AN: Hey guys.
Chapter 2 is here and it is a 'relationship' chapter, but there is still a lot of theories and tech talk between Harry and Hermione.
Hope you guys enjoy this one.
Chapter 2
Harry walked towards the common room after another exhausting quidditch practice; judging by the look he saw on the twins faces Wood would soon have a prank induced change of mind, the entire team had started to show signs of Wood's crazy training schedule and even the professors started noticing. Harry thought that professor McGonagall might be waiting to see if the team will solve it, before she intervened to protect her students; and that more than anything showed how bad it was, you knew things are bad when a quidditch fanatic like the transfiguration professor was thinking of talking Wood into lowering the intensity of his training.
Harry had ended up in the care of Madam Pomfrey two times in the last week due to training injuries, more than any of the others; although, to be fair, his injuries were due to his own lack of attention. He was distracted for about two weeks now, ever since he and Hermione had decided to continue his mother's research. He still hadn't found a place he and Hermione could use, when he asked the twins if they knew any secret passage that lead out of the castle they just smiled at him and said they might tell him later. He was now looking at some places near the forbidden forest that might be far enough from that castle that the ambient magic wouldn't interfere with their work; the problem with that was the fact that the forest was dangerous, the two of them alone near the forest might become a target for anything that lurked in the forest. Harry knew enough about what was in there to not be anywhere near it if he could.
While he was still working on finding a place they could use; Hermione already had some things they could do. The books she asked from her parents had arrived a few days ago and they immediately started reading it; the books were amazing and had a lot of information they needed. There were books on physics, engineering, mathematics and many other subjects they would need to know if they wanted to continue his mother's research, most of them were from secondary education level, but a few were old books from Hermione's cousin, who was apparently pursuing a master's degree in mechanical engineering. At first Harry was having trouble to understand a lot of what he read in the books; he quickly realized that Hermione was much better at it than he was, so he asked her to teach him the things she learned from the books, and as always; she was able to easily teach him something that would take him months to learn from the books.
They also quickly learned that they were able to do a lot more working together compared to separately; Hermione understood the books in a way Harry would never be able to do; Harry was smart, smarter than most people gave him credit, but Hermione's capacity to learn and retain information was vastly superior to his own. On the other hand; Harry was a lot more creative and intuitive than Hermione, while she could learn new things way faster than he could, he was able to learn from her and then think of new ways to use that knowledge in way that Hermione wasn't able to.
They made quite a good team working that way, so they were able to advance a lot faster than they would be able to if they were on their own. With only a few cursory glances in many different books, they had already concluded that there was a 90% chance that Harry's mother was right with her theory that magic worked in the electromagnetic spectrum; it was the only explanation they had that made sense, the only hole in that theory was the fact that London should be a electronic black zone with the amount of magic that was around the Ministry and St. Mungus.
They had also found that Hermione was right about silver being a good material to insulate against EMPs, but silver was quite expensive; they were thinking of building a faraday cage somewhere in Hogwarts so they could conduct their experiments, but it was proving harder than they thought.
Harry had the idea that magic might be used to solve the problems they couldn't solve with technology, but they were also having problems with that. Every day that passed Harry became happier that he had traded classes from divination to ancient runes; they thought of using runes to help in their research but also didn't have any success there, apart from a rune that was used to create a constant lightning bolt, they didn't found any runes that could be used to work with electricity. While doing that research they did had a breakthrough in something completely different; Harry gave the idea of trying to modify some runic arrays and their properties, specifically the gravity runes that the ancient Egyptians used to flip gravity in their tombs; Hermione did the arithmancy and found out that it was possible, just really hard. It wasn't something they would be able to do now, but in the future, something like that could be used to build spaceships.
