Under Heaven and Earth
Chapter Two: An Ordinary day...
"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination." -The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
On occasion in a youngster's life there comes a time where the painful suspicion is aroused that there's a secret that the adults know which the children are not privy to.
Such a premonition would only have been taken seriously by a child so paranoid or flighty that adults would say, "Tut, tut…that there child is touched"
This was a description that fitted Harry to a Tee.
Being a clever child he read between the lines, 'There is no such thing as magic!' became 'I deny the existence of magic!'. An ordinary child, especially one in young Harry's situation would have been long ago cowed and prepared to cede the point but there were two factors that prevented Harry from doing so.
First; was the fact that Harry wasn't exactly ordinary by any stretch of the word and though in lieu of evidence to the contrary he accepted the label Freak with equanimity, it did tend to go against the grain of established doctrine, much like Galileo and the Catholic Church.
Second; was the sad fact that no matter how much one says a thing, it does not make it true. The world is not always fair, good prevails only some of the time, the Dursleys, horrid though they were- were not, in truth the absolute worst type of muggle.
Apples, dates, pears, peaches and other assorted fruit fell from trees long before Newton's oldest ancestor. The Earth still fell toward the Sun as the Moon fell away from the Earth and the Solar system continued on hurtling through space around the super massive black hole at the galactic centre moving at a blinding pace of 13,200 kilometers an hour.
Time is relative, has always been, sorta……maybe…kinda…depends on how fast you're moving…
A wise man once said that the only thing that anyone can truly know; is that given the scale of the universe, we know so little as to actually know nothing at all…
So Harry with nothing better to do, locked away in a closet as he was for hours on end, had naught but his not-magic and his own thoughts…and spiders.
Gravity, weak nuclear forces, strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism, Supersymetry.
Add to that, the Demiurgos, that external unbalanced force that unzipped creation, that selfish act that despoiled perfection and cast the stars upon the firmament of space-time.
Love doesn't make the world go round, it unfolds space, transcends time, it drives the expansion and eventual end/creation of the Universe. It always has.
It probably says something shabby about the human race that the first human to figure this out, and find actual proof, was using a circa 1939 army cot for a crib, in a cupboard, under the stairs. And he liked it.
The Dursleys wouldn't realize the depth of their folly until one summer when Harry was seven, Majorie Dursley thought it fitting for her darling Ripper to chase the boy around the house as exercise, the child somehow found his way down the tree and inside the house, much to Petunia's shrill dismay, then when cornered in the living room, young Harry...
Freaked.
Marge was gone soon after…
The wards caught the Obliviators at the door…
The two smartly dressed men, in bowl hats and sharp suits looked idly at the departing cabby.
"Doyle?"
"Yes, Finch?"
"Does it seem like we forgot something?"
"…Did we decide to play the obliviation game again?"
"…I can't remember…"
Years Later
Dudley's birthday was coming up and Harry wanted to do something special…
"Oh I'm Iris Wyldethyme. -Wooooweeeewoooo woowoowee…."
The Dursleys normally had little traffic in the unnatural, which extended to unnatural television shows, still while Iris and the Celestial Omnibus was a little iffy, Dudley loved it and Vernon was mollified that the main character was a firm proponent of the non-existence of magic, as all oddities could be quite simply explained as the macro-scale propagation of quantum-level events, Magic.
They were quite enjoying their show as Ms. Wyldethyme dealt with the mildly amusing guest star who played The Doctor when... reality unzipped, the telly went on the fritz, and Petunia's hair stood on end, literally.
Harry stepped out of the irregularly active, traversable Lorentzian Morris-Thorne wormhole, carrying a single white lily, a small wooden coffin and an early present for his cousin.
His aunt got the lily, Vernon got the other half of Ripper's remains and a quiet apology, Dudley got the only version in existence, in their reality at least, of an autographed first edition of Things that go 'bump' in the Night by Rudyard Kipling.
Sadly it would go unread.
After a moment of silence, Harry rolled his eyes and sighed. "This is actually a figment of your imagination,"
Vernon looked confused. A horrid expression best described as attempting to fit a square pig into a round crow
"It was the bad tuna." His nephew explained.
"Lousy fishmonger!" The man bellowed, his wife slumped and slid bonelessly to the floor while Dudley wondered what on earth he would do with a book, after finally recognizing what it was...probably throw it at someone...
