"Ah, you're up. Jolly good. Quite an exciting fright you gave us," a man's voice he only knew from dreams smarmed at Harry as he woke. He cracked an eye to see the blurry outline of a man that had to be the Minister: even without his glasses and discounting the name over his head, that lime green bowler hat was impossible to mistake for anything else. "But I suppose death defiance is your métier, as it were."
Harry didn't recognize the word spoken, but glanced at his chat log (which seemed to have unglitched itself), and said, "I think I fell a lot of meters."
"Ah, no, métier. It's like a profession. I mean you're a professional hero," Fudge explained.
"Oh," Harry agreed. If the man had been speaking all in French, he might have even understood it with the three points of the language he'd picked up randomly from books. He was checking that the rest of the user interface was back as he reached for his glasses on the bedside table in the hospital wing. It was probably not great that he was used to the placement already at his age. It didn't look like too many other people were nearby on the map, though he could see Madam Pomfrey off in her office. The Minister must have somehow ensured a private conversation. "Did… uh… did we win?" He couldn't quite remember if he'd gotten to the snitch.
"Well… you certainly won at perseverance through unexpected calamity, as everyone saw you charging the dementors to try to capture the snitch," the man buttered him up. But then he admitted, "However, Lucius' boy did manage to catch it shortly after you became incapacitated."
"Of course he did," Harry groaned.
"A sporting rivalry between school chums I'm sure," Fudge tried, clearly not believing it himself but not willing to badmouth his ally's child if he didn't have to even to gain the allegiance of the Boy-Who-Lived. "I'm sure you'd have done the same. It's quidditch."
"I'm pretty sure I'd have tried to catch him, even if it was Malfoy," Harry frowned at the man, clearly struggling to figure out the most politic phrasing. Having his glasses on didn't make Harry feel any better about the guy.
[Marauders: Active] Harry Potter: I'm trapped in the hospital wing getting talked at by the Minister.
Ron Weasley replies: You're up! They ordered us to leave and go get lunch. Must be because he wanted to talk. We'll come right back and bring you some food!
"Ah, yes. Quite heroic. I'm sure you'll have another chance for quidditch glory," Fudge was continuing.
"Will there be dementors there next time, too?" Harry couldn't help but snark. His natural tendency to be deferential to authority figures had been sorely tried by his time at Hogwarts. He liked to think he wasn't being too obviously insolent. But if the guy was going to sit there and pretend Draco blowing past him almost getting eaten to catch the snitch was fair play…
"Right, no, of course not. You'll be glad to know that I've ordered them away from Hogwarts. Shouldn't have come onto the grounds. Reports have been filed. Protocols improved. Never happen again, I'm sure." Seeing that Harry wasn't mollified by basically admitting that the Ministry's dementors had almost gotten him killed, Fudge tried, "And, of course, the Ministry will replace your broom if it doesn't turn up."
"My broom!?" Harry gasped. "What happened to my broom?"
"It must have blown off when you fell. Possibly into the forest, or perhaps… the Whomping Willow," the sartorially-challenged man slowly trailed off, realizing that he'd completely made a hash of his introduction to the Wizarding World's young savior.
Harry was closing his eyes and drawing on his Mental Fortress to keep from crying. He'd lost the match. He'd had the game system turned against him by the dementors. And he'd lost his Nimbus 2000? It took him a moment to reign himself in before, absently, he opened up his inventory panel and switched to the mounts tab.
There was his broom, where it always was when he wasn't riding it. Even glitching out, the game system must have stowed it for him when he fell.
DECEPTION CHECK SUCCEEDED
Harry managed to keep his relief off of his face, and held onto his destroyed expression, telling the Minister, "It was the one really good broom our team even had. It's not fair, that we have to use secondhand brooms while Mr. Malfoy buys the whole Slytherin team new ones."
Treading water and realizing that he'd been thrown a lifeline that would only cost a few hundred galleons of reapportioning budgets, Fudge said, "An excellent point. Yes. I'd heard murmurings that the school brooms were in need of updating. I think we can get that taken care of." He beamed, hoping that his smile would be infectious.
"That would be great. Thank you, sir," Harry managed, realizing it really would be a big help. Especially since it sounded like Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw would get better brooms as well, so maybe Slytherin wouldn't be able to rack up an impossible lead against either of them later on. "Oh, I think my friends are here."
He'd spotted the Marauders (including Ginny; her brothers had handled the explanation earlier in the week, with only mild skepticism before Harry showed off some of his tricks) moving into the hospital wing, and a sea of mostly-redheads was visible in the door as Fudge turned to look. "Ah. Of course. It's good to have a supportive bunch of chums! It was good to meet you, Harry."
"You too, sir," he managed, glad to see that the Minister took that as a win and made his way out.
"What happened!?" Hermione demanded, as Ron plopped a napkin full of sandwiches and crisps from the lunch table on his lap. No strangers to the infirmary, everyone had already snagged the necessary chairs or nearby beds to listen.