But all of that didn't matter that day, it was Hermione's birthday and Harry had prepared something special for her; he had found an abandoned classroom and spent what little free time he had during the week setting it up for a party, thankfully he didn't need to clean the room, every room in the castle was always clean; but he still did a lot of work, he paid the twins to set up some food and bring a few things from outside the castle, they were even able to find party balloons somehow; he invited every gryffindor in his year and quite a few year mates from hufflepuff and ravenclaw, there wasn't anyone from slytherin that they were even remotely friendly with. He also set up a wireless, with some help from Lavender and Parvati; to play some of Hermione's favourite songs; apparently the wireless network sold recordings of songs that you could use in the wireless.
He could already see Hermione focusing on that, instead of enjoying her birthday; she was even more obsessed with their research than he was.
He walked into the common room and found it in the usual emptiness of a Sunday morning, most students were still sleeping, enjoying their day of; Hermione, of course, was already awake and sat near the fireplace, reading one of the engineering books; she smiled at him when she saw Harry enter the room.
"Happy birthday, Hermione." Harry said, approaching her. "Let me just take a quick shower, and I will join you." He said when Hermione started to rise from her seat.
"Sure, Harry." She responded smiling at him and seating down again.
Harry walked towards his dorm room; walking inside it, he saw that all of his roommates bar Neville, were still sleeping; he shook his head at Ron's snoring and went towards the showers. While in the shower he started to think about his gift to Hermione; just like last year it was a book, but this one wasn't about some magical subject, it was a recently released book about computer sciences; he knew how much Hermione wanted to know if his mother's experiments with computers and magic worked or not, but since they didn't had the her notes he decided to give that specific book to Hermione; maybe she would one day do the experiments herself.
Putting clothes on and walking out of the showers he saw that Dean was starting to wake up, but the others were still sleeping; he shook his head and went towards Ron's bed with the intention of waking up his friend, when he got close to the bed he drew his wand and shot a stinging hex at his sleeping friend; he was supposed to be up already, helping Harry prepare Hermione's feast, so Harry didn't felt too bad by doing this to him. He also learned a long time ago to not be near Ron when he was trying to wake him up, unless he was okay with being punched.
Ron yelped and jumped in his bed as the stinging hex made contact with his side; Harry tried to suppress his laugh when his friend looked at him with a look on his face Harry would have expected him to make at someone who had hurt his pet rat scabbers.
"Why did you do that?" Ron whined.
"You're supposed to be up and helping me with Hermione's birthday." Harry responded in a deadpan voice.
"That's today?" Ron asked in a confused tone.
"Yes, Ron; that is today. Now get up, take a shower and go help the twins with setting up the food in the room. I will take Hermione for a walk around the castle to distract her, I can give you guys maybe an hour and a half before she realises i'm trying to distract her." Harry said, his voice raising a little; he knew he was being a little too harsh with his friend and he would apologize later, but right now he wanted everything to be perfect for Hermione's birthday.
"Alright, mate; i'll help, there is no need to yell at me." Ron said, yawning a little.
Harry took a deep breath to calm himself down; he didn't know where this desire was coming from and why it was making him so short tempered; he just knew he wanted to make Hermione's birthday perfect. He thought it was because she had helped him so much in the last few weeks, it was because of her that he learned more about his mother, it was because of her that he now had the chance to continue his mother's work, it was because of her that he had remembered what it felt like to enjoy learning something new. He thought it was a perfectly good reason to not want to ever see her unhappy again.
"I'm sorry Ron; I just want to give Hermione a perfect birthday. I will get out of your hair now and go downstairs distract her." Harry said in an apologetic tone.
Harry said goodbye to his friend and went downstairs looking for Hermione; he found her still in the chair near the fireplace, reading her book; he started to approach her, she was so distracted by her book that she didn't see him until he was right in front of her; by that time it was already too late for her to do anything to stop him from grabbing her by the waist, lifting her from her chair and embracing her.
"Happy birthday, Hermione." He whispered near her ear, weirdly enjoying her shuddering at his words.
