Summary: Harry Befriends a professor! Too bad she's also hell on his teenage hormones...
Chapter 9: More Complicated Than it Seems
Harry wasn't sure if he was less bored as the Christmas break rolled around…or more. He had certainly been busier in the last few weeks. Getting approval from the Headmaster had resulted in Professor Babbling setting aside time twice a week to work with Harry. The problem was that the work in question wasn't what Harry had been hoping for. Oh, it was headed in that direction. But, for the first time since arriving at Hogwarts, Harry's magical control hadn't been quite up to snuff. The Professor had been amazed at how good Harry's control was, it was true. But it hadn't been quite good enough to for her to be willing to jump straight into the transference ritual. Not even with Pandora's help.
The reason honestly wasn't a surprise to anyone. Not even to Harry. While witches and wizards had their first true magical stabilization at 13, there were two more such stabilizations at 15 and 17. Indeed, the final major one at 17 is precisely how that age came to be regarded as the age of majority for witches and wizards. Unfortunately, under normal circumstances, no one even considered doing the imprint transference ritual with a witch or wizard until they were 15. After said individual had already undergone their second stabilization. The only reason Harry had even close to the needed levels of control to safely do the transference ritual was because of Pandora's meddling with Harry's magical pathways as he grew. They were, if anyone but Pandora had been able to look at them, far too ordered to be entirely natural.
That meddling, combined with the efforts Harry had put into magical control in order to achieve a limited ability with wandless magic, had resulted in Harry having ridiculous magical control for a thirteen-year-old. Unfortunately, it hadn't proven to be quite up to where it needed to be. Which was what had led to most of his new Professor's lessons being a series of complex magical control exercises, usually intended for much older students. Control exercises that Harry was now stuck doing in order to try bridging the gap. It was working, too, but only slowly.
Unfortunately, as the end-of-term approached, Harry hadn't closed the gap enough yet. In fact, at the rate he was going, the prediction was that he wouldn't be able to fully close the gap to the needed degree for another couple of months. And the control exercises had all gotten very tedious, very quickly. Still, it was technically progress, and something to fill his time with. But he had to admit that he was grateful for the Holiday break coming up. Sure, he was staying at Hogwarts for the break. But at least the diversion from regular classes might let him work on a project or two…
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Harry sighed in a mix of satisfaction and annoyance as the film reel smoothly rotated in perfect time to produce the 24 frames per second required. The film reel, this one a theater release of Beauty and the Beast from two years ago, had been among a couple of dozen reels Harry had managed to acquire. He'd hired someone, via post of course, to represent his 'second run theater.' A shell business that he'd established through the Goblins. Along with a similar number of classics he'd gotten his hands on via less questionable means, Harry had actual legal rights to play all of his acquired reels at his 'theater.' The idea represented one of Harry's first steps on the set of personal goals that, frankly, would near certainly have landed Harry in Slytherin if the Hat had actually gotten inside his head.
There was, after all, very little that could be more ambitious that upending an entire society, dragging it into the 21st century kicking and screaming…all as nothing more than a Step 1 of an even larger goal. A goal only Pandora knew anything about. In truth, it wasn't even truly a 'goal' so much as it was a dream. Harry's 'goals' were a bit more…down to Earth. He wanted to finish off a certain Dark Lord that Pandora was quite certain wasn't dead. He wanted to bring a bit of justice to those who had escaped it. And he wanted to learn all about magic, hopefully making his parents proud of him by the time he joined them in death. Not small goals. But attainable ones.
Harry's dream was a different beast altogether. Harry dreamed of actually making magical society something more than the gross insult to human intelligence that it currently was. Seriously, the muggles put a man on the damn moon over twenty years ago. And magicals, who could magically ignore a bunch of the laws of physics, were still dicking around on flying cleaning sticks. Literal sticks, originally meant for sweeping up dirt. What the actual hell? When Harry had started asking questions about the technology level of wizard kind, both he and Pandora had been insulted when they'd properly looked it over from Pandora's second-hand memories.
They'd decided then and there that they were going to space. Magically.
It had nothing to do with the fact that Harry had managed to see a showing of Star Wars.
