As summers went, the summer of 1993 was so far the sort of summer that made you want to send it back to the factory for reconditioning.

It had been nice and hot for the first few days, but then everything had sort of flopped and turned into what was more like spring weather than anything – not very wet or rainy, but with clouds and wind mixed together.

Harry didn't really mind, though. He'd had plenty of time to enjoy the summer with his friends up at Hogwarts before the holidays properly started, and the slightly-gloomy weather gave him plenty of time to work on his homework.

Fortunately, it wasn't much trouble. Uncle Vernon had tried demanding his magical things to lock them under the stairs, but Harry had (quite reasonably, he thought) pointed out that he had to stay at Privet Drive for a month every year, and if he wasn't able to use his own magical things to put the time to productive use doing homework then it only made sense to have a friend over to visit instead.

The idea of being visited by wizards made Uncle Vernon turn a funny colour (though lots of things made Uncle Vernon turn a funny colour) and no more had been said about locking his things away.

As a result, the eighth of July found Harry sitting at his table, looking between his Potions textbook and the notes he'd made about it.

It looked like Professor Snape had been sort of sneaky. One of the homework essays was about shrinking potions, but as far as Harry could tell the most important shrinking potion they would be making in the first five years of their time at Hogwarts was the Shrinking Solution – which was third year.

Based on the description, it was much better than the other ones they'd been looking at so far like the Deflating Draught.

Harry made a few notes with a pencil on a piece of lined paper he'd got available, thinking of making the essay about how the Shrinking Solution was more sophisticated because it could even make things younger if that was what it took to let them shrink properly.

It seemed like he had everything he needed, and he was about to start writing when there was a faint banging sound.

"Boy!" Uncle Vernon called. "Your aunt wants you for the garden!"

"Coming, Uncle Vernon!" Harry called back, putting the stopper back in his inkwell.

Leaving the rest of his materials where they were, so he could go back to them when he was ready, Harry left his tent and closed the zipper.

Moving aside the heavy trunk over the access hatch, Harry lifted the hatch out of the way before jumping down and flaring his wings to absorb some of the momentum. Then he made his way downstairs, past the clutter Dudley hadn't bothered to bring all the way up to his bedroom or his spare bedroom, and nearly stepped on a cartridge for Dudley's Super Nintendo before pausing to put it to the side.

It had a picture of a fox in a jacket on the front, and some spaceships as well. It was neat what they were putting in games these days.

Out in the garden, Aunt Petunia barely gave Harry a glance.

"Water the flower bed," she told him. "Then cut the hedge, and be quick about it!"

"Yes, Aunt Petunia," Harry agreed, going to get the hose.

At least it wasn't too hot. If the weather was really hot, like it had been sort of promising to be before the summer had turned into a fizzle, then there'd be a hosepipe ban and he'd have to use watering cans.

"And then I'll want you cooking," Aunt Petunia added. "None of that abnormal stuff you eat at that… that… school."

Harry nodded, thinking about what he should do.

Maybe some pasta. Pasta would be nice, and he could do it with a cheese sauce.

Humming what he thought the tune to Moreta's Ride was to himself, Harry began watering the flowerbed.

His summers were a bit unusual, but he didn't really have any reason to complain about them.

Some hours later, after cooking a pasta bake (sized for eight, which had turned out to be a good guess) Harry went upstairs.

He was told to tidy Dudley's spare room, which Harry had once thought meant that Aunt Petunia was giving him a treat. He knew better now, but that didn't stop it being a treat anyway, and that was the important bit.

This time, the check for broken things meant that Harry found a few music CDs that Dudley had decided he didn't want any more. They were chipped or scratched, so they wouldn't play in a music player, and Harry checked what he was meant to do with them before bringing them with him when he went back to his tent.

Inside, Harry said good-evening to Hedwig and sat back down at the table, finally starting on his long-delayed Potions essay.

As he outlined the disadvantages and uses of the Deflating Draught, Harry picked up one of the CDs he'd salvaged from Dudley's room and took a bite. It crunched satisfyingly, with a basic taste of plastic but some little extra tingles as well, and he chewed his way through the crunchy bits as he wrote.

Taking another bite, Harry moved on to a bit of an outline of a tricky potion which had to be applied as a salve and which shrank only hairs. He wasn't sure if it quite counted as a shrinking potion, so he said it was the 'same sort of thing' which sounded like a good compromise.

His wrist was itching by the time he finished that bit, and Harry gave it a bit of a rub before deciding to make some hot chocolate.

