Chapter 201
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To:
From:
Dear Spencer,
I did it, I'm currently sitting in the library on the Queen Elizabeth 2 and we set sail a couple of hours ago. Since I boarded with the staff, I've managed to replicate a boarding pass and the information packet and map when I was helping an elderly lady find her room. Meals at most of the restaurants are free, or they're included in the ticket price which is kind of the same thing.
Just as well, I still haven't found a space where I can put up my tent, so I don't have access to the food in the stasis cupboard in there and there's not enough stuff in my backpack for more than a couple of days. At least I know that the stuff in my tent won't go to waste, it will be good for a few years according to the shop clerk who sold it to me.
The library is open every day that we're at sea, from 9am until 4pm. Unfortunately, it's the wrong time of day for us to have a conversation but hopefully that will change as we get closer to New York, or I can use my cloak to sneak in one night if we really need to talk to each other.
I'm glad that you've made a new friend, and that you didn't seem to have any trouble talking to Bri in spite of the fact that she is a girl. It seems odd to me that she has that level of supervision to attend school, but maybe I'm just jaded by the lack of supervision in our lives and the fact that I'm coming from a community that all send their children to a boarding school that provided minimal supervision to its students from the age of eleven.
I don't have a new fact to share but I think that Superman could have been a muggleborn wizard, perhaps all the science facts behind his gadgets are hiding the fact that they really work with magic.
Your friend always
Harry
After waiting half an hour or so to see if Spencer would reply to his email, he got up and decided to finish exploring the ship. Nobody else had come into the library in the whole time he was there, and the staff member was starting to give him concerned looks. Clearly his behaviour was too out of character for someone with the money to travel on the cruise ship and he needed to move on. He quickly jogged up a couple of flights of stairs and ducked into the toilets, changing his shirt to something similar to what he'd seen one of the younger male passengers on board wearing and turning his hair a light brown.
He passed through the dining area in his invisibility cloak, he was taking a risk using it in such a crowded area with narrow spaces between the tables but he'd read about there being a different dress code in the evenings and wasn't sure what he should be wearing. He looked at what the younger adults were wearing for future reference and then how the older men were dressed. He transfigured his clothing and looks to match the men he thought might be in their seventies or eighties, elderly but not frail and pocketed his cloak, before lining up to get a meal, a good traditional roast beef with lots of vegetables, and sat by himself to eat, the food was good, on a par with the meals produced by the house-elves at Hogwarts. He resolved to try some of the other cuisines when he got the chance, he missed the Italian food he used to get at the restaurant in Little Whinging. The restaurant filled up and a business man asked if he could join them, then another. Harry introduced himself as David Easton and joined in the conversation when he could, hoping that he wasn't sounding too much like an idiot. When asked he claimed to run a landscape gardening business, speaking about some of the things he'd learned helping out the summer his Aunt had renovated her yard. Harry found his new acquaintances to be friendly enough, even though he had to fake interest in a lot of the conversation. He wondered if he'd ever grow old enough to be truly interested in the administration involved in running a company, it was certainly putting him off the idea of starting his own business at the moment. At least none of them seemed suspicious about his right to be there.
As he roamed around the ship after dinner, he noticed that the sun-loungers had been packed away for the night, or perhaps just so that the area of the deck could be cleaned though he couldn't tell whether it had already been swept or mopped or not, but he expected they wouldn't be put back out until the dew wore off in the morning. That eliminated one possible sleeping space, but if the cleaners came through this evening, he could perhaps put his tent up in the corner as long as he set a proximity alarm, and got up early enough to pack it up before the staff arrived to lay out the chairs. He considered the lifeboats but was concerned that the doors to them might be alarmed in some way since they weren't supposed to be accessed except in an emergency and wouldn't need to be cleaned or restocked during the cruise, unless they were used. They weren't the old-fashioned open rowboats he'd been expecting but much larger boats with fully enclosed cabins, they looked a lot safer and more comfortable if they did have to evacuate the ship, but they were stored up away from the deck and they'd take a bit of a climb or the use of his broom to get up to where they were stored. If they had a silent alarm he'd be caught before he even realised someone was looking for an intruder, but it might be worth flying up there to see if there was enough space for his tent on the roof of one of them, but when he got up there, he found that it would be a very tight fit and the boats were rocking slightly in the breeze. If the wind picked up too much more, then he wouldn't be safe up there. His next thought was the enclosed pavilion pool up on Deck 12, the security might be tighter up there in the more expensive areas but they also had the only showers outside of the private cabins so he'd need to access them sometime anyway if he couldn't find a secure place to set up his tent, and it would take extensive glamours for him to hide his scars and callouses to pass as unnoticeable in even the most conservative swimming shorts. If he was up there hiding until after the cleaners had been through, he'd be able to shower without getting caught. Hopefully being undercover they wouldn't see the need to pack up the sun loungers, or they'd lay them back out after cleaning to have one less thing to have to do in the morning.
With cleaning charms, a shower wasn't yet a priority so he made his way back to the library to see if he could let himself in without anyone noticing the door unlocking. There were still a lot of people moving around the ship heading to late dinner or the various evening entertainments. Harry was curious about several of them but he decided to be more cautious this first night, he could use glamours or his invisibility cloak to investigate those once he had a secure place to spend the night. There were no obvious security cameras that he could see but he expected that they were there and just well hidden, unfortunately he couldn't use his magic to find them.
A/N: Thank you to everyone who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
