After the basilisk the days seemed to move much quicker. Every day seemed to bring new information, new challenges, and by the end of October he'd have done anything for a nap.
It began the morning after his snake killing mission.
Harry had barely managed to spoon some eggs onto his plate when a ridiculously large owl flew in carrying an even larger stack of paper held together by rope with its claws. Behind it Hedwig flew, carrying a stack of about half that size herself.
A note was stuck to it which in strict legalese assured Harry that the entirety of his financial records were in the stacks, and that they had fulfilled their end of the treaty in its entirety.
Harry stared at the mountain of papers.
Harry could not carry that many papers—it was literally taller than he was!
"What... um, what did the owls bring?" Neville asked.
"My financial records." Harry replied distractedly. He was still staring at the mountain. Was it just him or did it seem to be growing?
"Oh." Neville said.
"Couldn't you have asked for a summary?" Hermione asked.
"They're not legally bound to give out a summary, only the full records." Harry explained. He felt a headache coming on.
"Your bird's eating all your food." Seamus said.
Harry nodded.
"Mr. Potter." Someone—Percy? —said.
"Yes."
"What is—is this?"
"He ordered his financial records from the goblins." Hermione explained. "Because he didn't know anything about his financial situation, and figured he needed to learn at least who was managing it for him."
"Worked out great for you, didn't it?" Ron laughed.
"While I will never critique self-sufficiency or maturity, I do wonder why you had your confidential records delivered to the middle of the great hall rather than, say, your dorm room."
"I didn't know I could have it sent there." Harry said. Careful observation had proved that the pile was not in fact growing, but that it was so tall to begin with that his brain didn't want to comprehend it.
"Well." Percy said.
Professor McGonagall arrived then and was quickly filled in. "I must say, this is a first Mr. Potter."
"It is?" Harry asked.
"Yes. I do believe that you can lay claim to being the only student in the history of Hogwarts to have a ten foot pile of paper involving personal records delivered to the middle of the great hall fifteen minutes before class starts."
"Yay." Harry said. Then he blinked. "You can help, right?"
"I daresay I can." She said, before promptly shrinking the entire thing to about a foot tall and binding it together with conjured rope. "The conjuring will disappear in about six hours, the shrinking in about a quarter of an hour later. I suggest you have the records secured before then."
"Yes, Professor."
After the classes were over for the day Harry sat in the middle of his dorm room with piles of the records surrounding him on all sides. He'd actually ended up rushing the shrunken package to his bed before the first class because it was only History, but Hermione had made sure he knew exactly how she felt about him being tardy to any class, regardless if it was the simplest in the entire school.
What that meant was when he begged help to comb through everything she had been the first to turn up her nose and proclaim "you should've thought of needing my help before you broke school rules."
Surprisingly, however, Harry did get two other volunteers: Dean and Neville. Dean explained that his father was an accountant and working on 'math stuff' would likely give himself brownie points for Christmas, while Neville kept his reasons for volunteering to himself. Regardless, they were both great helps in figuring out which papers could possibly be meaningful, and which were just "nothing happened on this one very specific day" spaced out over several paragraphs.
By an hour to lights out all three boys had a headache, but Harry was beginning to get a better picture of his financial situation. His helpers had taken the time in stride, though the longer it took the more they began to threaten retribution for the sheer boredom of the day.
"Ok, first, in terms of money I'm all set. I wouldn't have to work once in my life if I didn't want to, and neither would my kids, and my grandkids if I'm extra frugal."
"Yep." Dean agreed.
"Second, I have three vaults: the main one, the trust fund one I'll use until I'm an adult, and one whose sole purpose is to collect all the stuff people send me."
Neville nodded.
"And my current manager is Dumbledore." That, at least, hadn't come as much of a surprise. Out of all of those who could've possibly acted in that position in his first life, Dumbledore was the most likely.
"That's right." Neville said. "He hasn't actually done much, though; besides using your money to pay tuition and setting up the third vault all he's done is keep you contributing to the charities your parents supported."
