August 16th, 2002
He rests his hands on his knees, panting. Sweat is running down the back of his shirt. He needs to start bringing a change of clothes to work.
He was complaining about boredom—well, the last couple of days have made him reconsider. Ever since he first went to the training room, people started to follow him. At the beginning, it was mostly instructors—they wanted to check his level. He held his own against all of them, but in the end got his ass kicked every time. Then the rest started to come as well. First Lydia—she said he needs to be kept on his toes. It was a close fight, but she tipped the scales in her favour near the end. It encouraged others to throw down the gauntlet. He lost to Ashish, but he was told that the duel itself was quite spectacular, and it was a close call with both Graham and Terence; Harry's pretty sure that he only won the first one by sheer dumb luck and the second one because Terence panicked that if he beat him, Harry would have hated him. He's going to demand rematch for that one. He also lost to Mordecai pretty badly but defeated Gabriel with surprisingly little effort; apparently his speciality is more analytical work. He thinks he handled the rest quite easily, except for Cerberus and Alison, who both gave him quite a challenge. It's uplifting to see other newbies being that quick on their feet. Maybe the Auror Department will be a force to be reckoned with this time around.
He's decided to call everyone by their first name, at least in his head. Fuck last names.
And now he can barely stand. He uses his shirt to wipe off his face, wondering if someone would mind if he just went home.
"Well, none of you are duelling champions, are you?" He hears an irritating voice and wants to groan. "I've been winning junior championships for—"
"For seven years, we know, Fangbury," Hooper sighs long-sufferingly. He's been pretty miffed by losing to Harry.
Dorian has been bragging relentlessly about being a junior duelling champion for the last seven years. Harry finds it peculiar that when they were all fighting a war, someone else was winning fighting competitions. They could use the help. Harry gets that he was a kid at the time, but it's hard to accept this argument when he was a kid himself. Lots of kids fought. Of course they weren't supposed to, but they did anyway. Some of them paid for it with their lives.
Not the time to get gloomy. He turns slowly.
"How about it, Potter?" Dorian eggs him on, smirking.
"Good grief, let the man drink some water." Romsey proves that he has a heart by passing him a bottle.
"Cheers," Harry pants. "Is this standard? Baptism by fire?"
"What's that? Is it a muggle thing? I bet it's a muggle thing." Lydia snaps out of whatever reverie she descended into while he was duelling Dawlish.
"Báptō, meaning 'dip' in Greek, but more as 'immersion' or 'sinking into'," Gabriel chimes from the corner without looking up from his book.
"Thank you, mister walking encyclopaedia," Lydia mutters under her breath. Pippa was right; Lydia at least considers it absolutely outrageous that Truman has been promoted instead of her and is convinced it's a conspiracy.
"Alright, let's get on with it while I'm still standing." Harry waves his hand towards the platform.
He's a bit nervous, to be honest. The only time he was taught proper duelling was during training—he's not counting second year, because that had been a joke—but it was only bits and pieces that he picked up, as he still preferred to be a free agent. He did what he had to in order to survive. That's what he's been taught. The rest—rules, restrictions, proper footwork—is no more than a distraction, but someone who's been doing it for years in a controlled environment could definitely use it to their advantage. Harry might not be a sore loser, but getting defeated by a trainee would be a blow to his ego. Not to mention, Fangbury would get absolutely unbearable. He has no doubts that the whole team is counting on him.
The duel starts slowly and then grows more heated as they go. Dorian's bragging wasn't empty; he gives as good as he gets, and his reflexes are superb. When Harry creates an ice ring around his feet, he melts it mid-jump, lands in the puddle, and sends a disarming charm in a matter of a second. There are some oohs and aahs from the audience. Harry's eyes narrow; he's trying to beat him with his own spell. Over his dead body.
Through all those duels, his magic keeps doing its weird thing. Shit, he's supposed to stop saying that it's his magic that is doing something. Healer Pullman would skin him. He's doing it; his magic is an inherent part of him. They're one. And, well, it's been happening for a while now—magic swirling around him, as if it's trying to stretch as far as it can. It's not really distinguishable, except on the intuitive level. It feels lazy, like it's bored with the duel already.
