"Daddy sent all the back issues about the Chamber of Secrets," Luna explained, spreading out several folded booklets of newsprint about the dimensions of a magazine rather than a newspaper across the study table in the Hogwarts library. "The Quibbler" was emblazoned on the front of each, generally atop a cover image that was some fanciful drawing of a creature.
It had taken them under a week to basically adopt Luna. They'd mentioned her shoelessness to Padma, who'd realized that she'd been ignoring the spacey first-year like most of the older students in Ravenclaw, and had missed that Luna's roommates were bullying her. Padma had gone to the prefects, and the thefts of the girl's belongings had been stopped cold, but that didn't mean they wanted to be friends. Thus, Padma had her tagging along to study sessions, even though the material was a little advanced for her.
Where Luna had gone, Ginny had seen an opportunity to hang out with Harry Potter (completely silently, staring at him longingly from the other end of the table and looking away whenever he glanced in her direction). His little sister going and talk of a monster in the school had brought Ron back to the study meetings. By Friday night, they had the entire set of Gryffindor second-years, Padma, Luna, Ginny… and Colin Creevey.
Somehow, the boy with the keen networking senses had realized that first-years were getting to hang out with his idol, and had invited himself along. "These are neat, Luna," he gushed. "Maybe I can get an actual picture of the creature to use as the cover of the next issue!"
"We haven't had much luck with photography, but maybe," Luna demurred. "Most of the really interesting creatures know when you're trying to photograph them and hide. So we've been using drawings."
"What's a Rotfang Conspiracy?" Dean asked, seeing that name come up a lot.
Luna explained, "Daddy is convinced that a conspiracy of dark wizards and a conspiracy of vampires are fighting in a shadow war over control of the Ministry. Some parts of Vanaheim have notoriously poor teeth, and Daddy thinks those are sites where the dark wizards have located vampires and are trying to keep them from being able to feed by ruining the teeth of everyone in the area."
Hermione wasn't sure about the conspiracy theory, but noted, "People here do have very bad dental practices. Magic can only do so much if you're not brushing enough."
They read for a while, commenting on some of the stranger articles, before Harry summed up, "So it looks like the Chamber of Secrets was thought to be created by Salazar Slytherin, one of the Hogwarts founders. It was supposed to contain a monster that could be released by his heir to remove anyone not native to Vanaheim."
Lavender explained, apologetically, "There's still a lot of that kind of thing. Natives don't like offworlders coming and taking our jobs and trying to get us to change our culture. To be fair, they don't like people from Asgard much more than people from Midgard."
Ron added, "And families like the Malfoys think anyone that has recent family from Midgard is basically an offworlder." He'd already explained that Draco's comment about "Mudbloods" was a slur against anyone from their planet: a deliberate misunderstanding about the word "Earth" meaning dirt.
"And this isn't the first time it's come up," Luna showed off an article. "Daddy found out that something like this happened about sixty-five years ago, but the school covered it up because several students were injured and someone died."
"Sixty-five years ago," Harry considered. Clearly Dumbledore was that old. Maybe some of the other teachers. "That's, like, World War II time, on Earth. Anyone that would remember that would be… really old."
The other adolescents all nodded, none having a good basis of comparison to guess which of the adults would be in their sixties or older.
"All my grandparents have passed. What about your grandmother, Neville?" Lavender suggested.
Eyes downcast, the boy shook his head and said, "I don't think she's quite that old. My dad had me pretty young. So unless she had him pretty old…"
"Our great aunt Murel, maybe?" Ron suggested, unclear how old she was. "But she's mean, though. I don't know if she'd help." Ginny nodded in agreement.
"Well, let's think about it and ask around," Harry shrugged. "I have to get some sleep, though. Quidditch tomorrow."
They said their goodbyes and headed to their various dormitories. As they were getting ready for bed Ron mentioned, "I don't know if you should take everything in the Quibbler as true, Harry. Luna and her dad… well… they're kind of mental, honestly." Neville nodded in agreement.
