A/N: Alrighty-then, be forewarned: I plan on expanding this to have multiple crossovers. I'm just seriously debating on how to weave them together so that the space aspect doesn't overlap too much.
Honestly, aren't some space faring crosses mutually exclusive? If I went with an Avengers cross, that brings out an entire can of worms, and might be able to cross with Stargate, but I'd have to explain the Rockwell alien thing as well as why SHIELD wasn't a part of SG-teams (then again, they ARE a spy agency, they could just have assets within the SGTs). If I went with Mass Effect (which would have been my first choice, but then I'd have to go with Earth still being pre-spaceflight and have to accelerate the timeline) ... Avengers it is, for now. Maybe.
(Above is a brief look into how my brain pretends to work.)
Aside from that, I did something stupid and ate some meat from a chip truck, and now I have food poisoning. Y'all can thank that for an update of this story.
Chapter 15: Tabloids
Harry gazed upon the bustling crowd of people at King's Cross Station with mixed feelings. It was time for Harry to go back to school, as his holiday was over with, but at least he managed to have a semi-relaxing break. It might have been punctuated with the occasional bumping into royalty, as he later found out on the front page of a paper, and an issue or two with his Swarm being in combat, but Harry counted it all as a successful vacation.
He managed to distance himself from the craziness that was Hogwarts life for a while, which was the important part. Still, Harry felt the traitorous urge to miss the first home he ever had, only to know that later in the thick of it he would most likely regret ever entertaining such a feeling.
He knew that he'll blame the company more than the castle when the time came, though.
Harry readjusted the fastenings of his vivid red scarf and blended towards where he knew the entrance to his destined platform was. He was, effectively, just a face in the crowd when it came to the mundane world.
It was, perhaps, the best part of the vacation.
It ended all-too-soon when he crossed the barrier between the two worlds, as the magicals within the 'inner' station seemed to have a sense for noticing him. He could have sworn that if he were invisible, all the eyes would have still swiveled towards him.
It was then that the hivemind reminded him of its never ending-presence when it commented that it might have stemmed from the society's isolationist ideals that led to their suspicion of anyone entering from the outside. Harry didn't particularly care about that tidbit of information as it was.
He thanked his foresight when he had already covered his distinctive scarred forehead and the hat on his head. From what he knew of the perception of most people, he was a completely different person to the one they knew as Harry Potter, and from the way the eyes continued instead of double-taking the thought was confirmed.
It was relatively simple for Harry to find and settle into a compartment, having the boon of traveling light and not dealing with a school trunk. He spotted an outdated wizarding newspaper and figuring that he might as well see what the magicals had been up to in his two week absence, he decided to give it a gander.
His eyebrows rose when he spotted the front page, declaring that the Minister promised to institute a search for him! He continued to read on, as it became clear to him that he was under watch at Hogwarts, and it was a surprise when he 'disappeared' before the start of the winter hols. Flabbergasted at the inherent stupidity of wizards, Harry discarded the information as 'too stupid to deal with right now' and moved on to his planned entertainment while he was in transit. That was to say, wait and see if Hermione found him, and until then, focus more of his mind on the cadavers he had received from the attack at Diagon Ally.
Unfortunately for him, he didn't end up getting interrupted by his friends nor was he able to gain any real headway in his research. However, he still was interrupted. Since it wasn't from his friends or from arriving at his intended destination either, he was not impressed.
It started with a bang of the compartment door and ended with a ferret fleeing with its tails between their legs. That said nothing of what happened between start and end, though.
"Potter!" A white-blond ponce announced to the room at large, not at Harry himself until it seemed that Malfoy had finally noticed where Harry was exactly within the room.
Harry couldn't help the snide remark he made in return if he wanted to, "Do you announce that to every room you walk into? Oh, Malfoy, I didn't know you fancied me that much." He did manage to hide the grin that threatened to spread across his face, though.
Malfoy spluttered, before he gave an inarticulate growl and backed off from the room, forgetting what he had intended to do in seeking Harry out in the first place. Once the door closed again, that was when Harry let out his chuckles. Despite how it had been amusing to Harry, it was still a distraction and as such it didn't leave for much room for Harry to regain his focus in his set-upon task.
He promptly gave his attempts up as fruitless and decided to wander the train with all that he brought with him on his back. He figured that the method of staying put and letting his friends find him wouldn't work since so much time had passed going towards the school. The light outside had already dimmed enough to tell him that they were nearing the approach to Hogsmeade.
He was reminded that the sun had already set as he passed lit candles in the corridor, which struck Harry as an irresponsible thing to have in such a flammable object ferrying students hither and thither. That was before he was harshly reminded that, hey, magic!
It was probably why students could switch between the carriages even though the train was on the move; normally it would be prohibited for unsupervised transfers between carriages on a train of the same type. Well, at least common sense told Harry that, as he didn't have the experience himself to know that for sure. For all he knew it was completely fine to let eleven-year-olds switch between moving carriages on the metal couplings in the muggle world.