Fuck, stop personifying it.
It takes a while before Dorian attacks with full force again. Harry must focus all senses on mere defence and manages to sneak one spell that takes him out of the game for a split second, but he gracefully dodges the stunner Harry sends at him right after. They're both panting like mad and moving noticeably slower. The air surrounding Harry gets weirdly turbulent, and his right hand feels kind of numb. Finally, Dorian casts a series that forces Harry into some serious acrobatics to dodge, and after sending one more stunner, he's pretty sure he has no time for another Protego, so he lets the magic go as a last hurrah.
It looks... like a spell at first. White when it leaves his wand, but rapidly turning red. It doesn't behave like a spell, though, more like a shield, because it loses its monumentum half-way through and starts to form... something. When Dorian's hex reaches it—it's nonverbal, but turquoise in colour, must be an Impendimenta—Harry expects them to crash into each other and explode or at least make some noise and sparks, but instead the Impendimenta quietly disappears inside the violently red blob. Huh.
Dorian remains single-minded. He doesn't care for the magical phenomenon happening right in front of him; he wants to win the duel, so he takes a step to the right to have a clean shot at Harry, who makes a step to the left, eyes still on a blob.
Can he control it? He tries to guide it with his wand. It makes a cracking sound and flutters a bit, but basically ignores him. Well, the blob controls itself then.
Another one of Dorian's spells—Confringo, probably; it's similar colour to the blob but less luminous—gets absorbed, and Harry loses whatever interest in the duel he had left. Instead of aiming at Dorian, he aims at the blob and casts another stunner. The blob swallows it with a quiet hiss.
"Stop!" He hears a shout, turns, and sees Ashish approaching them quickly, the rest of the team shuffling after him. Harry thinks he wants him to stop, that he knows something he doesn't, that this thing is dangerous—it certainly can be. But he means for Dorian to stop the duel, then pauses half a step from the blob and blurts out, "What the hell is that?"
His guess is as good as Harry's. He studies the blob. It looks kind of like whatever spells are made of—well, their beams—like a shapeless ball of light, vibrating slightly in its core, making a low buzzing sound. There are specs dancing around it, a little less fervent in colour—yellow, orange, and pinkish. And there's a smell in the air—ozone, something akin to electricity.
"What the fuck, Potter?" Lydia words it best, and she's the first one to pull out her wand. She hits the blob first with a stunner, then with a diagnostic spell, then with a revealing charm. They all get sucked right up. It encourages others to start experimenting as well.
"Bombarda Maxima," Fawley drawls.
"Are you mad?" Gabriel grabs her arm and yanks her back, then exhales heavily when the spell disappears like the rest.
"It already swallowed Confringo," Penelope explains reasonably. "Don't touch it, Graham."
Pritchard stills with his hand reaching out, then retreats reluctantly.
"What kind of shield is that?" Fangbury must finally realise that their duel is over, and he wanders up to them. Harry looks up when Alison starts to giggle and blinks. The whole left side of Dorian's hair is reddish, while the other half is his usual platinum blonde. Some of the others laugh as well when Fangbury pats his head quizzically, while the rest is busy hitting the blob with the most explosive spells they can think of. Nicole goes around it to see the other side.
"Where do they go?" She waves her hand next to the blob. "They have to go somewhere."
"I don't think it's a shield," Gabriel answers Dorian slowly, uncharacteristically agitated. Lydia presses her lips together like she's glad someone else pointed it out. "It doesn't reflect anything."
"Then it's a variation of a shield that absorbs instead of reflecting," Romsey says in a tone that suggests he's trying to restore order.
"I don't like the idea of absorbing magic," Higgs mutters nervously.
"Absorbing the spells that hit it is one thing," Penelope points out. "It absorbed the magic from Fangbury's hair." Dorian looks like he wants to protest, but she scoffs, "Come on, everybody knows that you bleach it with a spell. We went to school together, Dorry."
