Chapter 7

A.N:

Welcome to the seventh chapter of The Chronicles of Camelot. This chapter contains several references to things both from real life and other fanfics, so I must say that anything you recognize, I don't own.

The next several days were rather busy for Harry. As it was, opening a new company in the magical world involved quite a bit of work. Once he'd received the initial paperwork from Talbot, he had to make several more visits to both the ministry and Gringotts.

There were people to bribe, mines and land to be registered as company assets, employees to poach from other businesses, and a thousand other things.

Then there were the publishers against whom Harry had decided to act. As he'd known, they did indeed want to settle. So much so, that they had taken the first offer they'd gotten for it.

Then, to get a head start on his plans, Harry had ended up spending nearly five million Galleons buying out three of the main offenders, which he merged into Althric's chroniclers. Once he controlled them, he went through them with a fine toothed comb, identifying just which of the staffers were actually capable workers, and which ones were there just so purebloods could have a job.

Apart from that, there was the company itself. During his time in the chamber, Harry had decided upon a number of directions that it would move in. A lot of the plans came from magic that was practiced eons ago, and several were inspired from the things Muggles were doing today. (He'd been surprised to discover just how many things satisfied both criteria).

For example, there were the little candies called Inception Lozenges. Utilizing the art of assimilation, they allowed a person to learn a completely new concept in a matter of hours at the very most. They weren't perfect, mainly as there was an abominable forgetting speed, but it was still good enough to give a basic grasp of whatever subject one took them for.

When the House of Slytherin was thriving, they'd been common everywhere, bought chiefly by parents who wanted to give their children a decent education but lacked the time. But once it fell into dormancy, the production stopped (Memory assimilation was a very closely guarded Slytherin Family Secret, and the patents for the lozenges were never sold).

That was just one avenue. Old scrying spells used as long ago as Middle Earth and Alagaësia far outstripped any broadcasting speed ever managed by Muggles. Communication mirrors that would make the Floo completely outdated (at least for communication) were in the pipeline, along with other things.

Oh yes, Harry had many plans indeed.

But first, he would need to get all those sources of raw materials in order. To that end, he'd visited his vassals that were supposed to maintain the estates.

In the magical world, 'vassal' was little more than a synonym for 'slave', although making this comparison was complete anathema in polite company.

The truth was, the true size of England was more than three times the size believed by the Muggles. While the nobles of the Muggles' courts had long since lost any authority to rule, the same was only partially true for wizarding Britain.

This also had to do with the Wizengamot. Around a millennium ago, Britain had been ruled by her greatest king, which was Arthur Pendragon. After his death, he had left behind two extremely important legacies, which were instrumental in shaping Britain into what it was today. One was the Noble court, with Nine Ancient and Noble families, Six Eldritch families and several lesser houses.

The other was the round table. The knights, eleven in number, were charged by him at his deathbed to guard the peace of Britain, no matter the cost.

When the nation sank back into the constant civil war that Uther(Arthur's father) and Merlin had raised it from, it was the knights had the unenviable task of enforcing peace.

They did so.

Thousands died, until the knights secured the agreements of the Lords of the Ancient and Noble Houses, and that of the Lords of the Eldritch houses, to form a new governing council. The families pooled their resources, and dragged the other families, often kicking and screaming, to the negotiation table. But the families did come, and the creation of the Wizengamot harkened the end to the conflict. The ancient weapons of war were sealed away, creation of new ones deemed forbidden, and peace had come. One of the clauses of the agreements was that each family was to release at least half their vassal populations and a third of their lands, so that the nation may breathe free.

They did so, but a lot more remained. The remaining lands were acknowledged the private properties of the families, although they retained their feudal names.

The Duchies of Shacklegrave, Gryphonsworth and Parsellsia, the Earldom of Wilmington, the Baronetcy of Blackwater were all estates spread over tens of thousands of acres, home to numerous villages and hamlets, all populated by vassals to the families of Sharr, Gryffindor, Slytherin, Potter and Black respectively.

It was these vassals that mined the mines, harvested the animal and plant parts from the forests, and so on. They were the people Harry visited, as he tried to get Althric Inc. on its feet. What he found was at the same time heartening and disappointing.