"Thank you Harry." Hermione responded, her voice a little low, easily showing her emotions.
"Ron is still sleeping; do you want to take a walk through the grounds with me?" Harry asked while he broke the hug, trying to sound excited in order to hide his plans.
"Sure, Harry; that would be lovely." Hermione responded smiling at him.
They left the common room walking side by side; Harry tossing a knowing look to Lavender who was near the door, she returned his look with a nod of her head, showing that her part of the plan was ready. As they walked down the stairs Hermione started to talk about the book she was reading before, apparently it was a physics book.
"You know, that book was fascinating but also really annoying when trying to use it to apply scientific principles to magic; magic breaks a lot of laws of physics. I don't even know where to start trying to understand how conservation of energy would work with magic, conservation of mass is a little better; transfigurations usually break down after a time so it might apply to magic, but there are also some ways in which magic could also break that law. And don't even get me started with potions and fluid mechanics; a lot of them also break physics." Hermione said.
"Well, at least nothing breaks solid mechanics right?" Harry asked in a light teasing tone.
"Yeah, because when you cast an unbreakable charm on something, it's reaction to stress is perfectly within the laws of physics." Hermione said scoffing, causing Harry to laugh; his laugh also drawing a small smile from her.
"Didn't you say something about atoms and transfiguration yesterday?" Harry asked.
"Yes, I think it might be possible permanently transfigure something if you know the atomic composition of both the base material and the thing you want to transfigure it into; I think it would be impossible to do it with something with more than a few atoms at most, but for basic things like metals it might be possible; we could probably make a spell that transfigures materials like coal or something even cheaper into gold." Hermione responded, her voice taking a distinctive passionate tone, showing how much she enjoyed the topic of conversation; Harry always liked hearing her talk that way.
"That will show Flamel and his Philosopher's Stone." Harry said, causing Hermione to laugh out loud.
"Well, it still isn't enough to make the elixir of life, but it could do the gold thing without much trouble." She said recovering from her laugh.
"What i'm thinking about is if we could possible turn something like that into a runic array; if we could do it, that replicator we talked jokingly with Lee might become possible." Hermione said, causing Harry to almost jump in surprise; he didn't think something so Sci-fi could actually be possible.
"Isn't that supposed to be impossible? I think I read something about how transfigurating food doesn't work." Harry asked.
"Yes, with the current method of transfiguration it is impossible; the transfiguration will break down before being properly digested, but the new method would change the basic molecules of the material, using the basic atomic particles to create something new; it would only work if the base material is more complex than the transfigurated one, so there would always be some loss of the base material, the process could never be 100% efficient." Hermione said, pausing a little and looking at him to see if he was still following her train of thought; when Harry nodded his understanding she continued. "But i'm not thinking about using it for food, like the replicators in Star Trek; i'm thinking of using it for basic materials, metals like rhodium, iridium, palladium and gold; or even rarer elements like curium or neptunium." Hermione finished.
Harry was once again awed by Hermione mind; with just some basic scientific knowledge she was already thinking of things that could revolutionize the world; he realized that this was the start of something big, sure they started it by reading his mother's journal and trying to continued her research, but it was quickly evolving into something new, something much bigger than just merging magic and technology.
"You want to grab something to eat?" He asked as they passed in front of the great hall.
"No, I can wait a little." Hermione responded. "What about you? I'm sure Wood didn't let you eat anything before dragging you to training." She asked.
"No, I can wait as well." Harry responded. "You think this runic replicator of yours could use air molecules as base materials?" He asked.
"Maybe." Hermione responded. "I think it would need to be a different version, instead of working like transfiguration, we would need to build one that works like conjuration, which also uses air; while they work in a similar way, those are two different concepts. But why do you want it to work with air?" She asked.
"I just thought that if it worked with air we could use it to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and release just the oxygen." Harry said, enjoying the open air now that they were out of the castle. He was surprised when Hermione stopped walking with him; he looked behind him and saw Hermione looking at him with an awed look on her face.