"Such a thing doesn't exist," Ashish insists, as if he's trying to convince himself.
"If you invented a spell, you should go to the Patent Office," Mordecai quips in a tone suggesting that she's inventing spells every other week.
"Only you could invent a spell in the middle of the duel, Potter." Hooper shakes his head, then frowns. "When you cast it, it kind of looked like Tempest. Were you trying to cast Tempest?'
To be quite honest, Harry wasn't trying to cast anything. He told his magic to do its thing, and it gave him a blob.
Now that he thinks of it, it was kind of monumentally stupid.
Nicole scoffs. "Does it look like Tempest to you?"
"The only way that's Tempest is metaphorical," Lydia snorts. "Potter is like a tempest. In a teacup."
Harry barks a laugh, and once he starts, he can't stop. Higgs eyes him with amusement. "You realise it's basically an insult, right? She just called you something small that's exaggerated out of proportion."
"But that's exactly what I am," Harry utters, still choking on laughter, which cracks everyone else up as well, and soon they're all cackling.
"Potter." Shit. That's the tone he always heard from McGonagall right before he was sent to the headmaster's office. Sierra Langley heads towards them with an expression that doesn't bode well. Everyone sobers up very quickly.
Pippa runs into the room after Langley, looks at the blob, and groans. In the meantime, Langley scrutinises it intently, sniffs the air, and narrows her eyes. "Do you know what it is, Potter?" she asks seriously.
It's been a long time since Harry last felt intimidated by anything that wasn't related to social interaction, and this is no different. "No. Do you know what it is?" he asks, point blank.
"No," she admits reluctantly, which strips away some of her previous gravity. "Can you get rid of it?"
Harry certainly doesn't know.
'Dear blob. It was nice to meet you. Can you go away now?'
The worst part is that it works. The density of the air slowly diminishes, and the blob dissolves along with it, leaving pale, yellowish specks that linger for a moment longer and then disappear as well.
That's when he feels the first genuine stab of panic in a long time that has nothing to do with social interaction. Suddenly he's so scared that he'll never be able to figure out how he's done it in the first place and that it's the last time he sees the blob that he feels weak to his knees.
"That looked quite sophisticated, Potter, whatever it was," she comments, like she doesn't know how to praise him for creating something so obscure without sounding stupid.
"It needs to be reported to the Department of Mysteries," Pippa informs him dutifully. Harry immediately pictures Unspeakables scrutinising his blob, poking it with stuff and rubbing their hands together, and clenches his teeth, feeling unreasonably possessive. "We should have been informed about any experimental projects conducted by the staff beforehand," she adds dryly.
"We were," another voice comes from the entrance to the training room. "Well, not this exactly, but before Potter was hired, Miranda Pullman spoke to me about him... exploring his limits under her supervision. I think we can safely leave this development to her expertise as well. She knows how to get research approval." Robards pinches the bridge of his nose. "Now I know this is exciting, but we are actually here to work. If the duels are over, everybody back to the open space." He starts walking off but pauses again near the door. "Potter, you don't want to know what will happen if I find out that you didn't go to the Department of Mysteries." Clearly, he's managed to get to know Harry pretty well already and is fully aware of how he operates. Harry smiles innocently.
"Wait, who actually won?" Nicole asks.
"Fangbury," Geoffrey sniffs. "Or he would have if Ashish didn't break things off because Potter was more interested in his creation than in the duel."
"His creation was way more interesting than the duel," Gabriel protests, and Alison adds, "Besides, Potter's shield would have absorbed every one of Fangbury's spells, and Potter would have hit him eventually."
"Yeah, but he didn't," Cerberus points out sensibly.
"Could you move the shield?" Alison asks resolutely.
"No," Harry answers truthfully. She looks disappointed.
"Well, did you need to actively feed power into it?" Romsey asks. "Could you cast other spells meanwhile?"
"You saw him slam it with a bunch of spells, Graham!" Lydia exclaims impatiently.
"Sounds like a rematch is needed," Romsey decides.
