‘You may be cross with me by the end’ came true a lot faster than anyone thought. The Hat of Attainment was like a curse of infinite teasing, it gave Harry a taste of super genius but couldn’t keep up with all the things Harry wanted to learn or get better at. Back during his friends’ visit on Boxing Day, Cedric had called it the ‘Hat of Infinite Edging’, prompting Cho to slap him on the shoulder for it. Harry knew what that meant thanks to dad’s magazines – and the notes on the margins – but was too embarrassed to admit it.
To prioritise, Harry mainly used the hat to speed-run learning spells that only Dumbledore knew, since the headmaster wouldn’t have so much free time once term started. Harry also used it to internalize their practical applications too, though not as well as the melee fighting. While Dougan hadn’t reclaimed his non-lethality clasp either, it didn’t work on spells. Or at least not on wands. Which Dumbledore admitted was rather a relief, especially after they confirmed the clasp was useless on all wands rather than just the Elder Wand.
Psychometry told Harry the clasp had a limit too, enough energy to function for up to six hours per 24-hour cycle, but that was more than he could use it for anyway, with everything else he had to do in a day.
It was, therefore, with a mixture of frustration and relief that Harry welcomed the very great impositions on his time that Doctor Strauss demanded for his procedure.
“Let it be known that I am doing this under protest,” the world’s best and most disgraced brain surgeon said gruffly when he ran out of warnings. “The research on quantum brain storage and everything else related to it plainly won’t exist for another two decades, so I cannot refine the procedure any further without it, if it’s even possible.”
“Me neither,” Charlie said from the door, having accompanied the doctor into the room.
“He’s lying,” the doctor sourly denounced his first and only patient. “I’m sure he reinvented the whole thing within a month of getting the procedure himself.”
“I didn’t,” Charlie denied with that strange thing he did when he deliberately suppressed his normal stoicism so that his feelings would be more obvious. “I was too busy being frustrated with my inability to relate to Alice, and looking down on you and doctor Nemur for not knowing every last language on the Earth.”
“Ah yes.” Doctor Strauss was trying his best not to act too openly bitter too, now. “You wrote in your journal that my areas of knowledge are too limited, that I was educated in the tradition of narrow specialization where the broader aspects of background were neglected far more than necessary – even for a neurosurgeon.”
“I was also shocked to learn that the only ancient languages you could read were Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,” Charlie said with completely transparent self-deprecation. “And that you knew almost nothing of mathematics beyond the ‘elementary’ levels of calculus of variations.”
Harry looked from one man to the other. “Isn’t that, like, college-level stuff?”
“Rather niche as well,” Charlie dryly confirmed. “It took quite a while for the rest of my frame of reference to catch up with my leap in intellect, unfortunately. Too long, in most regards.”
“Which is another reason I’m not comfortable with this,” the doctor cautioned. “It took Charlie two weeks to give me grey hairs and doctor Nemur an inferiority complex, then he went and invented a whole new way to measure failure-“
“Interspaced with more or less ruining the social aspects of my life, not all because of the Algernon-Gordon effect.”
“Artificially increased intelligence deteriorates at a rate of time directly proportional to the quantity of the increase, or so Charlie’s paper concluded,” said Doctor Strauss as he took the armchair across the small table from Harry’s own. “Since he later recovered with your potion, I am cautiously optimistic about your own prospects. That being said, we don’t know if it would do more harm than good to put you on them the moment the deterioration begins, as opposed to letting the mental regression run its full course. We definitely won’t give it to you immediately after the procedure.”
“If things proceed with you any way similar to me,” Charlie said while setting down the binder he’d brought along. “You might be able to solve that problem on your own, once the advanced intelligence takes over. We hope. Unlike you, I didn’t have psychometry to use on myself, and all else. Or the ability to shapeshift. Or magic in general. We don’t know what you’ll do with that, what you’ll even be able to do, but we can speculate.”
With all of Lorne’s memory of reports about ascended beings, and even being there for a couple of them, Harry could speculate too. “Charlie, how come you don’t want to do the surgery yourself? No offense Doctor.”