"Harry, you're a genius." Hermione said quickly walking forward and hugging him with enough force that Harry was almost sure she bruised his ribs.
"Do you have any idea how big something like that could be, not just for combating global warming; if we could combine the two arrays we could turn air into solid or liquid materials, we could use the carbon in the CO2 to turn coal or even oil into renewable resources." Hermione said, her voice almost shaking with excitement.
"Well, i'm glad I could give you a good idea." Harry said, breaking the hug.
They walked towards the shore of the lake and sat down near it; they both stayed there for over an hour, talking about the new ideas they had and how they could use them. Harry still wanted to make a lightsaber but Hermione said it might be impossible to do it; she thought that plasma couldn't be formed into a uniform bladelike structure since it was so volatile; she used lightning as an example, how in every lightning bolt there was branches reaching out from the main discharge. She also said how she wanted to make x-ray glasses but they also wouldn't work, the amount of radiation that would flow through something like that would immediately cause cancer in anyone who used it. But Harry still said they should continue to try to make both, the problems Hermione saw were scientific, maybe magic would be able to offset them. Hermione also talked about her theory that magic could make anything if given enough information by the caster; she talked about the fact that non-verbal magic was just the caster imposing his will and giving magic the information and then magic itself made the spell happen. Harry thought that that theory had a lot of potential, they could possible make spell that transfigured electronic things, it would be nice to make a spell that could transfigure a working television right into the gryffindor common room.
They also talked about the many ways that spells and runes could be used to make some things more efficient, cooling spells and runes could make anything that needs to operate in low temperatures vastly more efficient. Hermione gave the example of superconductors and how they could be used with cooling charms, the only problem with it was the potential magnetic interference if magic did generate its own magnetic field; they still weren't sure about that. That was another area of magic that completely broke laws of physics; Hermione theorized that it might be possible to magically cool something down to absolute zero, something that is supposedly impossible.
Another area of magic that broke physics was lightning runes; Hermione said that lightning could be used to generate electricity, so if they managed to create something that could convert magically generated lightning into electrical current, it would basically be a perpetual motion machine. Heat could also be used in a similar way and it was even easier to produce; Hermione remembered him of that wall of fire back in first year, Snape's addition to the defence of the philosopher's stone used flame generating runes, something they were supposed to learn later this year in runes class.
When it was getting close to the time that Harry had planed his surprise, he asked Hermione to follow him into the castle again; thinking he wanted to have breakfast Hermione agreed and they went inside the castle; when they passed the great hall and instead of entering it Harry led her towards the stairs she started to realize he was up to something.
"I thought you wanted to have breakfast Harry. Where are we going?" She asked, but didn't stop following him.
"I remembered something while we were talking; I have a surprise for you." Harry said, hopping she would take the wrong conclusions from that; he was glad to see she did so, when she asked.
"Did you find somewhere we can work?" She asked in a hopeful tone.
"Maybe I did, maybe I didn't; you will have to wait for your surprise." Harry responded in a teasing tone.
Hermione huffed in annoyance, but still continued to follow him; Harry smirked a little at his friend's expression, she looked quite cute pouting like someone had stolen her books or something. They walked up the stairs still immersed in their conversation, but this time Hermione was visible distracted, looking around her and trying to discover where Harry was leading her; Harry saw the look of recognition of her face when he led her towards the third floor corridor, the same one of their first year; He could see Hermione get more and more excited as they walked through the corridor and guessed that she still hadn't realized what he was doing, still thinking he was leading her to a work room further in the abandoned part of the castle. When they reached the end of the corridor Harry stopped in front of a door on the right side of it.
"Your surprise is inside this room; Hermione." He said pointing towards the door.
Hermione walked forward animatedly and opened the door, she jumped and threw her hands around him, burying her face in his shoulders when the door opened and she heard from inside.
