"Son you out your league like Jordan was with baseball" -A Day at the Races, Jurassic Five
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Harry, for all his many, many personal faults, was not a cowardly little bitch. But he sure as fuck wasn't about to go on some vague quest to find some legendary artifact that may or may not have even existed in the first place. The thought that somewhere there lay a magical shotgun with supposedly infinite power didn't sit quite right with Harry. As his Uncle Vernon famously said "If something's too good to be true, fucking Interpol will be busting down your door for possession of a WMD." At the time, Harry didn't know what a WMD was, but it sounded important enough.
Besides, the ghastly encounter that Harry had experienced the previous night seemed lifetimes away. All of the memories of his Uncle, the Ghost of Christmas Past, and the mysterious prophecy of untold fate predicted by Albus Dumbledore himself seemed to pale in comparison to the pure agony and horror that Harry now experienced.
"I really fucking hate Maths class, y'know?" Ron Weasley muttered to Harry, his voice hoarse from overuse. Ron talked a lot. A fuck ton. Like a literal fuck ton. His mouth ran day and night, like a motor that never ran out of gas. On and on and on and on he went, not wondering, not caring why everyone ignored him like the literal piece of human trash he was. Harry seemed to be the only one to acknowledge his existence.
"You've only mentioned that about eighty times in the last five minutes." Harry responded, angrily glaring at Ron's pale face. Ron's skin was so white he'd often blind planes flying overhead; right now the faint rays of sunlight shining through the ancient castle windows lit up Ron's face like some kind of mentally handicapped disco ball. Harry turned back to look at the teacher, a certain Professor Oxsmall. The man was not a wizard, nor even a man at all. He was some form of a half-breed between house elf and goblin. An unholy monstrosity of warts and limbs, and while technically maintaining a bipedal figure, he hunched over in an exaggerated slouch. When he talked, the flaking skin of his deformed lips would part to reveal rows and rows of razor sharp teeth, spiraling down into his gaping maw for an eternity before arriving at his multitude of cancerous stomachs. It didn't help that when he opened his mouth, you could see down his entire esophagus.
"Harry Potter." He spat, his slightly acidic spittle flying all over the room. A drop landed on Harry's hand as it painfully, but quite harmlessly, gnawed at his skin. "Perhaps you'd like to solve for the coefficient of the square root of Pi in section 12 of our multi-stage problem? Since you're so keen on sharing with us your insane numerical measurements, that is."
Harry's body went cold. His heart pounded in his chest. The Boy Who Lived pushed his mind into overdrive, cycling through an infinite number of miniscule calculations memorized by his massive, bulging cranial muscles. He had to carry the seven, divide by the lowest common denominator, then solve for Lambda in order to get...
"Three?" Harry answered tentatively, trying not to let discomfort seep into his voice. Oxsmall stared at him in disbelief, his mouth agape. Harry could even see the live cat he'd had for breakfast through Oxsmall's massive tubelike throat. The granulated fragments of the deceased feline gurgled and churned deep within the depths, signifying some deeper meaning Harry had yet to grasp.
"Amazing..." Oxsmall gasped. His face was one of pure shock, his single unibrow raised in a state of absolute amazement. "You've actually managed to get that answer entirely wrong. I've seen retarded monkeys with more brain cells inside of their fucking elbows than you have had in every single second of your entire fucking life COMBINED."
Ron leaned over to Harry, the sour cream color of his skin seemed to darken as he uttered meekly "Oof."
In that moment Harry wanted to smash Ron's stupid hazardously bright face into his stupid desk and tear out each of Ron's organs individually and sequentially to prolong the little shit's suffering. But he didn't. After all, next to Ron, Harry looked like the Pope King of upper west Boston, and Harry wasn't sure he wanted to give that up, no matter how badly he wanted to disembowel his best friend.
"This is your fault, you know!" Harry shouted at Ron, who looked surprisingly smug given the circumstances. "You dumb bitch! You can't shut your mouth for two seconds!"
Ron's smile seemed to curl up at the corners. It contorted his face into one of malice and spite, even though Ron probably bore no such intent, he was far too simple for something like that. Instead, it signified that Ron had something that he thought was very clever that he wanted to say, but couldn't because it would be extremely racially insensitive.
"Okay class, throw Harry out. He is being very disrespectful to his fellow students." Oxsmall commanded commandingly. Nobody moved a muscle. The corner of Oxsmall's gaping maw twitched, then wiggled, and finally he began to burst out into a dark, almost ravenous laughter. The room, despite previously being silent, fell entirely mute. The individual sound waves themselves paused. Everyone had seen the pictures of what had happened to Oxsmall's last three classes, and nobody wanted to suffer that horrendous fate.
Oxsmall seemed pleased with the silence. He grinned, which once more gave the entire class an immaculate view of the contents of his stomachs, complete with enough mulched cat carcass to turn anyone away from consuming animal flesh for a lifetime. Harry stood, turned, and left the classroom.
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"His Journey has not yet started?" Pondered a Voice. It was nothing more than that, a voice. It belonged to no body, no physical form. To have such would have been a burden of unimaginable pain. The Voice had long given up on pain.
"He is especially reluctant." Another voice spoke. To an outsider, the Second Voice would have sounded identical to the First, but to the Voices it was clear whom was whom. If an outsider had asked the First Voice how it could recognize the Second, the First Voice would be unable to respond, at least not in a way that didn't threaten to turn the outsiders' brain into a thin goop.
"He will see soon enough." The First Voice declared. It didn't carry any emotion, but the message still carried the indistinguishable weight of an order.
"Soon enough is not soon enough." The Second responded. A sense of irritation followed with it's words, which wafted through the infinite nothingness that was the Realm.
Silence followed. The First Voice would have sighed, if it had the capability. It took its time, choosing its words carefully. Words were the only thing it could choose, the only small part of its existence to warrant any thought.
"You are young." It began. "Despite your... talents, this does not change the fact that you are inexperienced. With time, with patience you will see the course of destiny set in motion. Time will only move as fast as time allows."
There was no pause from the Second Voice. It did not hesitate to respond like the First.
"Time? We are out of time, there is not any time left! The time for time is gone!" There seemed to be a growing dissonance to the Second Voice's voice, though it was not due to any physical distance between the First and the Second. In the Realm, distance did not exist. The was no up or down or any other direction. No tangible or intangible sign of its existence and yet it existed. The Voices were separate, despite being in the same location. They existed everywhere, yet nowhere.
Silence fell once more.
"We must bide our time. Surely you see that forcing this situation will yield no favorable outcome?" The First Voice asked.
There was no response from the Second.
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This took a stupidly long time for me to get around to making and it wasn't nearly as long as I'd hoped it would be. I'm working on Chapter 3 right now and maybe, just maybe I can get the plot going in the direction I want it to. Actually, just getting the plot going at all would be nice.