Ch 54 A Problem Like
This is the last chapter in this book. The next book is already started, Albus Potter, Friends and Foes.
I want to thank my two fantastic Beta readers. Deb has contributed some key dialogue. Both Diane and Deb have questioned some of what I have written, and in responding to their critiques they have made the book much better.
Minerva looked over the Great Hall Sunday morning. Albus and Cleopatra were eating with a group of MELL students, including Scorpius and Rose, Jesus and Ginny. The Ravenclaw Magi and Elf Language Learners, Jean-Louis Felion, Gabrielle DuMond, and Sarah Firewalker, were sitting across from Albus, engaged in some sort of discussion. Interspersed among the Magi were the Elves they were raised with, and Minerva assumed the discussion had something to do with the Elfish language.
Albus was the acknowledged leader of the MELL students, at least once Galadriel was gone. Galadriel seemed to be the acknowledged leader of the group that included Elves, but she and her consort Thorin the Goblin were busy meeting with all the beings that shared Elf and Goblin DNA, and the pair only occasionally showed up at Hogwarts.
Actually, Albus was probably the acknowledged leader of all the students, despite only going into fourth year. Everyone knew that he knew all the spells, even seventh year and beyond. He also knew many of the most prominent leaders of the magical community, including all the Magi who had been Chief Mugwump, the Prophets in Switzerland, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and even was not the kind of leader to force himself into a position of leadership, but the kind that others would acknowledge as leader because of who and what he knew and how he handled himself.
Then you had Cleopatra. She was as powerful a Magi as she had ever met, and her magic was way too close to being out of control. She almost levitated the whole castle, for Merlin's sake! Magic was very powerful, and Minerva had encountered way too many Magi who had lost control of their magic, often with tragic results. Luna Lovegood's mother was only one of many Magi she knew or knew about who had died or been seriously maimed, or who had killed or maimed others, by not controlling their magic.
Someone with Cleo's powers ought to be able to advance magical knowledge, but Cleo neither really understood her powers nor was particularly interested in understanding them. What do you do with a problem like Cleopatra?
"Cleo and I have to meet with Professor McGonagall," Albus announced as the two of them arose from the table. Gabrielle DuMond made a face indicating her displeasure. She looked at Rose and Scorpius, and then at Jesus and Ginny, noticing that none of them were going to accompany Albus and Cleo, before starting in again on the discussion on how to translate certain terms into Elfish. Gabrielle was brilliant, but she seemed to think that abstract knowledge was the key to solving all problems. She was also jealous of Jesus and Ginny's closeness to Albus. Gabrielle was ambitious, but not a particularly good politician.
Albus and Cleo met Professor McGonagall, and the three walked side by side up to Professor McGonagall's office. The Professor was wearing a lightweight dress that flattered her figure, something much more comfortable than robes in the middle of the summer. Albus was wearing what they called Bermuda Shorts, the legs long enough to have a wand pocked that would hold his wand, and a lightweight shirt with a collar.
Cleo was wearing what Muggles called a sun dress, except it was a distinctly Cleopatra sun dress, with the wand pocket, two other pockets, and decorations of growing plants and flowers that seemed to emphasize the fertility and expansiveness that was Cleo. There was a distinctly feminine way most female hips moved, but it seemed to be exaggerated in Cleo, and her dress seemed almost charmed to emphasize instead of hiding her sexy walk. As a female Cleo's excess on top, and the way she celebrated it, made Minerva regret that she had never nursed a baby. Minerva never understood how a female with all the excess shape of Cleo could make you think maternal thoughts, but that was part of the mystery that was Cleo.
Minerva sat at her desk, wanting the portraits of Headmasters to be able to listen as she talked to the two students. "How is ityou could see my cat Animagus was me, Cleo?"
Cleo looked at Minerva, then a Albus, back and forth quickly, her plaits flying. She closed her eyes, pondering. "You explain, Albus," finally came out.
"You have to understand that Cleo and I can come close to inhabiting the other's mind, Professor. It is not like Legilimency. You can get some understanding of what another person is thinking or feeling if you are a Legilimens, but it is not mind reading."
"Are you a Legilimens, Albus?" the professor wondered.
"Yes, Professor. I have actually been trained in the Ministry, and helped them with a few cases. It is all very confidential, so please do not tell anyone."
Albus closed his eyes and stretched back in the chair, before looking at the professor. "Do you know anything about red/green colorblindness?"
