Chapter 47

One of Harry's concerns for the immediate future had been another attack on Spellhaven while they were recovering. It was what he would have done in Voldemort's place, keep on hammering and give the enemy no breathing space.

To his vast relief, Voldemort seemed to be more like Dumbledore in this respect, prefering to back off and let things settle before making another big move.

Harry remained tense and wary anyway, and kept the island's defenders similarly tense and wary. He also invited the various politicians and their guards to come to Spellhaven to discuss things even though they annoyed him. If Voldemort attacked again, they'd make good meat shields.

When a week had passed with no new attacks, Harry relaxed fractionally.

Then he snuck into a German military depot, Imperiused one of the soldiers in charge of the inventory into being his guide, made off with a few heavy machine guns, the manuals for them and several crates of ammo, obliviated the soldier and returned to Spellhaven with his ill-gotten gains.

Harry was fully aware that this was not particularly nice of him, but there really was no good way to get one's hands on that kind of ordinance and he couldn't be bothered to jump through too many hoops over it.

A couple of days later, Spellhaven sported several machine gun nests that were kept hidden under a bevy of spells. The remaining members of the Raven Host had been a bit dubious about using the mundane weapons, but had learned how to use them at Harry's insistence nonetheless.

A simple shield charm would still suffice to defend against them unfortunately, but people wouldn't be able to attack if they were shielding.

A few days after that, a mysterious tower appeared on the grounds of their cháteau. It was a slender thing, about ten meters high and no obvious entrance, topped with an odd glowing crystal. Despite much curiousity Harry refused to explain what it was or even hint at what it was for.

Harry had figured out how to turn the liquid magic into a preset spell easily enough, but considered the stuff to be far too valuable to be used for that kind of thing. He made an exception for the tower, which was loaded with a massively powerful one-shot spell that would saturate the whole island with a sleep compulsion. It would affect everyone on the island and needed willpower that few could boast to resist, but it would handily put an end to any invasions.

His original idea of charging it with a stunner was discarded because a stunner that powerful would be as lethal as a Killing Curse.

While this was happening, the political shit-flinging also continued until public opinion eventually solidified. The European Ministries of Magic took hits to their image of competence, but since most citizens thought their government was fairly incompetent anyway this didn't really amount to much. On the other side of things, Harry's international reputation slid several notches towards 'dark', where it had previously been somewhat undefined. The initial tensions simmered down, but remained ready to flare up at the slightest provocation.

Lurking in the background, Bjomolf patiently waited for the ideal time to act. His web of agents both knowing and unknowing was significantly older than modern society, both magical and mundane, and pervaded it thoroughly, but he couldn't really force anything to happen. Forcing things drew attention and attention was unhealthy for a vampire.

After Harry sprung his trap, successfully or otherwise, that was when he would begin meddling again.

Harry of course remained oblivious to this and was still primarily concerned with putting a permanent end to Voldemort…

August 7th, 2018. Hogwarts.

Harry and Dumbledore exited the Pensieve into which one of Bellatrix's memories had been deposited.

"That does sound as if he made Nagini into a Horcrux." Dumbledore said thoughtfully.

"Which means that he failed to find either the Sword of Gryffindor or the Diadem of Ravenclaw. Or both." Harry finished.

"Given that neither item has been seen in nearly a thousand years, that is certainly possible." Dumbledore admitted. "But what of Hufflepuff's Cup? You seemed certain that Bellatrix would be entrusted with a Horcrux…?"

Harry mulled over his options on how to answer the implied question for a while before making a decision. "She was entrusted with it, but I don't think I want to tell you where she put it."

"Why ever not?" Dumbledore asked, puzzled.

"Because it's somewhere that I can't easily get to just yet and I'd rather not risk having your overconfident arse try it and make a giant mess of things."

"Harry, I thought you agreed that we would work together." Dumbledore said disapprovingly.

"And then we had to chop your hand off because you wanted to fly solo."

"Yes, well." Albus hemmed and hawed for a bit before slumping in defeat. "Very well, I will leave it to you."

"Good. Now, clues for the sword and the diadem. Are there any?"

On a nearby shelf, the Sorting Hat remained silent. It was not alive and did not understand how important it was to find either of the two objects. The spells that had gone into its making only allowed it to reveal the sword to a 'true Gryffindor' that was in great need of a weapon to defend the school with.

"Not of the sword…"

"But there is one for the diadem?" Harry pressed impatiently.

"It is not widely known, but the Grey Lady, the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower, is in fact Helena Ravenclaw herself, Rowena's daughter." Dumbledore finally revealed. "But I fear that asking her would be of no use. She refuses to speak of the matter."

Harry wanted to strangle the old man, possibly with his own entrails.

"Why am I only hearing about this now ?" He ground out. They had deduced that the Horcruxes were likely to be Founder artifacts ages ago. "Working together my arse. You are so fucking aggravating to deal with I just want to stab you sometimes and be done with it. No wonder your brother hates you.

Dumbledore flinched at the low blow and attempted to hide how much that had hurt by adopting his usual mask of serene wisdom. "Confirming what the Horcrux is will not help us find it." He pointed out.

"You don't know that, you are assuming ."

Albus couldn't deny it, so he deflected.

"It doesn't matter. Like I said, the Grey Lady will not speak of it. Students have been asking her about the diadem for centuries, to no avail."

"I'm not a student."

Seeing that Harry would not be deterred, Dumbledore did so and the Grey Lady showed up a few minues later.

"You wished to speak to me, Headmaster?" The ghost asked, a hint of curiousity in her tone.

"Actually, I did." Harry cut in. "Your mother's diadem, tell me about it."

Her expression turned cold in an instant.

"I am afraid I cannot help you." She said disdainfully, already turning around.

"But were you able to help Tom Riddle?" Harry asked accusingly.

The ghost froze in place.

"You did, didn't you?" Harry went on, making no effort to keep his tone gentle. "Somehow he convinced you to tell him about it. I was told that for all that he's a light breeze away from being a raving lunatic now, he used to be quite charming when he was my age."

"I… I didn't know… he was… flattering, and he seemed to… understand… to sympathise." She said haltingly, her cold composure broken.

Albus closed his eyes, remembering what a sweet talker Tom Riddle used to be.

"Will you tell me about it now?" Harry pressed.

The Grey Lady visibly pulled herself together. "What do you want with it?"

"To destroy it."

"Destroy?" Helena balked. "My mother's diadem?"

"It has been befouled by the darkest magics." Albus said gently. "And its destruction is the key to Voldemort's defeat."

The long dead woman was pensively silent for a long minute before she nodded and began telling the story of what happened to the fabled diadem, how she stole it from her mother because she wanted to be more important and more clever than her.

Harry cared little for the insecurities of an idiot girl that thought a magic item would fix all her self-inflicted angst, but he kept that opinion to himself. The part where Tom Riddle recovered it from a lonely forest in Albania was of more interest.

"I doubt he would have left it there." He mused and turned back towards the Grey Lady. "You wouldn't happen to know what he did with it, would you?"

She shook her head. "No, I never saw him again after he left Hogwarts."

Harry briefly scowled, annoyed that Dumbledore had been right.

"What about Gryffindor's sword?" Even if it probably wasn't a Horcrux, there was no harm in being thorough.

"Godric was the last of the four to die." She revealed. "Whatever he did with his sword, he shared with no one."

The Sorting Hat continued to maintain its silence.

"Well, I guess that puts us back to square one, pondering what location or event is significant enough for Voldemort to commemorate with a trophy."