"Could be," Harry didn't disagree. "But at least it might give us a place to start to get a second opinion. And a lot of stuff around here is weird. Maybe more of the stuff in the Quibbler is real than people realize." He thought about it for another second and admitted, "Probably not using tooth decay to fight vampires, but maybe some of the other stuff?"
"And she's a nice enough kid," Dean suggested. "Maybe she's just weird because her dad is crazy, and she needs friends to let her know how to act."
Ron said, "Maybe. I think she's really only ever had Ginny to play with. They live in the same village as us."
"An' it's no' like ye've a normal sister, either," Seamus chuckled. "Harry, how many total words's she said t'ye so far?"
"To me? Probably zero," Harry figured. "Around me? Maybe a couple dozen."
Ron sighed, "It was those stupid Boy-Who-Lived stories. Our mum's been reading them to her since she was a baby. She thinks you're some kind of bard tale hero. I think she was less excited about meeting Fandral than you."
"I still need to see if I can get royalties from those," Harry grumbled. "I can't believe they just let people make up stories about me like they were true. Anyway, night everyone."
The next morning was a bit humid, threatening a storm, so Harry was extra-motivated to get the game over and done with before he got rained on. Not that Wood hadn't been forcing them to train in the rain already. Harry was starting to seriously regret agreeing to be on the team, for all that it was fun to fly competitively. He guessed he'd see how he felt about it after his first real match.
He was feeling pretty motivated after Draco tried to trash talk him at breakfast.
As they suited up in their padded quidditch robes which were basically leather armor, Wood gave a short speech that ended in, "Wait 'til we're ahead an' then get 'at snitch or die tryin', Harry. We've gotta win t'day. We've gotta."
"So no pressure, Harry," one of the Weasley twins winked at him as they headed out of the locker room.
The quidditch pitch was an ancient amphitheater, almost a stadium in its scale, with the boundaries defined by the risers on all sides. It could probably seat ten times as many guests as the student body of the school, so most of the students clustered toward the top of the stands for the best view of the flying game (and to be out of the way of any bludgers knocked straight down). As usual, it was strictly segregated by house, with Gryffindor and Slytherin on opposite sides of the stands and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw as buffers between them.
As he took to the air, Harry could at least see that Padma and Luna had managed to sit on the edge of the Ravenclaw seats closest to Gryffindor, so they could sit next to the rest of the study group. He gave his friends a wave as he moved to a high position that would let him keep an eye out for the snitch, track the point total, and dive to interfere if necessary.
"Alright there, Scarhead?" Malfoy shouted as he raced past on his broom, for all that it was about the same quality of work as Harry's. The problem was that the other Slytherin players were on similarly high-quality brooms.
"No matter how much you flirt, I'm not going to make out with you, Draco," Harry told him calmly.
Draco started to sputter a denial, but both were surprised as a black iron bludger sailed in Harry's direction, forcing him to twist out of the way. Essentially cannonballs, the devices were slightly-modified war and hunting weapons designed to seek out the closest flier. Many a game bird had been brought down by them before someone (probably a Gryffindor) decided they'd be fun as an obstacle to spice up broom sports.
"Close one, Harry!" a twin called, sailing by with his bat and knocking the bludger toward Adrian Pucey, one of the Slytherins. The entire point of the beater role on the team (that the twins played for Gryffindor) was to try to defend their team from the bludgers.
However, rather than accelerating toward its target once it was closer to Pucey than to Harry, the bludger began to describe a steep curve, almost an orbit, trying to loop back toward Harry. "The hell?" he asked, making his broom dive away and keeping his head turned enough to track the ball with his peripheral vision. Sure enough, it quickly changed its arc to keep heading toward him.
