Since we didn't get any Harry last chapter, have some now.
Pandora
"Are you sure we can't convince you to stay?"
Harry looked away from the gigantic, buggy-like vehicle that was going to transport him and Mike back to base. Moa was already sitting inside.
Norm, Patel and a couple of Avatars holding guns were standing outside with them, 'seeing them off'.
"No, thanks," He refuses. "But thanks for helping me. I owe you one, big time."
He holds out his hand, which Norm takes easily and Patel side-eyes.
He tries to ignore the whispering in his ears. He meets Norm's eyes for a second before glancing away.
He knows that they suspect there's more going on with his new… growths, than he's told them. They want to study it, with a burning kind of interest he can't help but distrust, even though he knows that neither are malicious by nature and probably wouldn't do anything he didn't consent to.
He doesn't quite know how he knows that. He doesn't really want to know.
He has suspicions too.
"Well, you're always welcome back." Norm promises, voice muffled behind his mask. He's low-key envious of Harry's invisible bubble-head charm. "And if you feel any pain, or-"
"Thanks." He places his other hand on Norm's briefly, just long enough to be polite, before extracting them both. "Really. But we should be going. It'll be dark soon."
"You could stay until tomorrow?" Norm offers, not for the first time. His worry is genuine - and it's not just for Harry. He has a good heart.
It makes him feel a little guilty.
"We'll be fine." Mike interrupts, saving his ass once again. He claps a hand to his shoulder that looks rougher than it is and steers him towards the giant buggy.
Harry feels the murmur of his instinctive dislike, mistrust clinging thick and sour to the back of his tongue. Watchfulness itches along his forearms, a dulled form of fear. He waves over his shoulder, using the motion to duck away from Mike's hand, easing out from under the invasive emotions. Another round of thanks-and-farewell and he's climbing the ladder into the buggy.
The buggy itself is reasonably automated and is built to house both human and Avatar bodies. Mike checks the computer system and, as it starts moving, plugs in his gauntlet.
"Tracking disabled." He reports, then "Remote access disabled."
He unplugs and takes the seat for manual piloting - which mostly means telling the vehicle which direction to steer itself in. Its directional only, what with no longer being tapped into Pandora's GPS system. A human eye is critical, to stop them driving right off a cliff.
"Because that's not suspicious at all." Moa mutters to herself, working away at one of her PDAs. "They know where we live, why would we disable tracking?"
Nobody answers her. This is the plan that Baker and his lot cooked up, so this is what they're doing. The people at Hell's Gate will assume they're doing something suspicious, but they'll have to send out an aerial probe (or some of their flying native allies) to find out what - and Harry can cloak them from both.
Sufficient space inside the mountain has been cleared. Harry's brain-growths have been sorted out (hopefully).
It's time to start building.
Pandora
The heist goes off without a hitch. Rather than trekking on foot to the mine site and then floating masses of ore through the air, Harry disillusions the buggy and they drive to one of the older pits further out. The buggy has some protective armour over its tyres which he cuts off and repurposes to form a crude shallow bowl on top of the roof. A bunch of summoning, levitation and feather-light charms later and its completely full of so-called 'waste ore' - material that was too low-grade to bother with shipping out when richer deposits were available. Most of it was churned up en route to the valuable stuff and simply left abandoned at the edges of the mine.
It wasn't like there could possibly be thieves on Pandora, after all.
Some more summoning, sticking and durability charms later and it was secured by a net of jungle vines. Happily, if the net was hit with a disillusionment charm, it mostly hid whatever it happened to be covering rather than reveal it.
"If these 'charms' fail," Moa said bleakly, looking up at the ceiling of the buggy above her head, "we're all going to be crushed, aren't we?"
Real fear curdled at the edge of his stomach. He grimaced and edged away from her.
"They're not going to fail." He assured her. "Not unless I get knocked out somehow."
There was a pause as Moa and Mike both turned to stare incredulously at him.
"Right." Harry agreed, and both made the buggy's metal body harder and cast a shield around himself. Words like that were just tempting fate.