What was heartening was that the number of the vassals was high. This was because there really hadn't been much in terms of heavy activity from the Potter and Black families in recent times, while Grindelwald had never really managed to use the thousands of loyal Sharr vassals at his command. So the vassal settlements had had a lot of time to populate, meaning that they were running very nicely indeed. This would also prove to Harry a huge advantage in the 'force' part of the four cornerstones of power, as this was the base from which personal armies were traditionally drawn from.

On the other hand, the level of education they possessed was simply disappointing. Few had any knowledge above what they were trained to do, and in the case of the dormant families, even the trained workers were few. Fortunately, there was at least an easy solution to the latter problem, if not the first. Harry uprooted several families from the Black, Potter and Sharr estates to the Gryffindor, Slytherin and Peverell ones, so that they may settle there and train the people there.

As for the first, he was working on something, but it was still too early to say anything.

In any case, he extracted solemn promises to begin work as soon as possible from them, while he set about improving their conditions as soon as possible.

One thing he did was to 'land' several estates from his vaults into the lands he owned. The purpose was not to live in them, but something entirely different.

He was going to build factories.

The one major problem with making enchanted objects was that they almost always had to be hand crafted. Automation was very nearly impossible in the magical world.

Or rather, Automation had been very nearly impossible in the magical word. Harry knew that he could do it. Making a prototype in the chamber, he had done it.

The problem was that almost every major piece of magic required strong emotions. There were pieces that didn't, and others that didn't but people thought they did, but both these kinds were few and in far between.

And emotions were one thing that simply had to be produced by a human. Ergo, enchanted articles coming out on conveyor belts? Impossible.

Harry's answer consisted of two words: Emotional reservoirs.

Crystals, carrying mental runes derived from those used in Pensieves, could be used to record and store emotions perfectly, emotions that could later be used along with other crystals to serve as power sources, allowing full automation. It had been tried before with little success, but then not everyone was Harry Potter.

It was a wondrous discovery, one which would change the face of magic if he ever publicized it. As things right now were, he had absolutely no intention to do so.

As the largely uneducated nature of the vassals made them worthless for it, Harry raised a number of golems, using them to do the hard lifting, while he crafted enchantments to direct the construction.

Another thing he did was to upgrade their living conditions.

Before, they'd lived in pre-Victorian style huts, which were relatively uncomfortable and took up too much space.

What Harry had done was to acquire a considerable amount of construction materials, and use them to build huge blocks of apartments with four-five rooms, establishing every one of his people in style at half the space it'd taken them to live in squalor. For labourers there was the ever-present force of golems, which did the job better than any Muggle labourers.

Still, he hadn't managed to escape using Muggles, as the Inferi and golems could only work if they had a capable director. To that purpose, he'd picked up the memories of several of the world's best engineers, architects and builders, and used them to enchant a magical nexus.

Once again, Harry had to ponder the similarities between magic and technology. Few people ever understood just how similar a spell matrix, or something like the aforementioned nexus, was to a computer program. A magical nexus involved numerous separate spells and occasionally potions, which were tied into a central string of spells that were called 'decisive' spells. These spells decided which magic activated at what time, at what intensity, and so on.

Taking the construction nexus for example, the decisive spells were spells to ensure that the golems didn't obstruct each other, that they climbed the floors correctly, that they didn't confuse the sand for the cement, and that they didn't keep building the same floor again and again, things like that. The other spells were many more. Spells to mix the concrete perfectly, spells to dry the cement within moments, spells to ensure the perfection of the geometry, it went on. Had Harry wanted, he could have skipped the labour altogether. Levitation and propulsion spells would do the job well enough. But again, he saw no need to waste energy while there were perfectly good resources just waiting to be used.

All these things were separate, however, to the efforts Harry made in the Muggle world.

Before he did anything there, Harry had decided that his knowledge about them was rather lacking. So, the first and biggest priority was to remedy this. To this end all he needed to do was to make a tour through London. Taking memories left and right and piecing them together, he discovered nearly everything he needed.

First was the matter of identities. Just about everything he intended to do with the Muggles was illegal, and he had absolutely no intention of allowing repercussions to come to him. In today's world, creating new identities meant a beyond perfect knowledge of both forgery and computers. The first thing he did was to visit the heads of the Cybercrimes and White collar divisions of Scotland Yard. What he wanted, and took from them, were the names of the topmost criminals in both fields.

