Harry Potter and the Hermetic Arts
Chapter 21: Shady Aftermath
"Harry, this is my roommate, Su Lee."
Harry nodded at the slender Asian girl who Hermione had just introduced to him, his hands busy shuffling cards for the players seated at the table; they had not been previously introduced by name, but he recognized her from her regular visits to the gaming club, even though she has stuck mostly with playing Scrabble, which made Harry think she was using the club as a means to sharpen her own personal repertoire of knowledge.
"We've met," Harry said, and Hermione's roommate nodded an affirmative. "Want me to deal you two in?"
"You shouldn't gamble," Hermione chided. "It's wrong."
"We're not playing for stakes," said Harry with a shrug, and the players at the table confirmed it. "If you want to play for coin, I hear rumors the ginger twat-waffle's brothers run a floating casino, but I've got nothing to do with them."
"Who?" Hermione asked, confused.
"He means Ron Weasley, Granger," said one of the players at the table, an Indian girl; after Harry had explicitly banned house colors from the club on the grounds they were divisive instead of inclusive, he had found it much harder to identify which students came from which house, but ultimately, he didn't care as long is reduced friction between those present. "Potter here also calls him a 'cunt-muffin', 'arse-barnacle', and 'bell-end'. I don't think he likes him very much."
"You shouldn't use that kind of language, Harry," Hermione chided.
Harry shrugged. "I'd throw him down some steps and call it a staring contest."
Groans echoed around the table at the pun.
"I heard he fell down a staircase and had to spend the Halloween feast in the Medical Wing," chimed in another student, a lanky older boy who constantly ran his fingers through his hair. "He's a right annoying prat, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone."
"You know about him?" Hermione asked, clearly surprised.
"Everybody knows of him," came the answer from across the table, a thin, older girl with freckles. "Weasley comes by every meeting and harasses Potter like he thinks they're the best of friends. Can't seem to take a hint, either; don't know why Potter hasn't just thrown him out."
"Don't think he'll be coming by today," interjected a cheerful drawl, and Harry looked over his shoulder to see Neville and Fay together, the Longbottom boy with an unlit spliff in his mouth.
"You know the rules, no smoking in here, Longbottom," Harry said quickly, and Neville smiled widely, tapping the end of the joint as if to show it had yet to be lit.
"Can we talk to you outside?" Fay asked, tilting her head to indicate the door of the abandoned classroom the club was occupying today.
Harry looked to Hermione. "Can you take over dealing a couple rounds for me while I take a break and have a chat with these two?" he asked. Seeing her uneasy expression, he added, "It's not gambling, people mostly play to be social, and you can talk with everybody at the table and make some friends."
"All right," said Hermione in a less-than-enthusiastic tone, even though she wanted to be happier at the opportunity Harry had just dropped in her lap. These were still strangers who she hadn't been properly introduced to, and that filled her with trepidation.
"Great," Harry said as he stood up, placing the cards in the bushy-haired brunette's hands. "This table is blackjack; you know how that works, right?"
"I know," Hermione said. "I've seen Rain Man."
"I've not," Harry admitted with a smile. "Heard it's great, though. I'll be back in a few."
Hermione nodded, and Harry left the room with the two first-year Gryffindors.
"How'd you do it, Harry?" asked Fay as soon as they were in the hall and the door closed behind them.
"Do what?" Harry asked innocently.
"The troll," Fay said, happy to play along with the game.
"Funny, I heard you and Longbottom did the troll," Harry countered. "Even got points for it and everything, congratulations on that, by the way."
"Harry, we found the troll when we went looking for you and Granger," said Neville, as he lit the spliff and took a long pull before passing it to Fay. "It was already dead."
"We took credit for it because we thought you wouldn't want people to know it was you," Fay added, her chest puffing with pride as she exhaled smoke.
"What makes you think it was me?" Harry asked, declining the cigarette being passed around.
"Well, only you, Ron and Granger weren't at the feast," Fay said, as she counted the three out on her fingers.
"And Ron was with Madam Pomfrey in hospital," Neville added.
"Which leaves you and Hermione, and I don't think Hermione would have the stomach to burn something to death," continued Fay, as the chubby boy passed her the spliff and she took a hit.
"That assumes it wasn't one of the professors," argued Harry.
"Why would one of the professors burn the troll to death?" asked Fay. "A professor would know something better to take it down with."
"And you think I'd burn a troll to death?" Harry asked.
"You were just making a joke about what happened to Ron last night," Fay pointed out, and Neville nodded in agreement.
"You have heard from just about everybody that I can't do magic, right?" Harry said.
"We don't think you used magic to do it," Fay said, and Neville nodded again.
