The Lightsaber
By: Tellemicus Sundance
#05: A Lurking Menace

The trio had expected to have to comb Hermione's Daily Prophet carefully next morning to find the article Percy had mentioned in his letter back on Saturday. However, the departing delivery owl had barely cleared the top of the milk jug when Hermione let out a huge gasp and flattened the newspaper to reveal a large photograph of Dolores Umbridge, smiling widely and blinking slowly at them from beneath the headline:

MINISTRY SEEKS EDUCATIONAL REFORM
DOLORES UMBRIDGE APPOINTED FIRST-EVER 'HIGH INQUISITOR'

"High Inquisitor? What does that mean?" Harry asked darkly, his half-eaten bit of toast slipping from his fingers. Hermione read them the article in a low tone, only pausing briefly when one of the boys made a comment. Needless to say, Harry was far from thrilled with the sudden tremendous power boost the horrible professor had been granted. He knew that this was just the beginning of a long and highly-unpleasant series of unfortunate events and that his fledging attempts at controlling his raging temper were going to be sorely tested in the coming days.

Though he thankfully didn't have too many classes that she attended to 'evaluate' the teachers of Hogwarts, Harry still had to endure her dark and slimy presence much too often. If ever he had doubted that she was Dark Witch with a heart of absolute blackness to match Voldemort's, those doubts were thoroughly disabused and silenced forever. Through his powerful new sensory skills, he could tell what she was feeling and her very aura was laden with all of the darkest emotions a human could feel. The most prominent of her emotions was, ironically enough, envy. Whenever someone, be they student or faculty, did, said, or had something, she was struck by a jolt of green eyed envy. Depending on the strength of that envy, she would lash out in varying levels of sadistic, cruel treatment or words.

Had Harry not come to the stark realization of just how dangerous it now was for him to lose control, he knew that Umbridge probably wouldn't have survived their second class together.

September 16, 1995
Gryffindor Common Room

After yet another long week of painful detentions, losing points, struggling to keep up with the ridiculous amounts of homework, and barely managing to keep his darker impulses in check, Harry could honestly say that he was looking forward to the weekend with great anticipation.

However, his weekend started off not with a long and comfortable sleep-in to enjoy the simple fact that there were no classes today. No, he woke up at nearly the crack of dawn to a sudden and powerful pain in his body. It felt like his skin was on fire, his muscles throbbed and were in absolute agony, his blood felt like lava as it pumped through his body. But the absolute worst part of all was that he could literally feel himself weakening, his connection to the ambient magic fading as the power was no longer able to enter his body.

'The potion's wearing off!' he realized in agony. Struggling to get his protesting body to work, he pushed himself out of his bed and to his feet. He didn't even try to change out of his night clothes, merely grabbing his Invisibility Cloak and schoolbag, draping both of them over his body and feebly making his way down to his workshop. The journey was long, slow, and excruciatingly painful. He had to take no less than seven stops in order to give his body a chance to rest and regain his lost breath. If there was one positive thing about the whole situation, it was that it occurred in the morning, before many other students or professors were awake.

Finally reaching his workshop, he was only temporarily relieved to find it untouched. By this point, he was crawling upon the floor on his hands and knees, barely able to keep moving forward. But with his goal in sight now, he found he could push aside his pain more easily as he focused on reaching it. Making his way over to the desk he stored his potion samples in, Harry hurriedly uncorked one of them and drank it as though his life depended on it.

Unlike the last time where he could feel each of his pressure points opening like pinpricks in his body, he didn't anything for several long, agonizing moments. And then, with all the subtlety of a dam bursting apart, the ambient magic came flooding back into his system. The relief was like being welcomed into a warm room after traveling through a freezing blizzard for five hours. The heat was present, but the body was still too numb to fully appreciate it. Then, as the minutes slowly dragged on and the body's temperature rose back to its normal levels, the person became more and more aware of how cold they'd been and just how rejuvenating the return to warmth truly was.

Letting out a long, relieved sigh as he felt the last dregs of pain fading away, Harry muttered, "Is that what it's like going through withdrawal? No wonder all those drug addicts never try to quit."

Pushing himself off the floor from where he'd been laying, Harry grabbed the empty vial and set it atop the desk. Turning around, he looked over at his bulletin board and felt a small smile tug at his lips. In the past week, he had made some great and very unexpectedly fast progress in building his first prototype blaster rifle. Admittedly, once she was able to peel herself away from not only her homework but her own experiments in building a lightsaber, Hermione had been her usual self and made some super-efficient deductions on his initial plans, refining the ideas that could work and flat-out rejecting ones that she felt wouldn't. She hacked off entire weeks of failed experiments in just a few hours and Harry couldn't help slapping his forehead at his own stupidity every time he remembered it. If he'd had included her in his original lightsaber construction project, he probably would've had it finished in time for the Second Task of the Triwizard Tournament!

