QL - Semi Finals

Pride of Portree - Beater Two

Theme - Cyberpunk

Prompts - [creature] cat; [object] antique compass.

Word Count - 1735

Beta(s) - CupCakeyyy; Ash Juillet; secretfanficlover.

Rose Weasley had been excited to go to Hogwarts her entire life; everything about it sounded amazing. Brewing potions, flying around the grounds, learning incantations, and transforming objects into different things. It all sounded incredible, and those were just the things the eleven-year-old was most excited for. What could beat a magic school?

Her eyes opened suddenly at a sound coming from the bed next to her. The first-year Gryffindor poked her head out from the curtain. "Are you okay?"

Her dark-haired roommate turned her attention away from her honey-coloured cat to Rose. "I want to go home."

"Already? But we just got here!"

"It's really different here, food appearing from nowhere, flying candles, hundreds of stairs, and no technology. I can't even text my mum to tell her what House I was sorted into."

Rose sat up and turned her body towards the other girl; she really wished she could remember her name right now. "You'll get used to it, I promise. It's going to be so much fun here! And you can send your mum a letter." She smiled kindly. "I'm Rose."

"Riley," she introduced herself as she wiped the tears from her cheeks. "How can I post the letter?"

It took Rose a good few seconds to register what she had just asked. "No… you owl it."

Confusion filled the fellow eleven-year-old girl's face. "Owl it?"

"Yes, you send it via an owl."

"Oh," Riley verbalised and looked over at her cat who was on the end of the bed. "I don't have an owl. I brought Kila with me."

"That's fine! My owl should be back in the morning, and you can use him!" She paused, wishing she hadn't already Owled her parents so quickly. "Or I could ask my cousins if they have sent theirs yet! Well… I could ask James tonight, he's in Gryffindor too, but I can't ask Al until tomorrow, he's in Slytherin. Oh! Or you can use a school owl! But I'm not sure where the owlery is yet, and it's past curfew, but then we could send your parents a letter!"

Riley nodded along with Rose's rambles. "Okay, I'll write a letter. Thank you, Rose."

"Of course, I'm happy to help. My mum's a Muggle-born too, by the way, so she's been in your place. I'm sure she'll be happy to receive any questions you might have that I can't answer due to a lack of understanding."

"Thanks, Rose," Riley repeated, her eyes still red and puffy, but she was no longer crying. She fiddled with a plastic thing, sighed, and then pulled out a book and wooden stick.

Confusion filled Rose at everything Riley was doing, but she decided not to comment on it. Instead, she watched as Riley's cat meowed and purposefully walked to sit on her lap. That comforted Rose enough knowing that Kila was there to keep Riley company, after all, even though she didn't know the other girl very much yet, she knew that she was close with her cat.

"Hey, Rose!"

At the sound of her name, the young Weasley looked up from her book in the direction of the Great Hall doors as her friend Riley came running in. The two of them had got close over the last week and had learnt a lot about each other. "Hey, Riles, what's up?"

"My mum sent a few things over that don't rely on electricity so you can see! Unfortunately, that doesn't include my hoverboard - but I don't think the school owl would like carrying that; it's heavy. She said she might send more."

"Wait… hoverboard? What's a hoverboard?" Rose asked, her mind trying to process what that could possibly be but failing. She turned to look at Riley as Kila jumped up between them and then settled on Riley's lap - the two of them were so inseparable that the professors had told Riley off countless times for bringing the cat to class, but it never seemed to stop her. "Yeah, It's like a skateboard but without wheels. It floats like that spell… oh, what's it called? The levitation one."

"Wingardium Leviosa?"

"Yeah, that's it!" Riley sat down, placing a few items onto her plate immediately before holding out a circular object. "That's a compass! It used to be my great-granddad's, it's now an antique but still works brilliantly!"

Rose blinked as she took hold of this old wooden device. She turned it but the pointer always pointed in the same direction. "How do you use it?"

Riley looked over with her mouth full and pointed in the same direction that the arrow was and managed to say, "North."

"North?" she questioned as she tried to work out how to use it.

"Yeah," Riley spoke after a few moments. "It always points North. So you can work out which way to walk."

