A/N: Well, plenty of people noticed Harry's ineptitude when it comes to history lessons in the last chapter, but no one seems to have remembered that Earth's Stargate has an iris, myself included. So Harry sort of committed suicide at the end of the last chapter, at least in the initial upload. I've fixed that issue (Harry now sent a patronus through the gate before him, if you don't feel like opening the previous chapter to check) but as for the timeline mishap…well, I've decided that it's plausible that Harry would have simply gotten the dates wrong. He's not a history buff, after all, and I'm just going to assume that Harry made the same mistake I did; he listened to Daniel's theory that Atlantis left the Milky Way "somewhere between 5 and 10 million years ago," and then decided that Atlantis has been submerged and abandoned for that whole time without putting any more thought into it. Harry at least has the excuse that he was busy synthesizing potentia, I was just an inattentive author who didn't bother to check the timeline.

And for those of you sharp-eyed readers who noticed that Daniel was present for one of the occasions where Harry claimed that Altantis's shield had been holding for 10 million years (something else I overlooked for far longer than I should have) I will point out that right now no one in the story actually knows when Atlantis submerged itself, or exactly why, only that it was submerged long enough ago that it was almost out of power. So the story I'm going with is that Daniel assumed that Harry knew what he was talking about, and let the point pass since it wasn't really important to that conversation anyway. It even makes sense! Rest assured though, I'm not changing canon. Harry will have figured out his mistake off-screen, and will be using the correct numbers in this chapter.

And now, back to your (ir)regularly scheduled reading.

Harry stepped out of the Earth Stargate, still grinning to himself over his little bit of mischief. Harry gave a casual wave to the twitchy marines who were nervously pointing their weapons at him and nodded to Sheppard, who stood out in his darker Air Force uniform.

Then, still feeling mischievous, he apparated into the briefing room, consciously dampening the crack upon arrival. To his dismay, however, the room was empty. Harry ran a quick legilimentic scan of the base and found that most of the people he was looking for were in the control room now, and more than a little irritated with him. With hardly a thought, he apparated into their midst.

"Sorry about that," he said, ignoring the many startled reactions to his sudden appearance, "I was trying to surprise you all, but I seem to have landed in the wrong room."

O'Neill was the first to recover. "What the hell are you doing, Potter?" he demanded.

Harry sheepishly scratched the back of his head. "I…might have been in a playful mood. Sorry about that, it's just that the city's Artificial Intelligence was so stuffy I just couldn't resist pranking her on my way out."

"Did you say…artificial intelligence?" Rodney asked, picking himself up off of the floor. Apparently Harry's arrival had startled him so badly that he actually fell over.

"I did," Harry said. "She's a bit pretentious though, I'm not sure you folks will like her all that much. The only reason she was kind of okay with me was because I acted like I'm a lot more of a prudish pacifist than I really am. I get the feeling that the Alterans, and by extension their AI, greatly disapproved of the sort of warfare planets like Earth get involved in."

"What do you mean by that?" Dr. Weir asked.

Harry shrugged. "It's just a feeling, born from long experience with technologically advanced races. They look at you the same way you'd look at the 12th century Mongols: utterly barbaric in pretty much every way, but completely non-threatening on a technological level. Of course, they tend to forget that their ancestors were like that once, just like they forget that a Mongol born into their civilization would be basically indistinguishable from the rest of them. Well, unless the race you're dealing with isn't human, but that's a surface-level difference. It's all just a matter of context, really."

There was a pause as Harry let everyone digest that.

"Fortunately," Harry said, "I convinced her that your intentions are noble enough that she's willing to give you all a shot at impressing her. But…" he glanced at O'Neill, "it would probably be a good idea to brief the Marines about etiquette or something similar. They're used to violence being pretty much the only option when diplomacy fails, but races like the Alterans are used to stunning potential threats and containing them so securely that violence doesn't really even enter into the equation barring exceptionally extreme circumstances. Bridging the two philosophies is…complicated, in my experience."

O'Neill considered that. Then the general turned to Weir. "Well Doctor, you are in charge of this whole thing. Would you like to do the honors?"

Everyone, Harry included, stared at O'Neill in disbelief.

