As she kneels there, Arry watches as a tiny, featherless, version of the avian crawls out of the pile of ash. Carefully cleaning the ash away from it with a talon, she studies it intently as it squarks angrily at her. With a thought, she transforms and climbs back into her ovipositor. There she starts laying a very special adoption egg. As clearly the standard face hugger would swallow the small avian, that can survive having its head bitten off. Arry can see that it is growing rapidly, so she's not so worried about how small she makes it. As she finishes, raggedy feathers are starting to grow in, so she quickly climbs back down and returns to her humanoid form. Reaching into the egg, she feels the face hugger wrap itself around a finger before she pulls it out.
Fawkes can't believe it, she was doing a favour for her human by locating the child he misplaced 10 years ago. When she appeared, something killed her before she could even register her location. Unexpected burnings were always so uncomfortable. Then whatever it was stares at her from inches away. Well, it looks human so it could be the child, though she thought they grew slower than that. Then it grows into a monster and climbs up some awful creature before settling itself on top of it. Not liking the feeling she's getting, Fawkes tries to grow faster, to get to the point she can flame away. Two burnings in one day would be worth it, and, when she's recovered, she can have a loud word with her human. Oh, she thinks weakly, it lays eggs, why would it suddenly be laying eggs?
"No, no, no no no no, no. There's no way you're bring that thing anywhere close to me. Keep away or I'll mmmmph."
Weakly she tries to burn whatever it is, but it just holds onto her head harder, so she goes limp, very aware that she is at her most vulnerable at this moment in time. Whatever parasite she's been implanted with, can be burnt out later, she just has to survive to later. It detaches not too long later, and she coughs up the tube. Her stomach is bloated with whatever it left behind, but she can't cough it out. Tiredly she fights to say awake so that she can flame out as soon as she's recovered enough. It's a few hours later that she realises with a panic that the thing is getting smaller and part of her. The thing watches her in interest as she weakly bursts into flame, to no avail. It's still too early for another burning, and that also means she can't use the flame to travel. No longer having the energy to stay awake, she falls asleep in the puddle of ash.
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As Fawkes wakes up to the sound of a room full of people talking loudly to each other, she calls "Would you shut up, some of us are recovering from an unexpected burning day."
As everyone shuts up she lays her head down on the side of the nest, and then opens her eyes in alarm. Someone has wrapped some clothing into a nest and placed her in it. What becomes more alarming is the fact she's in a room on her own.
"I'm glad to see you're awake. I'm Arry, your new Queen. Who are you?"
"I'm Ptiana though my human calls me Fawkes."
"Hello Ptiana, why did you appear in my laying chamber?"
Ptiana can't help herself as she answers, "I was doing a favour for my human, he lost a male child 10 years ago. I followed the magic from one of his devices. It was obviously incorrect my Queen." - Where did that come from? – "What has happened to me? Why am I sharing so much?"
"You're part of my hive now, and I'm your Queen." Ptiana grumps as Arry obviously thinks that explains everything. In fairness, it probably does.
Arry continues, "I hope you don't mind, we moved you from your burnt pile, as you were rather small and I didn't want you to be stepped on accidentally."
Ptiana suddenly realises something, "How comes you can understand me?"
Arry sounds confused, "You're part of the hive, that means your memories are part of the hive too."
T'o-Ba'sall says, "Arry, you're forgetting that it takes longer to access the memories than it does to become part of the hive."
Ptiana squawks indignantly as she exclaims, "Why do I know your name T'o-Ba'sall?"
Sounding cheerful, Arry says, "That would be the accessing memories part of the hive."
Panicking, Ptiana flames back to her comfortable perch in the room her human uses. The voices all mute with the distance, until suddenly her Queen is right there.
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Albus sits at his desk, doing paperwork to take his mind off the fact that Minerva will be sending out the school letters in the next few days, and he still doesn't know where Harry is, only that he's alive, safe, and happy. If those enchantments had failed as well, he'd have spent more effort trying to find the child before now. However, he reasoned that if Harry couldn't be found with some effort on his part, then the Dark Lord's followers certainly wouldn't be able to find him. Fawkes should have found him, but the still empty perch says he probably ran into some difficulty, or a plum tree. Fawkes reappears on his perch and ruffles his feathers irritatedly. Probably difficulty then.