"Yeah, you could even out my hair," Dorian quips, indicating the strawberry blonde left side of his head versus the platinum blonde right side. Harry snorts along with everyone else. Who would have thought he had a sense of humour beneath all that bragging?
"Let's go before they come back," Dawlish, who's been pretty quiet the whole time, decides to be a spoilsport.
"Don't go anywhere," Higgs whispers to him while everyone reluctantly starts to disperse, so Harry stays put. He notices that Lydia stays behind as well, as do Ashish and Graham Romsey. Higgs gives him a questioning look, as if he's asking if Harry doesn't mind. He glances between their faces. This is a solid group. He hopes they help him figure it out instead of judging him for being an absolute ignorant, so he shakes his head. They sit on the floor with their legs crossed.
"I've seen it before," Higgs reveals covertly. "My grandfather was dabbling a bit."
Harry's relieved that he doesn't look like the only one with no idea what he's talking about. "Dabbling in what?"
"Alchemy," he says simply, and that's when Harry knows he's in over his head. "It's used in alchemy."
"Well, what does it do?" Lydia asks excitedly.
Higgs shrugs. "I don't know."
"How is it created?"
"I don't know," Higgs repeats. For someone with top secret information, he has sparsely little of it. "But it's called Phoenix Gold. And the one I saw didn't absorb magic."
Harry mouths the words to himself while Ashish groans. "We should have inspected it more closely when it was still here."
"You have a death wish," Lydia scoffs. "It was an unidentified magical matter. We most definitely shouldn't have inspected it."
"No, I'm just a Ravenclaw. We learn through exposure."
"I thought you ravens were all about theoretical speculation," Lydia taunts him.
Harry raises a hand to stop the cacophony. "So that's all we know?"
Graham picks up, "Well, if it's used in alchemy, then it's probably a product of some kind of reaction between magic and an element. Or a substance."
Element. Substance. Air? But what did his magic do? "Do you have any notes?" he asks Terence awkwardly, not knowing if his grandfather is alive or not.
"He might have left something," says Higgs. "I'll see what I can find."
It's not like Harry's asking because he's planning to practice alchemy. That would be absurd. Wouldn't it? There are people way better suited for it. Speaking of which, "Expecto Patronum!"
For the first time in a while, he regards Prongs more closely. He's most definitely made of magic—all glowy and translucent. The blob was vivid and scorching, bringing the sun to mind with how difficult it was to look at. Phoenix Fire certainly seems like a good reference. It wasn't made of the same stuff corporal Patronuses are.
Everyone else eyes Prongs with interest as well, but probably not for the same reason—it's still not considered a standard method of communication. "Mione, do you think I could come over tonight? I have a problem to solve. Thanks."
If he's going to trust anybody with this, it's Hermione. He wanted to go out tonight; maybe go back to that place he found before. Ash and his friend might be there, and he wouldn't mind seeing them again. But this is more important. He needs to solve this, and for that he needs Hermione. And healer Pullman.
The rest doesn't have more bright ideas, so they reluctantly get back to their cubicles. Close to the end of the day, Robards emerges from his office, and soon enough the rest of the senior rank gathers as well. It feels very official. Nobody mentions Harry's stunt from this morning.
He's kind of nervous, even though it's not an Unbreakable Vow; he's not going to die if the ministry turns out to be as rotten as it was before, and he needs to get the fuck out of here tomorrow. It's just a symbolic thing. No biggie.
He swallows. "I, Harry James Potter," he says calmly, trying to ignore the staring of the whole department, "do solemnly swear," 'that I'm up to no good,' fuck, you can't laugh, Harry, "that I will defend and support the Ministry of Magic of the United Kingdom and all its subjects against enemies from without and within", should be 'support and defend' and 'within and without', fuck, "that I will faithfully fulfil the duties of the auror office to protect the Ministry of Magic of the United Kingdom and all its subjects, its law and the values it represents," don't make a face, don't make a face, "with devotion, diligence, and integrity; and that I take the obligation freely, without an outside influence, as magic is my witness."