"What?" The man asked. "I've been around Daniel long enough to realize that sometimes his wishy-washy nonsense is…not nonsense."

Harry's opinion of O'Neill rose significantly at that admission. Getting a read on the weathered military man was difficult, but underneath all that leathery exterior was a straightforward, decent person. Probably.

"Well…" Weir floundered, "I suppose I could give the marine escort a bit of a talking to about diplomacy, but I feel like it would mean a lot more coming from someone like you, General. In my experience, military men listen best to other military men."

Harry considered that, and then threw his own opinion into the mix. "Well, no one said that it has to be one or the other. General O'Neill could go first, say that everyone ought to listen to Dr. Weir and summarize his own position on the matter, and then Dr. Weir could lend her more eloquent disposition to the matter to clarify the finer points."

In the pause that followed, a quiet voice spoke up from outside the conversation. "Um…now might be a good time, too," Siler said, "the Marines in the gate room are looking a bit jumpy after Harry's…disappearing act."

Whoops. "Sorry about that," Harry offered, "my dad was a prankster, and I just…can't help myself sometimes. Life would be boring without a little fun, you know?"

O'Neill frowned at Harry, but Weir was either better at hiding her feelings or didn't care as much. "Well," she said, "shall we, General?"

As the two left to address the marines, Harry stayed in the control and cast a few diagnostic charms on the potentia. He wanted to see just how much an intergalactic trip would drain an alteran power cell. By his calculations an intergalactic trip took a frankly ludicrous amount of power. And yet, according to his charms, the potentia's entropy had only increased by a tiny fraction. At this rate, it would take several thousand intergalactic wormholes to fully drain just one potentia. "Incredible."

"What's incredible?" Rodney asked.

"The potentia," Harry said, belatedly realizing he'd spoken aloud. "It opened a wormhole connection that bridged 3 million light years, and it's barely drained at all. I've never seen anything like it, and that's saying something."

"Well, it was designed by the ancients," Rodney said matter-of-factly. "It makes sense that it would be more advanced than anything you've ever seen, they were practically demigods."

Harry chuckled. "Rodney, I have personally seen and walked around on a space station that was bigger than Earth's moon, capable of both faster than light and conventional travel. It had a spherical power reactor with a diameter of over…10 miles, by your measurements, and this tiny little glowing gadget the size of my forearm outdoes it as easily as a nuclear reactor would outperform a AAA battery."

Rodney's eye widened. "A space station…bigger than the moon? How did it keep from collapsing under its own gravitational field?"

"Well, for one, the races that built it had long since mastered gravitational manipulation, so that wasn't too much of an issue. But they also had to keep the whole thing together during sublight acceleration maneuvers, and they did that by making it out of materials that are sturdier than you likely realize is even possible, and energizing those materials in…unique ways that increased their structural integrity even further. I actually thought those energy fields were magical in nature, at first, because a similar phenomenon is possible with magic, but it turned out they were purely technological."

"That's just…"

"Amazing, yes. And yet it still pales in comparison to this," Harry said, indicating the potentia. "Honestly, it's pretty humbling. All that power, and yet you could fit it in a bloody purse."

...

Several minutes earlier

Sheppard looked around nervously. Ever since Harry's disappearing act, the Colonel overseeing the marines had kept all of the men on high alert, even though Harry was a known ally and almost definitely not still in the room. Sheppard could already tell that he wouldn't get along with the man, which didn't bode well for their time together in Atlantis. Hopefully there would at least be someone in the chain of command he could see eye to eye with; otherwise this assignment was liable to end in the same bureaucratic fashion as his time in Afghanistan.

He was distracted from his thoughts when one of the doors to the room opened and General O'Neill walked in, followed by Dr. Weir.

"At ease, men," the general said before the colonel could bark any orders, "our resident wizard was just being mischievous. I've had a talk with him about it, but he brought up some points of his own that need to be addressed." He looked around at the marines, then turned to the colonel. "This isn't the whole Atlantis contingent, is it?"

"No, sir."

"Call them in then, Colonel. We need to have a talk about how things are going to work in Atlantis."

"Sir?" the colonel asked.