Despite his unthinking challenge to the Gods of Screwing People Over, the trip back to base was uneventful. Harry mostly spent it trying to breathe through the nausea of being in close quarters with unceasing stress, anxiety and paranoia for hours upon bumpy hours.
Back at base, they were met by the lead engineer, Baker, and a handful of soldiers.
The whispering started up again, louder than before.
He tried to ignore it, focusing on detaching the net, corralling the (still light-as-a-feather) chunks of ore into it and carting the whole bunch into the mountain. The buggy itself he left disillusioned for now.
"Any trouble?" Baker asked, after a few quiet words with Mike. Moa had already left for her bunk.
"No." He said shortly. His skin was buzzing, the unshielded trip and base re-introducing him to radiation he hadn't experienced in almost two months. He was already flush with magic again. It was… unpleasant. "Did they call you about the buggy?"
"Yeah. They weren't happy, but they seemed to accept it as a 'we need ground transport' theft. There shouldn't be any retaliation. How many trips do you think you'll need to make with it?"
"Not sure." He guided the netted ore through the entryway. Eventually, it'd be big enough to fit the massive mining trucks the RDA used. For now, to reduce suspicion, it was no bigger than the initial small diggers.
Baker followed him, along with the engineer - Pastel.
"The RDA provided high-grade ore to make the Earth gate." Harry explained, rolling his shoulders a little as the heat-without-heat of Pandora's background radiation fell away again. "We obviously expected to do the same here. I'll have a better idea once I've forged the first stone but since each stone needs to be made all at once - I'd like to get as much stocked as possible. Is the forge ready to go?"
"Almost." Pastel reported. "It's built, but unfired. We're still puttin' the arms and apparatus into place. We had some issues early on and it's looking like we're going to run short on materials."
"Will this help?" Harry gestured at the ore floating ahead of them. The engineer laughed.
"Hah! That'd be a right pricey assembly! Nah nah. Any old scrap metal should do. Everything built out here is made from the same alloy." He turned to Baker. "If we can dig up some more modules, that could work. If not, me 'n the boys could get over to the Hell's Gate and break apart some of the larger mining machinery. I can't imagine them what live there would have much to complain about that. We'd be doing the damned opposite of mining."
"I imagine they'd be somewhat concerned about what we planned to build with the pieces." Baker commented dryly.
"Bah!" Pastel made a rude gesture in the general direction of Hell's Gate. "We're due for a storm sooner or later. Tell 'em we're just gettin' some extra shielding."
"They've confirmed they'll host us all in case of a rad storm. Until then, I'll see what I can do about another module or two. The RDA is going to want to use those miners again." So saying, the man turned off into one of many smaller spaces that had been set aside for emergency shelter, on-site management and more secretive military stuff.
Pastel walked with Harry all the way to the massive, cavernous space they'd excavated. Metal 'struts' cut diagonally across in certain places, more the higher you went, which would allow for industrial-sized trucks to move freely between them. Only two connected the floor and the ceiling directly and had been coated in fluorescent paint.
At the far end, where divots awaiting gate stones had already been cut into the cavern wall, a mess of machinery sat squatly. Hanging to the side were a row of specialised suits. It was almost identical to the machinery back on Earth, which he'd used to forge the Earth-side gate.
Harry dumped the ore where directed and turned to go back. It was late in the night cycle by now. Most of Pandora's bio-luminescence would be active. The mine site was dead and dark but would the path from their to their base be the same? Would it be safe to make another run tonight? How did disillusionment look when running over bio-luminescent ground? He should probably test that.
A cough drew his attention back to the present. He glanced at Pastel, knew instantly what he was thinking about and looked away, frowning.
"So… What's with the new headgear?"
He doesn't go for more ore that night.
Pandora
The light of day brings the kind of stares and whispers he'd once known as a boy celebrity in a school full of children. Not even his fame as the Last Wizard In Modern Times had been the same, since he'd mostly moved between secure locations for specific purposes when he wasn't just meeting remotely.