Rose nodded slowly, hoping that everything she was going to be shown wouldn't be this difficult to learn to use as she still wasn't sure how to use this compose. "So you can only walk North?"

"No, of course not, you can walk West, but just make sure you keep North to your right," she explained nonchalantly as she pulled out another object. "Why's it not working?" she muttered.

Rose only watched Riley get frustrated that a ball thing wouldn't work for a few seconds before she turned her attention back to this compass. Turning it over, she saw tiny initials carved into it: 'PL'.

"Stupid thing! It works at home," Riley complained, her frustration growing. "Ugh."

"Maybe I could come to yours one day? You can show me it all first hand," she suggested.

Riley looked up and smiled brightly. "That's a great idea! It's going to blow your mind!"

Rose had to admit to herself that she was nervously excited to visit the muggle world with her friend, even though she had visited her grandparents and heard stories from her mother, this still felt very different. Everything that Riley had told her about just seemed so unrealistic! How could so much work without magic? Hoverboards, automatic lights, spaceships, inkless paper, writing on a tablet, and so many more things that Riley had mentioned in passing.

Part of the witch was unsure if her friend had been telling the truth about everything, but she didn't know why she'd have a reason to lie. However, after being taken to her house in a smooth car which had like a hundred fancier features than her granddad Arthur's car had, it was hard not to see that this was something entirely normal for her friend. The car itself was incredible; it had doors that automatically turned upwards for them to get in and out, a moving screen to watch on the journey where real-life people were talking to her, warm air that blew on her legs to keep her from getting cold, and Riley's mother talking to the actual car and getting a response.

"Riley, darling," her father started. "How did Kila get on at your new school?"

"She worked great, Dad! No glitches," Riley replied happily. "Which is surprising because none of my drones worked!"

Her father nodded. "How peculiar that electronics don't work, but cybertechnology does. It must have something to do with the biological connection to you."

Rose's attention turned to the honey-coloured feline with a near-horrified look on her face. She had watched that cat eat and drink milk! Merlin, she had even fed the cat from her hand! She had been so excited when she had found out that she liked strawberry-flavoured yoghurt more than vanilla-flavoured yoghurt! Kila couldn't be anything but a real cat; there was no way! Her tongue and nose were wet. They were warm! "What are you talking about?"

Instead of getting an answer from Riley as she had expected, Riley's father answered her question. "Riles had always wanted a cat, but unfortunately she is allergic to shorthaired animals, so I helped to engineer one for her. I was just checking if it was-"

He was interrupted by Riley, "Her."

"Right. I was just checking if she was functioning correctly as I'm unable to do weekly maintenance, and Riley isn't the best at keeping up with them."

"But… it… it's… just a cat?" she sputtered out. "You just made one?"

A laugh left the man. "Not quite. We were already creating a Feli-BOT, as we call it, which is basically a feline robot. You see, there is a huge market for something called antibodies. You don't need to know what they are used for, as I'm sure I would only bore you with the details, but, basically speaking, you need animals for their production. I'm lucky that my employer doesn't like using animals as lab rats, so we have started developing a robot with fellow engineers and molecular biologists, as well as chemists, to be able to produce antibodies without the need of using biological donors. The tricky thing is to get the robots to adapt to the actual biology of the original donors, though." Her father stopped and looked at the cat, if it could even be called a cat anymore, through the rearview mirror. "So one engineer came up with the idea of letting it run on its own, see whether the power sources work properly, and check for any problems in its biological functions, which it - sorry, dear - she is mimicking. So, I spoke with my boss, and as we had almost created a real animal, I suggested that it can be looked after by our family. That was about five years ago, right, honey?"

"Six."

"Right you are. Six years ago. Kila does come to work with me sometimes, but we've moved onto more advanced technology now, that's why we let Riley take her to school with her. The experiment has been successful and my company is now working on a patent to go into full-scale production."

Rose was only able to nod along. She had lived with a robot cat for months and hadn't even realised. How did she not know that Muggles led such amazingly interesting lives? What was even more worrying to the recently turned twelve-year-old was that she understood how the robot-cat worked more than the antique compass that Riley had shown her.

All of this simply left Rose with a thirst for more information and an overwhelming sense of excitement.