The Riddle House was just the way he saw it last. That was earlier the same year, of course, and not since then; though it was a recurring dream, it seemed unlikely that Vodlemort was aware of it at the time. It was certainly not to his advantage that they were revealing their plans to him, not that he remembered every detail when he woke up. Creeping through the house, it was easy to kill the flustered Wormtail. He wondered if he would have done the same, if not in a dream. The Animagus would have a soul, and there would be a benefit to taking him alive, but perhaps it would not be worth the trouble. Harry no longer agonized over it, though he wondered if that was meant to be.

"Tell me," he said, holding up his wand as soon as he found the broken, only clinging to life form of his worst enemy. "You have to have a list of places that you can go after this. The only way that it's safe is if you've memorized it, and so have the others- you've probably gone so far as to protect it with a Fidelius, making yourself the secret-keeper."

"That does sound like something I would do." The crumpled figure only produced a mirthless laugh. "I know nothing, though. What do you hope to gain by coming here?"

"Avada Kedavra. Some peace and quiet wouldn't be too bad." Almost immediately, he woke up, and found himself being levitated by Blaise. Explaining himself quickly, that it was nothing, just a dream that was giving him some trouble.

"Harry, you were practically comatose there," his subordinate said. "We wouldn't have even found you if we hadn't managed to wake Hermione up for a moment. Why weren't you here when we dug up the Time Turner?"

"I... was here, just not at the right time," he managed. I was starting to skip through time, faster and faster- it wasn't quite regular, but- Blaise, we can't ever use that thing for going back a few months ever again. The only thing that saved me is that Arthur Weasley basically trusts me implicitly. Have you used it since you dug it up?"

"No. We'd never use it while it was still in effect. That would not be in line with the policy of minimal intervention and we have no idea what effect it would have."

"Right. Right. I just thought for a moment that if someone panicked about my absence-"

"The unit will never disobey your orders, Harry. You can describe as cynical and superior, but I know now that there are plenty of things that are in no way jokes."

It was trivial for them to return to the base. They could scarcely believe that they had such a powerful magical artefact, even after chasing it for however long it had taken. There was no way to overstate its value, and they had it in their grasp once more. As soon as they made it to the base, Blaise turned his attention back to the dream.

"It's fine. I know how to wake up from it- it just takes a bit sometimes. I already told Hermione about it."

They decided to have a general meeting regarding the Time Turner. Several of the recruits had been similarly sworn to secrecy with their promotions to higher positions. There were whispers about the conflict being over already, and he decided to address that first.

"I've only just been informed that the announcement the Minister made is different from what it would have been. He doesn't mention the missing artefact, of course, but he's called me a terrible danger. He's gone all in and said that I'm a greater threat to the public than Voldemort."

It was a meeting, and not an address before a crowd, so there was only a long silence rather than a vocalized response of disapproval.

"Let's assume that Fudge isn't aware," Michael said. "The last thing the Department wants is for him to find out their precious artefact has been stolen, because what would be suspected would be an inside job. The security there is so extreme that his first thought would be to investigate the Unspeakables, and that effectively brings an end to everything that they're doing. All of their projects would have to be canceled if someone on the outside were to find out about them. Even if they're theoretically supposed to report to him, he has a name and address; there isn't any point if he knows, and he probably realizes that."

"Then it doesn't matter," Harry said. "My point is that it's not like we don't still have an enemy just because we have a device that can take us back a few hours at a time. I should also take this time to share the limitations with you. Most likely, you can ask Mr. Weasley for the details, I went back a matter of months, and I could tell that I was putting strain on the device."

"That doesn't mean that we can't use it well," Neville said. "I think we should use it to save our friends."

"Having a Time Turner wouldn't have won us that battle," Ron said. "There wasn't a way we could have done it differently where we would have won."

"If we knew about it in advance, we could have avoided it entirely."

"They were using Divination to track us. They had our number. Yes, we took position there because we wrongly thought it would be the last place they would have expected, but it's only because Voldemort suffered that sizeable loss in units that we're in this status of relative calm. It's true that we lost some of our own-"

"If someone appeared behind him and stunned him, you could kill him without even trying. As soon as Dumbledore was done helping you, wouldn't that be the obvious thing? Can't we just save everyone now that we have the Time Turner? What's the point in not using it?"

"It's not that we're not using it; we're using it from now on," Susan said. "Hannah was my closest friend; the fact that I can't see her anymore breaks my heart. The problem is the theory suggests that if we use it to go to a time when we overlapped with another change, we'll cause a paradox and only end up trapped."

"That causes a paradox? How does stealing it in the first place not cause a paradox?"