He fills his time with trips to and from a few different mining sites. Tests the night before had made it pretty obvious that an invisible buggy driving over bioluminescent grass that rippled in reaction to touch pretty much counteracted the being-invisible thing so it was daytrips only for now, with multiple scouting parties doing their best to locate and track their native watchers.
Throughout the day, reports of their numbers increasing made everyone more tense. Mike keeping his gun in hand at all times was enough to get Harry to agree to suspend his trips shortly after noon, despite the delay scratching at the back of his mind - and his escape from all the other minds around him being taken away.
Because yeah. There was no fooling himself about it. Ever since these things had popped out of his head like gross little mushrooms, he could hear… more.
Thoughts. Feelings. Intentions. Wants. Hopes. Dreams. A murmur, a stutter, a shout. Unless he focused on shutting them out, it was like the press of several dozen people's bodies inside his skull, skin-warm and prickling with undesired sweat and scent, rubbing up against his very sense of self, too much and too close and-
And too easy to push away.
One of the builders had staggered on the job, only his tool's safety switch stopping him from losing a hand.
A highly-strung young soldier whose fears and anxieties had just kept hammering at him had randomly dropped into a dead faint, the incident treated as alarming but not suspicious. Other people, more than a few, winced or rotated their jaw against an ache they couldn't identify, moving away from him in a completely unconscious awareness of the source of their mental assault.
He felt terrible about it, but at the same time he wished they could all just bugger off to some other camp. Go back up to space. Be anywhere that he wasn't.
Because this was important. They'd served their purpose, they'd built what he'd needed them to build, now it was up to him and he couldn't…
He couldn't stop.
He tries wearing a cloth over them like a bandanna, gently pressing them down against his skull, but it does nothing. He tries to practice occlumency but 'clear your mind' just makes room form them and he does not want them there.
His temper shortens. He can't sleep. A few times, he finds himself fantasising about just - driving them all away. Into the forest, into Hell's Gate, into the ship they came in on and out to space and just away.
Days pass. More Na'vi are gathering at the edges of the forest, like they're waiting for something. Half the base is on a hair-trigger, expecting an assault, unable to trust his wards against neurotoxin-tipped arrows when it's their potential agonising death on the line.
Fear rises thick and suffocating, defensive aggression on its heels. Suspicion and prayer, hateful wishes against people who aren't doing anything but standing nearby and watching. Too many people trying to start something, just to get relief from the waiting. Those, he smooths over, often without realising it until its too late. He tries not to but he can't.
They cannot be allowed to compromise his objective. His obligation.
There's no rest from it. Even in the mountain, there are always people working in shifts. Fewer minds, but not none.
And when he manages to sleep…
He knows they aren't his dreams. He quickly learns to hide himself, because if he leaves he just falls into another one. He can't ever seem to find himself, his own mind, and trying to force his way back only ever forces the dreamer's mind to conform instead and that…
He knows, somehow, at a deeply instinctual level, that he changes more than just dreams, when he does that. In this place, in this way… he could change everything about them. He could close the door and trap them. Could set rules and structure into their dreams, turn their minds into prisons, or sanctuaries, or factories for thought. Heaven and Hell, every night a thousand years, or never released at all.
The ease of his ability is what frightens him most.
How natural it feels.
How normal.
He takes what ore they have and does a test forge for one of the smallest stones the build will call for. It takes two or three men to keep up a consistent feed of ore into the furnace, where his magic separates the unobtanium and casts out the scrap he doesn't need. It hurts to hold the purified unobtanium, even with only his magic. It connects concentrated power directly to him when he's already gorged sick with it, stretched and torn and bloated. But hold it he does, until the workers have dumped in every last bit waste ore they can and he has as much raw material as he can get.
He wonders, too late, if trying to forge Avalonium here and now could actually kill him.
He can't quite decide if he'd mind.
Then he takes a deep breath, fogs the transparent mask of his heat-shielded suit, and does what he came here to do.
Forging Avalonium from raw alien power should be easy, when he has so much of it, but… it's not.