And suddenly he's an auror. He's glad the wording of the oath has been changed after the war, mostly on Kingsley's insistence. He doesn't think he would be able to force the previous one out of his mouth.
Someone pats his back; Robards welcomes him loudly for a thousandth time and starts another speech. Harry smiles and attempts to pay attention.
There's still half an hour or so left when the speech is finished, so Harry gets back to his cubicle. It's not as plain as it was when he first arrived. He put some pictures behind the pinboard frame: one of his parents, one of him, Ron and Hermione, and one of Teddy. He also brought a selection of books along, including 'The Plague' by Albert Camus that he picked up at the flea market and 'The Monster Within', a dissertation on Obscurials by a young American academist.
It's when he's at his desk that he realises that he had his iPod in his pocket the whole time. He spent some time in the last couple of days fruitlessly trying to make it work in the ministry, mostly by tapping it on the desk or staring at it very intently. He doesn't want to charm it to work. He wants it to work as it's supposed to regardless of the presence of magic, but that would mean influencing the surroundings and not the device itself, and the only way he can think of is to just refrain from performing magic or...
A shiver creeps up his spine, and for a split second he's absolutely convinced that his magic intentionally guided his hand to create a magic-absorbing blob for this exact purpose, because it wanted to make him happy. But that would be ridiculous, right? He pulls the device out, and of course it's dead—it wouldn't have had a chance to survive against the blob. But then he notices it's not only dead—it looks partly molten. Harry gulps and stuffs it quickly back into his pocket. Did the blob melt the iPod?
Or—even more ludicrously—did the iPod cause the blob?
This time he leaves work the magical way and apparates straight to St Mungo's. Healer Pullman confirmed that she can see him today, but he still has twenty minutes or so, so he heads to say hi to Tracey.
"Guess who's being promoted to healer," she mentions humbly, but he can hear in her voice that she's ecstatic.
"Congratulations." He hesitates before embracing her briefly. It's never stopped feeling a little awkward; he's used to people forcefully hugging him and him pretending to endure it but secretly loving it. He still feels shy that the other person doesn't want to be embraced by him when he's the one initiating. "Hey, about what we've talked about last time—"
"I've actually been thinking about it a lot," Tracey interrupts him, all business now. "All this muggle stuff you mentioned, and how little we know about them. It might not be very helpful to us, but it's still another perspective, isn't it? So I spoke to Hermione at your birthday party, and there are these ministry's programs for healers that allow to exchange knowledge with muggle doctors, right? Apparently it was her idea, only introduced by the Muggle Liaison Office. They're not really thriving yet, but I signed up—"
"Wait, how are you doing this?" Harry cuts in, confused. "If they don't know that they're—"
"They do, though. For now, we only work with muggles who already know. There happen to be some doctors among them. I think it started with Hermione's mother, who wanted to know more, but Hermione didn't have time to get into healing with her. So I've been talking to this doctor they assigned to me. He has so many interesting things to say, you wouldn't believe it."
Knowing muggles, Harry certainly can believe it. He glances at his watch. "When you speak to him, can you ask him about brain damage?" he asks quickly, as he doesn't have much time left.
"Brain damage?" Tracey echoes, surprised. "Like what, concussion?"
Harry sighs. He knows that muggles can't help Zoe, and apparently wizards can't do it on their own either—or never bothered to find out, at least—but how about muggles and wizards together? "A damage to the brain that permanently hinders mobility. Check what it is muggles know that we don't, and what it is that we can do that they can't." He gets up and kisses her cheek. "I've got to go. Congrats again."
Pullman is so far the most helpful. She watches the memory Harry brings forward intently from every angle and agrees that it's a phenomenon called the Phoenix Fire or the Phoenix Gold, that it's known to appear where the density of magic is very high—but when Harry asks why Hogwarts isn't covered with the stuff, she doesn't have an answer—and that alchemists use it for various purposes, but its properties, both superficial like colour and more essential like magic absorption—which she hasn't encountered before—seem inconsistent and dependent on unknown factors. If there are alchemists that are familiar with these factors and capable of producing the desired effect, they've never shared their knowledge with the rest of the world, which they rarely do.