"Thank Goodness…" Petunia whimpered.
There once was a Man who was not there, He was not there yesterday, he was not there today…Oh how I wish he would go away…
The Next Day…
And it all started so well...
"Wahhh! (hic) Waaaahhh!! I don't wan'im to come! Waahhhh!" Wailed Dudley, who cried fat crocodile tears before a flustered Petunia and smirked at an impassive Harry from behind his mother's skirt.
It was a big day for Duddykins, according to Vernon, the young tyke had finally after many years of unhealthy eating habits crossed one hundred kilos on the bathroom scale. Incidentally he was now also eleven.
The Dursley family had planned to celebrate the day with a visit to the zoo with the young Polkiss boy in tow. Harry was to be left behind at Mrs. Figg's.
Unfortunately, for Harry who rather liked cats, and the Dursleys who didn't want to ruin their day by having Harry present for the excursion, it seemed that Mrs. Figg had had a mite of a tumble down the stairs over one of her cats.
Mr. Tibbles was fine, Arabella had a sprained ankle.
The Dursleys had little warning of this and as such were unable to secure another of the neighbors to watch over the young lad, They might have had an easier time of it if Petunia hadn't spread around rumors of Harry's supposed A&B charges and B&E exploits at the tender age of five. My, but they do start early these young bucks…
Suddenly realizing that portraying their nephew as a depraved psychopath and budding career criminal, held a deleterious effect upon attracting babysitters who weren't a senile old cat-lady, the Dursleys were in a quandary. Quite a pickle, being seen with the HIM in public tended to draw out the weirdos in droves, yet Petunia would not under any circumstances trust Harry unsupervised alone in the house.
Harry, he who preferred to remain unnamed, knew with a glance what was bothering his guardians. For the last three minutes Vernon and Petunia had been switching their gazes between an innocuous spot on the living room floor and the doorway leading out of the drawing room and into the hall where his cupboard was next to the entryway.
"Oh, Really…"
Years ago in a fit of panic, Harry had caused the living room to be host to one of the most wondrous phenomena of the universe, a wormhole. Wizards of course had been toying with the fabric of time and space since people were still killing each other with pointed sticks. As was human nature the first such use of this knowledge was to kill in the most horribly gruesome manner, fortunately they had found little use for such things as a pointed stick worked just as well for killing with far less gore, especially when someone had the bright idea to make that pretty green light shoot out.
That said, cornered by the two year old pitbull Harry had wanted nothing more than for the dreadful beast to just go away poor Ripper might actually have survived had Majorie not broken the boy's concentration when she screamed and beaned him on the head with her purse.
The end result was something akin to the often brutal displays of supposedly civilized 'Big Game' hunters and 'Noble' wizards…only mounted out of the floor. The hind end of Ripper had actually been spat out of a rather queasy looking trunk made from sapient pearwood, to the delight of a rather hungry troll and the relief of a rather equally tasty wizard half a multiverse away.
Of the top half…well you can get the carpet out of the dog, but not the dog out of the carpet, it seemed that a micro-molecular strip of ol' Rip had become a permanent fixture of the floor hence the discoloration of the new rug, a discovery that had Petunia screaming for hours. After all, wouldn't you be put out by a circular patch of living flesh that kept peeing on the carpet?
So no, Harry wasn't allowed home alone…It was bad for Petunia's sanity.
"There's only thirty presents." Dudley remarked slowly, sulky at being ignored. "I had thirty-one last year"
At that Harry saw his cousin in a new light, he hadn't known the boy-whale could count past ten.
""But they're so much bigger this year…" Petunia added nervously seeing the signs of an impending tantrum.
"Waaahhh, waaahhhh, waagghhhh!!"
Maybe not so impending
In the end the matter had been cleared up by Piers showing up, forcing Dudley to 'Man Up' in front his posse. The five had gotten in the car and were on their way for a day at the zoo. The adult Dursleys were as grim as a funeral procession and Piers was squashing Harry, but all in all it was a bright and happy day.
What could go wrong?
There once was a woman from Niger who went for a ride on a Bengal tiger; she left with a smile though after a while, the smile, was on the face of the tiger…
What could go wrong?
Really, was he serious, 'What could go wrong?' He should have known better…
It had actually been a blast, if he closed his eyes and ignored Petunia's shrill voice cooing over Dudley, Harry could even imagine what it was like to have a birthday party of all his own. He'd gotten to eat a whole packet of crisps when the Dursleys weren't looking and Vernon had been forced to buy him a single scoop when the nice ice-cream lady had begun looking at him oddly.