He tried everything he could think of. He kept moving past Fred and George so they could knock the bludger off course. He tried moving through the rival players to scrape it off on them. He even spent two solid minutes orbiting Draco to try to put the other boy in between him and the Harry-seeking missile. But nothing was working, he and the twins were all distracted from the game trying to stay ahead of the bludger (which wasn't hindering the other team the way it was supposed to), and it was starting to rain.
At least his frantic aerobatics were basically making him count as a bludger, as the Slytherin team quickly learned to stay out of his way since he was dragging an erratically-arcing iron ball a few yards behind him whenever he sailed past. That was keeping the Slytherins from having a runaway victory, but he could tell that they were pulling ahead on points. And then, losing visibility due to the rain on his glasses and having to pull up suddenly to miss the stands, he felt the rogue bludger make contact with his left arm.
"Time out! Gryffindor's seeker is injured!" Lee Jordan, the twins' friend and match commentator, announced in his magically-amplified voice.
Harry got down to the ground as fast as he could, cradling his arm. He didn't think it was broken, since he could still move it, but it hurt. "Someone's tampered wi' th'bludger!" Wood was arguing with Madam Hooch already as he descended.
"I've been casting diagnostics since it started chasing Potter," the hawk-eyed flying teacher explained. "And I can't detect any magic on it except its own standard enchantments. Sometimes you just get unlucky."
"Unlucky! It's unfair! Make t'other chase Malfoy an' it's jus' unlucky!"
Hooch shrugged like she had no control over the decisions made by the ball, which was still looping on a long arc above Harry's head but at least sticking to its programming to not attack him on the ground. By then, a few of the other teachers, including Fandral, had come down to see what was going on, and Hooch asked, "Are you okay to keep playing, Potter?"
Harry wiggled his fingers and said, "I don't think it's broken, but I don't know if I can control my broom."
"I've a solution for you, then," Fandral boomed, producing a silver flask from inside his jacket. "Asgardian healing draught. Very potent. It'll keep the boy flying. I'm quite enjoying the death-defying spectacle!"
Before he could object, Harry had the flask thrust into his mouth and pure alcohol was running into his throat.
With Tony being a functioning alcoholic, Harry'd had many opportunities to surreptitiously indulge his curiosity, took one too-large gulp of scotch one time, and decided to revisit adult drinks when he was an adult. And this was exactly like that, only somehow much more potent. Defying all biology about alcohol uptake, he immediately got a buzz, and, to Fandral's credit, he barely registered that his arm hurt anymore.
"That's highly irregular," Hooch harrumphed. "Well?"
Harry flexed his arm and said, somehow without noticeable slurring, "I guess I can play."
She regarded him suspiciously for a moment and then shrugged. "Back in the air, in one minute at the whistle then."
Harry told the team, "Don't focus on protecting me. I'll just do laps and try to interrupt the Slytherins when I can. But if someone sees the snitch before I do, give me a whistle. I can barely see anything with the rain on my glasses."
"I can at least help with that," Angelina Johnson, one of the chasers, told him, and cast a spell that immediately caused water to stop sticking to his lenses.
"Magical Rain-X. Great!" Harry said.
"The whistle's aboot tae blow," Wood nodded. "We can still win this."
In hindsight, Harry couldn't remember much about the match after that. He knew he stuck to his plan, but seemed to be having trouble forming long-term memories. He remembered bits and pieces of frantic flying through the rain, pursued by the vicious bludger, trying to keep track of when it was time to catch the snitch or keep Malfoy from doing so, and finally seeing a glimmer of gold.
He blissfully couldn't remember the second impact with the bludger as he had to choose between catching the snitch and dodging. He certainly remembered being screaming in pain on the ground a few seconds later, somehow still holding the tiny golden golf ball in the hand of his shattered arm. His teammates and the crowd seemed very excited before he blacked out.
"I don't understand why they continue to play this stupid game," he heard Matron Pomfrey's voice as he came to in the dim light of the hospital wing. The elderly witch wore soothing blue robes, and kept her gray hair under what was functionally a nun's wimple.