Making sure that Madam Pomfrey wasn't going to bustle in and overhear, he began recounting what he could remember. "And then I guess I passed out. Did I hit the ground?"
Lee shook his head, "Dumbledore caught you with an arresto. But you were passed out from dementor exposure by the time you landed."
"Though it sounds less like dementor exposure and more like a software crash," Hermione pronounced. She produced a candy bar and said, "See if eating this makes you feel better."
"I mean… getting chocolate always makes me feel better?" Harry said, confused, but not rejecting the candy.
"No. Better in a different way. Chocolate is supposed to work to make you feel better after dementors," she explained.
"Oh, right, you did the research," Harry agreed around the mouthful of chocolate.
"What I find most fascinating is the heading you saw. G-U-I?" She began to turn her brain on the problem, and everyone just watched while she cogitated, Harry nodding in agreement. "Because that's pretty much what your game system is. It's a guided user interface. G-U-I. But! I also remember finding a reference to how Eastern countries consider dementors just another type of ghost… and "gui" is a common English spelling of the Mandarin word for ghost."
"So they're Chinese dementors?" Ron struggled to catch up.
That halted Hermione's inertia for a moment, as she had to admit, "That might also explain it. I guess we should get some more foreign creatures for Harry to look at to see if their names are translated. But I'd assume that he'd see 'Dementor' if it was just a normal creature."
"But it's clearly not a normal creature," George nodded.
"It has something to do with the game," Fred caught on.
"Exactly," Hermione agreed. "The most fascinating thing is that nobody really knows where dementors come from. They've only occurred in a few places on the planet, and they're considered basically impossible to destroy. There are some in China, the ones in Azkaban, and rumors that there might have been some in pre-history that people just thought of as demons and may have eventually trapped somewhere hidden."
"But we do know where the British ones come from," Ron corrected. "That dark lord… Ek… something with a Z."
"Ekrizdis," Hermione nodded. If they'd thought she was a walking library in her first year, that was before she'd maxed out her intelligence and gained the ability to seemingly recall basically anything she'd read. "And he wasn't exactly a dark lord, I don't think. Don't they have to actually use dark magic to try to take over the country to count? He just lived on Azkaban doing dark magic on passing sailors. Which isn't very nice, obviously. But! The dementors were there when he finally died and the concealment charms on the island disappeared, but I don't think it's proven that he made them."
Ron stepped in, "Anyway, you need to learn that patronus charm McGonagall was talking about to do anything to stop them. And it just scares them away. They make you relive your worst memories, and if they kiss you, they suck out your soul!"
THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (MAIN QUEST)
A secret from your past has escaped.
* Get to Hogwarts
* Learn about the crimes of Sirius Black
* Learn about Dementors
O Learn more about Ekrizdis
"This main quest is very learning-heavy," Harry commented, as the dementors task checked off and the new one opened up. "It says we need to learn more about Ekrizdis."
"I like that a lot better than the one about fighting basilisks," Hermione nodded.
"Me too," Ginny agreed, a little quietly, a week not long enough to get over her betrayal by Tom Riddle. At least she seemed to have been very cheered up by being included in the Marauders, and had easily agreed to keep Harry's game system secret. Honestly, Percy was the only Weasley child with a profound urge to share information with authority figures.
Having finished his lunch and the candy bar, Harry said, "I feel better for eating, but I don't know that I feel any different, mentally, after the chocolate."
Hermione nodded, "I bet it was doing something different to you than people that don't have a game system. In fact… I wonder if what they're doing is because other people don't have the game system. You said they looked like they were made of broken pieces of the user interface. Maybe they, I don't know, sucked the soul out of someone else that had it, and bits of it are still sticking to them…"
Harry shuddered, "So you think they came after me in particularly because they want to eat my soul and steal my game system?"
"Yeah, let's not do that," Ron frowned.
"And I guess we shouldn't figure out how we can all get it, until we make sure we're not going to become dementor-magnets," Hermione agreed. "Not that we've had any luck. But this is good! If someone else had it, even if they got eaten by dementors, that means we can learn more about it!"
"To the library?" Ron sighed, knowing the sound of Hermione ramping up to a research project.
"To the library!" she agreed.
Harry just hoped whatever answers they found weren't going to come with more disturbing questions.
And after this chapter, I need to take a brief hiatus on this story. I know, I'm not thrilled about it either. I wasn't able to build up enough buffer to get through November (and I had to hustle out this chapter to not go on hiatus after last week's cliffhanger). I'm working on year 4 of Infinity Stones as my NaNoWriMo project, so I won't have cycles to work on this again until the end of the month. Depending on how the holidays go, I'm hoping to start this story back up in January, if not earlier. Follow to get a notification when the hiatus ends. And, since we're all caught up, now is an excellent time to review with what plot threads you want to make sure I revisit or other tropes you'd like to see this story explore!