Maybe he could dip one of the CDs in it. It probably wouldn't work, but if it did then he'd have invented a new treat for dragons – or for his type of dragon, at least.

One of the good things about being apparently unique was how often you got to say you'd invented a new food.

The next morning, Harry's whole foreleg was itching.

He knew what that had to mean, and sighed.

Molting had been annoying enough when he'd thought it was something all growing dragons went through. Now he knew that it was something that he was the only one to actually have to deal with, it was sort of more annoying.

Rolling his neck, Harry gently inspected it with his talons – feeling for how far along the process had gone – then decided to take some notes about it.

The least he could do was to make sure that he had it written down, in case it turned out to be medically important or something.

After thinking about it a lot, Harry decided that the most sensible thing to do was going to be to just try and stay in his room until he was finished. His room was fortunately a lot bigger than it should have been, and he had plenty to eat, so he rubbed his itching brow ridges before heading downstairs to tell Aunt Petuina that he wasn't very well.

His aunt had sounded slightly concerned about it, and Harry had decided to be a little bit sneaky and say that it was the sort of thing that his sort got and that he wasn't sure if he could pass it on to someone else.

It made him feel a bit bad about tricking Aunt Petunia into thinking Dudley might catch some non-specific wizard illness, but it got what he wanted – Aunt Petuna told him to stay in his room and to not come out until he was sure he was well again.

Harry didn't mind that at all.

He'd only just got back to his tent, though, when Hedwig arrived with a letter. The neat writing on the front made him fairly sure it was from Hermione, and he opened it with a talon before unfolding the crisp white A4 paper to read.

It was quite a long letter, which seemed like just the thing to take Harry's mind off the itching running up and down his forelegs, and Harry paused to give Hedwig a treat before walking into his lounge room and rolling onto his back.

His tail snaked out to switch on the reading light, which gave him a good angle, and he began to read.

It seemed that Dobby had plucked up the courage – after Hermione had sent him a letter, and then talked to him – to petition to the Office for House-Elf Relocation.

Everybody there had been delighted to have something to do, by Hermione's account, and had taken all the evidence (like Dobby's testimony and his injuries) before issuing a writ that Dobby's owner would have to contest or give up his ownership of the House-Elf.

Hermione was quite annoyed by how they had to go through a legal procedure when, really, it should have been up to Dobby to say he wasn't happy where he was – after all, a wizard or witch could get rid of a House-Elf just by giving them clothes, so it wasn't like it was required that both sides agree or anything – but she was grateful there was something there at all, and she said that she'd read all the relevant laws and really Mr. Malfoy didn't have a leg to stand on.

(That made Harry smile, because he was sure that Dumbledore would have added that Mr. Malfoy had two legs to stand on – the usual pair, one on each side.)

After that, Hermione asked him about whether there was anything he wanted for his birthday. She admitted that his book collection was by now large enough that she wasn't sure of being able to guess at a book he didn't have, though she did ask whether he could not get any newly released books for the next few weeks so there was at least one way to tell if a book was a book he didn't have yet.

That sounded like a good idea to Harry, who wrote back to agree (and to say what he thought about things with Dobby) and then, reminded by Hermione's question, he dug around in the books he'd got in the first week of the summer holidays to see what there was he could read.

One book was called Hunting Party, which sounded like it might be interesting – Harry had got started with fantasy books, but it did seem like a lot of people who wrote fantasy also wrote science fiction so he'd sort of drifted into reading those as well.

For lunch, Harry had some soup (which heated up quite nicely with fire breath – a lot of things could be heated by fire breath, but things like soup had less chance of catching fire), following it up with the tin.

After that he still felt hungry, though, so he made himself a sandwich as well.

Then a second one.

At about that point, Harry realized that maybe part of molting was having a bigger appetite than normal. It seemed worth knowing, so he wrote that down as well before moving on to Charms homework.

It always seemed a bit strange that they had homework which was about how to cast magic – this one was about how you could recharge a spell that was sort of running out without either just replacing the spell completely or (worse) doubling the spell up, which might be dangerous with things like levitation charms – but you couldn't actually cast the spells, because it wasn't legal.

Maybe that was the problem Neville had? He did seem to get better over the year, but then so did everyone.

It took Harry longer than he'd hoped to finish the essay, distracted by the itches which were spreading over his whole body, and he had to admit he was at least relieved that his eyes didn't need to shed. Itchy eyes would have been even worse.