…
…
…
Okay, it absolutely had everything to do with Harry seeing Star Wars. But, in his defense, Pandora had been just as enamored of the question 'can wizard's travel to space,' as Harry had been. It had led to their deep dive into the magical equivalent of technology…and the results had been mixed, at best. Some things, like teleportation, seemed very much like sci-fi come to life. On the other hand, the most advanced form of communication Wizard's seemed to have was the Radio. Oh and getting down on your hands and knees to stick your freaking head in a fire. All while your arse hung proudly out into the room behind you. In principle, Harry didn't mind the latter, so long as it wasn't him doing it. Preferably, it would be an attractive older witch with a bum that Harry and Pandora could both appreciate.
But the magical world could do so much better than that. Neither of them knew if they'd ever get to the point of traveling to space in their lifetime. But Pandora and Harry were confident they could at least push the magical world into a magi-tech utopia, by tapping into even a tiny fraction of the things magic could do. They could even, they figured, get rich and influential by doing it! The fact that it also might, someday, give magic-kind a few better options for retreat when the muggles inevitably found out about them didn't hurt either.
And, step 1 of stage 1, as it were, was to bring a movie theater to Hogwarts. This would accomplish all sorts of things. It would make money for Harry. It would expose people to the idea that Harry was making cool shit. And it would expose idiot purebloods to a more modern idea of what muggles were up to. Exactly the sort of multi-faceted first strike that they were looking for! All while being relatively easy to pull off.
Unfortunately, the relatively part was why Harry was both satisfied and disgruntled, at the same time.
The movie was playing on the wall he'd charmed to look like a movie screen. Looked pretty good, too.
The only problem was that it was playing silently.
When they'd first come up with this idea, Harry and Pandora had legitimately wondered why some muggleborn hadn't taken the idea into the magical world already. It's not, after all, like film projectors were something new. On the surface of the idea, it should have been dirt simple. Use animation charms to spin the reel at the right speed, provide a light source of the right type via magic, and profit! In truth, that part was, indeed, pretty easy. Harry was satisfied because he'd just managed it perfectly, in point of fact. Oh, there'd been a fair few complications where he had to find versions of a lighting charm that could do the range of things a muggle bulb could. But that had been doable with some research. Likewise, finding a way to measure the timing and get the reel's animation working at the right framerate had taken the combination of several charms, reworked via arithmancy and repeatedly test run, in order to get right. It had been finicky, but fun, and he'd spent most of the break working on it.
Sadly, the problem of sound was proving far more elusive. It was, in fact, what he suspected had stymied those imaginary muggleborn he assumed must have considered the idea. When Harry and Pandora had done their research, they'd discovered to their chagrin that film movies had the audio track actually on the film. The sound waves are converted to light waves, photographically inscribed onto the film itself, and then the process was reversed to play it back. Which was a problem, because it played it back via electric pulses powering a speaker system. Which just flat out wouldn't work in areas of high-magical concentration. Magic didn't play nice with electricity at all.
Somewhere with relatively low magic, you could get away with EMP shielding. Say, if Harry built an actual theater right across from the Leaky Cauldron but outside the influence of Diagon Alley, he could probably shield things well enough to cause minimal issues. In areas of high-magical density like Hogwarts, Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, though? Not a change in hell. Mostly as magic wasn't some sort of electromagnetic power. It merely caused electromagnetic disruption when it interacted with strong electrical fields. How and why they interacted at all wasn't known. Or, if it was, the knowledge was in the possession of groups like the Department of Mysteries.
All of which meant that they had to essentially reinvent a sound system from scratch. And for that…they needed ancient runes. It was simply too big an ask to do it without them. Which, unfortunately, meant that this project was now at a temporary dead end. And Harry needed to find something else to do with his remaining break. It was only the 29th, after all. The Express wasn't due to bring back the other students for another week.
Maybe he should put his invisibility cloak to use? That had been a hell of a surprise to receive. One that pissed Pandora off immensely when she realized that Dumbledore had been holding one of the oldest artifacts of the Potter family hostage all this time. Still…they did have it now…
... ...
Harry's first attempt to use the invisibility cloak, thinking to raid the restricted section of the library, had proven a failure. Not a disastrous one, thankfully. But a failure, nevertheless. True to his grandmother's section of Pandora's memoires, the cloak had proven able to bypass detection wards quite easily. That had let him into the section itself…only for them to quickly discover that someone had been very clever when they built the restricted area. Passing through the initial ward with approval would record the magical signature of the person passing through, then a second set of wards on the bookshelves themselves would check against the current register of approved signatures. Since Harry had bypassed the wards, his signature hadn't been recorded. Which meant that any attempt to actually grab a book would have set off an alarm of some sort.