“Because it turns out that a too wide-reaching education can make it so the core aspects of a field are sidelined more than necessary in favor of tangents,” Charlie wryly admitted. “I’ve gotten mostly over when it comes to engineering, but that’s in large part because it has so many derivative sub-fields. I always find my way back to the initial focus eventually, and I’ve taken great pains to become entirely autonomous there. Brain surgery is not the same. I don’t trust himself not to come up with great ‘ideas’ on the fly based on some random epiphany or suchlike, or otherwise ‘improve’ the Doctor’s procedure while I’ve got my forceps inside your skull.”
Harry cringed. “Yeah, let’s not do that.” Harry leaned forward and gave all his attention to the materials the men had brought with them. “Alright, so what’s this then?”
“The first of what had better be the utmost exhaustive documentation of the process,” said Doctor Strauss. “We’ll begin with your ability for abstract thought. Rorschach inkblot tests have rather lost their shine over the decades, not for bad reasons what with the true facts behind the nonsense that is psychoanalysis. But I figured we may as well do a few for old times’ sake.”
“And that’s where I leave,” Charlie turned and made for the door. “Good luck, Harry!”
Harry blinked once the door was closed. “Weird reaction.”
“It’s how we started with him too,” the doctor said. “He didn’t understand it wasn’t a test you could fail, it gave him some rather frightful anxiety at the time. Also, there’s no empirical basis for inkblot tests, so we won’t actually be using them in any decision-making. But I still want to see how your answers change between now and later. Shall we?”
“I guess.”
It was kind of fun to describe all the things the inkblots made him think about, but not as much as the actual IQ tests that came after them.
Not as frustrating either, when he got to the later parts and they became more about thinking completely differently, even opposite from… literally every kind of thought he ever had about real life things. Some also didn’t feel like tests for smarts but for intuition, and there were a bunch of them he only got because alchemy needed you to think weirdly every once in a while. Magic theory worked against him there, though, because a lot of it went against common sense. It was a general issue with wizards, he’d found. Or Hermione had.
It was a good thing all the sheets were produced by a Xerox shop, who didn’t even know what they were printing since they just ran some files from a CD-rom. They were also completely uninvolved with their little group, or even the magical world. When Harry finally failed to stop his impulse to just use psychometry to read what the right answer was, he didn’t get anything. Charlie had anticipated things like that, even if Harry hadn’t.
Which went to show the difference between normal people and real geniuses, Harry supposed. Artificially boosted or not.
“Intelligence might not be the ideal word,” doctor Strauss cautioned him when Harry jokingly shared his thoughts during a break between tests. “People will tell you that I.Q. is something that measures how intelligent you are, like a scale in the drug-store weighs pounds, but that’s not true. The Intelligence Quotient only indicates how much intelligence you can develop, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still have to fill the cup up with something.”
“So, what? Your surgery will increase my cup’s volume?”
Doctor Strauss smiled in an oddly nostalgic manner. “Clearly, it still isn’t the best analogy.”
Looking at him, Harry had a rare moment when his psychometry mixed with Legilimency and he got a glimpse of the doctor reading that analogy in someone’s else’s daily log. Charlie’s, way back after he’d just gone through the surgery.
Harry averted his eyes and silently chastised himself for his lapse. He didn’t talk again for the rest of the test time.
When he was finished – or rather the time ran out before he could finish everything, even after he skipped a bunch of pages – the doctor packed up his results and went to assess them in private. Harry wouldn’t know what the results were until post-surgery Harry could re-take the tests.
Harry wasn’t looking forward to when he got to assess himself.
“From today onwards, I’m going to ask you to keep a written journal of your experiences,” the doctor told him at the end, giving him a large, blank tome. “It needn’t be particularly long or verbose, but if you can record the most important thoughts and experiences you have each day, it will do a lot to tell us how to proceed.”
“-. January 8 .-“
The next day, doctor Strauss gave Harry something called a Thematic Apperception Test, where he was shown a bunch of pictures he had to invent stories about. Make it as dramatic as possible too, with every possible detail like what led up to the event shown, what was happening at the moment, what the characters were feeling and thinking, even what the outcome of the story was.
It started out pretty fun but got a bit rough by the end, due to the sheer number of stories he had to tell – there were 32 picture cards and the doctor asked him to tell stories about all of them. The images were also about normal muggle stuff, nothing moving or fantastic in them.
Harry made his make-believe as fantastic as possible on purpose, the test said to do as much of that as possible, right? When that didn’t lead to any questions or observations, he ended up looking for the most roundabout ways to connect each story with the ones he said before, just to amuse himself. It didn’t really work out, and he even gave up at a couple of points to switch tracks to completely off the wall stuff, just to see if he could make the doctor crack.