Harry very much liked being a dragon, but there were some things that were really inconvenient. (Though maybe humans had inconvenient things as well, like hair – Harry had never had to have a haircut, but everybody else got it sorted out somehow at Hogwarts.)

The next morning, Harry stopped reading through his current novel.

He put a bookmark into it, turning it around to look at the back, then sighed.

Maybe it was The Animals of Farthing Wood, or maybe it was Stig of the Dump but he'd never really liked fox hunts as a thing. They didn't seem to have them in Surrey, and Harry didn't think he'd have the courage to get involved if one was going on anyway, but they just didn't seem very nice.

He also didn't think there had to be a fox hunt in a science fiction book, especially not when they brought the foxes to that planet specially to be hunted. Maybe he'd go back to the book later, but right now that had sort of made him sour on the whole thing.

It didn't help that by now he itched all over, except for places like his talons and the membrane of his wings. It was pervasive and constant and it was probably making him a bit more short tempered than normal… maybe this was how young dragons felt on Pern if they didn't get taken care of properly?

Harry still had a bit more than half of his homework left, history essays and Transfiguration and some DADA work set by Sue D. Nym before she left – presumably on the grounds that if their next teacher was moderately skilled they'd be able to do something with it – and some Astronomy as well, mostly about the planet Mars. But he didn't feel like he'd be able to do any of it at the moment, because what he wanted more than anything else was to roll on his back and scratch until the itching stopped.

Instead, Harry grit his teeth and went back to his library, putting back the book he'd been reading and taking out the Farthing Wood books instead. He'd been reminded of them anyway, and maybe reading them again would take his mind of things.

As Harry understood how that worked, that would probably be okay as long as he didn't end up thinking about how he was trying to take his mind off things. So he'd better hope that the books were as distracting as he remembered.

Harry didn't like being in a mood where he grumbled.

Some people seemed to quite like that sort of thing – certainly some of the people in Harry's books were – but Harry wasn't the sort to grumble, so it took a lot to make him grumble. And this all-over itching was definitely the sort of thing to make him grumble.

He was halfway into the Siege of White Deer Park, and the clock said it was at least nine in the evening, when he finally decided that it would be a good idea to try and get some sleep.

Just to make sure he didn't miss out on something, though, he quickly wrote a letter to Charlie Weasley asking if he knew any ways to stop a dragon from feeling itchy. Hedwig took it off into the night, not particularly bothered by the light rain Harry could hear faintly on the roof, and then the young dragon pushed his hoard around to make it a bit more comfortable and lay back on it.

Sleep was a long time coming.

When Harry's hide finally began to actually shed, it was a huge relief. The itching just went away, and the new dragonscale underneath was a bit soft and tender but there was so much less pressure on it. And the old hide was still dragonhide, so it was tough and flexible and it held together so well that it came away in big sheets and lumps with only a few gaps – in fact, in some places Harry had to carefully score it with his talon to make sure it would detach at all.

If it wasn't for the fact that shed skin was because you were growing and would be bigger than you used to be, Harry could have used the bits that had been on his forelegs as elbow-length gloves – though they wouldn't have covered his talons.

After two days of itching, Harry luxuriated in the sudden absence, and it gave him a burst of energy which took him through all of his Transfiguration homework over the course of the day. He wasn't sure quite what to do with all the shed bits, eventually putting them in a cupboard, but that couldn't dampen down either his good cheer or his appetite.

Of course, he did get a reply from Charlie Weasley, suggesting that he ask Nora how she dealt with itches. Harry didn't have a Whomping Willow on hand, but it was a good reminder and something to think about next time.

Once he'd done his work, Harry took a nice long hot bath. It used up a lot of the water he had in the tank, but that was okay, and Harry heated the water to the point it wasn't far off boiling before dissolving some soap in it and giving himself a good wash all over.

Tired out by a night of itch-driven insomnia, Harry fell asleep in the bath with his wings slightly open to let the water reach into the folds.

When he woke up the next morning, Harry found that his scales had firmed up again. They were still a little more tender than normal, but nowhere near how they'd been before, and he felt hungry all over again.

He was also about a foot longer than he'd been the previous morning, and he splashed out of the now-cold water to make sure by comparing how big his paws were and how high he could reach towards the ceiling by stretching his wings out.

It was… about a foot in length, though half of that was tail, and about the same in wingspan. His body barrel had definitely got wider as well, which made Harry wonder about whether he'd need to get more clothes, and checking with his gloves revealed that they definitely didn't fit.

