Harry Potter and the Hermetic Arts
Chapter 26: Bonds
"There's definitely a three-headed dog in that corridor," Fay declared triumphantly when the four reconvened the following day in another abandoned classroom. "It's name is Fluffy, and he belongs to Hagrid."
"Huh," said Harry, rubbing his temples as he processed the information. "Of course the bakebrain would call a highly dangerous mythical beast 'Fluffy'."
"Did he say what Fluffy was doing in the third floor corridor?" asked Hermione, words rushing out of her in flood as her rapid speech betrayed her excitement despite her attempt to appear otherwise calm, though neither Gryffindor seemed to notice.
"Hagrid's loaned him to Dumbledore to guard something," Neville said lazily, taking a bite out of a pasty he had sneaked from the Great Hall during breakfast, seeming to not even notice the Ravenclaw's eagerness.
"Something about 'Nicolas Flamel'," Fay added.
"I could swear I've seen that name before," Neville said, finishing the pastry with another bite. "Don't remember where, though." His brow furrowed in concentration as he tried to remember, but after a moment, he simply shrugged as indifference overtook him. "Eh..."
"Well, thanks for the help," Harry said, reaching into his haversack and taking out two brown paper bags splotched with oil stains and offering them to the Gryffindors, who took accepted the unexpected offerings, opening them up to look inside even as the scent of fryer oil, spices, cheese and meat wafted out of the bags.
"What is this?" asked Neville, looking back up at Harry.
"Nachos," the Hufflepuff said, smiling widely. "Somebody I know swears by them whenever she gets the munchies, which is what it looks like you're having."
Fay didn't so much say a word as reach into the bag, scooping out a heaping portion of browned ground meat, bright white cream, gooey ivory cheese, chunks of vividly red tomato, and pale green spread with a large piece of crispy-fried flatbread, rushing it into her mouth before it could crumple under its own weight, her eyes closing almost immediately as she nearly dropped the bag, chewing slowly as she sat back in her chair, tension visibly melting away into thin air.
Beside her, Neville had already torn the bag open, revealing the pile of food in all its splendor, and was hurriedly pulling pieces from the pile and shoving them into his mouth, cheeks bulging like a chipmunk storing food.
After a long moment, the pigtailed girl finally opened her eyes. "This is so…," she paused to search for the right expression, but all she could manage was "Yum", having clearly lost her words in her haze of culinary bliss.
"Where'd you get this?" Neville asked, morsels falling from his lips as he spoke between bites. "I've never seen anything like it in the Great Hall."
"Made it myself," Harry said. "You've got to have noticed you never see me during meals."
"I just thought you didn't eat," Neville said without thinking.
Harry decided to ignore the stupidity of that notion. "Well, you two enjoy your food," he said. "Danger and I need to revise."
The two eating Gryffindors were too preoccupied with their food to even look up, grunting and nodding in acknowledgement as Harry and Hermione departed the room.
Once they were out of the room, the Ravenclaw turned to the Hufflepuff. "We're going to try to find out who Nicolas Flamel is, right?" she asked.
"That goes without saying. Do you have a plan of attack?"
"I was thinking I'd just look for books in the library…"
"Given the way the library's organized, that's not going to be particularly easy."
"Do you have a better idea?"
"We could ask Madam Pince for help," Harry suggested. "She's a librarian, so she'd be better at working the system she's implemented than we'd be."
"That's it?" asked Hermione, stunned something so simple and thoughtless would be his plan.
"Of course not," said Harry, frowning. "I'm also going to write Martin and ask him for help too; he's a research librarian, so he's got access to resources we don't have here."
"But he doesn't know anything about magic!" Hermione protested.
"Doesn't hurt to have an extra pair of eyes and hands doing work," Harry said, not wanting to correct the girl. "Who knows, maybe Nicolas Flamel ended up in folklore or history.
"I'm also going to write every magical publisher and have them ship me every book they have that mentions Nicolas Flamel."
"That sounds expensive," Hermione said wistfully.
"Work smarter, not harder," said Harry with a shrug. "By paying publishers to send me books about a subject, what I'm paying for the books is really just a service fee for their weeding through all the things I don't need, saving my time for things I actually need to do."
"I hadn't thought of that," said the Ravenclaw, before frowning. "I can't afford that."
"Why don't we go to the library first?"