"The only thing I can think of is Hogwarts itself." Dumbledore admitted. "It would have marked his transition from the muggle world into the magical one, and he would have had time to hide it here when he came to ask for a job."

"Would he really have been brazen enough to hide one right under your nose?" Harry asked skeptically, then he recalled who he was talking about. "Stupid question. Of course he'd be so arrogant."

"If we are correct in this line of speculation, the only question then is where ?" Dumbledore continued with a furrowed brow. "The Chamber of Secrets seems the logical choice, but we could not have missed it while the basilisk was being harvested."

"And it couldn't be some random classroom either. Not only would that probably not satisfy his ego, but it would surely have been discovered by now." Harry postulated.

Dumbledore had never found the Room of Requirement, except for a particular incident when he'd been in desperate need of a bathroom. What he didn't know he couldn't consider.

Harry had been shown the room by Bryanna and Tiana for their first time and had only ever used it after that as a private place to train, fuck and sometimes sleep. He had never seen it configured into the Room of Hidden Things and didn't fathom that any such place existed. Plus, since Bryanna and Tiana had themselves only found it by asking the house elves, he unthinkingly assumed that Voldemort would not have found it due to his disdain of house elves. The leap of intuition that he needed did not come.

"I will ask the house elves if they have seen the diadem." Dumbledore said when it became clear that their pondering would bear no fruit. "They clean the whole castle, including the secret rooms and passages. If it is here, they would surely have found it by now."

Harry nodded, but it was clear that neither of them held out much hope.

This time it would be the phrasing of Dumbledore's request that foiled them. Neither imagined that there was a vast junkheap inside the castle, filled with the detritus of centuries. The only room in Hogwarts that the house elves didn't bother cleaning because they used it as a dumping ground for all the random crap that nobody owned anymore. They would have combed through it if they were asked to search the castle for the diadem, but would only shake their heads if asked whether they had seen it.

And a house elf's thought processes worked differently, so they wouldn't think to offer to search either. Their natural priorities were to take care of the people in their care, which meant cooking and cleaning. They would only search for things if told to do so because they couldn't otherwise understand that finding something might be more important than having food prepared on time or keeping things clean.

Helena had stayed as the two wizards talked and speculated on the possible location of her mother's prized diadem, hopeful that someone would find it for the first time in a very long time.

She hid her disappointment when it seemed that they would not find it.

"If that is all…?" She asked, already making to float away.

"Well, I do have a few unrelated questions if you'd be willing to answer them." Harry said, much more polite than he'd been before.

"What kind of questions?" She asked curiously.

"Mostly about the Founders. For example, Salazar Slytherin has a reputation as a blood purist these days, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. For one thing, the magical and mundane were not as separated as they are today. The vast majority of magical children would be halfbloods by today's reckoning, with only a smattering of purebloods and muggleborn among them. This whole pureblood nonsense could only have gotten properly started because Hogwarts was providing a place for so many magicals to be together, cut off completely from the mundane world. Plus, Slytherin couldn't have worked so closely with the others for such a long time if his views were so radically different from theirs."

The Grey Lady had looked annoyed at first, no doubt because it wasn't the first time that someone had badgered her for information on the Founders, but her expression had shifted into curiousity as Harry continued talking.

"You are correct, Salazar did not hate the muggleborn." She said with a nod. "He hated the muggles, this is true, but he was not alone in his feelings. All of us disdained them in those times, ignorant, filthy and violent brutes that they were. Even now, it remains hard for me to fathom that they could have changed as much as I have heard. The point of dissent was that Salazar advocated that any magical children they produce be taken from them permanently as soon as they were discovered. He was not a forgiving man, and had seen more of their cruelties than the others."

"I would have agreed with him." Harry mused. "Back in those days, Europe was drowning in war, filth, ignorance, disease and religion and the rest of the world wasn't much better. Take their kids and leave behind a few coins if you're feeling generous. They have one less mouth to feed and more money to do it with and the kids get to develop their gifts away from people that would probably kill them at the first sign of accidental magic. Everybody wins."

"Salazar gave much the same argument, you remind me of him greatly in fact." Helena smiled. "My mother would have also agreed with him out of pragmatism, but Godric and Helga thought it too harsh. In the end they agreed to do this only where it was deemed necessary. It often was."

"Why did he leave then?" Dumbledore asked, fascinated by this new perspective.

"There was… an altercation." The Grey Lady said cautiously. "One of the muggleborn children that hadn't been taken from his family assaulted Salazar's favored granddaughter. Salazar's response was… extreme. He killed the boy, his friends and their families in retaliation. I never learned the full story, but things were never the same after that. Salazar eventually left rather than continue being at odds at the others."

"That would do it." Harry nodded.

"You sound approving." Helena noted.

"I do approve. Some things you can't let go or else you'll always be a victim."

"But surely Slytherin's response was much too severe?" Dumbledore inserted his own opinion.

"Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't." Harry shrugged uncaringly. "It sure sounds excessive, but I'm not willing to cmmit to that without the full story, which we'll probably never have."

August 12th, Washington State, Seattle.

David Jones made his way towards the restaurant, still feeling a bit uncertain about this whole thing.

It had all started with an ad in the newspaper about a week and a half ago. 'Seeking former military combat veteran for consultation, minimum rank of major' it said, along with an e-mail address on where to send qualifications and assurances that the pay would be good.

David had been a lieutenant colonel when he lost his leg and been honorably discharged, so he fit the criteria. The promised pay sounded good, but what really got his interest was the chance to do something again.

It was hard, coming back from war and trying to adjust to being a civilian again. Talking to people who had never experienced it sometimes felt like they were on opposite sides of those glass panes they had in prison for when visitors wanted to talk to an inmate. You might be able to hear each other, but it was two different worlds.

He hadn't really been able to hold down a job for much the same reason, it all just seemed so banal. Not to mention that he was pretty bad with computers and there weren't many jobs that a man with one leg could do that didn't involve them these days. He supposed he could have taken the desk job he was offered, but he had always been a field operative, not a pencil pusher. And the pity inherent in the offer wasn't very appealing either.

He got by with his veteran's pension, but just drifting from day to day with nothing to do wasn't doing his state of mind any favors. So he called a guy he knew that was good with computers and asked for his help in figuring out this e-mail thing.

A couple of days later, he got a call from a pleasant-sounding British girl that introduced herself as Penny. She said that he'd made the short list of applicants and asked if he was still interested in working for Lord Potter.

David had been baffled by that one. What the hell did a British lord want a combat consultation for? Didn't those guys just sit around all day doing nothing and drinking tea?

Still, he'd confirmed that he was still interested. Now here he was, about to meet the man.

Penny had said that he wouldn't be able to miss him. Long black hair, green eyes and extensive facial scarring did sound pretty unmissable, David conceded, but it only served to baffle him even more. How the hells did a British lord get his face mauled?

He pushed open the door of the restaurant and looked it over in search of his quarry. Like Penny had said, he was quite unmissable and David saw him sitting in a corner immediately.

If pressed, David would admit to having almost expected the man to be dressed up like some ridiculous peacock on account of him being a lord, but he looked shockingly normal instead. He wasn't even wearing a suit, just a T-shirt and some rather nice pants.

As David made his way closer, he also noticed that his face wasn't the only thing scarred on him. His right arm was sporting burn scarring all the way up to the elbow and his left had what looked like claw marks going down from the shoulder.

Not just some soft aristocrat then, David concluded. One set of scars could be waved off as the result of an accident or stupidity, but that many combined with his strong physique and the easy self-assurance he held himself pointed in another direction.