"I've heard it exists, but do not know any more about it."
"Well, if you are red/green colorblind you can see some colors. It is not like the world is all black and white and grays. You just cannot distinguish red tinted colors from green tinted colors. Now imagine you lived in a world where everybody was red/green colorblind, and you were not. How could you describe what the other colors looked like? Pretty hard. Plus, your whole conception of beauty would revolve around what you could see, and you would see a world so differently than the world that everyone else saw that you could not make sense of it.
"Cleo is like that. Well, no, she is not exactly like that, but that is one way of describing it. She sees, in some way, dimensions that exist, that we use to expand space, that we use to make rooms bigger on the inside than on the outside, and all we see is the three dimensions of space, but Cleo sees, at least sort of sees, where the space is coming from.
"We get the power we use to summon or levitate or run things from somewhere, but we just say it is magic. Cleo senses where that power is coming from, although she cannot exactly see it. She sees what to most people, no, that's not right. She sees what we do not see, and when she is explaining 'other red' or 'other green' you cannot really say they are colors exactly. It is just seeing what is there to her, but not there to us, a difference that is, I guess, a color, but I cannot explain it any more than you could explain the difference between red and green to someone who was red/green color blind.
"When it comes to Transformations the original thing never totally loses what it once was. That is why if you transform something inanimate into a living animal the animal cannot last in that state for all that long, and cannot breed. It is not really an animal, just an excellent imitation of an animal. And as an Animagus you create what you become, but you do not totally lose what you are or you would not have the mind to Transform back.
"Cleo can always tell if something has been Transformed into something else, and what the original thing was. I can see it too, if I look through her eyes, if I inhabit her body looking at something. The other thing doesn't quite disappear. At first I could only see if I was looking through Cleo's mind, but I am beginning to see it as well."
"How canyou can inhabit each other's mind?" Minerva wondered.
"I think it is mostly because we are soulmates," Albus suggested.
Cleo waved like she wanted to ask a question in class. "I think the rings have something to do with it. Professor Snape's rings made a big difference for me. Before I could mentally talk to Albus, and even see what he was seeing, some, but afterwards I could lose myself in his body, actually be him even though he was totally him too, and he could be me even though I was always totally me.
"It is funny being in a man's body. I LIKE my body. It may not be pretty, but I am a FEMALE."
Minerva looked at the portraits, trying to receive some guidance. The problem with trying to channel Cleo was that you kept running into what she was, not just what she said or did.
"Those rings are only supposed to work if you are married, at least like what you are suggesting," the Snape portrait frowned.
"The Goblins say we are one, even though we are not married," Albus countered with a shrug. "We have a joint account at Gringotts because the Goblins say as soulmates we are not really two separate people in some ways, although we are, really, two very distinct people."
Cleo bounced up and put her face inches from the Snape portrait. "THANK you for the rings, Professor Snape, sir, thank you."
Professor Snape backed up into the portrait. "You are welcome, Miss Smith," the portrait cautiously replied, looking at this creature bouncing at him. "Albus, what is it like inhabiting Cleo's body?"
Albus laughed, looked at Cleo, and laughed some more. "Really strange," he coughed out. "I cannot inhabit her body without inhabiting, at least partly, her mind, and she has all these feminine parts that move and she rejoices in every movement and wiggle and, I don't know, she is just such a different person. She also usually has music running through her mind, like a movie score. Her whole life has music themes running through it."
Cleo, who was still standing, responded by wiggling all of her, and starting to hum.
Minerva remembered her brief marriage, and regretted that she had not experienced the love of a man, that giving and sharing of bodies that love making entailed, for most of her life. She regretted that she had never born nor nursed a child. Cleo did that to you, the excess of her femininity overwhelming you.
"I would like to get back to how you understand magic, how you see magic, Miss Smith," the old professor interjected, trying to get the conversation back on track.
"Well, it is easier to transform things if they are mostly the same atoms," Albus suggested. "You can transform a sausage into a sword, but the sword is made mostly of iron, and the sausage is biological material, so it wants to transform back to food. It looks like a sword, but it isn't one. You would not want to be in a battle with a sword that suddenly transformed back into a sausage. You cannot eat a sausage that is made from a sword either. That is Gamps law. You can only make food from food."
"Food to food transformations are easy!" Cleo volunteered happily. "Is that because they are made of the same atoms. You have a chart in your room in London with all the atoms on it, Albus."