The general waved a hand, dismissing the implied question. "I'll give you a full briefing later, Colonel, and it's best that we wait for the rest of your men to get here so that I don't have to repeat myself."

Well that was interesting. Sheppard was definitely starting to like General O'Neill a lot more than he liked the marine colonel. If he had a problem, maybe he'd be able to appeal up the chain of command.

Before long, the rest of the marines arrived, and the general walked up the ramp leading to the gate before turning to address them. Dr. Weir went with him, which struck Sheppard as odd, but he wasn't going to say anything.

"All right fellas, let's make one thing clear," the general began. "I'm your ultimate commanding officer on this assignment, technically. But you've all been on long distance assignments before, so you know that in reality, you'll be answering to someone much closer to home. You probably expected that someone to be Colonel Sumner here." He gestured to the colonel, who didn't look pleased at the implication that he wouldn't be in command. "To a certain extent, you're right about that, Colonel Sumner will have command over all military operations you undergo. But, and this is an important but, Dr. Weir is going to be in charge of this expedition. You are a security force sent to escort a scientific mission, do you understand?"

"SIR, YES SIR!" the men all shouted in unison. Even Sheppard joined in. General O'Neill knew how to make his point, even if he was almost unbelievably casual about it.

"Good," the general said. "Now, since Dr. Weir is going to be the one who has the authority to tell you when you are and are not needed, we've decided it's best that she say a few words of her own, to make sure that there are no misconceptions down the line." He stepped back, ceding the floor to Dr. Weir.

"Thank you, General," she said, before turning to face the men. She paused for a moment, seeming to consider her words before opening her speech. "I understand that the military, no matter which branch, has a rather negative opinion of civilian oversight. I dealt with exactly this issue during my brief stint in command of this very facility, so I certainly understand the objections many of you are surely thinking right now. But let me make one thing clear. This whole expedition, yourselves included, is representing both the governments supporting it and the planet as a whole, whether you realize it or not. A military presence is being sent primarily as a precautionary measure, and I expect you all to act accordingly. We cannot afford to have the first glimpse of humanity that an alien power sees be hostile military action. There are indeed races out among the stars who would attack us either way, such as the Goa'uld, but we shouldn't take behavior like that for granted. I will not hesitate to authorize the use of force if we meet races like that, but you must also understand that, as a diplomat, my duty is to ensure that we, the emissaries of humanity, don't get caught up in an unnecessary war against yet another alien power we have very little hope of defeating." Dr. Weir paused, letting that sink in.

"I'm not trying to be your enemy here," she said simply, "I'm trying to work with you to ensure that the real enemies are dealt with, and that potential allies aren't put off by what they might see as aggressive tendencies. Defensive tactics, after all, can get quite aggressive at times. So, can we all agree to work together moving forward?"

The silence in the room was palpable. None of the men said anything, but Sheppard could tell that some of them were on the edge of objecting.

"The woman asked you a question, marines!" General O'Neill barked.

"YES SIR," they all shouted instinctively.

"That's more like it," the general said. "This is your commanding officer, I don't care if she doesn't have stripes. I expect you to treat her accordingly, do you understand me?"

"YES SIR!"

"Good."

Well, Sheppard thought to himself, at least that meant he wouldn't have to deal with the Colonel Sumner quite as much. Probably.

One week later

Harry stared at Rodney. Rodney paced back and forth in the wizard's laboratory, clearly nervous.

"How am I going to go to the bathroom?" the man fretted. "God, I thought this thing was so cool, I didn't even think that it might trap me!"

"Yes, a bit of caution before activating a highly advanced 10,000 year old artifact might have been in order," Harry observed mildly.

"What?" Rodney spun, an accusing finger pointing at Harry, "You're acting like you don't even care!"

Harry smiled. "Rodney, you got yourself into this mess. You injected yourself with a gene-altering serum with the hope that you would be able to interact with technology that is, as they say, light-years ahead of anything you've ever worked with before, even including the Milky Way Stargates. What did you expect to happen?"

"Well…" Rodney trailed off.