"How bad is it?" Harry asked, newly sober, hung over, and regretting his choices.
"If you'd quit and come to me after the first fracture?" she asked, rhetorically. "You'd have been out of here in an hour. But with as many pieces as your arm's in from the second impact, you're going to spend a very uncomfortable night letting magic knit you back up."
"That's… honestly not that bad. Will I have problems with the arm after it's healed?" he checked.
"Not if you hold still while it finishes setting," she huffed. "Honestly, Midgardian students. Think I'm going to immobilize your arm in plaster for months? Maybe I should, to teach you a lesson, hmm?"
"To be fair," he objected, "Fandral gave me what he said was an Asgardian healing draught, but I think was just really strong booze, so I wasn't thinking too clearly."
"That… that man," she grumbled. "I suppose I should check you to make sure you've cleared all that out before starting you on potions."
Once he'd forced down several actual healing potions and had his arm splinted so he wouldn't move it overnight, Pomfrey allowed his friends to come in. The parade of congratulations from the quidditch team and recriminations from the study group was exhausting, combined with the medicine, so Harry found himself sleeping most of the afternoon and well into the evening.
He woke suddenly with a gasp of pain, as someone was prodding at his injured arm, and then a bony hand wrapped across his mouth to keep him from making noise. "Harry Potter is silent," a somewhat high-pitched man's voice insisted, with a strange accent.
Between the dim lighting of the hospital wing and lack of glasses, all Harry could make out was a pale face and dark eyes looming over him in the darkness. The hand tightened against his face, almost painfully, and Harry had to choke back the urge to scream.
"Good," the voice said, relaxing the grip again. It was less like the speaker was bad at speaking English, and more than he found the sounds of the language distasteful in his mouth. "Harry Potter came to Hogwarts, despite warnings. Why? Now he is injured and sees danger. Will he leave?" The hand was removed enough that Harry could speak, but clearly ready to clamp again if he tried to scream.
"You're one of the Dahvee?" Harry said, guessing this was the murderous elf again, though maybe it was another one that actually spoke English. The face nodded in a blur of what he assumed was agreement. "Why don't you want me here? Is it about the Chamber of Secrets?"
The elf's head again blurred slightly, almost in a tilt of confusion, but explained, "The Dahvee received contract for Harry Potter. We refused. Harry Potter is important to elves, for what he is destined to do. But we know this is merely part of dark dealings at Hogwarts. Harry Potter was safe on Midgard."
"You tried to kill Tony so I'd be stuck there," Harry suggested. "And then you gave the police my description at the train station." The elf didn't disagree, so he added, "Did you enchant the bludger to come after me today?"
"Elves have long mastered the arts of gravity and attractive forces. Altering the sporting device was but a child's work." He seemed very nonchalant about being able to undetectably alter enchanted items into dangerous weapons.
"Do you know what's happening at Hogwarts?" Harry asked. "Can you tell me who tried to hire you?"
The elf shook his head, "The Dahvee cannot betray an employer. It is much that we are working to save Harry Potter at all." Sighing, he withdrew a black blur that Harry suspected was one of those nonmetallic knives he'd tried to kill Tony with. "Harry Potter's injury is recovering. He will not leave, will he? Then he needs to take a greater wound, to stop him learning magic. Then he must return home."
Harry did scream, then, managing half a cry for help before the hand once again clamped down on his face and the elven mercenary tried to figure out where to stab him that wouldn't kill him but would cripple the boy beyond Matron Pomfrey's ability to repair.
In normal circumstances, that might not have been enough, but through very bad timing for the elf, Colin Creevey had also had the thought of making a late visit to Harry (possibly just to get a selfie with the unconscious boy). Colin hadn't made it. But his comatose body was, right then, being levitated into the hospital wing by Dumbledore and McGonagall.