Once he had the names, it was as simple a matter as taking a magical map woven with divination magic for this very purpose, and using the 'point me' spell with their names.

The next second he was looking at a yard by yard location.

Even in today's weakened magical world, almost all decent wizards learned to fool such measures, but with the people in question being Muggles, enough said. He found that there were quite a lot of people in both categories, each with their own areas of specialty. Keeping in mind what he needed to do later, he took memories from all of them.

Once he had the memories of the topmost forgers and cybercriminals of the world, it was time to track down weapon dealers, spies, and other such shady characters, locating them and assimilating memories till he had all the skills he needed. While he was at it, he had taken the time to visit and rape the minds of some of the worlds' leading bankers, industrialists and political analyst still he was confident of his ability to do whatever he needed without any problems.

Now fully aware of what he had to do, Harry began with creating a persona. Going back to his fictional person's birthdates, he then worked up an ordinary and unremarkable back-story for his character. The first thing to do was to create a birth certificate, an identical entry in the register of the hospital in question, and an appropriate memory in the mind of the alleged issuer. This was followed by a nanny, once more with appropriate memory modification. That was in turn, followed by a crèche, then a playschool, and finally nursery school.

After nursery, the real mind magic work began. There were school yearbooks to doctor, library cards to be issued and used, memories put in place in the minds of the teachers, and in those of fellow students.

Rinse and repeat for college, adding drinking buddies, classmates and girlfriends, and he was done.

Doing all this (and so much more), he decided against limiting himself and created a full dozen lily-white identities on every major nation on earth, along with hundreds of disposable ones. They would all see their uses soon enough, though a large number would be kept for emergency purposes.

Exactly what he intended to do with them was manifold. He had, in the chamber, developed a very useful piece of magic. Inspired from the dark mark, it was a tiny little tattoo that was embedded with thousands upon thousands of tiny enchantments.

Once placed upon an individual, the enchantments worked their way into a person's mind. They seeped in, penetrating all layers of the mind until they reached the base of the subconscious. After that, it was a simple matter to simply twist the subconscious until the person would regard Harry himself as their master and god. There simply wasn't any possibility of disobedience, as any such thoughts would utterly fail to register in a person's mind. That wasn't all the spells did, of course, as to be this ham-handed simply wasn't Harry's style. The spells, over the course of time, would modify the person's personality to whatever Harry wanted it to be.

They would suppress some traits, enhance others, and cause specific reactions that would allow Harry to make the person in question into anything he wished them to be, while keeping it completely legitimate in the eyes of anyone around them.

One of the personas he'd created was Samuel Phoenix. Born in Bristol, 1974, Mr Phoenix was created as the scion of a fairly well off family. He was also the owner of a small shipping line that had been in the family for nearly thirty years.

The business had long since stagnated with Sam's father's death, and now it was just enough to keep them comfortable. Harry intended to use this persona to establish an endless source of legitimate wealth and power in the Muggle world.

To that end, he had incorporated the (allegedly) old company, and renamed it after the family. This way, Phoenix Inc. was born. It was a small, dead end business, with hardly any turnover. By the time Harry was done, he intended it to be a conglomerate that would be able to challenge any nation. For that, there was need for considerable capital.

Harry had no intention of using his vaults to supply that capital. In the Chamber, he had thought long and hard about potential sources of funds. The sheer number of possibilities with magic was endless, and he would make use of every possible method.

One thing Harry did was to set up a huge number of bank accounts. Using the newly created identities, he moved city to city, setting up thousands of accounts all over the world. The vast majority were what he termed 'single use' accounts, which were all created from the worthless identities he had created. These would be used casually, to slowly funnel money into other, more legitimate accounts, until eventually it rested in completely clean ones.

Coming back to the source of the money, the first thing he did was to visit all the dictators of the world, and using the mark, ordered them to drain the sum total of their illegal wealth into his own (and every single one of them had such accounts, bar none). That done, he went about visiting drug dealers, illegal arms merchants, and other big time crooks, adding all their savings into his own. Once done, he split the resulting money (which went into nearly a trillion American dollars) equally between the Muggle and magical worlds.