"Mr. Potter?" David inquired once he reached the table. He couldn't really bring himself to address the man as a lord, even if he was one. It just sounded so pretentious to his American sensibilities.

"Yes." Potter drawled with a smirk on his face, apparently amused rather than offended. "And you must be Lieutenant Colonel Jones, US Army, retired."

It had been a long time since anyone had called him that. He'd missed it.

The man stood up and they shook hands. David noted that Potter's eyes were not just green, but green .

He was reminded of an old classmate from high school, a beautiful girl that half the school seemed to have a crush on. She'd had green eyes too, but compared to Potter's they seemed dull and colorless in his memory, whereas his almost seemed to glow in their sockets and glittered like gemstones.

He must leave jealous women everywhere he went, with his shiny black hair and his overly pretty eyes. Probably had no trouble getting them to drop their panties either, even aside from the fact that he was no doubt rich.

"Please have a seat and order yourself something to eat if you want. It's on me." Potter said, gesturing towards the chair opposite to him.

David maneuvered himself into the offered chair with practiced care and decided to take the offer of a paid for meal when the waitress arrived to take their orders.

He noted with both amusement and nostalgia that said waitress was putting out clear signals of interest when she spoke to Potter. It reminded him of the times when he and his friends would go out to eat and flirt with the waitresses.

Potter didn't seem terribly interested in the waitress though. He humored her, but it was fairly clear that he wouldn't be asking her out or anything like that.

The lunch was spent with David talking in broad terms about his time fighting in the Middle East, his training, military education at West Point, experience in leading men and that kind of thing. It felt a lot like a job interview actually, which he supposed it was.

When it was time to go, Potter paid with a single hundred dollar bill and told the waitress to keep the change, somethig which had her ramping up the interest signals to nearly indecent levels in return.

"That happen to you a lot?" David asked with amusement a little while after they stepped out of the restaurant, referencing the expert way that Potter had turned down the waitress.

"More than you'd think." Potter replied with a smirk. "Some women are turned off by the scars, but quite a lot of them find them either mysterious or get the strange urge to take care of me."

"How'd you get them anyway?" David took the chance to ask. He'd been burning with curiousity for the whole time, but hadn't wanted to be rude.

"This one I got from botching a fireball spell back when I was fourteen." Potter said, showing off his burned right arm.

"What?" David asked incredulously. Fireball spell? Did Potter think he was some kind of wizard or something?

Potter ignored him and rubbed at his scarred cheek. "My face was the result of some recreational tomb raiding in Egypt. The five thousand-year-old mummy inside it wasn't too happy about having visitors you see."

"Umm." David had no idea what to say to that.

"And this one…" Potter went on, now rubbing at the upper bicep of his left arm. "Let's just say that one of my girlfriends has a tendency to grow a wicked set of talons when she gets angry enough."

"Umm…" David had no idea what to say to that either. Potter had seemed so normal back in the restaurant, now he was talking crazy all of a sudden.

He also abruptly noticed that the two of them were alone in an abandoned alley. When did they get here? David didn't remember walking into an alley.

"Don't worry, it'll all make sense soon." Potter assured and grabbed his arm.

The world twisted and David had a horrible feeling of being squeezed through a garden hose, then it was over and he was gasping for breath on the ground.

"Sorry about that, but you wouldn't have believed me even if I tried to warn you." Potter said unsympathetically.

David ignored the offered hand and struggled to his feet on his own, a difficult task with a prosthetic leg but he sure as hell wasn't going to accept help from Potter right now.

"What the fuck is going on?!" He bellowed in confusion, seeing that they were now in a well-appointed study somehow. And the light outside indicated that it was heading towards evening where it had been mid afternoon before.

"What you just experienced was Apparition, a teleportation technique employed by wizards and witches for instantaneus long distance travel." Potter explained patiently.

That didn't help David one bit, but it did replace some of his anger with even more confusion.

"You're saying that you're a… wizard?" He said, still skeptical despite what had just happened. He hadn't had time to process yet.

Potter conjured a fireball in his hand, tossed it up like a basketball, made it turn purple, twisted it into a hoop shape and finally dispersed it.

"Yes." He drawled with an amused smirk on his face.

David couldn't even get annoyed by the… wizard's… obvious amusement. The ground under his feet felt unsteady as his world view took a fatal hit.

"I need to sit down." He said weakly.

Potter made a 'come hither' sort of gesture and a chair moved up behind him. Then he handed him a glass and poured a goodly amount of expensive-looking alcohol into it, which David chugged almost desperately.

"Thanks." He said shakily.

The next few minutes passed in silence as he tried to wrap his head around this new reality that had been presented to him. Magic was real. He had so many questions, but no idea where to start.

So… magic, huh?" He finally managed. "Are there, uh, others like you?"

"Not quite like me, but there are plenty of other wizards and witches out there." Potter replied.

The following thirty minutes was spent giving David a brief overview of the hidden magical world. The notion that there was an entire secret society of magic users hidden behind spells was damn hard to wrap his head around.

"How could you possibly have stayed hidden so effectively?" He asked, baffled.

"Like I said, spells to deflect attention and memory wipes. They're quite effective. You also shouldn't underestimate the power of people's weirdness censor. Even after I apparated you here, you were looking for ways to deny the obvious. Aside from that it's also highly illegal to reveal magic to mundanes."

"You broke the law to tell me this stuff?"

"Not exactly. This is my island and on it I'm a king for all intents and purposes even if I don't call myself one. Telling you about magic wasn't illegal for me so much as it was risking a diplomatic incident by not asking the North American magical government for permission first."

David nodded, oddly comforted by the fact that politics was still the same even with magic added to the mix. "Why would you do that, though?"

"Because the magical world has no professional soldiers." Potter explained. "The closest it has are the Aurors, which is an elite police force. I'm currently engaged in a war against a very powerful, very unhinged wizard that tried to murder me when I was a baby and isn't going to stop until he's either brought the world to ruin or dead. We've muddled through in our efforts against him so far, but after seeing how chaotic things got in a pitched battle I decided that I had to bring in some professional help, so here you are."

"Here I am." David repeated, having not quite shaken off the surreal feeling. "Why me? Why put an ad in the papers at all, why not just go to a private military contractor?"

"Too much attention. Ideally, I would have been able to use someone with the necessary skills that already knows about the magical world, but I have no quick or easy way of tracking such a person down, if they even exist. A vague ad in the paper and revealing magic to one person seemed a lot safer."

"I see." David nodded thoughtfully. "So what would you want me to do?"

"I can show you memories of the battles we've fought so far so that you can critique them. I'd also ask you to teach my people some of the basic combat necessities and tactics that may be obvious to you but have eluded us. I can pay you in any currency you want, even in gold bars if that strikes your fancy. I could also give you your leg back, although that would require some sacrifices on your part to avoid drawing attention."

"You can give me my leg back?" David asked in shock.

"I've dabbled in fleshcrafting." Potter said with a tight smile.

That sounded ominous. "What if I refuse?"

"Then you will find yourself back at your home, believing that today's meeting didn't pan out. That's what happened to the two men that I spoke to before you, actually. One had deeply ingrained prejudices that our admittedly basic screening hadn't caught and the other asked about our ability to heal and was outraged when he learned that we don't use it to help the rest of mankind. Apparently he had a sister that died of cancer recently and was quite irrational about it."

" Could you have cured cancer?" David asked curiously. His own father had died of cancer almost fifteen years ago now. It had been a horrible, lingering death.