A child in ill-fitting clothes that looked on forlornly as his better dressed cousin and the lad's friend gorged on their second helping of super-extra-triple fudge chocolate sundae, no they weren't the absolute worst type of muggle but in some ways failed as human beings, some children were unloved a simple fact, "What would you like my dear?" She asked, eyes bright and trying not to see the way Petunia's lips twisted into a scowl or the less than subtle glance toward the red-faced man and his own curt, reluctant nod.
She gave him a double scoop, and then Harry got to finish off Dudley's third sundae when the boy predictably ate himself sick.
Already having a vivid imagination and a truly prodigious propensity for accidental magic, add sugar to the mix…
He'd felt sorry for the snake, locked in captivity behind a clear window with the sign, 'Do not Touch, Do not Knock on the Glass', and to make matters worse.
-thunk, thunk- "Stupid snake, do something! Daddy make it do something!"
Vernon, knocked on the sign, -Thunk. Thunk- the snake just lay there.
Disappointed, Dudley moved on to the crocodile display…
"Sorry 'bout that." Harry sighed.
The python winked.
"Must be dreadful living in a cage?"
The serpent bobbed its head.
"I wonder where you're from."
A slender tail pointed to a sign next to the window, it was an information page.
"Oh, South America, Brazil, was it nice?"
The reptile gave the equivalent of a shrug and pointed again at a specific part of the page that read, 'Raised in Captivity'.
A lump filled Harry's throat, he knew what that was like and suddenly wanted to help. Miss Washu had been teaching him to control the emergence of his quantum tunnels, a bit of intent and…
Piers' loud shout startled him out of his musing, "Hey Dudley, come watch, the snake is acting weird, Harry is talking to it!"
Distracted by Piers and bowled over by an excited Dudley who rushed to the glass and pressed his cheek against it on tip-toes, Harry's only thought aside from finding a way to send the poor captive animal home was an image of Dudley's hind end mounted in the reptile display.
"Oh, no!"
-Snap!Crack!-
The window was gone, and Dudley overbalanced, tumbling into the water and coming to rest beside the cool scales of a sinuous serpentine body…Somewhere in South America, in the depths of the Amazon jungle.
"Thanksss, Amigo!"
Waaaaagggghhh!!!
Interlude #1
Pweek...pweek...pweek..!
Yyyyyooooowwwwrrrrllllllll!!!!
RROoooaaaaaoOAAAAArrrRRRR!!
O-OOHH-O-OOOhhh!!
"I want my MOMMY!"
ROOOOOAAAAARRR!!!
"Waaggghhh!"
--
Consider a moment, this, the first use of a tool. Human Progenitor A henceforth called Nod was trying to crack open a difficult nut. Human Progenitor B henceforth called Ogg watched as Nod pounded away at the nut with his fist. Unfortunately Ogg knew from experience that one's fist was not nearly hard enough to crack such a nut, at least, not without considerable pain....
Suddenly, a momentous occasion in the journey of humanity came upon Ogg and Nod, for what should Ogg spy in the distance but a fist-sized rock!
Carefully, consideringly, Ogg approached. He hefted the rock, rolled, licked it and grimaced, sniffed it before squeezing it firmly in one hand with a smile, Eureka!
Then Ogg strode over to Nod and bashed the bloke's head in for stealing his nuts!
Yet as Nod's skull fractured and pink bits began to escape, Ogg had an epiphany!
'It's a good thing I thought of this first!' He realised, and then, 'Hmm, Nod's head smashed open like a cracked-'
'oooooohh!'
Interlude #1 End
It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the very moment that Arthur Dent said "I wouldn't want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel," a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle. The two opposing leaders, resplendent in their black jewelled battle shorts, were meeting for the last time, when, a dreadful silence fell, and, at that very moment, the words, "I wouldn't want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in their native tongue, this was the most appalling insult imaginable, so the two opposing battle fleets decided to settle their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands of years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth - where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time.
-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, on Cause and Effect
To wit, to wonder, the workings of the multiverse of infinite splendor...and horror. Let us examine the phenomenon known as causality.