Hermione happily filled the time it took for the two to reach the library with small talk, telling Harry just how she and her roommate were becoming friendly and spent time studying together, as well as her hopes and dreams for the upcoming gaming club meeting where she wanted to start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the club's participants; Harry did not have the heart to tell her just how doomed her efforts were, from the probability of those from magical families protesting the plausibility of the Vancian spellcasting system, to the likelihood of even those willing to overlook the incongruity of the magic system almost all wanting to play wizards, to just how much of the work she had done in preparation would end up wasted when players inevitably decide they simply want to do something else…
Arriving at their destination, they found Madam Pince was away from her desk at the front of the facility, likely making her rounds to admonish the students who were conducting themselves unbecoming of being at a library.
When she returned to her desk, the librarian favored Harry with a slight smile and a nod of acknowledgement; taking it as an indication she was free to help, Harry approached with pen and notepad in hand. A hurriedly scribbled exchange followed between the two, with the boy looking increasingly frustrated and the librarian progressively more apologetic as it continued, until the boy finally smiled tightly, wrote something on the page and gave a shallow bow before storming off as quietly and politely as possible.
Worried, Hermione followed her friend outside, catching up with him just as he stepped out of the library.
"What was that about?" she asked.
"Madam Pince would like to assist us, but can't," Harry said. "She's been expressly forbidden from providing assistance to students who want to research anything related to the subject we want to."
"Which is?"
"What's in the forbidden third floor corridor."
"Who forbade it?"
"Who do you think?"
"I don't believe it."
Harry started to snap an answer, but Hermione interrupted him before he could even begin.
"I know, reality doesn't care whether I believe it, any more than if I care if it believes in me."
Harry smiled tightly.
"Did you find out anything else?"
"I asked how many books total there are in the collection."
"How many are there?"
"Nearly fifteen thousand."
Hermione gulped at the figure. To own so many books…
"I could try to find something the collection," she offered.
"That'd be a waste of time," Harry said, saying aloud what she already knew to be true.
"Then what can I do to help?"
"When the books from the publishers start coming in, would you be willing to read and make notes for some of them?"
"I'd be happy to."
"All right, then, we're off to the races."
~ooOoo~
As Harry had expected, Hermione's first foray into trying to dungeon master went over like a professional wrestler getting pinned: it didn't. Not only were there numerous complaints about the Vancian magic system, as Harry had expected, even most those willing to look past that bemoaned the complexity of the game system, and of those who were willing to accept the structure designed by David Cook and TSR, nearly all of them laughed at the idea of a character without magic having any effect on the story; in fact, of the dozens of students she petitioned, Hermione only managed four takers: two Ravenclaws from normal families who were in the upper years, and the pair of Neville Longbottom and Fay Dunbar, the latter who was hankering for any sort of adventure and the former just happy to just be along for the ride.
Harry assisted the best he could during the first weekend of Hermione establishing the campaign, helping teach the system in detail and giving a little bit of advice to players and dungeon master alike, though he ultimately left the final decisions to those involved in the game. By the end of the Sunday meeting, Hermione had her players and their party of two mages, a druid and a paladin, and Harry felt comfortable leaving them to their devices, only occasionally checking in with Hermione to make sure it was going relatively smoothly.
It took two weeks for Martin to respond in detail; unlike the coded messages Harry had sent out or the falsified author of the return post, Martin's response was written in invisible ink with a more ordinary message written by Karen, posing once again as Hermione's mother, on top of it in a completely different color ink; to find the hidden message, Harry had to heat it over his stove, and only then did the research librarian's thesis appear.
In the meantime, the publishers Harry was in correspondence with had began to send him books referencing Nicolas Flamel and his work, and Harry had more than a few sent to him through the post, which his long-suffering roommate delivered to him from the Great Hall in exchange for a few luxuries from home that Harry had packed away in his haversack; the time he had previously spent on researching why he couldn't use his magic was now turned to reading through the volumes and making notes as they arrived, and Hermione was happy to invest with her own time into the project when she was not revising for lessons or preparing for the campaign she was running. They had become accustomed to using abandoned classrooms for their work rather than the library, as it gave them the freedom to talk to each other as they read and wrote while also affording them anonymity by being a random space that changed from day to day, making it nearly impossible to find.
