Chapter 4: Hogwarts

Harry Potter woke up from a dream that he'd had all his life, and yet for the first time ever he remembered more of it than he ever had before. For what seemed like the longest time, he just lay there, staring up at his ceiling, going over the details that had always faded away before, but now he could recall everything with perfect clarity the likes of which almost scared him. Almost, because now he remembered more about his parents and that was something that he would have given almost anything for before.

Finally, he got up, deciding that he'd lazed about enough for one day and quickly went through his daily ritual of getting cleaned, dressed and ready for the day, in particular for school. He had breakfast with his aunt, uncle and cousin and then left without a word being said between them. Halfway down the block though, Harry raced down a dark and deserted alleyway and made sure his backpack was secured around him.

Looking all around to make sure no one was watching him, even subconsciously casting a detection spell for any scrying spells on him, and when he was sure he was in the clear, he then looked to the sky and cried out, "SHAZAM!"

A massive bolt of lightning and a deafening crack of thunder later, and Captain Marvel took to the skies. Within moments though, his magically empowered senses had him tearing through the sky just in time to catch a young woman falling out of a tree with her cat, which she'd been after, in hand. A single moment after that had him at a drug counter store disarming a gang of hoodlums and tying them up with lottery tickets and the owner on the line with the police.

After three or four other emergencies, just in the ten minutes it used to take him to walk to the underground station, Captain Marvel had made it to downtown London. Except he now had a little more than an hour before school started, and London being London, quite a few more emergencies that his senses were telling him about. Not all of them mundane either.

In the Underground and sewers, he sensed an unimaginable number of demons and vampires of every sort, many of which were resting, but plenty more were hunting and killing and doing other things that he needed to put a stop to. In broad daylight, there were people disappearing off the streets, taken in by demonic traps and human crime.

Harry might have once cringed at some of the things he now knew was going on, daily, in his city, and perhaps even felt a need to do something about it, and he certainly wouldn't turn away from it. Still, he wouldn't have been able to do much, not by himself.

Captain Marvel on the other hand, with the wisdom of Solomon and the courage of Achilles, merely grit his teeth and charged in, bound and determined to not turn a blind eye and to effect the change his heart desired. He pushed himself harder than any living being has ever had to push themselves in hundreds if not thousands of years. In that hour, on a Wednesday morning, the impossible happened in old London town, and the world, Britain especially, was shocked by the miracles that took place. Because in the space of a single hour on a Wednesday morning, Captain Marvel stopped, prevented, and corrected every crime that took place, rescued hundreds of people from certain death or worse, vanquished thousands of demons, vampires, and evil unheard of in the light of day, and ultimately put the fear of the Sorcerer Supreme into the Magical Community while letting all of England know that there was a new superhero on the block.

And then Big Ben chimed eight and there was a thunderclap right outside the school of Hogwarts, and Harry Potter walked in and took his seat just as the bell rung and classes started.

Harry actually made it to his Home Room on time, the classroom that students sequestered into before beginning their daily schedules. He sat down at his assigned seating, right between his two best friends, Hermione Granger and Ron Wesley.

"Hey Harry, on time for once, nice!" Ron teased him.

"Good morning Harry, I'm pleased to see that you got here on time today," Hermione primly remarked.

Harry rolled his eyes and laughed. "It was one day. And a freak accident had the school shut down for the day anyway, right? Are you saying all that was my fault too?"

"Well... of course not," Hermione flushed crimson, looking down in shame at her remark. "Still, you're often one of the last to rush in here usually. Even before yesterday's... events."

True enough, he supposed. Between the Underground travel and the run from the nearest station to the school, he was often pushing being 'on time' usually and that was on days where he hadn't been late or overly distracted by other things. As it was now, he was plenty distracted, but still managed to get here early enough that it didn't matter.