"There are charities in the magical world?" Dean, who had taken a break during that portion of discovery to do 'literally anything else', asked.
"Of course there are!" Neville said.
"Well how would I know that? Honestly, some of the things that the Magical world does have are fantastical, but you're also missing out on so much that us muggleborns take for granted—like pencils, for instance."
"Who am I donating to, again?" Harry asked, shuffling around the papers to try to find the right one. Actually, he was fairly sure he hadn't been told—while his long term memory was still a mess, if an incredibly detailed one, his short term memories were much more organized.
"Oh, um... there's YouthHeart, a charity that pays for young kids to get the treatment they need from St. Mongo's, First Steps, which helps people find jobs after they graduate, the campaign funds for Dumbledore, my gran, and the Abbots, and something called the Order of the Phoenix, though I don't know what that's a charity for. You don't donate much to any of them, though. I think it's mostly just to keep your name relevant to the charities themselves."
Personal Finance completed! 500 XP awarded.
"That's... that's fine, I suppose." Harry said. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Thanks for your help, mates. I'll get chocolate frogs for the both of you as soon as I can." The boys, appeased by Harry's offering, grunted agreement and stumbled off.
Harry began carefully putting everything away.
The good news, he thought, was that financially he was actually far better off than he'd originally thought. He'd known he was wealthy, of course, but for various reasons he'd never actually been able to quantify the extent during his first life. Neville and Dean had actually both been great helps there—Neville being very familiar with the magical economy and Dean knowing the exchange rates between muggle and magical money.
The bad news was that not only was Dumbledore intentionally donating to himself and the order of the phoenix (which Harry supposed could be excused, given the whole Voldemort-is-not-really-dead thing), but he'd also made absolutely no attempt to get into contact with Harry over his finances.
Harry... wasn't sure what to do about that, actually. Dumbledore hadn't always acted in the interest of Harry's welfare, but the man had also done a good many things to help him. Even more oddly, Dumbledore had yet to pay him any notice, despite Harry doing things like sneaking around in the middle of the night and getting giant piles of financial records which directly mention Dumbledore delivered to him during breakfast.
There was no point in trying to figure out what to do now, Harry finally decided. He'd make his decision tomorrow, or preferably the decision would be made for him by the Headmaster finally deigning to meet him for the first time (this time.)
Oh. That was a thought. What if this Dumbledore had been sent back as well? After some consideration, however, Harry had to dismiss the idea. His own goals were too alike what Dumbledore's likely would have been, and besides it was not as if the "new management" had sent all that many people back. No, it was far more likely that none were in magical Britain besides him, no matter how helpful they would have been.
The next day Harry got lost. Before he got lost he'd had breakfast, gone to class, had lunch, gone to class, and debated whether or not to contact Dumbledore over the whole finances thing before deciding not to until he had at least some kind of usable occlumency (which wasn't exactly going well, but whatever.) It was only after that that he'd... well, that he'd gotten lost.
It wasn't his fault, really—the castle changed every day! How was he supposed to know that the entirety of the fourth and fifth floors seemed to have switched places overnight and the tower whose entrance had when he'd walked up it been on the eighth floor north side of the tower but upon his leaving had clearly relocated to the seventh floor of the castle on, if the windows were right, the western side?
He didn't even know if he'd been to this part of the castle before! The painting of the dancing trolls seemed somewhat familiar, but he couldn't quite remember why, and none of the neighboring corridors seemed familiar at all.
Well, at least he'd finished all his classes for the day. He hated Wednesday classes—the double period of Charms was fine, but the double period of History before it was just miserable especially because there'd been a double period of history the day before too. Transfiguration and Herbology were not a problem, of course, but they weren't doubles and they were after lunch which was always less of a headache.
Still, his decision to go exploring directly after class (something, he didn't know what, told him that figuring out the rest of the castle was important) wasn't turning out to be the best idea. It was half past six already and he still had to get dinner before astronomy lessons began.