"Yes and no." Potter said. "I, or someone more specialised in healing, could have perhaps healed an individual, but we couldn't cure the affliction itself. Magic isn't something that can be automated or mass produced."

"You'd have to be there for every individual case." David surmised. He already knew what would happen if magical healing became known to the public. The greedy rich fucks would get all the benefits while the masses were left out to dry, same as always.

"Yes." Potter nodded. "Don't get me wrong, there are potions that can be bottled and sold in a store and a skilled enough potions master might be able to develop one that would target only the cancer cells, but you run into a similar problem. Even if the potion doesn't contain any materials so rare that they make the potion impossible to brew on a large scale, most wizards and witches simply don't have the skill to make anything other than very basic potions. And those of us who do have the skill have other things we want to do with our time than helping people we don't know or care about, and who are probably sick due to their own poor life choices in the first place."

"Wait a second." David said, suddenly realising something. "You don't already have a treatment for cancer? Do wizards not get it or something?"

"The answer to that is rather complicated, but the short version is that our magic protects us from most diseases, birth defects and other things that mundane people suffer from. As a tradeoff, we can get afflicted by magical germs, parasites or fungi that you are safe from. Scrofungulus, for example, is a sort of flesh-eating magical fungus which usually starts growing on the neck and spreads rapidly across the body if left untreated, eventually burrowing down into the muscle and then into the organs, until it finally reaches the spinal cord and brain, killing its host. It's fortunately easy to treat and quite unmissable, but there are others that are more problematic."

David really wasn't sure who had the better deal. Cancer was bad, but on the other hand… flesh-eating magical fungus. He decided to change the subject.

"So, if I agree I get my leg back and I get paid to train your people so that you can take down your crazy wizard and if I refuse I get my memory wiped and go on as if today never happened." He summarised.

"That's about the size of it."

David knew that Potter could be lying to him about who the bad guy in this story was, but he didn't think that he was. The wizard had laid it all out and answered all questions asked of him with blunt honesty even when the facts were unpleasant and he had not tried to pretend that he wasn't something of a bastard.

"You mentioned needing to make sacrifices to get my leg back. What kind of sacrifices?"

"Moving to a different country at the minimum, perhaps even faking your death if that's what it takes. A man suddenly getting his leg back is the type of thing that draws attention, you understand."

It didn't really take much thinking for him to decide. What did he have holding him back anyway? An ex-wife that had cheated on him while he'd been at war, no kids, no girlfriend, no close friends, no job, a brother he spoke to maybe a few times a year over the phone… no, there was nothing he'd be sad to leave behind.

"Alright, you've got yourself a deal."

"Excellent, I was getting tired of going through this song and dance over and over."

August 18th. Ravenhead.

Harry was by nature a reclusive sort of person, needing little social contact and plenty of solitude. Harry also had a high-functioning and downright demanding libido thanks to the runes he'd carved into his flesh, which required regular social contact of the sticky kind.

By all rights, this contradiction should have spelled the doom of any attempt at a sustained relationship. His other attributes would have drawn women in at first, but his habit of shutting himself away to do his own thing until he got horny would have inevitably created resentment and soured anything deeper than a friends with benefits relationship.

He had dodged this pitfall during his first relationship with Dora because they had still been getting to know each other during the summer and had spent most of their time apart later on when he went back to Hogwarts. And there were also the effects of the Joining to consider…

But it had been Luna and her unblinking acceptance of people as they were that had really been the deciding factor. Harry had not even been aware of what his behavior looked like to other people until she had, with her typical insightful directness, pointed it out.

He remembered the event very clearly. Fleur had been trying to coax him to spend time with her, but he had been annoyed with her attempts because he wanted to continue working on whatever project had been holding his attention at the time. That had gotten the veela huffy and she'd started to complain about feeling neglected.

Then Luna had chimed in and exposed the underlying problem in such a way that left both him and Fleur feeling dumb for not seeing it themselves.

Harry had since then been making a conscious effort to be more attentive to Fleur, Luna and later Dora when she joined the group, even if he sometimes really didn't feel like it. Fleur and Dora had in turn made an effort to not take it personally when he got carried away and temporarily forgot they existed. Luna didn't need to make an effort because she'd never taken it personally.

Then came the fateful day when a Time Turner was swiped from the Department of Mysteries. Suddenly, the possibility existed for him to be doing two things at once.

Harry was very pleased with how much easier it suddenly was to juggle his magical studies and his interpersonal relationships. It had been murder on his sleep schedule and he estimated that he was already several months older than he should be, but that was deemed to be of secondary importance.

However, Harry had never once been satisfied with simply using a bit of magic. No, he always felt the need to dissect it and see if it couldn't be taken further.

Temporal mechanics were neither simple nor safe to meddle with of course, nor was there anything solid discovered by mundane science that wizards had thus far ignored as had been the case with the Philosopher's Stone, so progress was slow.

But there was progress. The first thing that Harry sussed out was why Time Turners were so damn lmited in their effects.

Simply put, the universe had a thing he was calling 'temporal inertia'. Everything and everyone contributed to this temporal inertia with their existence, creating something that one might whimsically refer to as 'fate'. The goddamn Eldar knew what they were talking about when they said 'we are shaped by fate just as we shape it'.

But a time traveler was in constant discord with the universe, or with 'fate' if you prefer.

Some people were said to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was of course meant subjectively. A time traveler was objectively in the wrong place at the wrong time, all the time . Every single thing they did while in the past created ripples in reality, unseen and unfelt by physical senses, but detectable via magic because it existed outside of time.

Small actions could be gotten away with. The timestream would simply flow over the irritant and things would work out as they should, even if minute changes to events might be made.

There were no records or even rumors of a time traveler succeeding in making major changes to the past. Harry strongly doubted this was for lack of trying given how reckless and desperate people could be. There was really no way to safely determine what happened when it was attempted.

Harry wondered sometimes if the Unspeakables knew this stuff. Probably, they did supposedly study it after all. Unless the Department of Mysteries was just there to hoard cool shit and act mysterious while doing nothing, but that seemed a little unlikely.

In any case, Harry had researched this in the hope that he might be able to use time travel to cheat his way to an easy victory against Voldemort and any other problems that might crop up in the future. Alas, his experiments had proven with sufficient reliability that there was no way to avoid being viewed as a foreign temporal element by the universe when engaging in time travel.

Harry might sometimes act like an idiot child that kept sticking his fingers into the electrical socket over and over where dangerous magic was concerned, but he had no desire provoke the universe into deleting him from the timestream or something like that and reluctantly abandoned that line of research. It would have been different if he had some idea how far he could push his luck, but that was kind of the problem with time travel - if you fucked up you'd never know, nor would anyone else in all likelihood.

That being said, he didn't abandon meddling with time entirely. Going back and changing the past might have turned out to be a bust, but there were other applications that had considerably less risk of running afoul temporal inertia, less than a Time Turner even.

So it was that after months of research, experimentation and reading up everything on the nature of space and time he could find whether it be magical or mundane in origin, Harry carved the final rune on the door to his personal Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

A tiny little wrinkle in time, a small eddy in the river, a place where one second became one hundred seconds. It was perhaps his greatest achievement to date aside from the Philosopher's Stone.

It would give him time to work on stuff without neglecting his personal life.

It would allow him to advance his knowledge without feeling as if he was constantly behind schedule on something .

