price she had to pay for it.

Unfortunately, he had no clue about how to even begin to know where to look to begin figuring out a way to make it happen for anyone else. There were days, singular non-repeated days, where he went to Hermione first thing in the morning and explained everything and asked her help in researching ways to make it possible. It was fruitless of course, as Hermione always had the exact same ideas at the exact same time, so even if Harry told her what she had figured out the day before, they wouldn't make any real progress. And he still had no clue about where to begin.

"Believe me Hermione, if I could even think of a way to do it, I would be all over it," he told her. "But I wouldn't even begin to know where to start looking..."

"What about Dumbledore's Pensieve, drawing out the memories?" she suggested.

"The memories drawn out are copies and are made to go into objects, not other people," he immediately countered. "Same with Legilimency, and the process by which a Dementor sucks out a soul, and the possibility of fusion like what Voldemort did with Quirrel in our First Year. At best you get copies that fit fine in my head, but couldn't be transferred to your head because they would be my memories of your memories, and therefore would be based in my magic. The other ways, you come back to the central problem. Our magic cores would interfere with one another. Isn't it one of those rules of magic you love quoting?"

Hermione sighed, on the verge of tears. Sadly, she nodded her head. "Is there," she tearfully begged of him, "Is there any way that I could, that we could, that you could, maybe?"

An impulsive idea struck Harry right at that moment. His InnerSelf almost quarantined it, but then he took another look at it and allowed it to develop with some extra ideas and more information behind it.

Frowning with thought at the sudden idea, Harry reached out and took Hermione by the back of the neck and kissed her like she'd never been kissed before, the same way he always kissed her. "I'll see what I can do," he promised, already resolved that on his next off day, he would seek out Fleur and take her up on her offer, and see what else this Veela-ness of his could do for him.

Because if this crazy idea of his was right, then just maybe, he could find a work around to the magic incompatibility issue. But this wasn't going to be easy, or fixed just like that, even if he was right. But it was hope, and that's what he, and Hermione, needed right then. Hope.

-TBC-

Special Thanks to my editors, who definitely had to put a rush on this one, despite I'm sure some very busy schedules. Extra special thanks to one in particular who, while very talented and particularly insightful, didn't quite manage to sync up with what I had planned for this chapter. Moving just a bit too fast, if you know what I mean?

Still, he did such a great job with what I asked him that I couldn't just leave it out, so I decided to share. Hopefully this may even inspire others to further participate with this story. I give you; the First DOM Omake!

OMAKE:

(By: "Aiden_Reon O'Connell" knucklesrocks (AT) hotmail com)

ADDITION

While he was going about sending the bastard and his death eaters all over the place, he stopped to think of where else he might be able to send them. He had been sending them or sending things to them through space but what about time? He mentally kicked himself for overlooking it. How obvious could it have been! He had been roaming around in a never ending loop without really considering what powers might be at work keeping him there, let alone managed to put him there in the first place!

The first place he went was to Dumbledore's office to examine the old clock to see if there was anything blatantly obvious within its magic that might give him some hint as to how he might throw the bastard in a never ending loop of his own! Unfortunately, after spending a whole reset using all the divination skills he had recently learned, he was no closer to uncovering the secret of that clock than he was to getting out of the time loop. Setting that aside, the next thing he thought of was the pensieve. That magical pool of memories had the ability to propel one into the past, albeit in a controlled manner that was easy to get out of, yet, he wondered if that might be changed. Perhaps some form of interactive landscape might be designed, much like he had been studying about Occlumency. He remembered Dumbledore sifting and advancing through the ministry trials back in his fourth year and wondered if he could do the same.

Of course, since the memories in Dumbledore's pensive were not his own, Harry decided to empty out its contents. He found that he could vanish them thanks to all his work sorting through his own memories, as the concept of memories was now much less complex to him. He then chose a memory at random: the memory of when he set Nagini on Dudley back before he knew he was a wizard. If he managed to stick the bastard in there on his own, he might just escape, so Harry decided he would throw the snake in there as well. He could throw the snake in after the memory of it thanked him and started slithering away. He dipped his head into the pensieve and was face-to-face with the snake. He tried to stop the memory and move it forward and backward and found that all it took was thinking of which part of it he wanted to see and there it was. Then, since they were his own memories, he tried altering them and getting rid of the zoo, instead setting it inside Malfoy manor. He had seen enough of the place from all his scrying to be able to copy it completely. Then he went about linking the different doors back to each other so that no matter what door the bastard tried to go through, he would end up no closer to leaving the manor than Harry was able to enter. Then, he put more and more layers of it and set them to change at random so that even if the bastard figured out a pattern, the next one would be different and before long, the first one would have changed completely.

After all that, Harry tried to think of how he might manage to get the bastard and his snake inside the fabricated memory. That morning, he made the pensieve look like a cup and sent it to the manor. Unfortunately, no matter where he put it, somehow, the first person to get to it was always one of the bastard's munchers. (he paused to regain his composure) After trying so many times, he decided to put aside that plan until he had a more foolproof way to capture the snake and its master inside the memory. Even if he didn't get rid of them once and for all, while he was scrying the cup, he would see the stupid git putting it to his lips and disappearing. Then, he would search for him specifically and laugh for hours watching him run around the manor like a lunatic, looking for his master.

Although, if it helps, this would probably fit in quite well some time after Chapter 40 or 45... provided I ever get the story that far! ;D