Cause: The glass in twelve displays of the Reptile Exhibit at the Gatwickham Zoo suddenly and mysteriously vanish. A further eight displays in the Avian Exhibit and two in the Large Predatators Section are also likewise affected, fortunately the Ligers were already fed or who knows what might have happened....
Effect: Pandemonium...and several lawsuits.
Cause: Petunia loses sight of dear Duddykins for more that ten minutes in the confusion.
Effect: Her screams startle Vernon out of his wuthering germumblies.
Cause: While concentrating on sending his python friend to the Amazon by bending the laws of space and time. Piers Polkiss breaks Harry's concentration with a shout, and Dudley Dursley shatters it completely by barreling into his smaller cousin, knocking him on his bum and causing a magical surge.
Effect: When the excess energies threaten to obliterate everything within three square kilometers of Harry's position, by some heretofore unknown mechanism Harry instinctively bled off the building power into less destructive forms, such as an additional superstring harmonic, resonating with the subatomic particles of the glass within the affected diaplays...sending them to Pluto. The micro-wormhole then expands to encompass not only the snake, but Dudly who had been heavily leaning on the now vanished glass.
Cause: A team of Obliviators arrive at the zoo.
Effect: Piers, who saw everything, grows up to one day become England's finest Haberdasher.
Incidentally, one pane of glass would remain intact until discovered by miners in 2645 C.E. only to be dismissed as a prank.
It should also be noted that quantum tunnels are a species of phenomena that can link disparate points in space and time. Space and TIME...
So while Harry was suprisingly spot on in terms of WHERE he sent the snake and his cousin, he unfortunately slightly fudged, pun intended, on the WHEN
1.5 Million Years Ago
Waaaggghhh!!!
Dudley, wanted to go home, he really, really wanted to go home!
"Ug, ug? Ugug g!" Ogg wanted Dudley to sit still, he really really wanted to play with his Rock.
"Huff, huff, look mister, I'll show you something cool..." Dudley stammered having run out of breath. "Huff...I-if...-wheeze- you, Huff...stop chasing me."
Ogg hefted Rock consideringly, Squealing-One had made it a full five steps away before tumbling onto his back and gibbering. As far as chases went it was rather anti-climactic. "Ug!"
-Thump!-
"Waaaagggghhh!!!" And Squealing-One was up and away...limping like a lame duck.
Dudley rummaged around in a pocket before picking out an object that he had once knicked from the teacher's lounge at school.
-flick-
Ogg paused and looked at the shiny, and the glowing orange thingy that came from the shiny,
It was a bic lighter, neon pink, used by Dudley for tormenting spiders and pretending to smoke cigars. One part peace-offering, one part distraction.
Ogg reached out- and burned his hand!
"UG!" He exclaimed.
Seconds before Rock nestled in Dudley's skull, a swirling vortex opened under him and the young lad tumbled out, just in time to see his past/future self tumble into the first quantum drainpipe.
For a second he looked thoughtful, an action that exercised several facial muscles many of which had atrophied from disuse. A a result of the pain, Dudley resolved never to think too hard ever again.
Cause and Effect, Ogg's Rock would smash the bic lighter, spilling the contents and starting a mild bonfire. This event would lead to Ogg surviving the various predators lurking about in the darkness and the idea of stone/bash/fire/kill would lead to Ogg living to the ripe old age of nineteen.
His descendants would, have wider hips and shoulders, they would migrate, gaining a layer of protective fat, allowing them to cross the land bridge back into Eurasia. They would gain a stiff upper lip, a proud jowl, a curly crown of hair and beady black eyes...
Vernon clapped a hand on a suddenly nervous looking Dudley, jowls quivering, mustache twitching, beady eyes glittering. "There you are mite, had a bit of a spill have you? Lets go home and eat some cake. You too Boy!"
Harry would go home and be locked in the cupboard, not fed any cake. His relatives had of course deduced Harry's involvement and promptly installed dead-bolts and chains over the cupboard door once he was safely inside and presumably asleep.
It was a mean-spirited, short-sighted and incredibly stupid measure that the Dursleys would congratulate themselves upon, not knowing that Harry was currently visiting at another universe and couldn't care less about the letters for him that had begun to arrive.
Imagine his surprise when some weeks later after celebrating his own birthday in style, Harry would arrive back in his cupboard only to find it locked on the outside, mere seconds before a positive giant of a man ripped it off its hinges; bolts, locks, chains and all...
AN: Like it? Good Bad? Read and Review :) TTFN