/* A/N: So, it's been a long time since I've done anything with FFnet, except for read. The last chapter that I've posted has been sitting on my pen drive for almost as long and I thought I had posted it, but apparently not. The main reason for me not posting anything in a while is that I've just recently finished college, and now I work as a chef which is not known for alot of freetime for writing. It's also not what I went to college for, but that just fits the theme of what most people do anyway.
A guest recently left a review answering my last question of the space-cross. I'm inclined to agree with them about their points about Mass Effect. However. regaurding Harry's immortality, keep in mind that he's thirteen; albiet he's very smart from the augmentations of being a zerg animaugus and the overmind. While it is true that thirteen [and most teens] have a sense of invincibility, they are not known for their ability to comprehend concepts like true immortality and all that would imply. I don't think some adults would actually understand what that would mean [myself included].
I can't remember how Dumbledore should be in this story. I'm doing a good Dumbledore in one story, a completely 'hands-off' or more like sticking to the responsibilities given by his positions in society, and I'm also doing a less-than-stellar Dumbledore in other ones. Considering the title & Dumbledore's positions in society though…
Without further ado, let's get back to it! */
Harry gazed up on the tower thoughtfully. It was meant to be a proof-of-concept more than anything else, but he supposed it could prove useful for other things, in the future. He just didn't know what yet. The structure before him was originally only a test to see if he could get something to float. Harry knew that the swarm is capable of flight, the overseers were a prime example of this fact, though originally Harry thought they achieved this using magic. That, he found out, was not the case.
Normally an overlord floats in air using the same methods that submarines use to maintain depth – buoyancy. Instead of using water to pump into or out of itself, instead the overlord fills itself with nothing. They are huge because of this reason, really, since they have to fill a rather large area of their body with vacuum. It also had to be air-tight.
The tower before him uses this method, too, but only as a back-up of something else. Harry had wondered, after finding out how his overlords maintain their altitude, if weightlessness and levitation charms could be applied. So, Harry quickly set up a test. Harry ordered a drone over to his testing area – away from the other structures, but still protected in case something went horribly wrong. It soon, from the gentile guidance given by Harry, morphed into a cocoon much like the one the second hatchery he'd ever made was – a firehose sized umbilical cord connected it to the nearest stockpile of ready-to-use biomass, namely a creep colony. Once connected, the CC soon started shunting the necessary nutrients Harry thought he'd need for the thing he was going to use as a test subject.
Harry was surprised that it didn't take long, though it shouldn't have, considering that all he was creating was a ball of bones with a thick fleshy wall, leaving the centre full of air. It was connected to the creep via eight thick flexible cords, with an obvious design leaning towards the creep's umbilical cords that connect the experiment to the nearest CC. Those same cords were simply pooled into a coil, ready for the eventual stretch that would accompany the experiment.
Slowly, the cords activated one of their functions: they started to pump the air out of the large ball. Slowly, the zeppelin inspired design started to lift off of the ground as the air bladders were emptied, leaving only a tight vacuum. That was the point in time where Harry's experiment truly began, when he started to apply featherlight charms. Instead of a slow crawl into the air that it had been before, the subject easily sailed into the air, as if it was a moderately deflated beachball pushed under water. The reinforced umbilical cords strained in their ability to hold it tethered to the ground, but held true. Over time their fleshy outside would be covered by a thick carapace to help in their task.
With the first stage of the testing rendered complete, Harry then decided to proceed with the next phase. He could either slowly let air back into the subject, or he could shrink the subject's total displacement. The first would, if they became the standard practice, would run into the problem of it being a right pain to get the air back out of the air bladder again. The second option, on the other hand, would mean that the entire thing would need to be able to switch easily between flexible and rigid, it would then be vulnerable while switching between states. Harry chose the former, with the understanding that while it would be a right pain to create a vacuum all the time, it would also mean his family wouldn't have to be in a vulnerable position when he could easily avoid it in planning.
The subject slowly lowered back onto the ground, then Harry removed the featherweight charm. Harry could almost feel the wave of force that went through the subject's main body from the suddenness of feeling its full weight once more. Then, Harry cast a levitation charm on the main body, mostly to get a feel for levitating the full mass. Once done, Harry set it down gently – he didn't want it to pop like a water balloon – and ordered it to inflate its air bladder once more with nothing. Once the subject started to make a slow rise once again, Harry cast another levitation charm. Harry was pleasantly surprised that it was actually easier to levitate it, while it was a bit more difficult to force it back down to Earth.
What Harry didn't know was that the simple levitation charm he was using could only apply a force in a single vector at a time. What that meant was while the subject's buoyancy was positive, the levitation charm had to overcome the natural upward force before the subject moved downward. Harry would have been informed of the stresses placed upon the subject during this, if the subject had any pain receptors.
As it was, Harry allowed the test to reset, confident in having something to compare his experiences to. The next test, Harry transformed from his normal squishy human body for his impressive Amon form. While Harry could have easily completed the test solely from being completely human, he felt that he'd be less at-risk if he were Amon during the merging.