"Part of the reason Lantis still refuses to show herself to you is the simple fact that things like this are still bound to happen around such a primitive expedition. I don't care how qualified you think you are, Rodney, you need to act a lot more carefully in the city that predates your entire civilization by several million years. Now, where exactly did you find the forcefield emitter?"

"In one of the labs."

"Which lab, exactly? This is important."

Rodney looked thoughtful. "I could take you there, if you want."

Harry shook his head. "That won't be necessary. What I need to know is where in the city the lab is located. If that was an experimental device, you're in a lot more trouble than if it was a refined mass-production model."

"Oh," Rodney said, "it was on the north pier, not too far from the nearest transporter to the center."

"So it was a mass-production model, then. That's the factory area, in a manner of speaking. Alright then, I need you to sit down and relax." Harry gestured to the area in front of Rodney, conjuring a comfortable armchair.

"And how's this supposed to help?" Rodney asked miserably, collapsing into the chair. Harry noted idly that the forcefield didn't keep Rodney from touching the chair.

"Alteran technology operates by mental command, remember? If you don't feel safe, it probably won't listen when you tell it to turn off. So I need you to relax and focus on something that makes you feel safe."

Rodney looked skeptical, but closed his eyes and relaxed into the chair. Harry surreptitiously shot a calming charm and then a cheering charm at the man, and thankfully the forcefield didn't deflect either one. A few moments later, the green device on Rodney's chest stopped glowing and fell off. Harry quickly summoned it to his hand, examining it with a practiced eye.

"Yes, definitely a mass-production model. Compact power cell, and it would have run out of power…oh dear. It would have lasted a few years, unless you put it under significant stress. Do you see now why I told you to be careful with this stuff?"

Rodney nodded sheepishly.

"Good. Now I'm going to keep this, to make sure that it won't activate by accident again. You, keep your nose out of trouble. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Harry." Rodney looked sufficiently chastised. It was amusing how closely a grown man could resemble a toddler who'd been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Harry shook his head as he watched the man leave his room. They hadn't even been in Atlantis for a week and Rodney had already found a way to get into trouble.

"They are so careless. I have half a mind to throw them out of this city, back to their homeworld where they at least can't destroy the legacy of my creators."

Harry turned to Lantis's avatar, which had just appeared behind him. "But you won't," he said confidently, "because they need every advantage they can get in their fight against Anubis. They might have destroyed his ship, but if your suspicions are correct, that didn't kill the being himself. And Anubis is just as much your enemy as theirs."

"I still disagree with your laissez-faire attitude toward these primitives!"

Harry smirked. "I was just as primitive as they were, once. I got better. They can too, if you just give them time."

"How much time?" Lantis asked pointedly, "The pirasuti will wake in less than 50 of your years, and they will not suffer any humans wandering around with technology as advanced as what these primitives have brought with them, let alone anything they may take from my city."

Harry waved a hand dismissively. "Don't worry about these parasites of yours. If humanity has taught me anything over the years, it's to never, ever count them out of a fight. They'll be defending the most useful asset they've ever acquired, as well as the only viable path back to their homeworld. They'll fight to defend this city just as fiercely as your ancestors did. Perhaps even more fiercely, because we primitive humans tend to remember more about the realities of war than a race that was so enlightened that they literally ascended into godhood."

Lantis looked skeptical. "And will they understand the forces they attempt to control? The forces they're trying to fight?"

"We're nothing if not quick learners, Lantis. It only took me 500 years to get to where I am today. How long did it take the Alterans?"

The avatar pursed her lips. "Very well then, Harry Potter. I will trust you, for now. But understand that I will not so much as speak to these primitives until they show proof that they are worthy of the legacy my creators left behind." And with that, her avatar once again faded from sight.

Harry chuckled, knowing full well that she could still hear him. "You're such a drama queen, Lantis. You don't have to get your circuits in such a twist, they're just curious and very, very new at this." And it wasn't like she would stay completely out of events, either. Something told him that if push came to shove, she would find herself unable to keep from protecting her creators' descendants. Indirectly, if nothing else.

...

Amusingly, Harry's prediction came true not three hours later, when Lantis materialized in his laboratory looking slightly upset.

"Harry, you have to stop them!"