Albus thought a moment, his face squinting in concentration. "I think biological things are mostly made up of Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur atoms."
"Atoms are those things that look like a solar system?" the old professor wondered. "Aren't atoms made up of the same things, electrons that make electricity and are like planets, mutants and photons? And you get light when the photons wave at you."
Albus put his hands up to his face, shook his head 'no,' and wondered how to answer.
"I'm not really very familiar with Muggle science," Professor McGonagall admitted. "I probably do not have the details quite right."
"Do you want to go into food to food transformations, Professor?" Albus jumped in with. He had no desire to get into physics with the old professor, trying to explain the difference between photons and protons, and that neutrons were not mutant anything.
The three spent another hour talking about food to food transformations, something Cleo was comfortable talking about.
It was Friday, August fourteenth, twenty-twenty. Albus had been meeting with the students who had become his chief advisors, Cleo of course, Rose and Scorpius, Jesus and Ginny. Albus had a number of lists he had printed out, and he reflected, "This has been a strange year. I have read histories of what my father and his friends did duringtheir sevenyears at Hogwarts, and it is almost like someone wrote a series of books, with a climax at the end of each year. It has not worked that way for us. We had a climax at the end of the first year, with capturing Professor Chen, and a climax at the end of our second year, with the Chamber of Secrets, but this year has just been strange."
"The terrifying part, for me, was the attack at Hogsmeade," Scorpius butted in with. "The bomb in Switzerland was scary too. But we have not had to confront anything like either of them the rest of this year."
"Covid-19 started the middle of the school year," Ginny Wang added, "and it is going to be messing with things over a couple of school years."
Albus looked at his friends, and shook his head. "I guess the school year almost starts tomorrow, because that is when students start to arrive back at Hogwarts."
Scorpius looked at a pile of newspaper clippings. "I've had articles in most of the major Magical publications about what the MELL students have been doing this summer. Because of the quarantine we have had to do things remotely, but Mrs. Hudson has edited my writing. Rose has taken photographs, because she is very good with visual things, and Mr. Hudson has given her advice and done some editing.
"Thank you, Albus, for helping me figure out what to emphasize. I'm not trying to become a reporter; we are just trying to control the narrative of what we are doing."
Albus looked at a list on his tablet.
"Cleo and I are finished working with the professors Appleleaf. They are working on classes for next year. We've met withProfessor Gryffindor, but she is busy getting ready to teach, and we really didn't do more than meet with her. We've been doing other things, of course, but none that is relevant to the MELL students."
Rose pointed to an ancient book. "Scorpius and I have been studying, and translating, the oldest books we can find. Professor Babbling is busy now getting ready for school, so we are working on our own now."
Albus looked back at his lists. "Gabrielle DuMond seems to be the lead person translating Elfish documents into other languages, along with her cousin Jean-Louis Felion, Sarah Firewalker is the other MELL student in Ravenclaw, and she is part of that rather large group. I'm not sure what her cousin Joshua did, if anything. I know Sarah is rather upset with him.
"The Canadian Eseven siblingsHarry and Senda have been involved, as well."
Ginny volunteered, "My brother Harry and cousins John and Marcy have been involved, and have tried to write some things down with Chinese characters. I know Henry and Luta Edington have tried to do the same with Korean, but they do not know Korean as well as we know Chinese. Translating is not easy in either language.
"Jesus, what has your sister been doing? I have not talked to her much this summer."
Jesus looked a little ashamed. "Not much, I don't think.
"I know that Ginny and I have spent part of the summer talking to Adel and Hermann Brandt about how the world of the Magi, and the Swiss part, are run. We only get so much information, though. Adel has been spending a fair amount of the summer flying, and Hermann is one of the youngest of the MELL students. Hermann tries, and he has asked his parents and grandparents and even his Great Grandfather Gerhardt Richter questions, but he has not been as helpful as we would like."
Albus sighed a sigh of relief. "Well, after the Hogsmeade attack, we have really had an easy year. For all the trouble Covid-19 has caused the world, other than the quarantine, it really has not affected Hogwarts much. Let us hope we have a few more quiet years."
Albus was all too aware that the quiet could not last, and that he and Cleopatra had battles yet to fight. Well, Hogwarts was quarantined, and he and Cleo just never went into Hogsmeade, not wanting to risk it. He hoped the last half of twenty-twenty would be easy, without drama.
The next book in this series is Albus Potter, Friends and Foes.
2021