"Fawkes, I'm glad to see you're safe." Putting his quill down, Albus stands from his desk and is walking around it when something else flames in. Whatever it is, it fills most of the room, and has wicked looking talons on its hands and feet. With instincts honed through war, even if they are slightly atrophied, Albus pulls his wand and fires a brace of spells designed to put down a dragon. Each of them pierces it's hide, and he is bringing his hand around to send another brace, when he loses feeling in his hand and legs. It also feels like he's been punched and it's hard to breathe. He looks down stupidly to see the creatures tail protruding from his chest, as it lifts him up from the floor. How did he not notice the tail before? There's a sucking sound as the creature shrinks down into a young woman, who is holding her side with a taloned hand.
"What do you mean I have to heal him? Ptiana, does it look like I have tear ducts? Oh, fine, I have something that will help but you'll have to find someone we can explain the situation to."
Albus wonders why the young woman was using four different languages while talking, at least he thinks it's four. Curiously he touches the hole in his chest wondering why it doesn't hurt more. The young woman picks him up surprisingly easily, and flames form around them. Is she a new species of phoenix? When the flames clear, she puts him in a coffin, and he weakly raises his hands to stop the lid from closing. As the coffin fills with water, his last thought is of Tom's return and the missing Harry Potter.
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Ptiana screeches loudly in frustration, how is she supposed to find someone to explain things to. She can't exactly talk. That's not true, but only Arry can understand her. Oh, hell, she can't escape her Queen as obviously she's learnt to flame, so she might as well share the pain. She knows just the annoying cat to do it to too. Trying to tell her human not to keep feeding her those candied fruits indeed. Flaming back to the hive, she locates the eggs and carefully picks out an adoption egg.
"Hey Ptiana, have you found someone?"
"Yes my Queen, however they can't understand us. I'm taking an adoption egg so that we can talk to them."
"Well, I've put your human into a regeneration tank. It's Skarli design, but at least they're bipedal. The machine currently thinks it will take a full 2 cycles to finish healing him. Wow, your form of teleportation is much better than the method I came up with. Anyway, take this one, it should knock your human out so they don't try to kill anyone while it's working. I designed it for small children when we get to pirate raids too late, or we find a hive attacking a colony and there are children there."
"Thank you my Queen."
"You can just call me Arry like everyone else does. Of course, you have to accept the hive before your new instincts will allow that."
"Yes, my, Queen." Ptiana grinds out before flaming out with the egg.
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Minerva looks up from her transfiguration research as Fawkes flames in with a leathery egg.
"What's this then? Did Albus send it?"
Fawkes just trills at her in his mocking way. She casts a couple of spells at it to see if it was some new puzzle she needed to figure out, and is surprised when it comes back as mundane. She stands up to look at it more closely and sees four flaps on the top open up.
"Fawkes, I really think this should have been taken to Grubby urk." Whatever she was going to say next is cut off, as a face hugger leaps out and forces its ovipositor down her throat, at the same time it's tail wraps around her throat. She has enough time to attempt a single spell before the world goes dark.
A few hours later she's awakened by the sound of voices. As she opens her eyes, she finds herself lying on a hard bed in a spartan metal room. Her wand is on a desk that's too tall to be for sitting at, and too short to be stood at. A chair tucked under the table is similarly mis-proportioned, and has 4 armrests for some reason. What can only be described as a monster, pokes its head into her room, and she freezes instinctively. The monster turns and leaves quickly, and she hears a child shouting "She's awake, she's awake."
Standing up off the bed, she winces as she catches her ankle, because the bed is slightly higher than expected. Retrieving her wand, she conjures a goblet of water to soothe her aching throat. Now that she's standing, the fact that everything is uncomfortably too large is even more apparent than it was. With nowhere else to go, she makes her way through the doorway. Outside the room, the corridors are all covered in some sort of resin, putting her on guard. She jumps and whirls around when someone says, "Wait right there, I'm just coming to find you. Please don't fire any spells, our instincts are a little trigger happy."