The merging was something he and the hivemind cooked up during the night after the school reclaimed the children after the holiday. Whenever a new genome or unit was added to the swarm, it went through a merging process, wherein it was physically connected to the swarm, usually a direct line to a hatchery and thus a major starting point for other units. It gives a bigger sense of unity, and from that emerged the hivemind. Every unit in the swarm, and thus every building, can be genetically traced back to the first drone that Harry had bound to himself. The units that were infested with a xenozerg, like Professor Severus Snape get around this, because the xenozerg itself was born within the hivemind.
Harry, however, never went through this rite of passage. He felt that in order to understand his subjects better, he would need to connect with the swarm on this same level, despite having experienced the point of view of, and directly controlling, certain units. It was also a nice touch that symbolically, it could be seen as Harry being closer to his family.
Harry, wearing the form of Amon, gently sunk his tendril-like feet into the pliant creep beneath him. He let his wings flare out momentarily, blazing with psionic power while he got comfortable, then sunk deeply into the hivemind like he'd done viewing the perspectives of others. Slowly, the creep crawled up a good few centemeters of the tendrils, just enough to get past the armored points. Then, the creep seemed to merge with the exoskeleton of Amon's main locomotion. He looked like a demented form of the banyan tree, and just about as mobile.
Harry felt something indescribable change within him, mentally. If he were forced to explain it, he would probably go with something along the lines of he had just 'synced up' on a spiritual level with his family. He idly wondered what would happen if he'd done so in his squishy form. There would probably be a great deal of screaming in pain, if what the haptic feedback from the creep was any indication. Interesting to note that while he could feel his legdrils, he didn't feel any pain from them. He'd 'tested' it before, with accidentally impaling himself on his own tendrils.
Shoving the odd sensation away for his other parallel mental processing to deal with, Harry turned his main focus to his original tests. That was the point where the real fun began. With a great deal of effort, and with not an inconsiderate amount of the mental equivalent of white noise within the hivemind, Harry sent out his magic – what the swarm called psionics – through the swarm itself towards the subject, willing it to rise to his demand. Like a fleshy wand, the swarm's biomass transmitted the entirely mentally constructed spell to its destination. Like a feather in Harry's second Charms class, the subject rose, without the fire.
Harry grinned, well as much as he could without a mouth, as he knew that this could change everything. While he already knew that he could apply magical effects to swarm-made objects, like the acrozerg silk, he didn't know that he could full-on cast spells through zerg material. This, though, changed everything.
Having considered his expirements a success thus far, Harry decided it was time to take it a step further. Disconnecting himself from the creep so as to not influence his spells directly, Harry tried to replicate the reultes, but in aslightly different way. Eyeing a nearby zergling pair, close but staying out of the way as much as they could, Harry carefully constructed another levitation spell. Once satisfied, Harry directed it to go through the swarm once more. To his delight, the pair of zerglings began to float, orbiting each other.
Harry amusedly observed their emotions of confused delight at being the sole attention of their overmind. Harry had expected some sort of drain from spellcasting through the swarm, and physically disconnected from it. However, he was pleasantly surprised to note the it felt like his own Amon form was perfect for relaying the power just like his wand would do. He absently ordered his research-oriented cerebrate to look into it further.
Harry didn't know that the zerg hatcheries that he'd been creating thus far were normally covered by Hogwart's muggle-repelling ward scheme, as they were well within the confines of the Forbidden Forest. However, Harry feared that with a concentrated workforce, there would be a possibility of someone that could do harm to his family to succeed so he'd ended up distributing the hatcheries a distance away from each other. While it was a noble cause of securing both more security for his family and more space for them to grow, it led to the unfortunate circumstance where they were able to be detected outside of the Forbidden Forest.
To further their circumstance, it wasn't the nearby wizarding village that found out about their presence either. Instead, Harry attracted the interest of the scientific community and he didn't even know about it. Dr. Daniel Wolgolwitz, prominent acrachnologist and discoverer of the bridge orbweb within the Scottish highlands was just the sort of person that Harry didn't want to discover anything related to the swarm. To add to the increasingly unfortunate circumstance the good german doctor had happened across a sample of Acrozerg Silk.
He was also very confused. He had before him a piece of silk that with all apppearacnces of being from a spider, was more like a great pretender. It acted more like it had the tensile strength of steel. While it had the same markers for spiders and some from silkworms, he knew of no species that were able to create something that had the potential to replace steel cables in the appropriate quantities. It was mind-boggleing, but he also wanted to find the species that created it.
He put the sample aside, cleared his workstation, then ventured out once more into the forests in late winter. Most would say that it would be a generally counter-productive venture to look for various spiders during snowfall, but his original plan was to find any evidence towards his theory of spiders being able to hibernate with a construct of silk, much like they would surround their egg sacks. He headed off due South-West, near the location of the original sample.
He didn't need to go long; in fact, he was worryingly close to his campsite when he encountered a spider in-the-act of spinning a web. He froze where he stood, for the first time afraid of an arachnid. Even when he was fourteen and bitten by an Atrax Robustus then rushed to the hospital, he wasn't really afraid. The 'spider' before him, however, engendered a healthy respect immediately, just like a red diamond on a black body would.