… and he suspected that he would need it to have any hope of making even a passable attempt at parenting when that situation inevitably happened. He knew himself well enough to know that a no child zone where he could spend several days without being bothered or missed would be crucial if he was to maintain what sanity he had left.

August 19th. Ravenhead.

Harry generally had at least a dozen major and minor projects running at any given time. When he got bored or stumped with one, he moved on to another. Now with the fight against Voldemort apparently heating up, he felt the need to prioritise.

That was why he had focused exclusively on the Hyperbolic Time Chamber since the attack on Spellhaven. It would give him more time to work with in a more convenient fashion than the Time Turner.

Since that was done, it was time to refocus his attention on another minor project that he had been neglecting for a long while now.

Harry activated the Resurrection Stone and called out the name of the spirit he wished to summon.

"Imhotep."

The Ancient Egyptian sorcerer-priest faded into view. Short, bald and withered with age, but he could still muster up a fearsome glare.

"Why do you keep summoning me, blasphemer?" The former lich hissed angrily in his native tongue. "I will tell you nothing!"

Harry had of course tried to use the Resurrection Stone to pry some knowledge out of Imhotep before, but he had proven uncooperative.

"So you've said." Harry acknowledged in the same language. "But perhaps you would be interested in a bargain?"

"And what do you think you can offer me, affront to the gods?"

Harry held back a frustrated sigh. Fucking priests. You'd think that death would have cured this bony fucker of his religious leanings, but apparently not. Either they retained no memory of what death was like when not summoned by the Resurrection Stone, or else the experience was entirely subjective and their beliefs skewed their perceptions beyond any hope of objectivity. For certain, he had not received even two identical answers on what it was like to be dead.

At least he wasn't just flat out declaring that he wouldn't accept any bargains. It had taken a lot of softening up to get the old bastard to this point.

Instead of replying, he summoned the dementors he had enslaved. The sheer outrage on Imhotep's ghostly face was beautiful.

"Now you cavort with these shadow demons, who steal men's souls and deny them the judgement of Anubis? Have you no shame?" The dead man spat accusingly.

"Not much of it, no." Harry replied honestly. "Anyway, the bargain I offer is as follows. Teach me your spells and the secrets of your staff's construction and I will destroy these and all others of their kind."

To prove that he could, he drew on the Sun and conjured of blazing sphere of Light magic, the plunged it into the closest dementor.

It poofed silently out of existence, leaving nothing behind but a greasy black dust and a slight lessening of the oppressive atmosphere. The other dementors didn't even twitch at the destruction of their fellow, still bound by his will.

Harry busied himself with wiping dementor residue off his hand while Imhotep processed the situation.

"I do not understand you, blasphemer." The ancient sorcerer finally said, in a rather complaining tone in Harry's opinion. "You consort with demons of both fire and shadow. I sensed the Dark in you when we fought, yet you can draw upon Ra's Light. The disparity should have slain you, how is it that you live?"

"I am the first of the Dark Sun, and the last. My coming was foretold by prophecy and no others will follow in my footsteps." Harry replied, using some portentous ye olde language both because it would have more impact with Imhotep than a technical explanation and because Ancient Egyptian didn't have the vernacular for it anyway.

There was a long silence and Harry could almost see the gears - or whatever the Ancient Egyptian equivalent was - turning in Imhotep's head.

"You will destroy the shadow demons? All of them?" He finally asked.

"Yes." Eventually.

"And you will teach no others your ways?"

"Yes." Lying was a very important life skill and the dead man couldn't sense the falsehood, although there really wouldn't be any more wizards like him unless they could repeat his truly ridiculous set of extenuating circumstances.

"… I have stayed too long in the living world. Summon me again tomorrow and we will speak further."

August 23rd. Spellhaven.

"Tell me if I'm rubbing too hard, alright?" Luna said.

"Do it harder if you can." The sphinx nicknamed Kitty purred in pleasure.

Luna put a determined look on her face and gave it her all, massaging shampoo into the sphinx's scalp with zeal.

Kitty sighed and resisted the urge to plop bonelessly onto her side. That would dislodge the naked human girl on her back and interrupt the scalp massage.

For several minutes, the only sound was the deep rumbling purr of the sphinx and the occasional giggle from Luna when the fur tickled her legs or private parts.

She really didn't understand why people were so afraid of sphinxes, those mean European politicians were even implying that Harry was crazy because he kept them on the island. Sure they were big, magic resistant and strong enough to shatter stone with their paws, but they never hurt anyone that didn't pick a fight with them or try to take something they were guarding.

"Luna?" Fleur's voice called from the air, breaking the almost meditative atmosphere. "There you are! I've been looking all over for you."

"What is it, Fleur?" Luna asked, slowing down her efforts to look up at the veela levitating in the air.

Unseen by the two witches, Kitty pouted.

"I need your help with something." Fleur explained and took a humorous look at the scene below. "If you are almost done here that is."

"My arms are getting a bit tired." Luna admitted. "Could you give us a little water?"

Fleur nodded and waved her wand, conjuring a gentle stream of warm water.

"Close your eyes, Kitty." Luna instructed and began washing out the shampoo and then using a very minor wandless spell to dry off the hair.

"There!" She declared when she was done, feeling very pleased with herself.

"Thank you, my friend." Kitty purred. "I look forward to your next visit."

"Me too." Luna beamed and swung herself off the sphinx's back.

Kitty shook the water out of her fur, making Luna squeal as she was sprayed.

"My apologies." The sphinx said with clear amusement and bounded off.

"A sphinx that plays pranks." Fleur muttered and landed. "Now I've seen everything."

Luna looked up at her quizzically. How could Fleur have seen everything when she hadn't even seen a dragon eat ice cream or a dog do a handstand or a chicken ride a bicycle or a crumple-horned snorkack juggle or…..come to think of it, Fleur had actually seen very little.

She decided to give her a kiss to bring her back to sensibility. It was only supposed to be a short kiss, but Luna sensed that Fleur was actually quite aroused. Seeing as Kitty's purring had been causing her massive body to vibrate between Luna's legs, she was actually pretty aroused herself, so it all worked out.

Except that Fleur broke off after a minute with a gasp. "Luna, wait. Stop!"

"Why?" Luna asked guilelessly. "Didn't you come here because you wanted to get your vagina licked? I want mine licked too, so what's the problem? We can sixty-nine!"

"Normally I would love to take you up on that, but I need your help with something else and we probably don't have a lot of time."

"Oh." Luna was nonplussed. "Will there be sex? Because I'm really in the mood right now and I don't feel like doing something else unless it's important."

"Yes, there will be sex, but you won't be having it with me."

"Oh, okay. Who will I be having it with then?"

"Hopefully with Harry and my sister."

"You convinced Harry to have sex with Gabrielle?" Luna asked with a big smile. She knew how much Fleur's little sister wanted to boink Harry and was happy for her. Then she frowned in slight confusion. "But why would they need my help? Harry is quite good at it."

"I didn't exactly convince him to have sex with Gabby." The veela said evasively.

"Oh, so it's going to be a surprise." Luna realized. "How can I help?"

Fleur swept her up into a hug. "You are a treasure. Let's go back to the cháteau and I will explain everything."

"Okay."

"Luna."

"What?"

"Your clothes."

"Oh, right."

"Oooh, Aging Potion!" Luna exclaimed with some admiration when she saw the bottle. "Unless Harry was just making excuses, then this should definitely work."

"We thought so as well." Fleur said with satisfaction.

"How much should I drink?" Gabrielle asked, nervously eyeballing the potion.

"Hmmm, about…..this much." Fleur said, pouring a certain amount into another vial.