Then she takes another look at the memory and actually says, "Can you see the cracks on the surface when it absorbs spells? It almost seems like there's some different kind of energy altogether flowing through it." Harry's pretty sure that it was electricity that he felt in the air and that the blob must have somehow been conductive to it, but he keeps silent, as if it's a bad word.
Then she explains that transfiguration is designed to manipulate accidental properties of a substance, basically rearranging matter to imitate the expected outcome, while the goal of alchemy is altering the very essence of matter. When Harry asks how Phoenix Gold—he's tired of calling it a blob—helps with that, she, somewhat unsurprisingly, has no idea.
She says she will speak to the Department of Mysteries on his behalf. Every breakthrough needs to be reported. Research needs to be transparent and supplied to the department, which will then decide whether it's to be kept confidential or not. Every spell he's willing to share with the general public needs to be first approved and then brought to the Patent Office.
She also gives him a precious piece of advice: that there's only one requirement for one to work with a raw substance—one must love it very much. Harry wonders why wizards always have to be so fucking vague. She also says that it's extremely dangerous and to proceed with the experimentation with caution.
So of course Harry goes home and does exactly that. He's cautious; he turns off the fuses first. He's already had to replace them too many times. It takes some time and mental gymnastics in complete darkness to get his magic to cooperate. When it finally starts to get excited, it feels too expanded, so he attempts to squeeze it. It's not happy and twitches violently, but as it's being compressed, its brimming increases. He's not sure if he can hear actual buzzing or if it's just an impression from air movement and lack of light.
The fireplace comes to life at the worst possible moment. "Ron wanted to see the place," Hermione says somewhat apologetically before stopping dead. "Why are all the lights off?"
Harry shushes her. Hermione stares as the blob forms; it's more pinkish-white now than red and more flat, like a round plate of light spinning over his coffee table. Ron mumbles something that sounds like, "Guess I won't see the place."
"What is this?" Hermione whispers with wonder in her voice, while Ron watches the blob the same way he observes garden gnomes attempting something silly.
"I made a blob," Harry says simply.
"You made a..." she pauses and swallows, visibly trying to keep calm. "And how did you make it?" She doesn't even need his answer. She knows him well enough. "And you thought it smart to make it in your perfectly muggle apartment?" Her voice rises.
"The power is out," he points out sensibly. "Besides, it doesn't do anything. Shoot a spell at it," he encourages.
"I really don't think that's a good idea," she objects strongly.
"I'll do it," Ron volunteers.
Hermione swirls, "Ron, don't—"
"Reducio!" The purple beam pierces through the blob and hits the coffee table, which shrinks to the size of a shoe.
"Oh, shit," Harry curses. Hermione crosses her arms and gives him an unimpressed look. "When I made it this morning, it absorbed spells!" he exclaims defensively. The blob seems to get more agitated as he does.
Right. Pullman mentioned that its properties seem to differ every time. Which is unfortunate.
Hermione looks like she's praying for patience. "Explain," she demands curtly, so he tells them the whole story. After he finishes, Hermione is silent and thoughtful for a while, so Harry slowly, painstakingly, just like he practiced in order to not explode electronics, eases the blob out of existence. Suddenly it's completely dark, so he gets the flashlight and goes to turn the fuses back on. When he gets back, he finds Ron standing by the computer and tapping Enter over and over.
"Shouldn't it do something?" he asks, clearly disappointed. Harry comes over and powers it on. The screen lights up, and Ron's jaw hangs open. Trust a Weasley to be more fascinated by a laptop than a mysterious magical substance.
Hermione clears her throat. "Can we address the elephant in the room?"
"I can't see an elephant," Ron quips, although Harry knows he's perfectly familiar with most idioms and does it mostly to annoy Hermione.
"You've got anything for me?" Harry asks her hopefully.