"Happy Birthday Hermione."
She started to hit him in the chest with weak punches.
"You're a git, you know that Harry?" She said in a fake annoyed voice.
"I know; now, let's go enjoy your birthday." Harry responded laughing; he then grabbed her hand and walked inside the room.
Harry thought that Hermione enjoyed her birthday party, there were a lot of people there, most of their year mates apart from the slytherins were there; there were also a few upper years students; Harry´s quidditch teammates, Lee, Percy and his girlfriend Penelope Clearwater. There were three students from lower years; Ginny, she had brought a friend with her; Harry didn't knew the girl, the only thing he knew was that she was a ravenclaw named Luna; and finally, to Harry's annoyance, Colin Creevey was also there.
Hermione seemed a little overwhelmed at first that there were so many people there to celebrate her birthday with her; but she quickly started to loosen up when she realized that, while the party was for her birthday, most people there were just having a good time with each other and not hounding her.
Harry went around the party thanking everyone that helped him organize it; the twins that had brought the food and drinks, Ron for helping him set the decorations in the room and Lavender and Parvati for helping with the music. He also spent some time talking with all the guests, letting Hermione be on her own for a time so she make her own connections. He talked with Susan, Hannah and Megan again, something he found himself doing a lot since the start of the school year; the hufflepuffs were a lot friendlier towards him this year compared to the previous one; he left them when Ron joined and started talking about quidditch with Megan again. He also talked to Ginny and her friend Luna for a while, he found the ravenclaw to be a nice but quirky girl, he laughed a little thinking about the girl talking with Hermione, the creatures that Luna talked about almost every other sentence would drive Hermione crazy. He also spent some time talking with his teammates; Angelina and Alicia hugged him and said that they wished they had someone like him to organize a party like that for their birthdays; they were also looking at the twins while they said it, causing everyone around to laugh at the twins fake hurt look. When Wood tried to start another conversation about quidditch he decided to leave his teammates and look for Hermione again; he found her in a chair near the corner of the room, having a conversation with Penelope Clearwater and Padma Patil.
"We are still thinking about how to implement it, but it could be possible to use gravity runes to create a magical spaceship. It would take years of work, but it is possible." He heard Hermione said, catching the end of her sentence.
"Can I join your conversation?" Harry asked seating on the empty chair to the left of Hermione.
"Sure, Harry; we were talking about your idea to use gravity runes to create a magical spaceship." Hermione said smiling at him.
"It is just a concept for now; it would take a lot of work to make something like that." Harry said looking at the two girls seated in front of him.
"It is still an amazing idea, Harry; if something like that could be done with magic it would be like a Sci-Fi ship, instead of the one used today; the space shuttle is nice, but it is nothing compared to an actual spaceship." Penelope said.
"I still can't believe what you two said about the muggles landing on the moon." Padma said; her voice a little awed.
"Yeah, they've been doing that since before we were even born." Harry said chuckling a little.
"I still think it is amazing." Padma responded.
"Muggles have a lot of nice inventions; By the way, Harry, how is that wireless playing muggle songs?" Hermione asked.
"I don't know, like I told you before, Lavender and Parvati were the one to set it up; Lavender said it is something you can buy from the wireless network." Harry responded.
"You think they found a way to record songs with magic and play it later?" Hermione asked.
"I think i can respond this one, Harry." Penelope said. "It is probably a variation of the protean charm; the charm is used to link two things together, so maybe they just found a way to link a listening device somewhere to the device here. It would also explain the reason why we can't pause or even change the order that the songs are being played." Penelope explained.
"That is fascinating, maybe something like that could be used for communication somehow; some way to reproduce telephones." Harry said.
He could see the by the look in Penelope's face that she had never thought about using the charm this way; Hermione was also looking at him with a face filled with pride.
"I'm really liking this new Harry; you are letting your intelligence out more often." Hermione said smiling at him.