"Fleur, that's enough to make me look at least twenty-five!" Gabrielle squawked in protest.

"It is a bit young." Luna commiserated and turned to the other veela. "Are you sure you aren't being a bit too conservative? You know that Harry's favorite age is around thirty-five."

"I was thinking more like eighteen." Gabrielle muttered to herself.

"I don't want to feed his weird fetishes too much." Fleur huffed. "His BDSM kink is bad enough, but at least we have Septima taking one for the team with that one. If he thinks I'm going to let myself age past twenty-eight at the most he has another thing coming."

"You say that as if you have a choice." The younger veela said, staring at her sister in bemusement.

Luna stealthily fired a spell at Gabrielle designed to blank out her short-term memory.

"Luna!" Fleur protested.

"Sorry, Fleur. You know that Harry wants it kept secret."

"Kept what secret?" Gabrielle asked, shaking off the sudden confusion that had gripped her.

Luna scrambled her short-term memory again.

"LUNA!"

"Maybe we should just get on with the plan?" Luna suggested.

"What plan?" Gabrielle asked, frowning in confusion.

"The plan to get Harry to have sex with you."

"Oh, right. Sorry, I think I didn't get enough sleep last night. Zoned out a bit there."

"It happens." Luna shrugged. "Where is Harry anyway?"

"He slipped into….that special room of his just before I came to get you." Fleur said.

Ah, his Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Ever since he'd finished it, Harry had been going in there and coming back out an hour or so later sporting several days worth of beard growth. He had a bed and a bathroom in there, but relied on that alchemical stuff of his for sustenance. It drove the house elves crazy.

This was perfect actually, because it would mean that he'd come out in need of a good boinking.

"What special room?" Gabrielle asked curiously.

Luna scrambled her short-term memory yet again .

" LUNA! "

Luna made a mental note to have Harry talk to Fleur about secrets and how to keep them. She was clearly treating this whole thing a bit too casually.

"What about Nymphadora?" She asked. The metamorphmagus was rather less flexible than Harry and had trouble accepting that Gabrielle was a sexually maturing veela rather than a human.

"I will handle her." Fleur said tersely, which confused Luna a little bit. What was that tone for?

"Alright, then Gabrielle can set herself up in the bedroom and I'll lead Harry to it." Luna said with a nod.

"Where is Harry anyway?" Gabrielle asked curiously.

"He's…." Fleur began.

Luna fingered her wand behind the younger veela's back.

"….working on something."

Luna nodded. That was better.

Ravenhead.

Luna waited in front of the door of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, frowning at it. She'd been here for a while now and the counter that Harry had put near the door showed nearly two hours, which would translate to just over a week if her calculations were correct. That was longer than he'd ever spent in there in one go.

Luna hoped that he wasn't pushing himself too hard. She knew how much it bothered him that Voldemort had still been a better fighter than him and whatever he was working on in there was probably meant to give him an edge.

Another ten minutes passed quietly, which equated to over sixteen hours for Harry, before Luna felt an odd sense of vertigo. That was the normal flow of time re-establishing itself within the Chamber. Harry had likened it to an airlock when explaining it to them. Good thing that Luna learned what an airlock was from some of the films they'd watched together, or he'd have needed to explain that too.

The stone doors opened and Harry stepped out, cocking his head at her in confusion.

"Luna?" He questioned with a frown.

"Hi, Harry!" She beamed and launched herself at him. "Did you miss me?"

"Yes." His reply was a bit bemused, but his hands were already wandering.

"You look handsome with a beard." Luna informed him, scratching at his cheeks as if he was a cat. With how fast and thick his facial hair grew, eight days was enough for him to be sporting a full beard, if a very short one.

Well, not quite a full beard. The hair didn't grow over the scars on the left side of his face anymore.

"You think so, do you?" He grinned.

"Mhm." Luna nodded seriously.

"Even if I do…..this?" He asked and stuck his face into the crook of her neck before giving her a beard rub.

Luna squealed with laughter and squirmed in his embrace as the coarse hair prickled at her skin.

"Still like the beard?" He asked teasingly.

"Yes." She said simply and pulled him down into a kiss.

As expected, Harry quickly became a lot more handsy than a kiss warranted and was clearly looking to go further. While Luna's initial arousal from sitting on a purring sphinx had faded, it was now quickly coming back, which was why she only pulled away reluctantly.

"What is it?" Harry questioned. No doubt he could sense her arousal and was confused by her actions.

"Catch me if you can." Luna said impishly, spun around and started running back towards the portal mirror.

She heard Harry snort with laughter and give chase.

"Oi, what the fuck?!" She heard him curse when he crashed into the transparent plastic wrap she'd set up in the hallway at head height for him. Completely non-magical so that his Magesight couldn't see it.

Luna didn't bother to keep her giggling quiet. His legs were a lot longer than hers and he'd have caught her before she even made it to the portal mirror if she didn't slow him down.

More cursing came from behind her as Harry stumbled over the tripwire she'd left for him.

"I'll kiss your boo-boos if you catch me, Haaaarry~." She teasingly yelled back. She was having so much fun that she decided to prank Harry more in the future.

Indistinct disgruntled noises were the only reply she received.

With her pursuer slowed down either by caution or by her little surprises, Luna made it back to the cháteau with a comfortable lead and quickly dashed towards the master bedroom.

It was dark, lit only by candles and the fireplace. Gabrielle was already there, looking to be in her twenties and gently masturbating on their bed. Judging by the light sheen of moisture on her body, she'd been at it for a while.

"Luna!" The young veela gasped in surprise and then scowled. "Where were you?! You were supposed to be here nearly an hour ago!"

Well that wasn't true. It was more like forty-five minutes.

"Harry took longer to finish up than I expected." She said, quickly stripping off her clothes and deciding not to comment on the exaggeration. "He'll be here soon though, so we'd best get ready."

Gabrielle gained a look of nervous excitement, the same kind that one would have after something they wanted for a while was finally going to happen. She nearly pounced on Luna and had to be reminded that Harry would be coming soon and to pace herself.

Luna had a rather different view of Gabrielle than either Harry or Nymphadora. To her, the young veela was Fleur's little sister and a friend besides. Of course she would do everything she could to help. Even if Gabrielle were human, she wouldn't have really paid her youth any mind, instead simply accepting that she could make her own decisions regardless of age. Even if they were potentially bad decisions, she wouldn't have seen it as her place to prevent Gabrielle from making them.

That was why she'd been happy to join in on the fun when Fleur had invited her to help with Gabrielle's budding sexuality and why she was happy to help now.

They had barely been at it for a couple of minutes when the door opened and Harry rushed in.

"Hello, Harry." The two naked blondes cooed in unison.

"Oh." He said, blinking. "I see."

"I hope you didn't have too much trouble with my traps." Luna said, getting off the bed and making her way towards him.

Harry frowned down at her. "I think you've been saving the biggest trap for last."

Luna giggled and poked her tongue out of her mouth.

Gabrielle swung her much-longer-than-usual legs off the bed, making sure that her much-more-developed-than-normal chest bounced enticingly.

"Is that how you see me, Harry?" She asked with a pout as she also made her way towards him, running her hands up her body the whole way. "A trap?"

Harry's mouth twitched into a smile. "I don't think you realise what it means to refer to a person as a trap. In any case, I was talking about the situation. Been hitting the Aging Potion, have you?"

Luna kept her hands busy undoing his clothes and fondling his crotch while Gabrielle talked. She wanted Harry to focus on the young veela after all.