She bites her lip. "Not in terms of actual alchemy. But as far as I know, that's how lots of spells are created—by studying the properties of substances, the steps leading to a particular outcome, and layering them on each other. It's actually the closest to science that magic gets, and that's why you can, for example, transfigure something into wine without knowing its constitution because someone before you knew it and incorporated it into a spell. But if we take alchemy as a starting point, those spells are only a side effect; discovering a bunch of rules about how matter can be reshaped while trying to figure out how to change the very essence of things."
That checks with what healer Pullman said, and Harry wonders where he was when they were learning this. In hospital wing? Thinking of quidditch? Arguing with Draco? What a waste of time.
He doesn't say anything, so she continues, "I have no idea what your blob," she pulls a face when she calls it that, "has to do with alchemy. If you don't find an actual alchemist, Department of Mysteries is probably your best bet." Harry can almost see the wheels turning in her head when she frowns. "You said there's a feeling of magical density and vibration in the air when it happens?" Harry nods. "Well, let's think muggle for a minute. It was caused by your magic affecting your surroundings on a molecular level, energising it—let's assume air. If it was heat energising the particles of a gas, it would cause ionisation. Atoms turn into ions, which are electrically charged, and the substance turns from gas to the fourth state of matter. Which is, accidentally, rather similar to your blob." Not for the first time, Harry is impressed with Hermione's ability to remember random stuff.
"So I... ionised air?" he asks uncertainly.
Ron must find the word funny because he exclaims, "All bow to the power of ionisation!"
Harry barks a laugh. He agrees that it does sound pretty lame. "And what state is that?" he asks when Hermione doesn't elaborate. He hates when she enters her teaching mode; she tends to expect them to actually think and attempt to find answers on their own.
She rolls her eyes. "Plasma."
Ron makes a face. "Ew, that sounds like some weird bodily fluid."
"It's not..." Hermione starts sharply but hesitates. "Well, actually, it is also a blood component—"
"This shit is in my blood?!" Ron shrieks in horror, looking at his own wrists and probably thinking about the blob.
Hermione sighs long-sufferingly. "No, Ron, these are two different things that were labelled with the same term."
If possible, Ron's horror even increases. "Why would anybody do that?"
"This is not the first case of it ever happening, Ronald."
Harry can see that Hermione gets agitated and Ron gets encouraged by it, and he knows that for them it's basically foreplay, so he decides to cut it out quickly. "So I made magical plasma?" It's probably a better name than a blob.
Hermione looks uncharacteristically unsure. "Well, this is where things get complicated."
"Oh, this is where it gets complicated?" Ron echoes incredulously.
"We don't know if the particles that are known to muggles are what our magic actually affects, or if there are some other particles that interact only with one type of energy, or—"
"Why don't we know that?" Harry cuts in.
"Because wizards are allergic to science!" she exclaims. "We don't use scientific methods! We don't have measuring equipment! We don't know, and we don't care!" Wow. That must have been eating her for a while.
Ron looks at his feet. Harry dares to say, "But that doesn't make any sense. Do you think I'm the first person to ever 'energise the air'?"
She looks tired. "That's the thing, Harry, when it comes to magic, we just can't know. It might have been a whim. It might depend on the lunar phase. It might happen only to those whose name starts with an H. It might depend on Professor McGonagall's current mood. It might be that when you're pissed, the metaphorical heat produces it."
"The power the Dark Lord knows not!" Ron exclaims in a dramatic, Tralawney-like voice and even Hermione dissolves into laughter.
She finally gets herself off the floor, panting, while Harry wipes the tears from his face, muttering something like, "Well, he was rather cold-blooded." Then adds, more seriously, "Okay, what is plasma, then? For muggles?"
Hermione straightens up. "Let's put it this way. We have ice cubes that are solid," she starts to explain, drawing a couple of patchy blocks on a random piece of paper. "We can heat them and melt them into a liquid. It's still the same substance." She draws a few squiggles that Harry suspects are supposed to be waves. "If we heat it some more, it will evaporate into a gas." She pauses, clearly wondering how to draw a gas, before she crumples her masterpiece and continues without the illustrations. "But if you keep heating gas, it will turn into plasma," she finishes with a wild movement of her hands that is apparently meant to indicate plasma.