Harry put down the shield device he'd been examining. Curiously, its circuits essentially looked like a very advanced shield charm he'd learned after leaving Hogwarts, with power from the internal cell running through them to project a semi-permeable force field that let non-threats in, so long as they were subconsciously whitelisted by the wearer.

"What's got you up in arms this time, Lantis?" Harry asked patiently.

"The primitives are going to attempt to rescue one of my creator's ships, a ship they wouldn't even know about if you hadn't fully reactivated my long-range scanners. Harry, they're going to get themselves killed! The pirasuti will no doubt have detected the ship as well, and if your expedition leads them back here, all will be lost!"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Yes, Lantis, that would be suitably dramatic, wouldn't it?" Pausing to consider possible outcomes, Harry sat on a nearby stool. "Tell me about this ship. Why does Weir want to rescue it? Surely the crew isn't still alive after all this time. For that matter, how did it even survive the war?"

Lantis hesitated. "The ship was on a stealth mission and thought lost during the war. Presumably something went wrong while they were in transit, and neither we nor the pirasuti ever found the ship. As for the crew…they may yet live. Vessels of that class came equipped with enough stasis pods to sustain the crew almost indefinitely. My records indicate that this particular vessel was stranded late in the war, well over 10,000 of your years ago, but many of the crew could still be alive in stasis. Their bodies would have aged a great deal even while suspended, but their minds should have remained quite healthy."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "And you let the 'primitive tech monkeys' figure this out?"

"Of course not! They seem more interested in seizing the vessel for themselves. Some are even suggesting that it could be used as a weapon in their wars!"

Harry smirked. "And why not? Finders, keepers, as the saying goes. Even if we do manage to salvage the vessel, it doesn't sound like the crew will be in the best shape to actually operate it. Hell, even with the best stasis technology I've ever seen, the crew would be on the verge of death after all that time."

Lantis stared at him, clearly disgusted. "You are no better than they are. Thinking only of your own problems even though you know the threat that permeates this entire galaxy."

"Well, yes, about that," Harry said carefully, "I don't think these pirasuti are actually all that threatening. By your account, they're basically peaceful farmers who just so happen to feed on human life force. They're hardly an interstellar empire, even if they do occupy most of the inhabitable systems in a dwarf galaxy."

"These 'peaceful farmers' wiped out the majority of my creators, Harry. They are savages and parasites who have terrorized this galaxy for 500 generations unchallenged-"

"And that means they've also likely grown complacent in the absence of any real threats to their way of life," Harry interjected. "If you ignore the details of their methods, they're nothing more than farmers, carefully culling and tending to their flock. It's barbaric, but only because they're culling sapient beings. Surely your creators weren't so peace-drunk that they condemned carnivores for their diet?"

Lantis sniffed haughtily. "Your metaphor lacks meaning. The pirasuti are not animals, and they should not be judged in the same way as one would judge a mindless beast."

"You're honestly telling me that the alterans never encountered a sapient race of carnivores?" Harry asked incredulously. Lantis pointedly refused to answer. "It's the same principal, at the end of the day. The circle of life, the predators consuming their prey, and while the food sometimes going along with things because it doesn't know better, it also sometimes fighting back in doomed rebellion."

"Surely you don't condone the atrocities the pirasuti have committed!"

Harry sighed. "Well, no, of course not. The livestock never much likes the people who run the slaughterhouse. I'm just used to having to take a step back and look at the whole situation for what it really is. Vampiric species exist all across the multiverse, and rarely do they limit themselves entirely to 'lesser' species of non-sentient beings. That doesn't mean that they're universally evil, it means they're fundamentally different from you and I."

Lantis absorbed that for several seconds, before dismissing the argument entirely. "You've gotten us sidetracked. You must stop your people from putting this city in danger! Even if the pirasuti are mere farmers, they are farmers with ships the size of mountains, and enough numbers to overwhelm even this city's impressive defenses!"

Harry smiled. "Yes, well, I suppose I should do something about that. Still, this conversation isn't over, Lantis. Your creators were admirable, but they apprear to have tainted you a bit with their love of peace. Normally a fondness for non-violence isn't a bad thing, but there are times when one has to factor in the unfortunate necessity of violent deeds."