"You said that you weren't interested in me because I looked young not because I was young." Gabrielle said with her best breathy voice, pressing her naked body up against his other side. She was a bit clumsy and unpolished, but there was no hesitation or fear in her actions.

"I did." Harry admitted.

"Do you like the way I look at this age?" Gabrielle continued, a small note of nervousness now present in her tone.

"I do." He admitted again, reaching around to rub his hand across her naked back.

Luna smiled widely to herself at the way that Gabrielle gasped and arched her back into the touch.

"Kiss me." The young veela demanded more than asked.

Luna had to restrain the urge to hop in place gleefully when Harry did just that. It had worked! Judging by how aggressive he was about it, he had been exerting considerable willpower to hold on to his self-control. Harry was always fun when he was pent up.

It took some doing to relieve Harry of his shirt with the way that Gabrielle seemed determined to stay attached to his lips, but Luna convinced her to let up for a second by guiding her hand towards the bulge in his pants.

The young veela let out a distinctly hungry groan and started making a hurried path of kisses down Harry's hairy chest, going down on her knees within seconds.

Luna did the same, and the two of them teamed up to liberate Harry's member from his pants.

As soon as it sprung out of his underwear, Gabrielle grabbed it and shoved it into her mouth without fanfare.

Harry grunted in discomfort at the rough handling and Luna knew that she needed to intervene. She moved behind Gabrielle and hugged her, one hand on her stomach and the other on a breast.

"Slow down, it's not going to run away." She said into the eager young veela's ear, giving her an approving squeeze when she listened. "Good, that's it. It can hurt for men too, so use plenty of spit…."

Luna was enjoying herself quite a lot in her mentor role. She'd been the student in the relationship before, so this was a nice turnaround.

And Gabrielle was such a good student! She listened to instructions eagerly and executed them flawlessly. Even once Luna started using her own hands to stimulate her and Gabrielle started shaking and groaning in arousal, she kept her eyes focused upwards, somehow knowing instinctively that it would further stimulate Harry. Maybe it was a veela thing? Fleur did say that veela had naturally good instincts at anything sex related.

With Harry being as pent up as he was, there was no way for him to last long against that kind of assault and he was grunting out his climax in short order.

Luna stepped up her rubbing when she sense that it was about to happen, and held Gabrielle tightly when the young veela shuddered in climax and groaned deeply, greedily gulping down the magically potent seed spilling into her mouth. Her magic flared outwards uncontrollably, looking to initiate a Joining with both Harry and Luna, but they kept themselves closed off. They kept that confined to each other, Fleur and Nymphadora now.

"Wow." Gabrielle breathed when the initial high passed, panting for breath.

She sounded and looked so dazed that Luna had to giggle. Then she wiped a bit off runoff semen from the corner of the young veela's mouth with her finger.

"You missed a little." She teased, holding the finger in front of Gabrielle, who cleaned it off with relish.

"Damn, I am so jealous of Fleur right now. She gets to have this and more all the time." Gabrielle sighed.

"Envious." Harry muttered just loud enough for Luna to hear.

"You haven't even taken it in the vagina yet." Luna pointed out. "The Aging Potion is still good for several hours and Harry's penis will be hard again any second now."

"Yes." Gabrielle breathed, staring at the organ in question with a thirsty gleam in her eye before looking up into Harry's eyes with determination. "I want you to fill me up until my belly bloats."

Luna noted that all signs of nervousness in Gabrielle had been completely wiped out. She must be running completely on instinct already.

And by the look on Harry's face, he found the suggestion to be very enticing.

There was only one thing to do now.

"Make sure to leave some for me though." She reminded. Just because it was fun to watch the faces people made when they had sex didn't mean that she didn't want some for herself.

Tonks yawned and scratched that itchy spot under her left tit as she approached the breakfast table, absently lengthening her nails so that they scratched better.

"Good morning, Nymphadora." Luna greeted serenely, breaking through the fog of sleep like a ray of metaphorical sunshine.

Tonks mumbled back a similar greeting of her own, so desensitized to the use of her full name by now that she couldn't even muster a flicker of irritation. It wasn't as if Luna had ever listened to her requests to stop using it in the past.

That was when her eyes registered the presence of Fleur's little sister at the table in addition to the usual suspects, wearing nothing but an open silk robe and a satisfied grin. The very picture of woman that got laid real good and felt smug about it. It was bloody uncomfortable seeing that expression on a preteen girl, no matter how many times Fleur explained that it was normal and even necessary for veela to start having sex as soon as puberty kicked in.

Puzzle pieces started coming together. Fleur had brought her a little after dinner snack that she'd baked herself, some kind of pastry made with honey. It had looked good and Tonks had munched on several pieces without thinking about it. Almost immediately afterwards, she'd become extremely horny and realized that Fleur had probably used Marae's Nectar rather than honey for her culinary efforts.

The veela had apologized for her 'mistake', rather insincerely it had to be said, and offered to take care of the problem. Several hours of sticky fun in one of the cháteau's unused rooms had followed and then they'd fallen asleep right there, too sleepy and worn out to get back to their own bedroom.

"Harry, you didn't." She groaned in exasperation, knowing full well that he had. Unlike her, he had been able to accept the differences of the veela species much more easily.

Harry shrugged. "She was under the effects of Aging Potion."

"That's not the point." Tonks sighed, privately wondering why she even bothered.

Harry shrugged again. "It was for me."

"Fine, but don't come crying to me if the veela designate you as the primary deflowerer for their young." The metamorphmagus muttered and pulled a plate of fruit slices towards her. "They already treat you like some kind of rare delicacy."

"You're quite the delicacy yourself, Nymmie." Fleur teased.

"Thanks." Tonks said dryly.

Fleur and Gabrielle grinned at each other, amused by the foibles of humans.

The older veela was also wondering how much longer she'd have to keep softening Harry and Nymmie up before they'd agree to start breeding those veela that wanted more children. It would benefit everyone, she felt.

There were only about four hundred or so veela in the whole world. Her grandmother's four daughters was a situation so rare it was nearly unheard of and had boosted her personal prestige greatly as a result. Most only managed one, two was considered fairly lucky. Having a reliable way to get pregnant on demand would be an incredible boon for their species.

And it would also benefit Harry and his family, the veela species as a whole could be placed in his debt.

It had taken Fleur quite some time and many lost bedroom dominance struggles to accept that Harry was the center of their group rather than her, but accept it she had. Now it was second nature to angle for an advantage in his favor, even if her species came out worse than they might have otherwise as a result.

Not that the matriarchs would have anything to complain about. The situation was still incredibly beneficial for the veela and her own grandmother, a matriarch herself even if she was the newest and youngest of them, agreed that being loyal to Harry in return would be no great hardship.

Luna would probably agree to start doing it right away if she was asked. Harry had for the moment put aside his project to help Luna develop a Metamorph talent, so a little Polyjuice would be required to give her the proper delivery system, a cock in other words, but it could certainly be done. The problem was that she didn't want to do that until Harry and Nymmie were sufficiently mellow to accept the idea.

Ah well, there was still plenty of time. Maybe after they had a few kids of their own?

"Are you done with your project yet, Harry?" Luna asked out of the blue.

"I am actually." Harry said with a grin. "I was just finishing it up yestererday."

"Can I see it?" Gabrielle asked excitedly, sounding exactly her age and causing more confusion for a certain metamorphmagus.

"Yes, this one isn't something that's going to stay secret for long." He nodded and stood up. "I'll be right back."