The friends chatted each other up for the rest of home room, being friends and children, until Mrs. McGonagall arrived and began handing out morning assignments. That was the downside of have a great teacher like Mrs. McGonagall for their Home Room Teacher, she refused to let the class use the hour as a free period to merely socialize and gossip, so she gave them simple assignments, sometimes vocabulary and spelling quizzes, but more often riddles and brain-teasers that kept the quiet and focused on using their brains.

To Harry's utter amazement, however, the moment he received the assignment, he'd already worked it out. Now true, he did have access to the Wisdom and knowledge of Solomon, but he'd also figured out that he only had full unfiltered access to that Wisdom when transformed into Captain Marvel. So why and how could he figure out a puzzle that only last week would have taken him the entire hour, if not longer, to figure out in less than a second.

Harry filled out the answers and turned over his sheet inside of ten seconds and then spent the rest of the hour trying to figure out the puzzle that was his new self. It didn't take quite that long, but eventually he discovered that he could actually feel the separation between 'Harry' and 'Captain Marvel'. Where if her were Captain Marvel at the moment, he was sure the knowledge would have just come straight to him when bidden, it took him over ten minutes to recall information that had shot through his head only that morning when he'd noticed multiple 'lit' areas throughout the city. After wondering what those were, the term 'warded areas' came to his mind as well as the definition and several examples.

That was it. His mind was warded. Or rather, Captain Marvel's powers were warded, he amended to himself. Anything that he actively accessed and could recall himself doing or thinking about on the other hand, Harry realized that he would still be able to remember. In analyzing his own cognitive abilities over the remaining hour, he likewise came to the conclusion that his IQ had just shot up by about a hundred or more points. Not that he had all the knowledge of the ages (as Harry Potter), and he still wouldn't put himself up against himself as Captain Marvel, intelligence-wise, but he was able to work things out much faster than before.

The why however, that was still eluding him. And he probably wouldn't be able to figure that out himself unless or until he changed back into Captain Marvel and actually sat down to think about it for a while.

Idly he wondered if there were any other leftovers from his being Captain Marvel that he could use now.

Hogwarts

Lunchtime

It was a typical school day morning for the most part. From Home Room he went to English Class with Mr. Flitwick, then to Science Class with Mr. Snape, before going outside with Mrs. Sprout for P.E. on the roof for some manual labor in moving bags of seeds for the garden she and her Gardening Club maintained there. Then it was back inside for Mathematics with Mrs. McGonagall before breaking for Lunch.

Unfortunately, Harry had forgotten to make his bag lunch today and then forgot to get money for it from his Aunt and Uncle. So he was prepared to either go hungry for the rest of the day, or maybe even change to Captain Marvel and hurry home to pack himself a quick lunch before speeding back in time for afternoon classes. He really didn't want to go hungry after all.

So he went out to the back dumpsters, telling his friends that he was buying his lunch today and that he'd catch up to them when he could (the lunch lines were notorious for taking so long you had exactly enough time to eat on the way to your seat, sit down, get up and put your tray away before having to be at class). Before he got there though, he came across one of the last people he neither expected nor wanted to see.

"Hello," the young blond girl chirped as she skipped along beside him.

"Hullo," he grunted, trying very hard to ignore her, but the way she was skipping round and round him wearing her transparent blue robes were making that impossible.

"Would you like to know something?" she asked as they made their way to the back of the building, behind the dumpsters.

"Not really," he said.

"There are gremlins attacking the subway under the city. The whole messy line is going to tear itself to pieces in a matter of hours, if it takes them that long. Provided of course that the blibbering humdingers I've put on the case keep the train engineers busy long enough so they don't cause a wreck sooner than that."

Harry stopped and turned to look at the latest bane of his existence.

"What are you doing her Luna? Why are you bothering me? I thought we settled matters. You're free to do as you wish, and you're still protected and all that. Look, I'm just hungry and I need to get some food from home that's all..."

"Here," she handed him a half a loaf of bread. "Elvish waybread. That will fill your stomach."