Thankfully, Pandora was good at spotting wards and had warned Harry about the second set, even if it had then taken almost three hours of study for them to figure out how the combined set of wards actually worked. Of course, the study of such had been fascinating, so it was hardly a loss. The whole point had been to kill time in some useful fashion. Figuring out the wards, learning a lot in the process, and adapting a bit more to the mage-vision mode of his glasses along the way, had certainly been a useful and entertaining diversion. Though one that had only been good for a single night. The wards hadn't really been that complex, their lack of complexity actually making them extremely hard to bypass.
That left Harry stuck pondering and plotting what else he could do with the cloak. Exploring the Forbidden Corridor and Forbidden Forest had both been ruled out on the grounds of too much unknown risk just for entertainment. Pandora's lecherous suggestion to spy on the remaining cute girls at Hogwarts, or even on a couple of the younger female teachers, had been tempting but equally quickly ruled out. Interested teenage boy that Harry might be, he'd also long since gotten used to resisting temptation like that, what with Pandora's constant ideas along those lines. Seriously, his mother probably would have chosen different people if she'd known how perpetually horny a couple of the people she'd imprinted had been.
Ultimately, it had been his next idea that led to a trio of late nights…and getting caught. Though it was looking like, just maybe, getting caught wasn't the terrible thing he'd been afraid of. After his quick explanation of why he was on top of the Astronomy Tower, Professor Sinistra had looked more intrigued than anything else, and was currently looking over his work. His work that, as it happened, was an attempt to combine the very best modern muggle telescope lenses he could get his hands on with the magical enchantments that wizarding telescopes used.
Considered side-by-side, the results of magical telescopes actually outperformed their mundane counterparts in several important ways. First was how much magnification could be worked into a portable size. That was admittedly a killer advantage of the wizarding version, worthy of its own point. The rest were all about the differences in what they could see, with the wizarding version not being limited to just light. The enchantments on magical telescopes were designed to allow someone to observe how the movement of celestial bodies impacted the ebb and flow of magical fields. Something made possible by a far more diffused version of the same mage-sight that was on Harry's glasses. Instead of being focused on detail, the diffused version in the telescope helped view the equivalent of tides and currents in magic. Though that wasn't something that was normally studied below NEWT level, since the subject was incredibly complex.
Harry, of course, wasn't able to reproduce that level of enchantment yet. What he could do was attempt to duplicate the charms for magnification using modern muggle lenses. The lenses that the magical world currently used were badly out of date. Like, by at least a hundred years or so. It's just that no one had really realized that fact, since the end results they got out of the telescopes were still comparable to the best the muggles could make. By combining the two, however…
Aurora Sinistra, whose backside Harry had been desperately trying not to stare at as she bent over to use the telescope he'd been experimenting on, stood back up. Since he had, in fact, been failing to not stare, he quickly had to redirect his eyes. Thankfully, despite a twinkle in her eye telling him he hadn't been quite fast enough, that same twinkle seemed merely amused, rather than annoyed. Instead of yelling at him for that, she addressed his progress instead. Along with his technically being out of bounds.
"Now, in theory Mr. Potter, I have to punish you since you were out after curfew. Even the more relaxed curfew of the Holidays. On the other hand, it's up to me to choose that punishment…and I'm impressed with both your idea and the amount of progress you've made all on your own. So, your punishment is a late-night detention with me for the next two days. Where we will be working to improve your design."
Harry blinked. Then what she was suggesting fully processed and his face split in a grin.
"Really, Professor? Er…I mean…yes, of course, Professor. A terrible punishment! I will certainly have learned my lesson."
Harry discovered a moment later that Aurora Sinistra had a very musical laugh. Which really wasn't going to help the slight crush he was developing on her. Oh well, at least he knew that like, half of the other Griffs, including a good quarter of the girls, had a bit of a crush on the young, gorgeous professor as well. So he'd be in good company for the inevitable teasing when someone figured it out, at least…
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A/N: Mwahahaha, bet you thought this was dead, huh? Nope! It just keeps losing the Secondary Story Poll over on my . But, as I did with Mass Effect: Eridium Dreams in January, I snuck in a small (5.5k words) update for this story despite it not winning. I'll try to keep doing that with the secondary stories that go the longest without being updated, but my writing schedule is pretty tight. As evidenced by it taking almost six months between sneaking one in for Eridium Dreams and this one for Pandora's Box. Still, the point is to keep them alive in some fashion...