Fortunately, despite what he'd been told happened to humans, his time in the bath hadn't made his fingers go all wrinkly. It would have been a real pity if they'd ended up staying like that until his next molt.

After towelling himself off, and letting the cold water drain away, Harry did his best to get back to a routine. It was a bit tricky, because he kept bumping into things, but that was the sort of thing he heard happened to human teenagers as well after growth spurts so it seemed fair.

There was a little pile of letters waiting for him, and that reminded Harry to send one off to Sirius and Remus. It was kind of likely that they'd be living in the same house, though not certain, and besides it was much easier for Hedwig to carry one letter than two.

Sweeping the chair aside – and nearly bouncing it off the wall – Harry crouched at the table and began writing.

He said how he'd gone through a moult, which was something he'd done before and was used to, and explained how he was now bigger and a bit clumsy as a result. He couldn't estimate how much heavier, because he didn't have any scales, but put everything else about how big he was now into the letter.

Putting it to the side for now, in case he thought of anything else, Harry picked up the top letter on the pile. It was from Ron, and Harry opened it with care before unfolding the parchment to read.

The first thing Ron did was to say that he was hiding in his room to write. It seemed that Fred and George had indeed invited the Smith twins around for a few weeks, and Mrs. Weasley hadn't really thought through what that would mean until it was too late.

There were a few ink blotches, which Ron explained were because every so often the house shook slightly as one of the four pranksters did 'something' (Ron wasn't able to be more specific because it was often quite different) and everyone was getting used to the sound of scrabbling claws going up and down the stairs as some or all of them ran away from a misfired experiment or Mrs. Weasley.

Or both.

Percy had politely said that he'd be sleeping on the roof from now on, which struck Harry as quite a good idea given the situation.

Ron also said that Fred and George hadn't even bothered to hide their Animagus forms any more, and that his mum was kind of pleased by how they could do it (even if it sounded like she wished that they could put their energies into something more fulfilling).

Then there was a little postscript by Ginny, who explained that because Ron had given the letter to her to attach to her owl she thought she'd give a bit of an update herself. Apparently Ron and Ginny had taken to fleeing to Luna Lovegood's house when they had actual homework to do, because it meant they were away from the madness happening at home.

They'd met Tanisis' parents, who were 'kind of terrifying, but nice', and who got on very well indeed with Luna's somewhat unusual father, Xenophilius Lovegood (who Harry remembered ran the Quibbler). Ron had also mentioned the Muggle moon landing to Mr. Lovegood, but Ginny mostly mentioned that to say how confused Ron had looked when Mr. Lovegood had earnestly told him that it had been all a fake and the actual landings had been on Mars.

It gave Harry a smile, and he put it carefully to the side before moving on to Hermione's letter.

Unlike the Weasley letter, Hermione's one was just about all business. It seemed that she was following what was happening with Dobby very closely indeed, and they were involved in 'lots of discoveries and interrogatories' – apparently Mr. Malfoy's main argument was that Dobby was doing those injuries to himself, so Mr. Malfoy couldn't be blamed, while the woman in charge of Dobby's case was focusing on whether Dobby had ever been told to punish himself and whether he'd had a reasonable belief that he had to.

It all sounded very complicated to Harry, but Hermione seemed enthusiastic about it and he was glad to leave it in her hands.

Then there was a letter from Dean, and Harry was about to open it when he remembered something and dashed off back to his library.

Five minutes rummaging around in his things, and Harry had found what he was after. Giving the little hand mirror a rub, he sat down at the table and waited, and a minute or so later his reflection changed into Sirius'.

"Harry!" Sirius said brightly. "Great to see you! How are you?"

"I've been moulting," Harry said, by way of summary. "It was kind of a pain, but it's over now."

"Huh, I've had to deal with shedding, but that's not the same thing," Sirius mused. "What's that like?"

"Itchy," Harry told him. "For about two days, all over… then when I actually shed, I grew a foot overnight."

"So you're a five legged dragon now?" Sirius asked, tilting his head in a very canine way, and Harry snorted. Sirius smiled broadly at Harry's reaction, seeming very pleased with himself for managing the joke.

"Jokes aside, Harry, that's quite a growth spurt," Sirius went on. "I've got no idea how to deal with it, but if you don't know either then you can always let me know. Then we can be confused together."

"I thought you said jokes aside?" Harry asked, tail flicking happily from side to side. "Maybe it's too much to ask to expect no jokes when you're being Sirius."