Of course, it also helped that he was using a medium that he was intimately familiar with. The plasma potion he created and the focusing gem he developed for use in his lightsaber were proving to be even more versatile than he first thought. By using a much more generic crystal, rather than the deeply magically-imbued gems that the original recipe called for, the crystals could now theoretically be used by everyone, including Muggles. Though, Harry knew that the crystals wouldn't possess the same power output or lethality if they were used in a lightsaber. The crystals had mere 'slivers' of magic in them, whereas the gems were saturated with the magic of their creators. Regardless of that, they still fulfilled their function with remarkable aptitude, emitting a brief high-intensity light beam that shot into the potion mixture to create a small burst of magically-charged plasma. All he had to do now was fit it into the rifle assembly and make sure it worked as he hoped it was supposed to.

Glancing down at his pajamas that he was still dressed in, a slight grin crossed his face. "After I get dressed."

"—so the heat containment runes in the crystal chamber, plasma potion, and emitter shroud are extremely important," Harry said in an even voice. He was mostly speaking robotically, quoting information he'd memorized through experimentation, while he focused most of his attention on applying such runes to what would become the rifle's firing chamber. "If not done right…"

"It'll either explode or melt in your hand," Hermione answered, both enraptured by what she was learning and horrified at the possibility of what could happen if she placed the runes incorrectly.

Hermione was doing much the same as Harry, only paying partial attention to what he was saying as she kept her mind latched onto the intricate process that she was doing. That being stirring a delicate mixture in the very rare and expensive stone cauldron. The material inside was less of a liquid now and more of a gelatinous green mass. Holding her wand over the cauldron and using it as a type of ladle, she was stirring the gelatin with slow, steady, and carefully smooth strokes, pumping a gentle stream of her magic into the mixture as she did so. She had been doing this for the better part of an hour now, watching the potion with great interest as it transformed from its original white-opaque color into its present green color.

"Harry, how much longer until its ready?" she asked when Harry stopped his explanation, becoming distracted when something unexpected happened on his own project.

Glancing at his watch and comparing the time, he smiled. "About another minute or two, actually. The potion should be starting to resist you, that means it's starting to solidify. When it's completely hardened, Vanish the potion. Don't worry, the gem will remain."

"How did you ever come up with this potion?" she wondered aloud, just now noticing that he was correct. The potion was starting to resist her magic's stirring it and the surface was hardening.

"Honestly? I don't remember," Harry admitted. "I was trying to cope with my bad mood last year because of the Tournament and just started putting some random stuff together. When it turned rock hard, I thought it was a failure and tried to get rid of it, and lo and behold what I found afterwards."

"Bloody hell, mate," Ron said from where he was trying to help them by mixing up a batch of Harry's plasma potion. "When did you get so good at Potions?! What would Snape think if he knew?"

" '50 points from Gryffindor for creating a new potion without my expressed permission, Mr. Potter,' " Harry said, trying (and failing) to imitate Snape's drawling voice. His comment drew quick, if somewhat reluctant, snorts of amusement from his friends as they both knew that Harry's mocking reply had a very firm foundation of possibility.

Taking a quick moment, Ron glanced over at his best friend. After their minor 'falling out' the previous weekend and letting Harry vent his obvious anger, the Gryffindor idol had come back and humbly apologized for losing his temper again. Though he tried to explain that he wasn't going to let himself fall to the Dark, Ron had purposely steered the conversation away from that awkward and unhappy topic. If Harry's temper had such a hair-trigger these days, then Ron just wanted to avoid the subjects that caused it entirely and try to go about their days as they normally did. Truth be told, Ron had been carefully watching Harry's reactions and newfound strange habits closely all week. What he saw was both relieving and concerning for the same reasons. Harry's temper still remained fairly close to the surface, but it almost always seemed closer to breaking loose whenever they had to endure Umbridge's presence or the Slytherins (particularly Malfoy). Other than those relatively few instances, Harry was doing a remarkable job of reining in his anger. But that is also what concerned Ron since he knew whenever he did that, the inevitable explosion would be all-the-more powerful as a result.

"Pay attention, Ron," Harry called over, not looking up from his work. "That potion's nearly finished and ready for storage."

Blinking in surprise, Ron quickly looked down at his potion and saw that Harry was correct. As he hurriedly collected the different vials for storing the plasma potion, he couldn't help asking, "How could you tell? You haven't even looked over here or been paying attention, mate!"

