Fem Harry reincarnated as Clow Reed's daughter.
Ming Yue sighed, and wondered if she was cursed or something, to always be the one cleaning up after the mess the adults made.
Initially, her rebirth wasn't that bad. Being born in China at least a hundred years before her own time had been a bit of a shock, but she had long since learned to roll with the punches. She retained her knowledge of magic, and she had a loving mother this time around.
But.
Her mother was up to something nefarious. After years of cleaning up after dark rituals and even worse magical experiments, she had long since learned to recognize the signs and knew something would need to be done sooner rather than later.
Whatever her mother was doing was stripping the magic from children, for Merlin's sake! It was barely above being Kissed by a dementor, from what she could tell and she knew it had to be her mother's doing because all the children had one thing in common...all of them had mentioned an 'apprenticeship' with a female mage that roughly matched her mother's description in some way.
She couldn't let this stand...she had spent entirely too long cleaning up after people like that to allow her mother to continue.
Unfortunately her core was too weak to do the job herself. Never mind the fact she didn't have a proper focus to pull it off.
However, her mother often ranted about a "Clow Reed" and all her research indicated he was a powerful sorcerer. Which meant her best bet to getting help was from him.
The problem was that he was in England, which in this time period meant at least a month of sailing minimum. It didn't help that there was a superstition about females on ships, and the fact that a young girl traveling by herself was an easy target.
Regardless of how 'street smart' she was, the simple fact of the matter was that she was too weak to defend herself against a lot of people who would happily take advantage of an obvious foreigner with no adult supervision.
Which was why the first thing she did, upon gathering her supplies and finding a ship to England, was cut off the majority of her hair and dirty her face enough that most would mistake her for yet another orphan trying to earn a living.
The real trick was convincing the captain to take on an extra person, but a bit of magic helped that along. After all, what was another cabin boy among the crew?
Several months later...
It was a fact of life that traveling by ship before the invention of the steam engine took months to get anywhere and required a large number of supplies from food to fresh water. There was a reason sailors drank grog and it wasn't because they were all alcoholics.
To that end, she did her best to help out in the kitchens to avoid getting scurvy or worse, diarrhea.
It felt weird to be given slaps on the back once they passed the equator line, and a small celebration for her first trip on the ocean.
Two months in...
"Shit, is the doctor in?"
"Bastard's drunk again, as usual!"
"Hang in there, Luke!"
Ming Yue peeked inside to see the scene. One of the sailors had a nasty cut and was bleeding out fast. An older sailor tried to stem the flow, but it was clear that without proper treatment Luke would die.
The ship's doctor was a drunken idiot who was rarely there when needed.
Sighing in exasperation, and because she didn't want to deal with the mess of cleaning up after a corpse, she pushed aside one of the men blocking her way.
"Get out of here kid. You don't need to see this," said one of the older men gruffly.
Ming Yue observed Luke's condition, and rolled her eyes.
"If you want your friend to have a chance of living to see the next sunrise, then move. I don't have time to dally, especially since he's bleeding out. At least he didn't hit an artery...those a pain to deal with and I don't have the tools to fix them properly on hand. If this idiot even bothers to keep his equipment fully stocked..."
Dead silence.
"You can save Luke?" said Chase.
"I can if you idiots move your arse and follow orders!" said Ming Yue sharply, her tone leaving no room for arguments.
Falling into her no-nonsense tone she left for dealing with idiots with less than two brain cells to rub together but were all she had to get things done, she began barking orders while the ship's doctor snored away his booze.
Luke chomped at the bit he was given while she went to work sewing his leg together and doing her best to keep him from getting an infection.
She ignored the screams every time she had to splash the low-grade alcohol on his wounds to keep them sterile. Which wasn't easy as the damn ship had hit a rough patch of sorts.
On the plus side, none of the men said a single word about her swearing. It was a stressful situation. She was allowed to swear her head off and she could be very creative.
A few days passed, and while Luke was still in bad condition, so far there was no sign of an infection. She still kept a close eye on it though.
On the plus side, she got a nice pay raise and a proper title. If the men had to choose between the drunkard their captain had kept on or the relative unknown deckhand that had already shown some knowledge of medicine, they'd choose the deckhand every time.
Too bad she couldn't officially be hired as the ship's surgeon, but at least she didn't have to swab the decks as often or do as many menial chores.
London. So much had changed, but at the same time it felt like home. That being said, it was still considerably cleaner in her own time, though the weather was still as horrid.
Setting foot in England was strange. She had gotten used to the rolling seas and having to adjust her footing. From what her new friends and comrades had said, she had adapted easier than most of their cabin boys. For one thing she hadn't had the same trouble adjusting to the way the deck would roll every time it hit a particularly bad wave, or thrown up once from seasickness.