A tsunami of power at his back but it can't flow where he needs it to go. It feels like he's… forced to constrict and compress it then shove it all through the eye of a needle. It feels like…
It feels like it would be literally impossible if it weren't for the people who'd come to Pandora before him. The shadow of them. The blueprint, maybe, the right? It comes with them, and Harry too, but for all his power he's just one being and they… they had done more.
Avalonium is not of Pandora. Not of Eywa. It's born of Earth, anchored to it. The lustrous bones of Gaia. Too foreign, it could never grow here. It needs them to seed even the idea of it. They, all of them, such small pieces of her, resonating and sheltering and growing.
Their ships that brought them to this place.
Hell's Gate, a foothold incursion and lingering stamp of ownership.
A home.
A fortress.
A place that shuts out the roots from below and radiation from above. Full of Gaia's people - waking, sleeping, dreaming - all broadcasting in a way this world is deaf to.
And their deaths… every one of them a spore, carried on oblivious winds, needing just the right conditions to… reproduce.
He sees then, why they are the way they are. Gaia's children, all of them, just another iteration of a winning pattern. Wasps and worms and mistletoe. Fungus and vampires and cuckoos. Success, success, success.
There's enough of them for the thought of Gaia to be here, a microbe in a foreign body. Just the shape of her shadow. But…
It's enough.
For Gaia's hand, under the benevolent naivete of Eywa's distant attention, it's enough.
The automated arms take the weight of the solid chunk of blue crystal, the smallest piece, done.
He doesn't see it. His vision faded before he was halfway there, nose running and legs trembling.
But he does it. He forces that ocean through the narrowest strip of territory, of sovereignty, converting it to their own and after…
After, it's quiet.
After, he can sleep.
And in his dreams, blessedly his own and nobody else's, his bridge of buttons is stretching through an asteroid fields made of sickles, galleons and knuts. He captures them, one by one, but their transfigured edges make his hands slippery and the ones he drops spin away again, ruby-red and violent.
He keeps building, slower now. He can feel what waits for him and his hands won't stop shaking.
He plucks wreckage from the void and, button by razor-sharp button, builds his way back to a home that hates him for leaving.
Pandora
He's shaken awake, groggy and aching. It's… Mike. He looks…
"The Na'vi are here." His guard says. The words don't make sense. He can't.. What was he..? He was…
"Get up. Their medicine woman, or whatever, she's here. She wants to talk to you. Apparently she's been asking for a while, and didn't like not getting a response."
Harry ran his tongue over his teeth, half his mind still sunk close to dreaming. This… didn't feel real. His eyes slid shut, something inside him turning away and reaching out... towards…
"C'mon, snap out of it!" He was shaken again, more gently but by both shoulders. Mike looked worried now.
He could… feel it. Muzzy thoughts about the build, his collapse, the scans they'd done of his brain while he was unconscious. No bleeds, thank god, but-
He cringes back into his own mind, raw and aching.
"'M ok." Harry forces out. He stands, sways. Mike helps him. Every step, every fumbling move to change his clothes and drink some water from the container at his bedside helps drag him away from where his hindbrain wants to be. By the time he's leaving the small mountain tunnel and stepping into open air, he's mostly certain that this isn't the dream.
Standing at the edge of the ward line, partly-hidden by masses of armed soldiers if not for how tall she and her companions were, a female Na'vi clothed in glittering beads is waiting patiently.
Her eyes lock onto him the second he arrives.
And he… is curious.
For the first time, he reaches out deliberately. Sends his awareness through the air like a ripple of thought. She maybe twitches? A little? But he… he can't feel her. Like the woman in the forest, if he couldn't see her he'd barely know she was there. She just doesn't register and neither do any of her companions.
Then, with a faint impression like a pebble bouncing off glass, he knows that there is someone further back in the forest.
Someone strange.
The big tall woman steps forward - guns rising nervously as she does - as Harry reaches the closest line of humans. Harry drags his attention back to her.
"Oel ngati kame." The woman greets. "I am Mo'at, Tsahik of the Na'vi. I would speak with you Ha'ri Po'ta, Tsahik of the Sky People."
Pandora