"Hey, which of the two of us has serious experience with being too hairy?" Sirius replied. "You've only ever been one Harry."

He snapped his fingers together. "Oh, that reminds me, I've got some relatives who aren't in Azkaban, aren't unpleasant, and aren't disowned! You'll have to meet them when you're next able to come around."

Harry nodded his interest, and Sirius looked a bit shifty. "Mind you, I had to remember to undisown them. Own them? Not sure how you phrase that. Anyway, how are things with your relatives?"

"Not bad, really," Harry answered. "I've been upstairs since I started to moult, but before then it was okay..."

It was almost lunch when Sirius finally and regretfully announced he'd have to go.

Harry was fine with that – he'd forgotten just how nice it was to be able to talk to someone, but Sirius had his own life to live – and he still had a letter from Dean to read, so he retrieved that from where he'd left it before opening it with a talon.

As he read it, he had to smile a little.

Some of Dean's letter was grumbles about how hard it was to do the homework when he had to deal with sisters, or when there wasn't anyone else around he could really talk to about the magic side of things – his mum and dad were supportive, but neither of them could really tell you much about witch burning or the Noctis Labyrinth – but most of it was about a quite different subject.

Football.

Dean's beloved West Ham had – somewhat to his surprise – been promoted up into the new Premier League over the course of the previous season, so he was newly optimistic about how the 'Irons' would do.

(Harry didn't know why West Ham were the Irons. Some teams it was obvious, like how Millwall were the Lions because they had a lion on their badge or Arsenal were the Gunners because you kept guns in an arsenal, but he couldn't tell why a place name like West Ham turned into a name like 'Irons.')

Dean also said a few things about the transfers, and Harry didn't really follow them but he was sure that Dean was interested. Now Harry thought about it, though, transfers didn't happen all that much in Quidditch, or at least he'd never heard of it.

Wizard sports were weird. But then again, so were other sports.

Though he was now leaving his tent again to do things like help his relatives cook and go to the library, Harry still spent most of his time working on the rest of his homework.

Neville sent him a letter about how he'd had an argument with his great-uncle Algie, who'd said something about how Neville had better buck up his ideas and get good at casting spells, and Neville had replied by saying that he didn't think Great-Uncle Algie was one of those wizards who didn't like Muggles, and then there'd been a lot of shouting.

Harry felt really quite sorry for him, and wrote back a letter to say so, but tried to also say that a single argument shouldn't be a problem if the relative in question genuinely did like him. That it was good to reach out a bit, but Neville shouldn't feel like he had to do all the work in patching things up between them.

It was kind of a tricky idea to get across, but that was partly because Harry wasn't quite sure of it himself.

A few days before Harry's birthday, a letter and a parcel arrived from Hermione.

The parcel had a label on it that told Harry not to open it until he was thirteen, and Harry put that to the side before opening the letter to see if there was something he could read there while he was still twelve.

Fortunately, there was, because Hermione was very happy indeed. The first thing she'd written was that Dobby had been successful, and underlined it twice, and how he'd been very brave and managed to stand up to Mr. Malfoy even when Mr. Malfoy was being all intimidating.

Harry hadn't realized Hermione was there at the hearing, but it sort of made sense with how interested she was.

So now Dobby could go out into the world and find what he wanted to do, hopefully with a nicer family, or even do something himself.

Harry had barely finished reading that letter when Pigwigeon arrived, landing with a splash in Harry's orange juice and making enthusiastic owl noises at him. The letter tied to the little owl's leg was fortunately unsullied by orange juice, so Harry untied it before fishing him out and giving him a quick wash and dry.

That done, and with Pigwigeon given half-a-dozen owl treats, Harry opened the letter.

Ron was mostly asking whether this was something he or Hermione had planned deliberately. Harry wasn't sure what he meant at first, until he saw the postscript by Ginny that explained how the Weasleys had woken up to find themselves with a new volunteer House-Elf.

Mrs. Weasley had already started making him a Weasley Jumper, because he wasn't actually theirs so much as staying with them and so clothes wouldn't really do anything.

Harry had to admit that that sounded really quite nice, and he was happy that Dobby had found some people who would look after him.

On the twenty-ninth of July, which was a Thursday, Harry was in the middle of cooking some steak and mash for dinner when Uncle Vernon got back from work.

"How was the day, dear?" Aunt Petunia asked.