Karen proved herself a masterful bullshit artist, weaving together a narrative of days she never had into a five page hand-written letter long enough to provide cover for Martin's entire essay; Harry could not help but admire just how well she made the imaginary life of Hermione's mother sound rivetingly mundane, filled with just enough detail to seem real and yet totally wearisome to anybody trying to read it for its content. That it was so tediously uninteresting in itself made the letter a work of art the boy admired, and he would study it long after his research into Nicolas Flamel was concluded to try to learn the secrets of its perfectly boring composition.
Martin's piece painted Flamel as a French scribe and manuscript seller from the turn of the fourteenth century who developed a reputation as an alchemist who discovered the secret of the philosopher's stone and achieved immortality through it, though such accounts did not appear until the seventeenth century, at least one hundred years after his supposed death.
Combined with their own research, the details painted a very vivid picture: Nicolas Flamel, the only known maker of the Sorcerer's Stone, possibly also called the Philosopher's Stone, was the partner of Albus Dumbledore in matters of alchemy. Flamel, who lived in Devon with his wife, used the Stone to produce the Elixir of Life, which apparently made the drinker immortal. The Stone also transformed any metal into pure gold.
"I could see why you'd want a cerberus to guard it," Hermione said after they consolidated everything they had learned, still scribbling in her notebook. Since returning from the break, Harry had noticed the proliferation of binders, notebooks, ballpoint pens, erasers and pencils amongst Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw students alike, particularly those of normal background, and Hermione was amongst their ranks, clearly finding them far more convenient to write with than quill, parchment and inkwell. "Immortality and wealth… who wouldn't want it?"
"What do you want to do about it?" asked Harry. Their investigation had reached its natural conclusion, and it was time to turn it into action.
"What do you mean?" asked the Ravenclaw.
"You think you know what is being guarded," reiterated the raven-haired boy, his emerald eyes boring into the bushy-haired girl's. "What are you going to do with that knowledge?"
"Nothing," she said defensively. "I was just curious to know."
"Well now you know," said the boy. "And a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous."
The girl gulped in nervousness. "Maybe it was why Gringotts was broken into," she said.
"They were?"
"Didn't you hear?"
"I might have. Probably wasn't paying attention because nothing of mine was hit."
The reminder made him think of the paper-wrapped parcel the trog had taken from the vault; if that was the Philosopher's Stone, he at least knew the approximate dimensions it would be.
If it really was the Philosopher's Stone, well, then he'd have to do something about it.
~ooOoo~
"Chocolate?" Harry asked, offering an opened bag to Hermione one Friday morning in February.
"Excuse me?" asked Hermione, confused.
"I made truffles," Harry said, once again offering the bag.
"Why? How?" Hermione asked, looking into the bag to see various spheres coated in dark brown powder, colorful sprinkles and bits of chopped nuts.
"It's Valentine's Day," said the boy matter-of-factly. "Well, for us, it'd be Pal-entine's Day, since we're just friends, but still, everybody loves chocolate, unless you're allergic, in which case I feel sorry for you. As for how, that's just a matter of baker's chocolate, heavy cream and controlling the temperature of everything."
"Where did you get the ingredients?" Hermione asked, tempted to have a taste but still wary.
"Brought them with me from home," Harry said. "Again, I only eat my own cooking."
Hearing this, the bushy-haired girl relented, taking a chocolate sprinkle-covered ball from the bag and taking a bite out of it. Instantly, her hand flew to her mouth as her eyes widened in surprise.
"It's really good," she said.
"The secret is the butter and the vanilla extract," Harry said, taking a powdered coated one himself and taking a bite.
"You must have gotten a lot of cards, being the Harry Potter," Hermione said, remember just how much she had felt about Harry the first time she had read about him.
"I can see why you'd think so, but that's not the case," Harry said, smiling wryly. "They would need to be able to give it to me first, and that's not easy. I always wake up well before anybody else in the dormitories, so that eliminates the morning window for everybody in Hufflepuff or anybody who might see me passing through the halls; I never eat in the Great Hall, so that eliminates pretty much all the meals, and since today is Friday, I don't even have any classes besides Flying and the Astronomy practical, and I'm pretty much going to skive off Flying like I always do since the incident with the wall."
"I still can't believe you no longer go to that lesson," Hermione said, frowning in disapproval. "Even I've learned to fly on a broom, although I'm not the best at it."
"I don't need a broom to fly," Harry said shortly with a shrug. "It's a skill I'll never need because I've other skills that are better, and it's one of the most important skills to have. You'll be needing it sooner than later, so it's a good place to start your research into the arts."