Harry paused, scrutinizing the clearly curious Gryffindors' expressions. The main threat, that his magic be exposed, had already passed; all that was left was whether he wanted to keep denying what they suspected, even if they would never stop suspecting him.
Something Jason had once mentioned off-hand during a session of Shadowrun came to mind, and the boy decided to run with it.
"Fine, you got me," Harry said with a sigh, throwing up his hands in false capitulation as he lied. "But you have to swear to never tell anybody about this, all right?"
"I swear," echoed the Gryffindors eagerly in unison, and Harry leaned close, like he was telling them something he wanted to keep secret.
"I used jellied petrol," he lied.
"You used what now?" asked Fay, clearly intrigued.
"Jellied petrol," repeated Harry. Seeing the clear confusion in Neville's expression, he sighed before launching into the explanation, a paraphrasing of what Jason had once told him. "In the normal world, there's a highly flammable liquid called 'petrol' people use as a fuel source. Normally, it's thin like water and evaporates pretty quick-like, but there's a process that can turn into the consistency of jelly, which would make it stick to surfaces even when it's burning."
"That's what you used on the troll?" Fay asked.
"Well, that some matches I 'liberated' from Transfiguration."
"Can you show us how you made it?" asked Fay.
"I can't, for a couple reasons," Harry said. "First, it's illegal to have, even in normal society, so it's better if I don't teach you, lest you get the urge to break the law. Second, I don't have any more materials; I wasn't actually expecting to need it, so I didn't bring much with me, and it's not as if the materials are easy to come by, either; I brought them with me from home, and I'm pretty much out of that stuff now."
"Oh."
Harry was glad the Gryffindors had missed the gap in logic of what he had just said; if he had not expected to need it, why would he have made it in the first place? For a moment, he thanked his lucky stars, if they existed, that Gryffindors weren't known for their guile.
"We done here?" Harry asked, and when the two potheads nodded, he opened the door to himself back into the club meet. "You should join the games instead of just watching and laughing at them, you know."
He walked back to the table where he had left Hermione and her roommate, and found the table had fallen into an awkward silence where small talk had once been before. When the bushy-haired brunette looked up at his approach, Harry could see the pleading look in her eyes, almost begging him to take her away from the uncomfortable quiet.
"Who died?" Harry asked, breaking the silence, and the players at the table broke into chuckles. Examining the cards on the table, he saw the face up ace in the dealer's possession and understood fairly well what had happened in the last couple rounds: Hermione had been dealing straight and the players were getting what was on the top of the deck, unlike when Harry had the cards in his hands and made sure everyone playing would regularly get a good hand by controlling who got which cards through bottom and center dealing, thus keeping them engaged by cheating without them knowing about it by "shuffling" the deck after every hand was played. Without the ability to use small talk to keep players engaged, the table was floundering.
"Can we talk in private?" Hermione asked, as she ceded the dealer position back to Harry just as the round finished.
"I just got back," Harry said, quickly shuffling the deck and surreptitiously sighting the order of the cards on the near side as he did so. "Is it urgent?"
"Not exactly," said the bushy-haired girl after a moment's thought.
"Then, why don't we talk after club's over? Until then, feel free to walk around, join a game, watch people or just hang out."
Hermione started to protest, but Harry shot her as disarming a smile as he could, and she seemed to melt under it, capitulating and sitting down at the table as he started to deal the next hand of cards to the players.
~ooOoo~
"So, what's up, Doc?"
Hermione had hung around until after the club meeting ended; after they departed the table where Harry was dealing, she and her roommate joined a game of Scrabble, and the bushy-haired girl found herself challenged to a battle of vocabulary with some older students, a losing fight if there ever was one, even with Hermione's prodigious knowledge of the English language.
As the club had wrapped up, she had hung around to help with the tidying up, though the way she constantly snuck glances towards him made Harry think she would rather leave to task to somebody else and just drag him away to talk, but did not feel comfortable interrupting him as he used the process to finish up making small talk with the stragglers who were trickling out.
Now, it was just the two of them, leaving the abandoned classroom together, leaving a few students behind, and Hermione looked more comfortable than before. Her roommate had departed without waiting for her, having remembered Hermione's earlier mention of needing to talk to Harry in private, leaving to friends to leave together.
"What did Dunbar and Longbottom want?" Hermione asked.
Harry stole a glance at Hermione's face; he could see the anxiety in her eyes even as she tried to hide it behind a mask of calm, and he realized again just how difficult maintaining friendships with children his own age was, something his previous life experiences had not really prepared him for.
He pulled the bushy-haired girl into the abandoned classroom they were passing by, deciding it was as good a place as any to stop and talk to his friend.
"They thought I killed the troll," Harry told the Ravenclaw girl. "They wanted to know how I did it."
"What'd you tell them?" Hermione asked, clearly concerned.