The next was the use of his hacking skills to setup tiny diversions in online bank accounts. Once again, he placed the mark upon the heads of numerous banks, ordering them to ignore the diversions. The diversions themselves were completely undetectable, being routed, not from the contents of the accounts, but from the interest they collected. After all, people kept a close eye on the contents of their accounts, but hardly anyone bothered to calculate their interest with the changing rates.

What Harry did was to setup instructions in the computer's operations that would divert ten percent of the interest collected by each account into one different account, which wouldn't even appear on the bank's records except when it received the transfer. There were programs in place that would again erase the records the moment the transfer was done.

The wealth coming in this way was huge, and Harry set about using it. Instead of starting all the separate businesses himself, he bought already existing businesses, amalgamating them into Phoenix Inc.'s aegis. He went for the small, ailing businesses, buying them out and reducing them to mere subsidiaries under Phoenix Inc.

The first priority was, naturally, businesses that he had an urgent need of. That included a sweets company, a small real estate developing firm, several minor shipping companies, and so on. The biggest acquisition he made this was the Cray Corporation as his entry ticket into the Cyber Market.

As it turned out, Harry found Roger Seymour Cray to be a man fully aware of the magical world. He had to be, as he was a squib vassal of the Potter family. Harry had read the reports of the man saying that he gotten a lot of help from elves under his house. The general public had no idea just how honest the man was being when he said such things.

Roger Cray was a project started by Charlus Potter several decades ago. He had an idea, which was to make magical and Muggle technology work together using a very particular set of runes and potions. Others would have laughed at it, calling it impossible. After all, many had tried and failed.

Charlus Potter, on the other hand was interested. After all, he knew the power of the concept.

He set Cray up with what he believed a sufficiently advanced lab, and a five thousand Galleon monthly stipend.

But, however far-seeing and progressive he might have been compared to his contemporaries, Charlus Potter was still a pureblood wizard.

As a result, the lab in question was outdated by at least two decades.

For Cray it was like playing in the Quidditch World Cup on an old twig. However, understanding the kind of reception his idea would've normally gotten, he was euphoric. After that, he'd asked to be left in the Muggle world to his own devices, except for some help now and then, so that he may keep abreast of the latest developments, especially this new-fangled 'computer' thing that had become the talk of the town.

Charlus granted that, too. And the genius squib did it. After thirty years, he found a way to do what wizards had believed impossible for the last three hundred years. He'd had help, as Charlus had made available to him the best books and research money could buy, all taken to him via the Potter family house-elves. But the final credit still rested with the genius squib. He had made the world's first supercomputer. A computer created using purely Muggle technology, and augmented beyond belief by integrating magical methods. But by this time, Charlus, his beloved benefactor, was dead.

Not only that, but the enemies such a man always acquired after a lifetime of politics were now in power, and set to destroy anything that could be credited to him.

It was them that had, after having gotten some hint of the research Cray had been doing, had brought the Muggle protection act in being. The act itself was not much of a problem, but it meant that the misuse of Muggle artefacts office was in position, and presenting the device would mean immediate confiscation.

He'd lost even after winning.

However, that was then. Since then, Cray (who was a brilliant scholar but a hopeless businessman) had practically driven his company to bankruptcy, just in time to be saved by Phoenix Inc.

And that changed everything. The first thing Harry had done after placing his mark on the man was to present him with the latest blueprints of all the projects of his competitors. That done, he had given the man carte blanche to "do whatever he needed to do, spend whatever he needed to spend, but build Harry the best damn computer the world had seen or would see for the next decade".

After business, Harry had started on politics. Originally, he'd decided to simply choose a dictatorship, and then take it over from the shadows using the mark to test and polish his administrative skills, not to mention build a powerbase in the Muggle world. But once he'd collected the money, he'd thought about it.

After all, why should he limit himself to one? Why not, say, all of them?

He'd known just how much effort would need to be put into it, and just how careful he would have to be. But the eventual decision was, why not?

And so it led to him utilizing the marks that he'd placed on the dictators to order them to turn over the entirety of all relevant information they possessed to him. He took over the countries in all but name, deciding to do whatever he could to improve their conditions as much as he could.

To anyone watching, it would seem that the men in power had suddenly decided to become benevolent. He took over many countries this way, but the jewel to his collection, without any doubt at all, was Russia. Once a great superpower, the nation had all but collapsed.