"You're going to have to teach me that," Hermione said. "I know it's in the Player's Handbook, but I still don't understand how to do it."
"Well, the Hermetic method is based on research and experimentation; I can only help you along so much," Harry countered. "I've already taught you all of the Forms, Techniques and gestures I know; you need to figure out the rest for yourself."
The Ravenclaw frowned. "Can you at least tell me how you do it?" she asked.
"For one, I grow wings."
"You what?"
"I grow wings. I mean, I take of my shirt first, so it doesn't get ruined, but I grow wings."
"Do I have to grow wings?"
"No, there's a couple other ways you could do it," Harry said. "You could use air to lift you off the ground and move you through space, you alter subjective gravitational forces to respond to your will alone, you could make yourself lighter than air and then release forces from your body to make you fly around…"
"I get it," interrupted the girl before starting to talk at Harry in French. It was something she did with increasing frequency whenever he irritated her because she knew it irritated him in turn, though she did not know he had been spending time researching and designing a version of tongues, a spell that would allow him to speak and understand any language, though the experimentation had hit a bit of a snag when he had decided he wanted to develop a prolonged adaptation of the cleric spell instead of the wizard one because it did not require the use of a material component.
Still, Harry envied her for her fluency in a foreign language; unlike her, he did not have any experience outside of the United Kingdom, and none of his friends, not even Jack, spoke a foreign language with fluency as far as he knew, even if Jason seemed to know fragments here and there, and Karen was happy to learn as much as she needed for her roles.
~ooOoo~
February quickly turned into March; on the last week of the month, Hermione began preparing for end-of-term exams, cutting down on the time she had for other activities, and because she was committed to dungeon mastering on the weekends, it meant she had less time to spend with Harry working on developing her grasp of the Hermetic arts, which honestly suited him fine, as it gave him more time to devote to the research and development of his own Hermetic arts.
As it turned out, that was all the extra time he needed for himself; on the last day of March, he finally cracked the design for tongues, and he spent the next day speaking only in Afrikaans, which was more than enough to confuse all those he interacted with when he continued to act like he was still speaking in English, selling the ruse by pretending nothing was out of place, even in the face of the bewilderment of everybody he interacted with. It was a good prank, even if he was the only one who understood what was happening.
On Sunday, he had the chance to put the spell through further testing, holding a conversation with Zhang Qiu entirely in Mandarin Chinese after she showed up with a friend to play a bit of Pictionary. Surprised by his fluency, she asked how he could speak with such effortless fluidity after telling her he spoke only a little bit in September; Harry answered with only a knowing smile and a half-shrug, using the mystery to draw her in and hold her natural curiosity captive. By the end of the club meeting, her body language had opened up, and the two were openly laughing and flirting with each other.
All in all, it was a good chance to practice being a charmer; with Karen as the go-to for faces, Harry didn't have the occasion to practice often, and he welcomed the opportunity he got. It was also an opportunity to practice deflecting and steering topics of conversation, and he enjoyed the challenge of dancing around what Zhang wanted to know without giving away the game. Even if it was in a completely different language, the principles remained the same, and that was what mattered for the exercise.
Of course, she returned the next week, and the week after that, expecting more of the same, and Harry was more than happy to oblige; after all, one does not look a gift horse in the mouth, especially one that helps you get better at what you do.
~ooOoo~
When the professors piled on the homework for Easter break, many students complained about the increased workload, but not Harry. Then again, he was already the hardest working first year student at Hogwarts, even more so than Hermione, and he practically lived like a hermit, so all the assigned extra work disappeared into his calendar like it was nothing; all he lost was two days of research and development, only mildly annoying in the scheme of a two week long break with no classes to attend. Then, it was back to his regularly scheduled, well, schedule.
Having finished development of tongues the previous month, he had spent the last week and a half focused entirely on the research and design of disintegrate, the most complex spell he was attempting to create to date. Functionally, it was one of the most useful spells he knew of, serving as a tool and a weapon the one time he managed to get a wizard to a level that could learn and cast it. The versatility, however, came with a cost: the Form and visualization could change from casting to casting depending on the target even as the Technique and material components remained the same, and that made the research process all the more difficult as he had to account for those parameters in the design of the spell.
Still, without classes to attend or revise for, he could throw eight hours a day at the problem, which was that was exactly what he did. It was the kind of single-mindedness that could be mistaken for obsession, but if it was, it still solved the problem, because on the last Thursday of the holiday, he made a breakthrough.