Harry mentally shook his head; it wasn't something that mattered, but instead of dismissing the train of thought entirely, he shunted it off to the hivemind for it to be processed somewhere else. It helped to have the thought process come to a proper conclusion rather than be dismissed, since that allowed for a better resting experience and a clearer mental environment than if he hadn't. At least, that was what the hivemind told him.
Harry personally just thought that the hivemind was board enough to want to think inane thoughts for him.
To replace the thought that had been plaguing his mind until the hivemind was kind enough to delegate it to an overlord, and of course that overlord would just be all too happy to think of some random thoughts for their overmind.
When Harry managed the door to the space between the two carriages, Harry noticed that the train was slowing down. He was of two minds about that situation: for one, Harry didn't exactly feel the need to face a crowd that, according to the tabloid he had read about himself, the vast populace thought missing. For another, Harry was eager to see Hogwarts again, since it still remained his home, and around it represented the hive clusters he had set up as his family at home.
From there, it didn't take long for Harry to give up looking for Hermione and find a seat once more, intent on waiting it out until the train pulled to a stop. After all, Harry might be an enhanced human with strange abilities the average wizard might not understand, but he still thought that it was common sense not to stand in an accelerating or decelerating vehicle despite the average Londoner doing exactly that when they got on a lorry.
Though, to be fair, they'd usually have something to hold onto when they were standing.
Regardless, Harry found himself a seat in the compartment he had recently vacated, and waited for the train to come to a stop.
Harry stared; he stared hard.
He hadn't thought of the strange skeletal creatures pulling the carriages since he had seen them at the start of the year, and now that he was seeing them once again waiting patiently for a full load of students before carting them up to the castle, the hivemind made him pay very close attention to them. 'Well,' Harry considered, 'more like ask, since I'm the drive behind the hivemind.'
Still, Harry couldn't help but to notice the sheer hunger that the swarm held when it noticed the beasts that under normal pretense, should be dead. Added to that, the hivemind took note of the way that people in general tended not to notice or pay any attention towards the beasts. That suggested that they had some sort of anti-gaze field for even the terrans born of psionic parentage to not marvel in awe at them.
That was why they really wanted to eat one or two to gain the essence of them. They wanted to study them, and that was the way the Zerg studied the biology of things.
Harry was inclined to let them do it, too. It might be cool to be able to walk through a crowded hall full of people and not have them all stare at his forehead. He missed that about the streets of London during his vacation, while he was a nobody like everyone else. Ah, what he would give to be a drone in the machine, and how he silently envied all of the units in the hive for being able to do it.
Harry distinctly remembered Hagrid once saying that he was the one to raise the skeletal creatures that hauled the carriages, during one of his visits to Hagrid's hut. As he made his way into one of the carriages, ready for them to take him to the castle, he considered a way for his swarm to gain a sampling of the beasts.
He'd certainly need to find where they're kept when not in use, otherwise he'd have to risk someone noticing one of them being taken. Even though he had a decently sized amount of hive clusters in the area, he also knew that it would be detrimental to the swarm if they were found out so soon. Ideally Harry wanted to have at least a foothold on each continent before the swarm was revealed to the magical world, let alone the general population. Of course, showing up in a heavily populated area like Diagon Ally in order to halt a Death Eater invasion was one thing, but attacking invisible dead horses ferrying children was an entirely different thing.
Harry was under no illusions about the difference between muggles and wizard kind based solely on his past experiences of the two. He was under the impression that the wizards might declare the Zerg to be a new magical species and thus under the protection of the Magical Species Conservation Act. They were also liable to attempt to use his children for nefarious purposes, since Dark Lords were apparently common across the continents. He shuddered to think of what kind of sacrifices the Dark Arts could come up with, or the kinds of different elixirs that could be produced from their biology. Of course, that was likely only one threat from the dark wankers. As far as he knew from his studies under the founders with Luna, it was completely moral for potions to be made with ingredients that didn't kill or place undo suffering on the magical creatures. Of course, magic didn't really care if it was taken forcefully from non-magical animals that had no sapience unto themselves.
The mundane, however, were likely to react as if they were being threatened. They would poke and prod, trying to discover anything about the swarm and how it operated, and then they'd stoke the fires of their war machines. They would find the swarm as too much of a threat to be allowed to live, they see his children as a plague that couldn't be controlled, and that would be when they started to drop the bombs.
Obviously, Harry couldn't allow that. Thankfully, historically speaking, the Zerg didn't exactly jive well with captivity. If they could be raised in captivity, then those same units wouldn't stay captives for too long. More often then not, in fact, the ones that had experimented on the Zerg would in fact become a Zerg.
The next morning Harry was seated at the breakfast table among his fellow Griffindors, since the night before he was cornered by a worried Nevil of all people. If Nevil was worried enough to confront him about his general absence and disconnect with his once close friends, Harry could only wonder what his close friends were feeling.
By the way that Harry could see the poorly-hidden relief flash across the faces of his classmates when he showed at the table, he considered it lucky that he'd chosen to join them; he wouldn't put it past them to get the great idea to have one of their 'interventions'.