"Neville, I'll be honest, it makes my head spin, but the Time Turner disappeared because time itself was rewritten; everything that happened was undone. The device preserves itself and your memories. It doesn't move you through time, even though that's what seems to be, it turns time back. I wasn't aware of it the first time either, but I'm sure that almost everything that happened around the world went the same way as it did the first time." He sighed. "There was a time that I thought that it had no real effect, and that it was only tricking you into thinking that, but realistically there was no way we could have saved Buckbeak, let alone Sirius, if we had not gone back in time. It's more likely to be a Confunding Effect or something like it than anything else."

"Yeah," Ron said after looking deep in thought for a moment. When it looked like he was about to say something, no one cut in, and everyone seemed to have gotten rather good at recognizing each other's cues. "I was right there when you returned... well, technically I woke up a moment later. The point is that it was like you were never gone; I heard Madam Pomfrey say that she would have heard if you left. Sirius had to have been rescued before you left, and he could only have been rescued by you. I'm sure that if you didn't have the Time Turner then, I would have woken up to hear he'd already been taken away." He frowned. "I reckon the device has an effect on your memories... or if it's even more powerful than that, and it messes with the old timeline, pushing things into place so that there's not as much change and everything's as seamless as it can get."

To say that everyone was stunned into silence by the profound suggestion was probably an exaggeration, but there was a noticeable pause. Even before Blaise formally brought it up, there had been people asking him or Hermione about how time travel worked. On his one previous venture as the copilot to the past, his partner in magical crime had mentioned that wizards had meddled with time before, and it almost always ended in disaster, killing their past or future selves, so he had known the field of study had limitations- but the real limitation was not how badly they screwed things up, it was the entire concept. In order for a wizard to go back into the past, there had to be a reason, and if he accomplished what he set out to do, then the reason ceased to be.

The probably unintentional key to the whole thing as it was coalescing in his mind was the word 'seamless'. A fundamental task of the Time Turner was to stitch together the reason for leaving with the reward, the problem and the solution. Had he not gone to the lake because he wanted to see his father, more than anything else? Had he not only produced that Patronus because of that memory giving him the confidence? The basic problem was that the supposition required the device to be always on and always working, making the changes, or making room for them, before they ever happened. They had no way of confirming whether or not the theory was real, but if it was, they could be certain that effect was he true brilliance of the Time Turner.

"It's entirely possible that I was wrong about the timeline being entirely reversed," he said after a moment. "We won't know until we can somehow improve it enough to go back and ask its creator, because apparently she didn't leave any notes."

"They could have been destroyed by Rookwood when he murdered her," Susan said. "She might have acted like she wasn't one to keep notes so that no one would go through them and steal her ideas, but I seriously doubt she could have made anything like this without doing a ton of research. If we're committed to the idea that he didn't lie to you, he could have destroyed them unintentionally."

"She could have also destroyed them herself, because she knew she could use the Time Turner to see them again." Harry shook his head. "It doesn't matter now. If we can one day modify the Time Turner so that we can go back whenever we want and make as many changes as we want, then we'll have no problem saving the others. At the moment, though, the theory suggests that it's not a good idea to have an overlap. Hermione's currently in a magical coma from something that happened just a few weeks ago and she wouldn't want us going back and fixing that. I'm sure she'll say that the next time she's conscious."

"How should we use it, then?" Michael asked. "If you're saying we should only be going back a few hours at a time and only to fix one thing, then are we just going to change the results of individual battles and missions going forward?"

"That's the idea. We wanted it in order to counter Rookwood's prototype. There might be nothing else that can counter it."

"We don't know when he's going to strike next," Neville said.

"We won't need to. From now on, every hour, on the hour, we're going to send one person back in time. There used to be twelve of us- thirteen including me, actually-"

"Let's involve the recruits and get it up to twenty four at least," Susan said. "We'll be making ourselves older, so at the very least, we should be spreading it around."

"They haven't aged enough already?" Ron asked. "Everyone's time is valuable. Even if we brought a bunch of kids in we'd be making them grow up before they were ready."

"That might be a better idea, though," Terry said after a moment. "There are a ton of kids missing out on their education right now. Even with the Order, we can't teach them everything that they need to know, but at least a handful of their parents would probably rather have us teaching them than nothing."

"As I understand it, many of them are currently in co-op homeschooling networks," Ginny said. "That option isn't available for everyone, though, and not because of location; it's because of resources. Not everyone has access to the same kinds of libraries, and as we've been over, it's apparently quite common to forget everything from Hogwarts."

"Well, most of what we could offer would be practical skills, but I suppose there would still be some parents who would be okay with that," Harry said. "Until then, we'll do it ourselves. Many of us still aren't seventeen yet, so that's another factor. If we can get the Trace off of us, we'll all be better off."