Harry realized this as ferocious spellfire was suddenly coming from two directions and the elf had to let go and stop preparing to stab in order to dodge. To the assassin's credit, there weren't a lot of beings that could manage to dodge attacks from two of the most powerful wizards on Vanaheim (for all that, admittedly, they were getting on in years and their reflexes weren't what they once were). "He's a dark elf!" Harry yelled, hoping that would help his rescuers.
It seemed to mean something to Dumbledore, who began casting bright lights into the room, making it easier for Harry to see. And the Dahvee assassin also quickly realized who he was dealing with, and made the wise decision to throw himself out of a nearby window. Harry had just gotten his glasses on and grabbed his wand, but narrowly missed the escaping elf with an energy whip, largely due to the pain of moving his still-healing arm. He heard the assassin make some kind of acrobatic roll on the lawn outside and begin sprinting into the night.
"Minerva," Dumbledore ordered, "see to the boys. I'll adjust the wards and contact Ronan's guard and Hogsmeade's leaders. I shall return soon." With that, he swept out of the room.
"Even in the hospital wing, Potter," McGonagall tutted as Matron Pomfrey finally staggered from her sleeping room, without even her wimple on. "Poppy, Mr. Potter was just attacked by some kind of dark elf with a knife and needs checking, and we have another victim of… well," she looked at Harry and shrugged, "of whatever attacked Mrs. Norris." With that, she retrieved the small body that they'd set down before attacking, levitating Colin into the room.
"Oh, no, is that Colin?" Harry asked. "Why was he out… was he coming to visit me?"
"Very possibly," McGonagall admitted. "We shall have to stress that curfew is important for more reasons than our own intolerance of shenanigans."
As Pomfrey began scanning him, Harry told her, "I don't think he did anything more than grab my face to keep me quiet. He was going to try to cripple me so badly I'd have to leave Hogwarts."
"Only you, Mr. Potter," Pomfrey shook her head. "You haven't upset your arm too badly, and seem otherwise fine."
"Is that Colin's camera?" Harry asked, as McGonagall placed the object on the table next to the bed she'd floated the comatose boy into. "Do you think he got a picture of the monster?"
"It was near his face," the rector admitted. She started to reach over to unclasp the back of the old SLR.
"Wait!" Harry warned her. Colin had been talking at him nonstop about subjects including film photography for months, and as annoying as he found the boy, he'd been interested in the science of it. "You have to open it in a pitch black room or wind the canister back up before you open it, or it will ruin the film."
"Hmm," McGonagall gave him a nod, "Two points for quick thinking and scientific knowledge, Potter. I don't believe we have the facilities to develop this kind of photograph locally."
"If we can get it rolled up safely, I could send it to my aunt with Hedwig," he offered. "I bet she knows places that can still develop film." He thought about it for another second, "And that she can explain the pictures are from a movie set or something, and make them sign NDAs, in case he got anything obviously magical."
"Well, I don't know what an indieay is, Potter, but otherwise that sounds reasonable," she allowed. Pomfrey had been checking over Colin while they talked, "How is he, Poppy?"
"Same as the cat, I'm afraid," the matron explained, sadly. "It's like something attacked his spirit but left his body intact. I hope they'll recover with all their faculties intact. Severus has had some good ideas about using a mandrake restorative draught, but that needs fresh mandrakes and they're only ready in the spring."
The rector sighed again, her stoic mien almost breaking at the thought of one of her charges in a coma for months, possibly never to recover fully. She placed a trembling hand on Colin's shoulder, and glanced at Harry, realizing that another of her lions had almost been crippled somewhere that should be perfectly safe (and had been seriously injured playing a game). All she said, however, was, "Get some rest, Potter. I'm sure Albus will want to debrief you in the morning."
For all that he thought he wouldn't be able to sleep, as soon as Dumbledore's illumination spells began to expire and his adrenaline crash happened, he was out like those same magical lights.