"Uh, thanks?" Harry accepted the piece of bread. Taking a bite, he was pleasantly surprised to feel his hunger vanishing with each bite. In fact he could only eat a total of four bites before feeling quite full.

"As for why I'm here..." the young blond girl ducked her head, her cheeks flushing pink. "I like you."

"Wh-huh?" he dropped his bread.

"Sorry, not like that. Not exactly anyway," she corrected herself. "You gave me a chance, even after I attacked you, and you kept my protection intact despite all that and having every reason to turn me into a slave all over again. So, I decided to help you out a bit. Besides, you're not exactly the type of person one would expect to be connected to the magical underground. You need to know when you're going to be needed."

She glanced at her watch, which was actually just a wrist-mounted sun-dial whose shadows did not match up with the current position of the sun, given they were in a shadowed alleyway. "And I would think that gremlins in the Underground having a party and planning on derailing every train in London would be something you need to know about, right?"

"Uh, right...?" Harry looked around one last time, sighed at the nymph's expectant face and shouted at the sky, "SHAZAM!"

One crack of thunder later, and Captain Marvel was flying for the nearest Underground station.

It didn't take him long to find them.

They stuck to the shadows, but that wasn't exactly hard under ground. They were about a foot and a half tall, bone-thin, had giant ears that made up most of their height, beady red eyes and scaly skin with warts all over. They also had sharp little fangs and talons on their hands and feet. And they were in the subway tearing apart every bit of safety technology they could get their ugly little hands on.

"How am I supposed to...?" he started to ask himself, seeing as how much damage was being caused and if Luna were to be believed, on a city-wide scale too, when the answer suddenly came to him.

It wouldn't be pretty and it would make a huge mess, but in all honesty it would still save a lot of lives in the comparison. Flying through the tunnels at a blazing speed, he went straight for the water ways and along the way tore open every water main along the way. He then punched no less than a hundred holes in the walls between the London Underground and open water. The entire subway system was flooded within the hour and the gremlins, among other demons, vampires and dark creatures, were drowned out, while Captain Marvel went through and rescued any homeless people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time as well as any and all innocent creatures living down there as well.

By flooding those tunnels, not only did he stop all Underground trains from crashing, but he also prevented thirteen different robberies, four of which were bank robberies, fifty two murders, five hundred assaults, and over thirty demon/vampire attacks. For the long term though, the London City government would be out a few hundred thousand in repairing the damages, but likewise that would force them to get repairs done that needed to be done and had been put off for the past decade, not to mention the damage to the aquifers.

When it was all said and done, the city and the press would only be talking about how Captain Marvel saved the city from an accidental flood and the countless people that he had directly saved from disaster. And then when the sabotage to the trains had been discovered (blamed on terrorists of some sort) he was praised for saving the city from the worst train accident that ever was or could have been.

That would all come much later however, and for that afternoon, Captain Marvel's work was done. So he raced back to the school and changed back to Harry and finished the bread that he had left behind, which somehow hadn't gotten dirty at all.

He blamed it on magic.

London

After School

Harry had gotten back to school just in time for class, and was thankful he'd told his friends he'd been going through the lunch lines today. It worked out perfectly with what everybody knew about the lunch lines and his timely arrival. Afternoon classes were a bit of a bore after racing through the London Underground, rescuing people and flooding the tunnels to rescue the railways from gremlins and all other sorts of nasty things. The History teacher especially, who he typically had right after lunch, nearly put him right to sleep. Thankfully, Professor Binns, he was a real honest Professor and everything too, stopped lecturing them before they fell asleep on him and had them just read from the text books and assigned that chapter's questions for homework.

After that it had been his Citizenship class with Mr. Quirrel. That had been an odd class, because the teacher kept calling on him whenever asking the class questions. He managed to answer most of them, but there were more than a few where he had to look through the book for the answers and was then publicly chastised for not doing the assigned reading. The first couple times the class had laughed at him, and he'd tried to hide his embarrassment, but when the teacher kept calling on him and not even looking at anyone else, they stopped laughing and started wondering what was up with him.