Her problems were many, chief among them the pandemic level of corruption that was present at every level of administration. Russia had one of the richest deposits of natural resources in the whole world, but the benefits from them never reached the government, much less the populace.

What happened was that the well bribed officials responsible for the resources simply sold them to the mafia. They had to, as apart from the bribes, doing anything else would mean death after hours of brutal torture. The mafia sold them for billions in the international market. A part of what was earned thus went into fuelling the same cycle again, while the rest lined their pockets.

The end result was a dying economy, and a country standing on the brink of total anarchy.

And it was not limited to the Muggle world.

Magical Russia was once a great magical community, but it had never really healed from the ravages that had been visited upon her by the Dark Lord Rasputin. Grindelwald wooing away half her magical population into his armies hadn't helped, either.

The truth was that magical Russia today resembled pre-Arthurian England far more than it did any twentieth century country. There were several families, like the Cherinkskys, and the Alexandrovitchs, who ruled their own portions of the land with an iron fist.

This was something that would, one day, be very useful to him. This was because the house of Strassinov, one of the biggest players in that particular sandbox, was an age old vassal of the Sharrs. Not that Harry would use them so soon, as he had no intention of taking on the headache that always came with the noble vassals.

No, what he did just now was to take Boris Yelstin under his control. After that it was a simple enough matter to start with the changes that he knew would return Russia to her superpower status.

The simplest decision to make was to use a bit of Legilimency and locate the heads of the various factions of the Russian mafia. The nation watched, horrified, as Russian state forces marched into the hideouts of the mafia bosses, dragging them away to the now reactivated cells below the Lubyanka.

Anyone even slightly familiar with the workings of the now defunct KGB was unsurprised when it was announced that they had died after signing over the entirety of their assets to the state, after signing full confessions naming and locating in full detail every person in their organizations.

This was followed by wave after wave of arrests and summary executions of every person involved in the theft and smuggling of the oil, gas and gold resources, among others. These actions gave the government enough capital to start work. And there was a lot to do. The first priority was the farming infrastructure, as Harry firmly believed that a country that couldn't feed her people couldn't do much else.

Not that there would be any particularly discernible results so soon. Resurrecting a country wasn't that easy, even with magic.

No, far more tangible results had been seen with the other dictator in the region that was in Harry's control.

Slobodan Milosevic was the president of Serbia, and the man responsible for the blood drenched war zone that was the former Yugoslavia. Harry had decided to intervene after taking the man under his control, and, as the first objective, had assassinated the leaders of the fledgling nations of Bosnia and Croatia. Serbian forces had moved in, and the nations were dissolved, once again forming Yugoslavia.

The brutal civil war that had ravaged the land was suddenly over, and the land was united again.

Of course, a nation formed this way would probably never have a life of more than a few weeks, so other measures had to be enacted. One thing he had done was to scrap the pro-Serb anti-everyone else regional policies. He didn't care how popular they were, how many of Milosevic's own people wanted them in effect. If they were what he termed 'divisive influences', they went. Any party member disagreeing meant a quick arrest and execution.

Another thing he had Milosevic do was to take proper control of the vast amount of money coming in the form of international aid, and use it was meant to be. Roads, houses, bridges were all built at a mind boggling pace.

The company contracted was, of course, Phoenix Inc. where Harry had acquired and merged over thirty infrastructure companies for this exact purpose.

Of course, foreign charity was hardly ever enough to restore a destroyed land. One thing the Yugoslavian government did was to apply for, and secure, massive loans from banks all over the world. The fact that the current heads of all of the banks involved were currently Harry's finger puppets was obviously just a happy coincidence. As was the fact that the loans were all roughly on a timescale that would put the major repayments all at the turn of the century, when, as the government defaulted, the banks would obligingly collapse, leaving the way open for the banking branch of Phoenix that Harry had ensured would be in place to mount a smooth takeover.

And now, we come back to the Magical world, because if the author were to detail just the sheer number of things that are involved in taking over dictatorships and turning them into places able to support long term plans, both him and the reader would be stuck to the computer screen for years.

It had been a week and a half since he'd met with Talbot and started work on the company, and it was just finishing now. Both his name and his wealth had helped considerably in shortening the time, but this was more or less the minimum duration.