Still not seeing anyone, Minerva quite deliberately puts her wand in its wrist holster and braces herself. What she sees doesn't match expectations in any way, as a naked young woman with a tail and claws, blood red hair, and killing curse green eyes, comes around the corner. Her arms and legs have black leathery skin that gives way to human like skin on her torso and head.
She lifts a clawed hand and waves, "Hi, I'm Arry, queen of our hive. I asked Ptiana to find someone we can explain what happened to the human I accidentally skewered with my tail. If you follow me I'll take you to see, him? Is him the right word?"
"Before we go anywhere, where are your clothes?"
"I don't normally need them. However, when I appeared in my normal form the human fired at me, leading to his skewering. So I figured this would be less likely to lead to bloodshed."
Minerva pulls all of her experience, in unexpected situations, around her like a shield as she responds, "That is, considerate, of you."
"Anyway, this way. Oh, and nobody that you see here will harm you. You're part of the hive now."
As she follows Arry, Minerva misses a step with that last sentence, "I'm a what of the what now?"
"You're part of the hive. Ptiana decided that it was the only way that you'd be able to understand us."
"Who?"
"You'll meet her in a moment, as she's watching over her human."
True enough, after a few minutes of walking through an alien environment, she is led into a room with a row of metal coffins, where Fawkes is perched on one.
"Fawkes! You're here."
"I'm not Fawkes you stupid human. My name is Ptiana, as I keep telling people. I'm also female!"
"What?!"
"You can understand me! Happy days. This is my, and now your, Queen, Arry. My human sent me to find a child he lost, and I appeared in front of her. She followed me back to him and he attacked her, thinking her a monster. Admittedly she is a monster, but she's not a needlessly aggressive monster."
"Oi! I resemble that remark, and good on you being able to make it now."
Minerva staggers at the vehemence in the phoenixes tone, "I'm sorry, I didn't know."
"Of course you didn't, you never even questioned it. Just like you never question anything my human does. Not that he helped matters, never actually asking anyone else except the stinky human if their plans are ok. As if the stinky human as any sort of good judgment after joining the snake human. While I'm at it, what do you have against me eating those sugary fruits? I'm a phoenix! I don't need to eat, I only do it for pleasure. I get reborn every few years, which clears out anything that might have been bad for me. I can't wait until you have your own first burning day. Oh, and you can flame back to the nest on your own. I'm going to raid the sugared lemons now."
Once Ptiana flames out, Arry turns to Minerva, "I guess she had a few unresolved issues."
"I, uh, had no idea." – Something the phoenix said trickles through her mind – "Does the name Potter mean anything to you?"
"Eh, it's familiar somehow."
Wracking her brain for any sort of idea, she tries to remember that night. Hagrid had brought Harry on Sirius' motorcycle, in a moses basket. Then Albus had tucked the letter into the blue blanket that covered the baby. "Accio baby blanket!"
"Hey, what's that?"
"Dunno, let's chase it."
*fun* *chase*
A moment later, a filthy blanket with the odd blue spot, where a fold had protected it from the grime that accumulated, flies through the door, followed by a few monsters, one humanoid with 4 arms, another arachnoid with 3 fingers on the end of two of it's legs. Finally a couple of pitch black creatures with elongated heads, vicious looking claws, and a sharp barbed tail. Following shortly behind them is a massive humanoid with a hideous maw and beady little eyes. They proceed to crowd around her, the ones with hands picking at her robes.
"Who's this? What's she wearing? Why does she smell strange? Did she bring food? *hive mate*"
"Children, you're being disrespectful."
The humanoid and arachnoid both jump back as though they've been bitten. The arachnoid lowers itself to the floor, "This one is sorry, this one is known as Krizror. Would that one be willing to share their name?"
The other one puts all four arms down by their side and bows, "I'm sorry, we should have introduced ourselves. I am Brugroch."
The break and introductions are enough for Minerva to gather her wits, though the monsters rubbing their heads against her thighs aren't helping, "I am Minerva McGonagall. Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry."