Harry frowns. "So we can assume that the magical version works similarly—"
"We should absolutely not assume that," Hermione protests, but he doesn't listen to her.
"Is it different depending on the gas? I mean, the magical ones have different properties, and nobody knows why."
Hermione blinks slowly. "It can depend on the substance."
She's hinting at something. His brain jumps from alchemy to different properties to the melted iPod. "Can it be done to metals?"
"It absolutely can be done to metals." Only they're wizards, so of course they don't need to affect the metal directly. They can have it in their fucking pocket. He pictures going to the Apple Store with a complaint that his iPod turned into a magical blob. "Wait, I have an encyclopaedia at home somewhere."
Harry glances towards the computer where Ron started to copy something somewhere by pushing a random string of buttons and then got bored and left it like that. Now there's a big error in the middle of the screen. "Is the web version sufficient?"
He sees Hermione's eyes widen, and right after she gets this impish look on her face, like she's about to break the rules. Harry doesn't get why it's rule-breaking; he suspects somewhere along the way she convinced herself that she needs to either be here or there; that she can't have it both ways. Harry had the same problem at the beginning. And she's in touch with her parents, so she must know that the internet exists and how it works, but it's still something foreign. It wasn't created for her, and it's not meant to be used by her. She won't find the entirety of the knowledge she seeks, so it must be a deception. But it's not alien technology; they inhabit the same planet. Some things overlap.
She sits gingerly, opens the searching bar, and types very slowly. She instinctively knows what to do; she knows how muggles design stuff, how meticulous they are, and how they like to systematise. They're all about looking for order in the chaos, while wizards pull chaos out of order.
Or she just used it before, and he's full of shit.
Harry, on the other hand, tries to follow her as she jumps from one window to another and opens links, from ionisation to charged particles, to ions and free electrons, to electromagnetic fields, to Maxwell's equations, to quantum electrodynamics, and thinks it's impossible for her to understand all that. She must be faking it. He feels a headache coming.
"Fuck. I need to learn physics," he realises suddenly, half-resigned, half-aghast.
Ron, who's wandered back to the couch, looks up, surprised. "Isn't it that thing that we break?"
"Sure, we break it, but it still affects us, doesn't it?" Harry bristles. "Take gravity. We break it by levitating stuff, but it affects us; otherwise, we would be floating all the time. Can you tell me that the person who invented Wingardium Leviosa didn't need to know first how gravity works in order to reverse it? We don't even know what rules we're breaking, and isn't us breaking it just another set of rules?"
Hermione blinks, like she's stunned by hearing something so clever from Harry's mouth. He wonders if he should be offended. Ron starts to protest, but she's quicker. "You're right. Let's talk rules, Harry." He wants to groan. "Rule one. You're going to need to understand basic physics. And basic chemistry. Rule two. You're going to need to decide what you want out of it. Do you just want to study magical plasma? Or do you want to use its various properties for spell creation?"
'I want to understand how it works and why I'm doing it, and I want to figure out a way to use magic absorption to make muggle devices work around magic,' Harry thinks. "What would I need in order to do that?" he asks for now.
"Arithmancy," Hermione answers promptly.
Harry's face falls. "Shit. Math. I'm pants at math."
Hermione's eyes bulge. "You want to learn physics!"
"Are they really that related?"
Hermione gives him an extremely unimpressed look. "Rule three. You're not experimenting at home and not on your own. Muggles live on the other side of that wall. Find a lab; they're used to explosions, or ask Professor McGonagall to do it at Hogwarts. Rule four."
"How many rules are there?" Harry whines.
"When you're talking to the ministry, and you will, try to mention magic absorption as little as you can." Shit. She might have a point. "Now, do you really want to pursue this?"
Harry wisely stays silent.
Later, after they leave, he goes back to the computer and enters a science chat room. When he types carefully, 'I need to learn physics and chemistry, but I'm pants at math. Can it be done?' someone answers him, 'Eat shit and die, you moron.' Charming.