"What do you think he made this time?" Fleur asked curiously.

"No idea, but given how much work he's been putting in it'll probably be pretty amazing." Tonks replied.

Several minutes later, Harry came back and in his hands was a tall staff.

It was a deep, vivid red color, shaped to look like two entwined serpents. There was a transparent faceted crystal at the top, nestled between the heads of the two serpents, which were turned towards each other and bore a significant resemblance to Etal.

"Six feet and five inches of South American bloodwood, with a quetzalcoatl feather core, topped with a solar focusing crystal. I've named it the Spire of the Dark Sun." Harry declared with a proud grin, turning the staff this way and that. "What do you think?"

"There are so many jokes about size compensation and wizard's staves available that I don't even know which one to pick." Tonks mused.

"I know, it's really quite intolerable." Fleur agreed, contemplatively sipping tea.

"Really? That's it?" Harry deflated.

"It's nice?" Luna ventured.

"Ah, forget it." Harry grumbled.

Fleur and Tonks snickered at his disappointed expression. They knew he wanted to monologue about it. They might love the prat, but he did enjoy the sound of his own voice a bit too much sometimes.

"Why not just use a wand?" Gabrielle asked with a confused frown on her face.

Harry perked up at the question. "Because a modern wand is a precision instrument designed to be a shortcut to learning magic that later becomes a psychological crutch. Using my old wand would certainly allow me to cast faster, but it would also limit me too much to be worth it. A self-made magical focus is a superior tool for channeling magic, as well as being much more flexible and personally suited to its maker than a store-bought one."

"But why not just make yourself a wand?" Tonks asked. "It's a lot more convenient than a staff and nothing you've said so far makes a staff better."

"Mostly because it looks way cooler and for the solar focusing crystal." Harry replied, raising an eyebrow. "I'm sure you remember our adventure in Egypt?"

"Oh, you can do that now?" Fleur looked interested.

"I think so, though I'd have to try it to be sure." He nodded.

"Do what?" Gabrielle demanded. "And why did you name the staff anyway? Wands don't have names."

"Maybe I'll show you later. As for why I named it… I just thought it'd be cool." Harry admitted.

"Neeeeerd." Tonks snorted in laughter.

"Don't listen to Nymphadora, Harry." Luna said supportively. "It's very 'cool', I'm sure."

"Thanks, Luna. I could have almost believed that if it wasn't for the audible quotation marks."

"Could you make me a staff?" Fleur asked, daydreaming about firing Sun-powered laser beams around.

"Nope."

"Why not?" She demanded indignantly.

"There's a reason that there's no young wandmakers. It takes for-fucking-ever to learn how to make a magical focus that other people can use with any kind of efficiency. I can, however, teach you how to make your own. In fact, you'd all benefit from having foci of your own make."

"How long would it take?" Tonks was interested now.

Harry considered it. Without his advanced magic attunement…

"A few months maybe?" He hazarded. "I don't really know for sure."

"Would we be staying in your….special room?" Fleur asked.

"What special room?" Gabrielle asked.

Luna had been waiting for something like this to happen and scrambled her short-term memory.

"Stop doing that!" Fleur snapped.

"Harry, we really need to have a talk about Fleur's ability to keep secrets around family members." Luna said, ignoring the incensed veela.

"I can see that." Harry said with a raised eyebrow.

Fleur crossed her arms and looked away with a very snooty 'hmph'.

"What?" Gabrielle shook her head. "Did I miss something just now?"

"You zoned out for a little while." Luna explained serenely. "I call it the veela cum daze, it sometimes happens to veela that aren't used to Harry's penis."

Tonks snorted into her juice and went into a prolonged coughing fit. The absolutely calm and straight-faced way that Luna had just shoveled that ridiculous load of bullshit was simply too much.

August 24th, 2018. Ravenhead, Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

It hadn't even been a single real time day and Harry was already contemplating his next project. The staff was nice, excellent even, but he didn't think it would be enough. He had examined the fight against Voldemort in his Pensieve(another leisure project), both alone and with others, and had concluded that even with the benefit of a magical focus he'd still be at a disadvantage in a one on one fight.

A lot of that was pure combat experience of course. Not just sparring, but serious life and death battle. No amount of training could really teach you to fight the way that mortal combat could.

But that kind of thing carried the unfortunate risk of dying, which Harry wasn't keen on. As much of an adrenaline rush as it could be to fight to the death, Harry was still more of a thinker by nature than a fighter.

So he thought, and he considered how to skew the odds in his favor from a different angle than just 'git gud'.

As was often the case, he stole an idea from a fictional setting.

The problem was that he didn't know diddly squat about blacksmithing, metallurgy or metalworking in general, nor was it something that he could use his extreme magical aptitude to learn at a stupidly accelerated pace. And Tzeentch (probably) didn't exist either, so he would need some serious blacksmithing skill to pull this idea off. Simple transfiguration and enchanting wouldn't do it, he'd already tried. No, the necessary spells needed to be weaved into the item during the actual forging process, so that magic and metal became one.

Well, fuck it then. He'd set up a forge in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber and he could find plenty of books and shit on blacksmithing. There was probably even a 'Blacksmithing for Dummies' book out there. He could also go out and ask actual blacksmiths for tips.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, he could use this temporally dilated room of ultimate cheating to pretend it was fucking Skyrim and he needed to forge one thousand iron daggers to level up his blacksmithing.

If the goddamn goblins could do it, then so could he.

Harry pointedly ignored the minor quibble of goblins being racially inclined towards metalworking. It didn't matter, he was human and humans could advance to any level in any skill. Dungeons & Dragons said so.

August 27th, 2018.

" Etal, have you come across any remote human villages in your exploration of Africa? " Harry asked.

" Many, why do you ask? " The quetzalcoatl wondered.

" There is something I need to try….. "

Africa.

Harry didn't rightly have any idea which country this particular village was in, nor did he really care. What he cared about was that it was far from any magical or even mundane authority.

Controlled experimentation had been promising, now he needed to try it out 'in the wild', so to speak. This place was perfect for a small scale field test.

It was the dead of night and most everyone in the small village was asleep. Even if they weren't, they wouldn't have seen his disillusioned form as he stalked towards his target.

He hesitated only for a moment before unstoppering the flask in his hand and pouring the liquid magic into the village well. He saw the water begin to shimmer with magical potential as the raw magic bonded to it. It would be invisible to anyone without Magesight, although even fairly mediocre wizards and witches should be able to feel something from it.

The last thing he did was to hide a Palantír nearby so that he could monitor the situation from a distance.

" What was that good for? " Etal asked as they were leaving.

" I want more magic in this world. " Harry hissed back. " If my theory is correct, then this place will be just the beginning. "

September 1st, 2018.

Harry stopped in his tracks as his communication mirror let off a particular sound associated with an emergency call.

"Madam Bones." He greeted as the face of the monocle-wearing witch appeared in the mirror.

"Potter." She bit off tersely. "There are Death Eaters attacking the Hogwarts Express."

Harry paused for a moment to consider that. The train should already be at Hogwarts at this time, or nearly so. If they were going to take prisoners, it would have made more sense to attack it en route.

"Most likely a diversion." He determined. "Voldemort will probably make a play for the Department of Mysteries with an elite group while everyone is distracted."

He had brought Bones in on the plan to bait Voldemort with the prophecy. She had not been happy.

"But not a diversion we can ignore, so get your arse over here and help fix this mess." She snapped and closed the connection.

"This had better not turn out to be a monthly thing." He grumbled and started calling the girls.