Harry tried a door and found an empty room. He tried another and found an empty room. A third—empty room. Fourth—empty. Fifth—empty. Sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth—empty. Tenth? Well, there was an odd number of teacups in the room, but it was otherwise empty.
It was the 29th door, in the end, which lead to a staircase which brought him all the way down to the kitchens where he nipped a bite to eat then raced back to the dorms so that he could get his books in time for astronomy.
"You're late." Hermione pointed out when he'd finally finished racing up the stairs of the astronomy tower. "And you weren't at dinner."
"Sorry, got lost and ended up eating in the kitchens. By the way, if you're ever in need of teapots I've a good idea of where to find some."
Hermione sniffed. "How did you even get lost? We've been here long enough now that you should already know where everywhere is."
"Well, sure," Harry said, adjusting his telescope as per Professor Aurora's written instructions, "but only for classes and the library and stuff. There's an entire castle here, with dozens of rooms, and I'm a curious boy."
"It doesn't sound like you found anything interesting." Hermione said.
"Not yet, no, but that doesn't mean I never will." Harry rebutted. She was right, though—he had plenty of other goals he had to get to, and yet for some reason he'd found himself regularly wandering through stone hallways at least three or four times a week. What exactly was he looking for?
On Thursday, therefore, Harry decided to refocus on his goals: it was time to take on the library. Harry already knew that most of what he was interested couldn't be found in the most well-perused parts of the library, but Hogwarts was also the largest library in Europe (or at least was claimed to be.)
So Harry went exploring again, but this time he had a tag along.
"But what are you looking for?" Hermione whined, following after him irritably as he poked around a stack of books which seemed to be focused on porcine spells, which was a surprisingly well studied subset.
"What aren't I looking for?" Harry said. "Magic is wonderful, Hermione. It is amazing and, based on what I've already learned, nearly limitless. What if there's a spell that gives you instantaneous fluency in a language? What if there's a device which lets you go forward or back in time? What are the other cultures of the magical world like? What have they learned? What have we learned? Don't these questions interest you?"
"...yes." Hermione said. "I just—I guess I didn't expect you to... to be interested in it, yourself. I know, I know you get good grades on your papers and everything, but you don't really seem... bookish."
"I'm not really." Harry admitted. "I mean, I've been good at school since Year One, more or less, but... I'm not truly all that interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake. I mean, right now that's exactly what I'm looking for, but that's only because I figure I don't know what'll be useful yet. If something is obviously useful, then that's what I'll focus on."
"Useful for what?" Hermione said.
Harry thought back to his goal list. "For life, I suppose. For making the world a better place."
"But all knowledge is good for that!"
Harry gave Hermione a look, but it seemed as if she was serious. "Not... not that I'm disagreeing, necessarily, but I suppose you could say that there's a gradient of usefulness. Basic arithmetic is on one end, for instance, while knowing why wombat poop is shaped like cubes is on the other. Not that knowing it is definitely completely useless—who knows, maybe it'll help with some kind of innovation or something—but the people who know enough other stuff to use the knowledge are few, and what benefit that knowledge may get you could be even less."
"Wombats poop cubes?" Hermione asked.
"Yes." Harry said, and then he noticed a book. "Wait—aha!"
The book was titled "Relations Between Magical Britain and Other Countries." Harry and Hermione both stared at it, and the latter clearly wanted to snatch it out of the former's hands: for all that her understanding of varying levels of usefulness wasn't innate, even she could see that this book would likely be a better read then a book on how to make a pig fly (there were three of those, actually—and that was only counting the ones whose titles specifically referenced it.)
"You count this as useful, then?"
"Yep!" Harry said. "I'm not an isolationist, myself. At least, not based on my current knowledge. Best to learn why magical Britain as a whole is, though."
"Can I read it with you?" Hermione asked.
Harry thought about it. To some extent it might be better to just lend her the book after he'd finished, but at the same time... maybe if he showed her how he analyzed books, she'd never end up thinking authors like Lockhart really did fart rainbows. "Sure. Let's snag some seats, okay?"