Harry left her to stew on that. And with a quiet crack, he was gone.

…

Dr. Weir didn't bat an eye when Harry apparated directly outside of her office, even though the crack of displaced air was quite audible and the transparent walls allowed her to fully witness his sudden appearance. Harry was impressed. Usually people took a lot longer to get used to him popping up unannounced like that. This was barely his fifth time apparating around her, and she already treated it like an everyday occurrence, simply glancing up from whatever she was reading on her computer and waving him inside.

"So," Harry said after seating himself across from her, "I hear you've found a ship."

Weir frowned. "How on Earth do you already know about that? I barely heard about it five minutes ago, and that was only because my office is so close to the control room."

"We're not on Earth, for one," Harry said with a smile, "but as for how I heard, the city's AI you don't quite believe me about noticed what was going on and…wanted me to 'stop the primitives from ruining her creators' legacy'."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. She may not have said it in those exact words, but that was the gist of it. And quite aside from worrying that you might see the ship as nothing more than a highly advanced weapon, she also thinks that these pirasuti she keeps telling me about will have noticed the ship."

Weir frowned. "I thought the pirasuti were a race of parasites. How would they notice a spaceship?"

"Ah…I may not have been clear, earlier, though to be fair I don't know too much about them myself. The pirasuti are a race of sentient parasites. They feed on alteran life force, or failing that, on human life force. They're apparently humanoid, gray-skinned, incredibly strong and unbelievably numerous. Or they were 10,000 years ago; Atlantis hasn't exactly been able to keep an eye on current galactic events while it hid at the bottom of the ocean. But among the things that aren't likely to have changed, they tend to fly around in spaceships the size of an entire mountain, sort of mobile cities that they use to travel between worlds as they…well, as they cull their human flock."

Weir's eyes widened in shock. "They…cull entire worlds?"

Harry nodded. "Once every few centuries or so. It seems they can sustain themselves on the humans they abduct for that long, and the intervening time is long enough for the human population to recover from decimation like the pirasuti tend to inflict."

Weir slumped back into her chair. "And I thought the Goa'uld were bad…"

"I'm afraid the Goa'uld are quite mild, as hostile galaxy-spanning civilizations go," Harry observed wryly.

"And these pirasuti?" Weir asked, looking intrigued.

Harry considered that. "Well, as I told Lantis, they're basically farmers. Toppling the current regime would probably be about as easy as it was for the Europeans to conquer the Americas…provided we exercise a lot of caution, and get our hands on more alteran technology than just one Atlantis-class city-ship. The city shields may hold out practically indefinitely, but we can't do much more than hunker down and hide if the full force of the pirasuti fleet comes down on us."

Weir blinked. "Farmers? They cull entire planets!"

"Yes, they do," Harry allowed, "but if they were dumb savages, they would exterminate their food supply instead of merely culling it. They've reverse-engineered a lot of alteran technology, probably even more than the Goa'uld have, and they've had a very long peacetime to carefully integrate that technology into their ships and weapons. But I still get the sense that they're not so much fighters as highly evolved insectoid farmers. Something like you'd get if a mosquito suddenly got smart enough to graduate from Oxford. They beat the Alteran civilization in this galaxy because they bred like…well, like insects, and overwhelmed the Alteran fleets through sheer numbers. Even Atlantis might not last under a sustained barrage from the entire fleet, if they kept it up long enough. I suspect the pirasuti just didn't realize that, or didn't care once the residents of the city fled due to supply shortages."

"And these…pirasuti, you're saying that they're probably already investigating the ship we detected with our long-range sensors?" Weir looked suitably disturbed at the thought.

"If we can find it, Doctor, the pirasuti probably can too. According to the records, Lantis says, the ship was likely damaged in the war. They were on a stealth mission and never returned. The ship was presumed destroyed, and the war ended shortly afterward. It's entirely possible that the crew couldn't repair the ship well enough to return, and stowed away in the on-board stasis pods."

"Stasis pods?"