"It's my Sorcery," Harry said, making a good show of pretending not to notice Ron's flinch at the reminder. "It gives me a ridiculously high awareness of everything around me, especially if it's magical. I can sense that the potion is reaching its stable state and is ready."

"That's…convenient," Ron admitted reluctantly. If he could've had such a power when he was younger… No, it was better not to think like that. Shaking the wandering thoughts from his head, he quickly ladled the plasma potion.

Meanwhile, Hermione eagerly waved her wand and vanished the contents of her cauldron. The rock-like substance that had filled it disappeared in an instant. And there it was, glowing up at her from the very bottom of the cauldron. Her very own gem to be used as the focus in her lightsaber. Reaching inside the cauldron, Hermione gingerly touched the gem. A small electric jolt shot up her arm when her finger brushed its surface, but other than that, nothing untoward happened. Gently lifting it out, Hermione stared in deep awe at the beautiful gem she held between her fingers. It was barely the size of her pinkie's fingernail, and yet it felt so…powerful and deeply familiar. Her rational mind told her that of course it was familiar, since her own magical essence had gone into creating it. But just the same, the irrational part of her mind just felt that it had finally gained something it had been searching her entire life for.

"It's green," Ron commented, breaking Hermione from her slight trance. There was a very definite note of teasing in his voice as he said, "Please tell me that you're not going Slytherin on us, Hermione."

"If she is," Harry said grinning, speaking before Hermione could properly rebuke Ron. "Then I'll have to get transferred to Ravenclaw."

"I think it's a beautiful color," Hermione said, a note of finality in her voice, putting the gem safely into a robe pocket. This gem was representative of her very soul and she wouldn't have anybody mocking it.

"I'm done," Harry declared, leaning back with a wide smile of pride on his face.

With a few waves of his wand, the various scattered pieces of shaped plastic, wood, and metal all jumped into the air, spinning and twirling as they assembled themselves from a random clutter into something that was very similar to a Berretta pistol. Moving over to Ron, Harry gently poured a small amount of the potion into one of the magazine clips and sealed it. Sliding the magazine into the pistol and locking it in place, he carefully aimed the pistol away from his friends and towards the far wall. Gently squeezing the trigger, Harry's grin widened as a bolt of blue-white energy shot out of the barrel with a soft popping noise. The energy bolt hit the wall, splattering very slightly on impact and leaving a darkened burn mark and hole on the stone with a small puff of smoke rising up.

"I'd say that's a successful first test," Harry said, looking over at his friends as he continued to smile. Hermione had a small smile of her own, but Ron looked a little hesitant before he returned the smile as well.

"Tell me again," Ron said. "Why we're making MagiTech weapons for your Muggle cousin who, if I'm not mistaken, wouldn't stand a chance in a fight against full-grown and trained Wizards?"

"MagiTech, really?" Hermione repeated, rolling her eyes. She still couldn't believe Ron came up with such a silly name for the magical technology they were making, or that Harry actually approved of the name!

"Because he's recently lost his parents to Dementors and he wants—needs—something to channel his anger against," Harry supplied. "If it's not against the one who sent them, then it's against the one who's responsible for putting the world in this state." Looking Ron carefully in the eye, he continued, "If you were the only survivor of a Dementor attack, wouldn't you want to arm yourself against those things so they can't hurt you ever again also?"

Ron could only nod in agreement. "But still, isn't your cousin a complete prat?"

"People change," Harry said softly. He didn't know what Dudley was doing right now, but he knew that he was going to be a very different person the next time they met. Loss and pain had a tendency of changing people in various ways after all. 'I just hope 'Aunt Marge' doesn't get her teeth into him and make him back into what he was before all this started happening.'

"Actually," Hermione said, breaking off Harry's wandering thoughts. "Ron does have a point, Harry. If your cousin is serious about wanting to get involved in Wizarding business and fights, he's going to need a lot more than a few blaster rifles and pistols."

"What've you got in mind?" Harry asked as the boys looked over at her questioningly. They saw an all-too-familiar gleam of excitement in her eyes.

"If he gets caught in a Wizards' Duel, he'll need a lot of different kinds of firepower," Hermione explained, her slow smile starting to spread across her face. "A way of moving quickly around the battlefield, especially if the Wizards know how to Apparate. He'll need armor strong enough to endure or deflect attacks. And he'll probably want something to hide his identity as a Muggle so the Death Eaters can't hunt him down afterwards."

"I think I see where this is going," Harry said, a grin starting to spread across his own face now.