Let it never be said chemistry is useless to a wizard. It was in a textbook of the subject that Harry found the answers he was looking for: chemical bonds between molecules, but more specifically, the dissolution of them.
All that was left was to figure out just how to visualize it for all different kinds of complex matter. Once he had that, disintegrate would be his.
Author's Notes: Like I said before, food is very important to this version of Harry, partly because he's an extension of who I am. Being originally from Hong Kong, "Have you eaten?" is the typical way of asking "how are you?", so it's a huge part of my cultural personal identity, and it ended up bleeding into this version of Harry, although I think it makes sense, since he's been in the kitchen since he was quite young.
Since Harry never card cataloged his collection and is incredibly wealthy, it makes sense for him to outsource the finding of books. Given his positive relationship with this version of Madam Pince, who is much more like an actual real librarian, it only makes sense he'd ask her for assistance because he's not afraid to ask for help, and she's be forbidden to provide any, because that's something typically Dumbledore. It'd also make sense for the Hogwarts library's collection to be incredibly sizable just given the history of the school's existence.
Martin being a research librarian has always been his character and is not just an ass pull; it just never came up beforehand only because it wasn't relevant to the situation enough for any of the characters to make note of it. I do believe, however, that this reveals the professions of all the Irregulars; Ethan English teaches Economics at university, Karen North is a (struggling) actress, Rosemary Davies is a graduate student studying chemistry at Eastmere College and working part time at a lab, Martin Roberts is a research librarian, Jacqueline Murray is a software coder, Shaun Jones is a construction foreman, Sarah Williams is a sociology professor, and Jason Bourne owns and runs Bournes Comics and Games.
Yes, DMing for D&D is something I hate doing, even though I did it every day for four years in high school. At least it's not 3.5 edition though; at that point, Hermione might as well just give all her notes to the Wizards at the beginning of every session once they pass a certain level. Still, there'd be extreme difficulty in convincing Hogwarts students that D&D would be a hobby worth pursuing, particularly because of the dissonance between the game system and what the students are being taught.
More tradecraft, but that's to be expected of shadowrunner Harry at this point. I kind of feel bad for reducing Roger Malone to being Harry's gofer, but he was never going to be a character of importance beyond being Harry's roommate.
It fits Harry's character to want to do something when he receives actionable intelligence, while it fits Hermione to just want to know; it's what separates the scholar from the runner.
Truffles can be made from just baker's chocolate and heavy cream; simmer 2/3 cups heavy cream (1/2 cup if using milk chocolate) per 8 ounces of chocolate, then pour into chocolate. Let sit for a five minutes, then stir until chocolate is melted. Place a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the chocolate (to avoid condensation) and refrigerate until the mixture is set (1-2 hours), then roll into balls and coat in cocoa powder, sprinkles, coconut shavings, etc. For extra creamy truffles, add a tablespoon of butter to the chocolate before pouring the warm cream over it; to give the truffles an extra pop of flavor, add a half teaspoon of vanilla extract after you've let the cream and chocolate mixture sit. They store 3-4 days at room temperature, up to 2 weeks in the fridge and indefinitely in the freezer. Hurray for food porn!
It's always been weird to me that Valentine's Day becomes a sticking point in Chamber of Secrets but isn't even mentioned once in the text of Sorcerer's Stone; if Harry is really as popular as Rowling says he is in Chamber of Secrets, he should be receiving valentines even as a first year student. At least it makes sense in this version of the story, seeing as it's a Friday, so this version of Harry doesn't have classes he can't just skip and he's pretty much impossible to find due to his schedule.
I felt it was necessary to demonstrate the difference between Harry and Hermione's learning styles; while Harry is quite happy to just experiment and test things out, Hermione prefers to be told what she needs to do, possibly because she's lacking in imagination.
And Zhang Qiu is back; for those curious, it's actually the official translation of her name in the Chinese edition of the books. Despite their flirting, there's nothing going on between them as far as Harry is concerned; to him, he's just practicing skills he doesn't have a chance to practice elsewhere.
Oh, you thought the title of the chapter was about Harry finally bonding with other people? That's cute. The knowledge of chemistry is way more important to this version of the character.
Review, PM... Like Harry making lunch, you know what's cooking.
Credit to Shinshikaizer for the original story pitch and goalie12345 for copy-editing. Furthermore, my thanks to Romantically Distant for additional editing and proofing.