"What's a school?" "What's witchcraft?"
"A school is a place where children go to be taught how to do the things that adults know how to do. Witchcraft is magic involving potions and rituals, while wizardry is magic involving spells and enchantments."
"Children, Minva will be able to talk later ok?"
"Awww."
The two that backed off leave, while the others keep rubbing their heads against her. Deliberately raising her wand and enunciating the spell, she says "Scourgify". All of the dirt and grime flake off of the blanket, revealing a golden 'Harry' embroidered in a corner.
She turns to Arry, tears in her eyes, "You are, were, Harry Potter. I knitted this blanket for you when you were a baby. Can I hug you?"
Arry looks at her strangely, "What's a hug?"
"I don't know how to describe it, but it's gentle."
"Ok, go ahead."
Minerva steps up to Arry and pulls her into a gentle hug, just how tall Arry is, becoming apparent by the fact the top of her head only just reaches Arry's chin. "I'm so sorry I never looked for you. I trusted Albus when he said that you were safe and happy."
Awkwardly, Arry returns the hug, "I was safe and happy, well mostly safe. I have my children."
"You should have been raised in a loving household, not taking on so much responsibility so young."
"I wasn't, and instead I have seen so many amazing things, helped people, and even built up a good trophy collection. We can talk about my life later. At the moment, you need to know that the healing chamber says that the old human will be healed in 2 cycles."
Minerva looks up at Arry's face, "What happened?"
"Ptiana ran away so I followed her, when I arrived the old human shot me three times in the side. Reflexively I speared him with my tail and, well, you can see if you look through the window there. Ptiana demanded that I fix him, so I brought him here, and told her to find someone we could explain the situation to."
Minerva is surprised at how well she's taking this news, "I see. How long did you say it would take him to heal?"
"2 cycles."
"I have no idea how long that is."
"There's 360 ticks to a rest period, 360 rest periods to a cycle."
"I see, I think. You wouldn't know how long that is on Earth?"
"Dirtside it depends on the rotation of the planet."
"Earth is the name of our planet."
"You call your planet Dirt?"
"Some people call it Gaia?"
"I'm going to need a little more than that." – Arry walks over to a console on the wall and presses a few icons – "What colour is the star?"
"Erm, yellow I think."
"How many planets does it have?"
"9?"
"How many gas giants?"
"3 or 4, Jupiter has a large red spot, and Saturn has rings."
"Ok, which planet starting from the star do you live on?"
"The third one."
"Does it have any distinctive features?"
"A large moon?"
"I have 4 possibilities in this galaxy, do you recognise any of these?"
"That one."
"I see, it has been surveyed, and it apparently is part of a hunting preserve for the Yautja. There are currently debates about listing it as a developing world, after the last failed hunt showed significant technological development, that may preclude remaining unnoticed within 30 cycles. An average rotation of the planet is 4 ticks longer than a Rest Period."
Finally, tears prick Minerva's eyes as she walks over to the window indicated, and looks at her mentors face and the gaping wound in his chest. It takes her a moment, but she notices that the tiny arms inside are removing his beard and hair as well as working on the hole. Stepping back sharply she exclaims, "What are they doing to his hair?"
Arry glances over from the console, "Oh, the machines are fixing any deformities. It's a Skarli design healing pod, Brugroch was one before we rescued him from a Hive, the one with 4 arms. They don't have body hair."
"You have to get him out of there."
"He doesn't have a heart, can you fix that?"
"Ah, I don't know."
"Could you get him to a human that can fix it before he dies?"
Minerva's shoulders slump, "No. I see, I'll need to go back and tell people that he's currently in a healing sleep. How do I get back?"
Arry shrugs, "The same way Ptiana did. Give it a couple of rest cycles and your connection to the hive should firm up enough for you to understand how to do it."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's a natural ability isn't it. Like being able to control your tail and talons when they grow in. It would be a little awkward if you disembowelled yourself accidentally while scratching an itch, or sliced your foot off with your tail because you forgot where it was."
Minerva just stares at Arry in horror.