"Have I mentioned recently how much I hate being left out of the conversation?" Ron asked, annoyed. They had been speaking about and referencing numerous things that he didn't understand the context of a lot lately. Frankly, he was starting to get quite frustrated with it.

September 18, 1996
Gryffindor Common Room

BY ORDER OF
THE HIGH INQUISITOR OF HOGWARTS

All student houses and dorms are henceforth subject to random inspections by the High Inquisitor and the Inquisitorial Squad. The inspections are to ensure that no contraband items are present within school grounds that will affect the students' studying (see the attached list for details). Should any specified item be found, they will be immediately confiscated by the High Inquisitor and the student in question will serve a week of detention. Any repeat offenses will result in immediate expulsion from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The above is in accordance with
Educational Decree Number Twenty-four

Signed:

Dolores Jane Umbridge
HIGH INQUISITOR

This was the unpleasant surprise that Harry, Ron, and Hermione came back to after they'd finished their classes of the day. And, after just a quick survey of the Common Room, it became painfully obvious that the Gryffindor House had already been 'inspected'. There was a large number of students from all years talking in worried, hurt, and angry voices over a large of things that were evidently missing from their dorm rooms after they'd returned.

In fact, there was a not-so-surprising amount of commotion coming from the Seventh Year dorm. Fred and George were practically seeing red in their rage at Umbridge's invasion and confiscation of their massive amount of 'contraband', Harry didn't even need his newfound sensory powers to know that.

"How can she get away with this?!" Hermione hissed in mounting anger.

"It's not bad enough she can make our classes terrible," Ron said, more than agreeing with Hermione's sentiment. "But she now can invade our rooms whenever she wants?!"

Looking over at Harry, Ron blinked in surprise to find him missing. Turning to look up the stairs to their dorm room, he just barely glimpsed the tail end of Harry's robes as he turned the corner. Running up after him, Ron arrived at the dorm entrance just in hear Harry cry out. "IT'S GONE! SHE TOOK IT!"

Even without his Sorcery, there was unbridled fury and power that echoed through his words as he shouted that. Ron could almost feel it as the power seemed to pass around and through him, causing him to stumble backwards slightly.

"What's missing?" he asked cautiously as Harry started practically throwing his stuff around without a care of the mess he was making in his frantic search.

"My Invisibility Cloak!" Harry cried out, looking extremely distressed as the silvery material continued to remain unfound. "She took my father's Invisibility Cloak!"

Now Ron fully understood Harry's rage and distress. The Invisibility Cloak was one of the extremely few possessions he had of his family. If it were the case for Ron, he'd probably have been handling it even worse.

"THAT BLOODY WITCH IS SO DEAD!" Scratch that, he was taking it just as badly as Ron would have. In a blur of motion, Harry shot past his redhead friend to no doubt confront the toad-face witch. After a moment of being torn between going after or stopping Harry, Ron noticed that there were some things of his own that were missing from his bedside table and instantly rushed forward to account the stolen possessions.

Needless to say, Harry and many of the other students didn't get their stolen supplies and keepsakes returned to them. If any professor had ever tried to keep a tally of how many detentions were handed out in a certain time frame, much less a single day, Umbridge would've most definitely taken the record by a massive margin. The High Inquisitor passed out her detentions with little to no warning when she was confronted by a student asking or demanding their stuff returned to them. Despite the countless complaints to and mounting pressure from the Heads of House, the High Inquisitor remained completely resolute and unfazed by her sudden drop in what little popularity she'd garnered. Harry even had a strong suspicion that the ugly toad was actually enjoying all the complaints and rage she was causing among the students and professors. But it wasn't only that that seriously tested his temper in the coming days.

With his heightened sensory skills, he could quite literally sense Professor Umbridge's slimy, black aura. And while normally it was confined to her classroom and wherever she was during school hours, he could occasionally sense her following him. The first time this had happened, he had very casually glanced back down the hall as if he was watching a passing student, but the hallway was empty behind him. But while his eyes may have been fooled, his senses certainly weren't and he knew that she was there.

Professor Umbridge was using his own Invisibility Cloak to follow him around school!

This realization caused a great deal of questions and accusations to spring up. When he shared this fact with Hermione and Ron, they both agreed that she was probably following him in hopes of finding some blackmail material on him so she could expel him or something of equally bad nature. Harry had to spend the next hour out in the Forbidden Forest venting his frustrations and anger after that revelation.