"Well, my mother was a genius, my best friend is another genius; I have to make them proud of me?" Harry responded in a teasing tone, causing both Hermione and Penelope to laugh; Padma had a confused look on her face, Harry learned the reason for it when she asked.
"What is a telephone?"
"It is a muggle object, it is used to talk to someone anywhere in the world; it is somewhat similar to a Floo call, but you don't get to see the person on the other side." Hermione responded. "Well, video calls do exist but they are expensive and unreliable." She added.
"Muggles can do that?" Padma asked in a shocked voice.
"Yes, they can." Penelope responded. "They don't have anything like Floo travel, travelling like that is thought to be impossible by muggle scientists, but like Hermione said, telephones are similar to Floo calls; I would say they are even better in some cases, the connection is a lot cleaner and has less noise. That is not mentioning cell phones, which are portable telephones that fit in your pocket." She added.
"Wow, magicals are getting left behind aren't we?" Padma asked.
"In some ways; some things are just impossible to do without magic, so magicals will always have an advantage." Hermione responded, causing Padma to adopt a pensive look; she then turned towards Harry and asked.
"Will you let me join you two in your research; Hermione told me it was your mother that started it. I know I will need to learn some muggle knowledge before I can help you two, but I want to help; this seems like something that could change a lot of things and I want to be a part of it." She asked.
"Hey, don't keep me out of it; I also want to help." Penelope said.
Harry turned towards Hermione and smiled, seeing in her eyes that she agreed with it; he also agreed, Padma was one of the best students in their year group, and Penelope was the best in her own year group so they could help them a lot in their research; Padma would need to learn some science but they had the books that Hermione's parents had sent her, they could teach her the necessary knowledge; Penelope wouldn't need to learn much more, she was muggleborn so she must already have a basic understanding of science from her classes before Hogwarts.
"Sure, we would be happy to have some help; both of you will need to learn more about science and technology; we have some books we can lend you." Harry responded, causing the two girls to smile. "But you two will have to wait a little while; we are having some trouble finding a place where we can work; magic and electricity don't mix and with the amount of magic flowing around in Hogwarts, it is proving difficult to find somewhere we can work with electronics." He added.
"Unless, that is, if one of you knows somewhere we could work?" He asked.
"No, I don't know anywhere that would be good enough, maybe some place near the forest; but that would be dangerous." Penelope responded.
"I don't even know what electricity is." Padma said, causing everyone to chuckle a little.
"Don't worry; we will help you understand it." Hermione said, in a calm tone, showing the younger ravenclaw that they were just teasing her, instead of making fun of her lack of knowledge; something that could probably set of a ravenclaw if Harry had to guess.
They stayed in talking for another couple of hours; Harry, Hermione and Penelope, teaching Padma some basic science; Penelope took it upon herself to teach the younger claw in their common room; teaching science to someone who had no background and who had lived her entire life in the magical world, were some scientific laws were broken on a regular basis, would be difficult; Harry and Hermione were more than happy to let the older girl take care of it.
By the end of the party; Harry saw that Hermione's eyes were sparkling with happiness, so he thought his party was a success. He was proven right and also received what was in his opinion a massive reward, when, after everyone but Ron had left the room; she hugged him and said.
"Thank you Harry; for giving me the best birthday party I ever had."
AN2: A Lot of tech talk; Harry and Hermione also found some help with their research.
Like I said in the last chapter's AN, this fic will mostly be in closed arcs, so proper crossovers will only happen after the Harry Potter arc is finished.
And when I say proper crossover, I mean characters from other franchises, but before that, there will be a lot of tech 'borrowing' from other franchises.
I said before that this will be a harem fic, and it will be; but not every girl will have 'screen time' in every arc, the number of crossovers i'm planning will mean that this fic might one day have an enormous amount of characters, so sometime I will divide them into groups.
I will explain more in the next chapter's AN.
See you guys in the next one.