Thankfully it hadn't lasted forever, and the last class of the day was a relief compared to all that. It was Art and Music Class with Ms. Trelawney. She was a... unique teacher, but since her subject was teaching art and music, it rather fit with her role. While she wasn't his absolutely favorite teacher, Harry gladly admitted to liking her more than Quirrel or Binns or Snape.

After school was out, Harry hung out with his friends for a bit, waiting with them for their rides. It had been announced earlier during the school day that the subways were down and that everyone's parents or legal guardians were being contacted to let them know they had to come and pick their children up today. Once all of his friends were on their way home, Harry hurried out of sight and then almost immediately ran into Luna.

"How did you...? Never mind," he shook his head and hurried past her.

"Nice job with the gremlins," she giggled.

"It was all I could think of!" he protested, thinking she was making fun of him.

"No, really, it was a nice job. I doubt the Wizard himself could have done better. Well... he may have just teleported them all into limbo or something, but he was prone to doing things big like that. Your way was much more practical I think."

"Why are you here Luna?" he asked reluctantly, "Is there another crisis or two that Captain Marvel needs to rush off to take care of? Or is there something else that you'd like to attack me for?"

"You're not going to let that go any time soon, are you?" she questioned him wide-eyed.

"I'm barely eleven years old, and even then not until near the end of summer. I'm not mature enough to let it go just like that," he shot her a teasing look.

Raising her eyebrows in interest, she merely smiled back at him. "There are a few dark rituals I've been made aware of that you might want to put a stop to, but they can't really happen until midnight at the soonest. I have, however, also been listening to the wrackspurts for signs of the Dark Lord. There are a lot of his minions still hanging around the countryside, awaiting his return. Some of them, thankfully not all, are stirring. One in particular, I thought you might be interested in paying it a visit."

Harry's expression had darkened at the mention of the Dark Lord, but he didn't let it affect him too much, instead just asking her, "What is it?"

"The Crumble Horned Snorcack," she answered. "It's supposed to be over in Cardiff, keeping an eye on the Rift that's supposed to be in the area, but word from the wrackspurts has it moving North up to Brecon. Probably for mating season."

A cold chill swept through Harry at the casual mention, and he'd learned since becoming Captain Marvel to pay close attention to those feelings, because usually it was Solomon or one of his other leftovers from Captain Marvel trying to tell him something very, very important.

The Crumble Horned Snorcack reproduces by abducting young human women under the age of 20 and holding them all in a hidden den held captive to the walls with it's saliva and other secretions which hardens to a near-unbreakable substance after only a few minutes. They are held for no less than 13 days and no more than 31 days, during which the Snorcack constantly mates with them non-stop until they are impregnated with multiple spawn, no less than ten each, afterwards the spawn tear their way from the inside of their 'mothers' and eat and kill each other until the only ones remaining, which are the strongest of all of them, are then eaten and consumed by the original Crumble Horned Snorcack in order to renew it's immortality and increase its power. Young witches are often the prime targets of the Snorcack.

Harry blinked away the clinical and non-emotional explanation, which helped to lessen the horror, but only by a very small amount.

"SHAZAM!" he screamed out with urgency.

"Find out if it's already made it's den or not and then find me wherever I am and tell me where I can find it. In the mean time, I'm going to be tracking the creature directly and see if I can stop it before it has a chance to do anything," Captain Marvel ordered.

Luna immediately shifted from her little girl form to her full-bodied Moon Nymph body. "At once, Captain Marvel. I would suggest starting in Cardiff. There have been a few covens that moved in recently with the Rift being in the area, thinking they could tap into it somehow. I'll let you know as soon as I have any more information for you."

"Thank you Luna," the green-eyed titan of magical might nodded at her and then took off into the air, moving as fast as he possibly could, hoping to get there in time.