The only bright spots of the week were that Umbridge hadn't found his book of Sorcery, which he had kept hidden in his schoolbag, or his lightsaber that he now wore under his school robe at all times. His workshop in the dungeons, though slightly harder to reach without his Invisibility Cloak, became one of his few havens in the school. He quickly dedicated much of his attention to his newest project of creating new types of weaponry for Dudley to use. Of course, he usually had to take a much more roundabout route to reach his workshop on the days that he could sense Umbridge following him in an effort to lose her, which was actually quite easy since she apparently didn't know Hogwarts' layout as well as the students did.

For the new weapons, he decided to start simple and make a variety of grenades. He quickly was able to make three different types using different potions and charms; an electrical pulse discharge for shocking and paralyzing, a type of compressed adhesive for immobilizing, and the classic explosive using magical flames that could resist water and other forms of nonmagical fire suppression. He created these three types in less than a week of dedicated research and experiments, he was that enthralled by his work. That's not to say that he was working alone on these projects either.

Hermione had gotten it into her head that she was the best qualified to create the more complex and delicate parts of the project. She had taken over the creation of the helmet and jetpack, while trying to incorporate a variety of 'computer systems' into them that would link the two together. So far, she wasn't making much progress on that front, even though the basic helmet shape and design were long finished. And Ron actually surprised himself by having more fun in his own project that he originally thought he would. He was working on building a set of gauntlets that were bristling with different weapons, including a miniature flamethrower and a zip-line with a grappling hook launcher on one gauntlet and was trying to build in a wrist blaster into the second one. Compared to Hermione's much more complex one, Ron was making great progress on this.

It was truly amazing just how quickly he could make new MagiTech when he had some helpers backing him up.

September 28, 1996
Gryffindor Common Room

It was nearly midnight and the trio was lounging in front of the burning fire of the Common Room. Things had quieted down a fair deal since Umbridge's invasion on Monday, but many of the students were now openly investing in increasingly powerful locking charms and secret compartments to store their now 'contraband' items.

Though Harry wasn't entirely sure how they managed to reacquire so much of their 'non-school related' contraband like that multi-colored quill ink, Butterbeer, and other miscellaneous items. He suspected that Fred and George were on the rise as smugglers, all but ransacking the various shops of Hogsmeade so that they could make a profit and restart their research again.

"She's an awful woman," Hermione was saying. "Awful. You know, I was just saying to Ron when you came in…we've got to do something about her."

"I suggested poison," Ron said grimly.

"No…I mean, something about what a dreadful teacher she is and how we're going to learn any defense from her at all," Hermione clarified.

"Well, what can we do about that?" Ron yawned. "'S too late, isn't it? She got the job, she's here to stay, Fudge'll make sure of that."

"Well," Hermione began tentatively. "You know, I was thinking today…" She shot a slightly nervous look at Harry and then plunged on. "I was thinking that—maybe the time's come when we should just—just do it ourselves."

"Do what ourselves?" Harry asked, suspiciously. He glanced up from gazing at his bleeding hand. He had been experimenting with a new way of using his Sorcery, trying to use it to heal his hand from Umbridge's Blood Quill detention torture. Either he wasn't very skilled with that type of magic, or the magic of the Blood Quill was interfering with his meager attempts.

"Well…learn Defense Against the Dark Arts ourselves," Hermione said.

"Come off it," Ron groaned. "You want us to do even more extra work? D'you realize Harry and I are behind on homework again it's only the third week? Granted, doing that stuff in the Workshop isn't helping matters, but still."

"This is much more important than homework!" Hermione declared passionately.

Harry and Ron both openly goggled at her. Speaking for both of them, Ron said, "I didn't think there was anything more important in the universe than homework."

"Don't be silly, of course there is!"

And thus Hermione began her sales pitch, trying to entice Harry and Ron over to her way of thinking. The sad fact of the matter was that she was correct on many of the reasons, even Harry could agree with many of her points. She easily swayed Ron over to her side, but Harry bluntly refused. He didn't want to waste his time teaching to the students of the school how to defend themselves. It might have been selfish of him, but he was far more interested in not only exploring his growing Sorcery powers but also developing new MagiTech. He hadn't been this passionate about a project since…his Third Year's Quidditch training? Yeah, that sounded about right.

But he knew that that wouldn't stop Hermione. She was already set in her course of creating a new, student-run Defense class. Harry just wasn't sure if he would support and be a part of it or not.

(Author's Note) Merry Christmas! I hope this chapter finds you all well and merry for the holidays! If you'd be so kind, I'd like to ask that you give me a Christmas present in the form of a review for this chapter. That's all I ask. Happy Holidays and look forward to the next chapter. Things REALLY start to change after that one!

PS: There's a new poll up on my homepage here that deals with this story. Could you guys please check it out? I'm very interested in your opinions on it since it will play a role in the future of this story. Thank you!