Everyone seemed to agree with the basic nature of the plan. As sure as he was that none of them would have wanted to rush through their teenage years if asked before Umbridge showed up, they were all aware that their lack of magical majority had already become a larger issue for them. While Hermione was in third year, she was taking three extra classes every day, five days a week, and if she had not quit Transfiguration, she would have ended up with about a fortnight longer, which was barely anything. She was already older just by virtue of having been born earlier in the same year group, which was the main reason she had already hit seventeen. Basically, there was no reason to worry about going grey just from using the Time Turner to stay ahead of the Death Eaters.

The idea was that they could have an unbroken chain connecting their present with their future and if anything happened, they always had someone from the next hour who could warn them about it. It was quite possibly more effective than any defense they had ever constructed. The next order of business was the fact that the public had realized that Eleazar Higgen was not a real person. Apparently, after a long string of sworn statements by 'childhood friends' and 'former coworkers' to the effect that he was every negative thing that could be imagined, there was an actual probe into the matter which determined there was no conclusive evidence he ever existed.

"The obvious step to take is announcing that we actually said this in an interview with the Quibbler ages ago."

"Is there any way that this could go badly for us?" Neville asked.

"It's a somewhat dishonest proof of concept, I suppose," Susan said after a moment. "We lied to prove that they would lie. At the same time, I think it's an understandable reason to lie. I don't think that will be the focus of the public response. There's not much the Ministry can do now. Too many of their employees have appeared in Prophet articles saying something ridiculous about Eleazar Higgen. The credibility of the entire institution is shot."

They had discussed the topic before- there was only so much they could do to influence the public's opinion about the subject. Probably a small amount of people would still be against them because it had not been about the truth for them in the first place. Many who supported their cause after finding out that the current government had been lying about it would actually do nothing. The most likely explanations were frequently disappointing like that, but the more adults would probably at least nominally support them than not, and the current government would lose its underpinning. It would have force that it could still project, but the decreasing confidence in the system would cause more people to switch over to the Defense Association for court cases. As before, Harry did not really want to entirely supplant the government, but by giving it the choice between flagrantly denying reality and being destroyed, he was giving everyone else a fair chance. It was still perfectly possible for the opposition to rally around him, toss Fudge out, and then start replacing everyone that he appointed, and that would be preferable, at least to him, to becoming a revolutionary and overthrowing the current system.

Basically, he was sure that if he won the war, he would have the write to publish the new history books, but then his word would be the only word supporting itself; there would be no continuity. Perhaps his island home would accept him in time, and there could be more confidence in the system than ever before, but he would then have to hire an entirely new staff made of those lifeboating out of the old system by pointing fingers at everyone else. It was not really how he wanted to live his life, all things considered; he would prefer to find someone to whom he could effectively hand things off and go play Quidditch again. Perhaps it was a selfish ambition, but after burning out his younger years, he was going to need some joy in his life if he did not want to turn bitter. He was not the most qualified to rebuild the country, and he was not the most responsible for its problems.

"Then what remains to be seen is how people react, including Voldemort. The Ministry must have been doing more research on me after my recent demands, and they found out about my interview where I said that the whole thing was a fraud, and they compared that with the fact that they had never actually seen the man before, and decided that I was most likely telling the truth at the time. They would only continue to look ridiculous by insisting that he was a real person."

"What if they produced someone?" Ginny asked. "That seems easy enough."

"They wouldn't know what he looked like," Harry said. "We were actually ready for that. The Quibbler said that for his own safety, they couldn't release pictures of him, but if the government claimed to have found him, and just pointed to some random person, it would be simple for Luna's father to just say 'no, that wasn't the man we interviewed' and they wouldn't be able to say anything about that. They could forge their own records, but from the beginning, Eleazar Higgen was someone that I knew, and for them to talk about him, they could only talk about the one that I knew, the one who had my endorsement. They never produced a picture of him because they had to be talking about the same person, and they didn't have one because we didn't post one."

"So, you're going to do another interview?"

"Yeah," he said. "Press conference of sorts. I'll invite Skeeter and Lovegood at the same time and see if they can stand to be in the same room together. What I want the rest of us to do is work on Hermione and Daphne's condition. We might not know as much as they do, but there has to be someone who can solve it if we work at it for long enough."

"I think you're right," Neville said after a moment. "We can't let ourselves keep thinking that they're the only ones who are qualified. Maybe they need a fresh set of eyes on it. They can't work on it just by themselves. Didn't we have a recruit who was learning Legilimency from them?" Everyone looked around, perhaps deciding that they had no need to leave their friends to suffer any longer and at the moment it was the best way to make use of their numbers, with a direct attack from the enemy unlikely.

"We've had recruits learning most things," Harry said. "Find out and get it taken care of."