It wasn't that he thought that the red on black tiger pattering made him think that it was deadly with a bite – he already thought it would based on past observations of types of venomous and poisonous invertebrates. Instead, it was the sheer size of the thing that made him pause first. It looked, from the distance he was at, close to be the size of a full-grown golden retriever. It could easily make a claim to be the largest in the world, de-throning the Goliath Birdeater tarantula with contemptuous ease. Very carefully, Dr. Wolgolwitz placed his obviously useless containers in favour of a much more useful camera.
He started to silently curse himself with gusto as soon as he snapped his first photo, forgetting to turn off the flash. Instead of an opportunity lost, though, like the predator running away from something that it had never encountered before, it showed a disturbing amount of aggression in that it sprint-jumped towards him.
Against all the he believed about preserving the biosphere and possible endangered species, the good doctor grabbed his survival knife out of its sheath, and ran away as fast as his legs could carry him.
Harry was alerted to the fact that someone found out about the acrozerg strain as soon as the camera flash was registered. His knee-jerk reaction, and that of his familiar, was to try to neutrilise the threat. Unfortuneately the Zerg took this to mean kill all threats. Before Harry could fully come to terms with the situations and come up with a suitable course of action, it had already changed in the form of the unit already bounding across the separating space.
With a mental sigh, Harry dedicated the full attention of one of his minds to personally take control of the situation so that the random person running for their life didn't mean the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force would start dropping shells and bombs on his carefully constructed safe-havens.
From the eight eyes of the acrozerg, Harry had enough of a depth perception to effectively aim his next sprint/jump to land just at the heels of the problem. With quick thinking and an inspiration from the form he was piggybacking in with one of his parallel conciousnesses, Harry quickly spun some of the remaining acrozerg silk he had available to trap the struggling man.
The knife took him by surprise, but he was able to easily use one of his mandibles to knock it out of the man's hand. For a man that gripped it like his life depended on it, he sure was clumsy with his choice of weapon. Harry prepared to, like the hivemind suggested, simply get rid of the problem before him.
Something made him pause, though. The man before him wasn't an enemy or a big enough neusance to him that he'd need to die, nor was he in any real way a threat to him or others like the death eaters in Diagon Ally and his own Potion's Master for a professor. The latter didn't even warrant being killed, only monitored and limited so that he wouldn't be able to do any damage, while the former was an act of protecting others. With glib octal oculi Harry considered some of the possibilities in multithread, with another parallel consciousness leanding its mind from the task of cleaning up the spellcasting-through-the-swarm expirement towards the effect of finding out how he could possibly let the man go.
An idea came to him, which would also limit the possibility of the man escaping before he could get a zenozerg embedded within him, or even a prototype medizerg tweaked for human use. Harry dragged a hairy leg, full of finely-tuned hairs that would 'taste', across the sweaty man's skin. He made it look like it was accidental, but after it happened Harry froze the body of the acrozerg in place. He then made a slow motion of backing off the prone man, tearing off the used acrozerg silk as much as he could, and stuffing it within his mouth for recycling because, hey, that stuff got expensive after a while.
The man, after a minute of wondering at the odd behaviour, finally figured that Harry's acrozerg form had decided that he wasn't a type of food that it could eat. With exaggerated non-threatening actions, he slowly backed away, keeping the acrozerg within his line of sight.
Harry let the man run away, figuring that this would be the best way for him to let people know that while there was a giant spider type within northern Scotland, it also wouldn't eat people. Well, he was hoping, because he honestly didn't expect some random person camping in the middle of nowhere ranting about giant spiders to be believed.
In point of fact, Harry was a part of a magical society, and didn't really put much stock in angels, demons, and other such nonsense. They were probably just misunderstood magical presences or scientific phenomena.
Maybe by the end of it, he would be able to have parts of the swarm kept as 'pets', and as common as the TV within every household. It would be a perfect spring board towards intelligence gathering, from their own home. It would be perfect for knowing which families were dark like Godric Gryffindor, and who was actually a Voldemort supporter. For all he knew the Nott family could actually be dark like his friends say, but weren't actually a Death Eater family.
Besides, it would be a pleasant introduction to the International Confederation of Wizards, too. The last time they had a magical species that they couldn't hide, didn't pose an immanent threat to people, and weren't obviously magical were the kangaroos discovered back when Australia was a penal colony. All Harry needs for his family if for it to get the same protections that magical animals get under the ICW animal convention of 1960, is for them to be declared magical animals, preferably ones that are endangered like dragons or an Erumpent.
It would be worthwhile, even, if Harry were to attract the attentions of a prominent magizoologist or two, if he was confident that he could fool them. He wasn't, yet, but he had a plan in the making for him to sidestep that issue entirely. With the mundane, he mostly just wanted them to leave him alone, and know that at least some of his family exists so that they didn't venture into his territory willy-nilly or by mistake.
Maybe. Or it was just what he was telling himself, because he didn't want to be responsible for the death of a completely innocent person. While his family may be right to get rid of a threat to the colony before it could harm the colony, it was something completely different to getting rid of something that is not yet a threat. It was a fine line that Harry was attempting to teach the hivemind so that these situations didn't happen.