Considering she had flown through a storm once just because she felt like it, on a broom no less, a ship at sea was nothing.
Now that she was in England, she needed to find Clow Reed.
It took her all of two hours to find an entrance into the magical community, and it made her very happy because she recognized the familiar sight of Diagon and Gringotts.
It made maneuvering around so much easier, because it was practically home.
Only problem was that she wasn't quite old enough for Hogwarts and the goblins were less inclined to help someone who didn't even have an account with them yet.
She really should have guessed as much, as her mother had never shown her where the magical alleys were, only the nonmagical ones. To be fair, the magical alleys would have picked up on her behavior by now and would have likely sent someone in to deal with her...or have a stern chat.
From what her mother implied, she had a one-night stand with her father, so her birth was highly frowned upon. In fact it would almost certainly prevent her mother from marrying into a 'proper' magical family, regardless of her talents.
It would also impede her own future prospects, as no one would want a child of uncertain heritage in their family.
Still, she was able to get a general area for where Clow Reed lived. One thing she had learned from her own time was that anyone of note were easy to find if you knew the right questions to ask. Something that had irritated her greatly, and forced her to have two houses...one for use when her friends and family visited, and the actual house a respectable distance away so she could use the first as bait.
Apparition made it so much easier to deal with that headache.
Armed with the knowledge of his location, Ming went back to the ship she had traveled with. As it happened, their next stop would take them close to Wales and they were more than happy to let her return long enough to her new destination.
On the plus side, she had gotten a good enough feel for Diagon and had found the discreet apparition points so she could visit anytime she wished, once she had some magical currency.
Wales was beautiful, and a few discreet questions directed her closer to her destination. Clow Reed was very famous after all, and it took her very little to find the town his servants frequented for the daily supplies.
There was however a snag she hadn't anticipated. Mainly how she was supposed to contact him. Clow Reed was rich enough that he had servants doing the daily shopping, among other things. The odds of him meeting a random stranger, a child much less, were nonexistent.
Which meant she would have to find a way to enter his household. It was a good thing she was used to work, but first she would need a few references. People like him were unlikely to hire a mere child to do basic tasks without it.
It took her three months, but she managed to earn a post as a stable boy. Taking care of horse was hard, dirty work and very few people liked doing it. Add in the fact that the common folk were extremely leery of mages for good reason, and they were willing to hire a relative unknown to work in the stables.
This...was going to be fun, she just knew it.
The second she saw the library, she wanted to dive in an read the books inside. She wasn't Hermione, but after leaving school she had come to enjoy learning magic for magic's sake. And some of the titles she could see from the doorway looked so interesting!
The problem was that most mages tended to be pretty protective of their personal libraries. Especially the powerful ones. Besides she wasn't one of his students, which meant she was unlikely to have permission to touch, much less read any of them.
She did her best to stay out of the way of the students, mostly because they were all arrogant shits who could give Draco at his worst a run for his money...and had the competence to back it up. Better to avoid their attention, since she was still relatively new.
She had only seen Clow Reed once in passing by this point. It was little wonder people spoke so highly of him...he reminded her of a much more competent version of Dumbledore. Though he was much easier on the eyes and less of a hypocrite.
As she passed by one of the study rooms, she happened to overhear some of the students talking.
While they were his students, they had not yet earned the coveted position of 'apprentice' and all the perks that came with it. Perks like permission to study the Master's personal tomes or one on one instruction from the man himself to say the least. As such, competition was very cutthroat and the idea of collaborating with others was beyond them.
So long as they didn't go out of their way to outright sabotage one another to the point it went beyond a petty spat, Master Reed ignored it.
Since the door was partially open, she happened to see the formula written on a piece of paper before one of them noticed her and closed the door firmly shut with a scowl.
The thing was, she vaguely recognized it and wondered if Master Reed had set them a challenge to test their skills.
To be fair, she was very bored and decided to listen in to the other students.
Sure enough, Master Reed had given them all a task, with the prize being Master Reed helping them with a different project for a full month. Considering the sort of high level artifacts he had personally made, this would give any of them a major boost on their competition.
Now she had no personal interest in the prize. She was honestly just bored out of her mind and it had been a while since she was able to let loose and just enjoy using her magic for a project. And the task he had set could be useful later in other ways.
Since GPS hadn't been invented yet, creating a spell or artifact that could point you in the general direction of a place was extremely useful. Especially out in sea where the only thing you had to guide you was the stars and the movements of the sun and moon.
The students were having trouble with the navigation aspect, but she had recognized the formula the Master had given them as the incomplete version of a spell she had used before when the compasses got all screwy.
The real headache was pilfering enough materials from the store room that the students used to create a quick and dirty version that she could use in place of the final product. Once she had the prototype she could work on a more permanent version that would take longer and cost more, material wise.