Harry had ordered the man to setup several new branches for the company, and had already filed for numerous new patents that they would be using. Another thing was that he'd started production on his estates. It had taken some time, but the whole thing had been helped along vastly by the fact that Harry had used the confectionery company he'd bought as Samuel Phoenix to start the production of a huge batch of Inception Lozenges.

It had been a small matter to program sweets carrying the knowledge of advanced Mathematics, English, Science, and the Hogwarts years one to seven.

It didn't solve all his problems. Hell, it didn't solve half of them, as there was much more work to do, but it was a major step forward.

Another good thing was that his factories were all online now, and the printing presses owned by the Althric Chroniclers had just finished the first catalogue for Althric Artificers.

The first item Harry had decided upon was the television. And even if he did so himself, it was a work of art. Having decided to ignore the chunky unattractive Muggle models, he'd gone straight for flat screen. It basically consisted of a series of runes inscribed on the back of a mirror. What the runes did was to turn the mirror into a scrying mirror. Then, they were connected to another set of runes, placed on the camera.

What this did was to limit the scope of the TV. Instead of picking up images from anywhere, like actual scrying, the mirrors could only receive what the camera runes transmitted.

This, in conjunction to the Peverell Broadcasting Service (yet another Althric Subsidiary) would make it very easy for Harry to take advantage of the upcoming Quidditch World Cup, not to mention the Triwizard Tournament. Another thing was that Harry was surprised by just how many details of ancient magical history had reached the Muggles in the form of fantasy books or cinema, something he had every intention to take advantage of.

He had, under various pretexts, hired numerous scriptwriters to make serials out of films and books such as Conan the Barbarian, Wrath of the Titans, and the Lord of the Rings.

There were plays and songs about such stories in the magical world, but they were rather few and lacking in his eyes. And after all, it wasn't as if all this was costing him any money of his own.

Harry had plans to launch, over the course of the year, Cell Phones (created out of a lot of tinkering with multi way mirrors), Computers (tiny magical nexus), and calculators (as a substitute to the currently used calculating parchment).

Another thing he would launch immediately was a paper production and supply company.

While paper was one of the cheapest and most commonly used items in the Muggle world, it was rather expensive in the magical world, mainly as it had to be hand produced. This was compounded by the fact that they couldn't just buy Muggle paper, as being machine produced, it refused to let any enchantments take hold.

However, a purely magically automated way to produce paper circumvented this problem, and would allow Harry to sell paper at half the market price. Moreover, the same thing applied to pens and Muggle clothes. With all of these measures put in motion, and Harry was looking at a complete rejuvenation of the magical world in a few years.

Not that it would be a moment too soon. Because the fact of the matter was that as things currently were, magical Britain was dying. There were roughly three hundred and fifty thousand witches and wizards in Britain, and near about five to six times that in the rest of Europe.

And that wasn't even the worst part. The fact was that the witches and wizards that were there were hardly worth the name. There had been a time when British wizards and witches had been able to divert floods, cause and end earthquakes, create volcanoes, part seas, all of it on a whim.

Compared to now…

Well, the less said the better.

The painful fact was that all of this was reversible. Currently, Albus Dumbledore held the future of magical Britain in his hands. Were he to wish so, he could order the reestablishment of the classes that had been steadily ended in the last three centuries. He could bring Hogwarts, and by extension Britain, to her former glory.

But he was hardly going to do so, especially when he'd personally abolished half the subjects.

Still, there was hope, as Harry was Lord of two of the founder Houses. He could, should he choose, remove the headmaster. He wouldn't do so already, as being recognised as a legitimate enemy by Dumbledore so soon was rather unadvisable, but one day the time would come.

For now, Harry had decided to make another visit to the ministry. One thing he had to do in the Department of Magical Finance was to allocate the shares for Althric Inc., but he had other plans there too.

A.N:

Um... People, I've recently had reason to believe that my chapters a bit too bland. So, could you just put in a little review/PM to confirm or deny this? And, if you confirm it, could you suggest something? Pretty please with a cherry on the top?

Apart from that, please review/PM me for any clarifications, criticisms and suggestions that you think could improve this story.

Next chapter should be up in a week.

Signing off,

blackshadow111