"Well, there wasn't any way I could convince them I didn't do it," Harry explained. "They had already made up their minds about that, but did still believe I can't use magic, so I told them I used home-made napalm."
"You can make napalm?" Hermione asked, horrified at the implications.
"Petrol and certain plastic products," Harry said with a shrug. "It's not really napalm, but it's close enough to serve the same purpose."
"Why do you know this?"
"Jason mentioned it once during Shadowrun. Remembered because I thought it might be useful to know one day, which turned out to be today."
"Why does he know?"
"I don't know, I didn't ask."
"So, you lied to Dunbar and Longbottom? I thought they were your friends."
"I did what I had to; I never promised them I'd never lie to them.
"What did you want to talk to me about?" he asked.
Hermione hesitated for a moment, then sat down at a desk. "I've been thinking about what spells I want to learn," she said. "I was reading the Player's Handbook last night and I saw a lot of spells have material components that aren't exactly easy to come by if you can't go to the shops."
"Regardless, you should start with first level spells," said Harry. "They're the easiest to learn because they have easier visualizations than higher level magic."
"Do you have any recommendations?" asked the girl. "I'm not sure where to start."
"You haven't learned any gestural components yet, right?" Harry asked, and the girl nodded in affirmation. "I'd start with hold portal if I were you, unless you want to try jumping off high things, in which case you could also try feather fall; both only have verbal components and relatively easy visualizations, but before you start working on either, you need to show me you've learned to control the flow of magic. I don't want you dying just because you can't properly control your power source."
"Fine, but I won't take long," Hermione promised.
"I wouldn't bet on it," warned Harry. "It took me a few months, and that was pretty much all I was doing during all of my free time."
"There's something else, too," said the girl, after another moment, then started fidgeting.
"Spit it out, Granger," Harry said firmly.
"After seeing the club, I think I'd like to try being a game master," Hermione said, still fidgeting. "Maybe you could help me with that?"
"Are you sure you want to do that?" Harry asked, cocking his head to the side as he scrutinized the bushy-haired brunette. Seeing her shoulders start to slump, he realized she had taken what he had said the wrong way and quickly added, "It's a lot of work to prepare for every session and players often won't do what you want them to."
The girl swallowed at the warning. "Still, I want to try," she said. "If I do nothing, I won't be able to make any more friends."
"Players won't necessarily be your friends, depending on how they approach the game," warned the boy, dragging his fingers through his mess of raven locks. "Most of them won't appreciate what you have to do to make the game playable, and many will take you for granted. If they take the approach of players against the game master, they'll make your life a living hell; we used to have a player like that at the shop, and that's what put me off game mastering."
"Still, I want to try," Hermione reiterated, digging in her metaphoric heels. "You said I had to make the effort, right?"
"I did," Harry said, smiling slightly. "If you are going to game master, I recommend running Dungeons & Dragons and not Shadowrun; many of the students from magical families won't understand the concepts of technology past the age of steam. No Ars Magica either; they'll likely get into arguments over the magic system."
"I'll remember that," Hermione agreed.
Author's Notes: After two action-intense chapters and a chapter of exposition dump, I felt it was necessary for some lighter fare, so this chapter and the next are both shorter and lighter, hence the simultaneous release to retain a reasonable word count for each week.
I think Harry's advice in the previous chapter was ultimately something Hermione needed to hear; because of it, she's beginning to take steps in creating friendships of her own, starting with her roommate, which, honestly, should have been something she had tried to do from the start, since she would be spending at least the year living with her.
A touch of Harry's sense of humor, and it's very heavily influenced by punchlines you'd hear from rap battles. This will come back much later in this story.
Yes, I know how to make jellied gasoline; it's really not that hard to produce. Call it the knowledge of a misspent youth. If you're reading this, welcome to a government watchlist; it'll be the first of many reasons you'll end up on one if you keep reading this story. And yes, it will come back up in the story, because everything does.
See? Just like Harry practicing sleight of hand.
Harry talks about game mastering, and just how much it can suck, but of course Hermione would want to do it; the amount of research it takes to even start running a campaign just fits who she is as a person, and, having already experienced roleplaying once, she's already been bitten by the bug. Like being an addict, nobody ever really quits roleplaying for good, because it's something most people already have to do in their everyday lives.
I'm looking for a French and a Norwegian translator. While I've used Google Translator for the drafts, I'd nonetheless like to run those parts by actual French and Norwegian language speakers to make sure they're properly translated, rather than rely on machine learning.
Review, PM... like an employee at a hardware store's power tool section, you know the drill.
Credit to Shinshikaizer for the original story pitch and goalie12345 for copy-editing. Furthermore, my thanks to Romantically Distant for additional editing and proofing.