"Think cryogenics, except the technology is far more advanced, and actually keeps people alive instead of freezing their blood. The point is, if the ship is running on automated systems and limited power, it could easily have preserved its crew throughout the entire span it's on record as 'Missing in Action.' Only now, it's detected something about Atlantis's activation, perhaps an automated Lantean signal on some secure cosmic network, and the ship has reactivated its primary power systems in an attempt to return home. That sort of thing would light it up on everybody's scanners, ours included. If the pirasuti are still out there, and there's no reason to believe they're not, we'll need to hurry to beat them to the punch."

Dr. Weir considered that carefully for nearly a full minute before asking, "And how are we going to do that? I'm sure you've heard by now that there are several…shuttlecraft in a hanger near here that appear to be designed for Stargate travel, but they wouldn't be much use for a search and rescue operation."

Harry grinned. "Ah, but your scientists probably haven't tooled around with the shuttles enough yet to realize that they're actually highly advanced stealth-enabled research/force projection fightercraft. They don't have onboard hyperdrives, but with the right modifications, they can do just about everything else, even without bringing extra hardware on board."

Weir's eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. "How…how could you possible know that? Rodney said you've spent the last week shut away in your personal laboratory."

"Oh, it was easy enough to access the specifications remotely with a bit of help from Lantis," Harry said, "And I've always been interested in flying machines. I may not look like a fighter pilot, but I'm probably just as qualified as your top pilots on Earth, if not more so when it comes to vacuum-based craft. Believe it or not, witches and wizards on my Earth flew around on broomsticks in a sport called Quidditch, and I never really lost a passion for flying after I stopped playing."

Weir blinked. "You know, out of all the things you've told me about yourself, that surprises me the least. You might be good at hiding it, but you're an adrenaline junkie at heart, aren't you?"

Harry laughed at that. "Guilty as accused, Doctor. I do try to reign myself in most of the time, but there's nothing quite like the thrill of an adrenaline rush. After living on the move for several centuries, I'll take enjoyment anywhere I can find it."

Dr. Weir's eyes danced knowingly in a way that reminded Harry of Dumbledore. "Should I assume that you'd like to go on the mission to explore this ship we've found, then?" she asked.

"Yes," Harry said simply. "I don't want to brag, but I might be the best chance any exploratory mission to that ship has of coming back alive. The pirasuti may be farmers, but they're farmers with a tight control over most, if not all of the inhabitable planets in this galaxy. Even when they're mostly dormant they're nothing to be trifled with."

The humor fell from Weir's eyes as he said that. "I'll talk with Colonel Sumner about a marine escort, as well. Do you think we should send some of the more experienced technicians along as well? They might be able to help with repairs to the damaged systems."

Harry nodded. "That's a good idea. The gateships have seating room for at least 12, and enough standing room for more than that in a pinch, but we should probably keep any crew compliment down to 12. It's not a good idea to be standing up without proper restraints if we get into any trouble."

"I'll be sure to tell the Colonel. Was there anything else you needed to tell me?"

Harry shook his head. "No, I should probably start getting my things together for an away mission. So long as I'm invited, of course?"

Weir smiled. "I wouldn't dream of trying to keep you from going, Harry. I saw what you were capable of in Nevada, and I'd rather you go on the initial mission than stay behind and be forced to mount a rescue."

Harry smiled gratefully. "Well then. I guess I'd better pack my things."

And with little more than a farewell wave from Dr. Weir, he apparated away to do just that.

She didn't even blink in surprise as the sound of air cavitating in his wake echoed around her office.

A/N: Well, this one certainly took a long time to write. Don't worry though; the next chapter shouldn't take nearly as long to write. Most of the time I spent 'working' on this chapter was actually spent figuring out exactly how events are going to go now that Harry's completely messed with the timeline and practically overwritten the canon universe entirely.

Actually, canon's probably still out there somewhere, drowning in horror and barely managing to save the city by cycling through potentia over 10,000 years and activating an emergency-last-resort measure that Janus only programmed in as a precaution, but this timeline is now a significant causal distance away from that one, which makes things harder on us poor fanfiction writers who are trying to figure out what happens next. Anyway, thanks for the patience, and don't forget to leave a review or three!

Best of wishes,

~feauxen