"It went very well, Pet," Uncle Vernon replied, sounding satisfied with himself. "Someone came calling to ask about our drills, seemed very interested – nothing signed yet, but I think we could be making quite a big sale. I took him out for lunch, he seemed very interested."

"Oh, well, I hope you didn't spoil your appetite," Aunt Petunia replied.

"No fear, Pet," Uncle Vernon told her. "I told him the joke about the Japanese golfer, you know the one."

Harry had never actually heard the Japanese golfer joke, and he wondered what it was. He didn't let it distract him from his cooking, though, and he started mashing the potatoes with one paw while keeping an eye on the steak.

"Funny name, though," Uncle Vernon added. "Not heard of anyone with a name like Regulus Arcturus before. Still, his money's the same colour as anyone's."

It took Harry a moment to realize what had probably happened, and then he had to hold in a snigger.

It just went to show that Uncle Vernon really did base almost everything about how he thought about someone on things like how they were dressed.

Twenty minutes or so later, as they were eating, Uncle Vernon cleared his throat.

"I was on the phone to Marge earlier," he announced. "She's got to bring her dog with her, her usual sitter has the 'flu."

"Aunt Marge?" Harry asked. "Is she coming here?"

"She is," Uncle Vernon confirmed. "And while I'm at it, there's a few things I want to get straight before she arrives on Saturday."

He nodded at Harry. "We've been telling her that you go to St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys. She doesn't know about any of your weirdness."

Harry twitched his wings, thinking about how much of his weirdness Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon didn't know about, then frowned.

"Why would you tell her that?" he asked.

"We've got to tell her something," Uncle Vernon barked. "You're away most of the year, we can't say you're going to the local comprehensive, can we, boy?"

"Well… I would have thought that if there was a place like that, it wouldn't let kids out for summer holidays," Harry explained. "You could have just said that I was going to a cheap school in Scotland on a Government grant because that way you didn't have to deal with me."

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon exchanged glances.

"And I was going to be staying with someone else for half the holidays anyway," Harry added. "I could just leave in the morning of my birthday? That way you wouldn't have to deal with me, and nor would Aunt Marge."

That provoked a lot of grumbling, but eventually Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon agreed that maybe that would make a lot more sense.

One of the less odd (but still odd) things about Harry's life as it now was was that – despite how the thirtieth of July was his last full day at Privet Drive for the year – he didn't have any packing to do.

All of his things were in his tent, pre-packed simply because that was where he kept them, and he'd finally got the last of his homework finished. Harry did have to make sure the spare bedroom was clean, so he spent an hour or so doing that (and then another half hour with the vacuum cleaner up in the loft making sure his tent was tidy) but after that there just… wasn't really anything left to do.

Fortunately, Harry knew just what to do in that sort of situation, and he spent most of the afternoon scribbling out notes on pieces of paper about what he'd do if he was going to do a proper Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

With so many fantasy books under his belt, there were a lot of places he could base it on, but there was this idea that he kept coming back to. It would start with the Lord of the Rings, or to be more exact the Silmarillion, but changing things so the dragons had revolted during the war against Morgoth and the werewolves – that is, the werewolves Morgoth had created, who were more like the Forbidden Forest Wargs – had done the same.

That would mean that Numenor was still above the water, and there were a lot of Elves still around, and that there were good dragons and good wolves as well. There could still be monsters to be faced and orcs to fight so there was something for the heroes to do, but it would be a lot more of a situation where they could take their time.

Plus, it would mean the map was already mostly done. He'd just need to make sure there was a Numenor off the coast, and somewhere where dragons lived.

Maybe there should be Gandalf as well. Harry wasn't sure if Gandalf would be there if what he was thinking of had happened, but he could just decide for himself that the answer was yes.

Hopefully there'd be people interested. He did feel vaguely guilty about taking so long to use his present from last year, and he hoped that Neville found the present Harry had got him a bit more useful than that.

Admittedly, it was sort of a boring present if you thought about it one way, but the way Harry preferred to think of it was that Neville didn't have a watch and it would probably help him out if he had one.

He'd made sure to get one with an alarm, because he'd heard that one of the things teenagers had trouble with was getting up at the right time. Harry didn't know yet if that applied to teenage dragons, but Neville was human so he was much more sure about that.

AN:

Bit of a delay for this pair of chapters, thanks largely to a frankly ridiculous cold.

Anyway. Harry's now bigger, and his main problem with the St. Brutus's plan is just that it's a bit silly – he doesn't mind the idea of a cover story, but it could at least be a consistent one.