Unfortunately, his inspired saga about Dobby the Sock Tree and the Beer of Madness didn’t elicit more than a blink from the man, he had an annoyingly hard poker face. Harry got that the examiner wasn’t supposed to intervene at all in the storytelling, but it only made Harry feel awkward and stupid when the old man just continued to wait and listen. Even after the Ballad of the Blast-Ended Quintaped!
Lorne had been a decent enough drawer. Maybe Harry Potter should look into that too, instead of trying to be a writer?
“-. January 9 .-“
Tomorrow was the big day.
This meant Harry Potter was quite restless because he didn’t know what would happen afterwards. He was sure something would happen because Nicolas had finally stopped being able to see Harry’s future beyond tomorrow. That didn’t necessarily mean things would go well though, or that he’d ever survive.
He was actually scared a little, which was made worse by everyone else. Perenelle cooked him a feast she promised to only let him eat after the operation, because it was better to fast before one. Nicolas almost gave him an extra teaspoon of Elixir just in case, despite that he’d already gone over the year’s allotted share after Harry’s coma, and would therefore have put himself in danger of being left without if something happened. Cedric and Cho sent him an authentic Italian Tarot Deck. Even Ron made the ultimate dignity sacrifice and offered to learn Wizard’s Checkers to give him a break from Wizard’s Chess.
The twins sent cakes through Ron too, because while Ron had managed not to actually talk about anything happening in their little conspiracy, he was still the opposite of discreet and his stress-eating was always a revelation.
Even Hermione didn’t miss out, she gave him a music box that sang the Romanian Rhapsody.
“Hopefully the liveliness in the symphony will rub off on you so you won’t, you know,” she told him as she handed it over. “Brain surgeries always carry a risk after all. But you’ll be fine, I’m sure of it!”
It was maddening! Everyone acted as if he was going to disappear! Even though he’d had one, maybe two gods – literal gods, probably – totally-not-say that he’d be fine, fer sure.
Sirius and Neville were the only ones who didn’t seem to believe Harry was in any real danger. Or at least they pretended not to. They did practically nothing to mark the impending occasion. Harry appreciated the normalcy, even though it only served to highlight how much of it was missing from all the other areas of his life all of a sudden.
Harry bore it all the way to evening, at which point he agreed to take an early lie in so he’d be fully rested for the procedure tomorrow. But of course he had ulterior motives too.
Once he was in bed, Hary Potter put on the Hat of Attainment and worked his mind and his magic, until all his past experiences clicked together into the realisation of how to astrally project intentionally. Like he did in the Chamber of Secrets when he was petrified, just without manifesting Prongs this time.
After he succeeded, he woke himself up again, removed the hat, and laid down again. He tried again. It took some doing, and all the occlumency practice with Nicolas and Sirius helped less than he’d hoped, but eventually Harry did succeed again.
This was the first time he managed to astrally project intentionally since the Chamber of Secrets, never mind without any help. Now if only – yes! The other thing worked too, just as he’d hoped!
The past few months had shown him that the Third Eye functioned on a 72-hour cycle instead of the 24-hour one of the physical body. Kind of like people switched to 48-hour or 72-hour cycles when they lived underground for extended periods. For every 64 hours that Harry kept his inner eye open and active, he only needed to rest it for eight, not necessarily all in one go. He easily gave it more than that just by going about his normal daily life, and the necessary rest period was decreasing over time.
Now, he could also confirm what Nicolas had told him, that the Third Eye was part of both his spiritual and physical bodies. It worked kind of like a protean charm in that sense. Most importantly, it played an essential part in being able to remember what went on during times when he projected out – the half of it in the brain was constantly being processed by the brain.
Harry giddily flew all over his room, euphoric at his success. His mood barely dampened even when he finally remembered why he was doing this.
He had to psych himself a whole bunch before he finally had the nerve to push through walls, especially with his eyes open. Soon enough, though, he was flying through the Pottery like a ghost, except more invisible. Like Godric had been when he came out of the painting and Ron and Hermione couldn’t see him even though-
“-could have raised your objections before this.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit!” Sirius yelled at Nicolas – privacy spells? Nicolas and Sirius, and the Doctor and Charlie too, there was a whole row taking place in the parlor?! “I’d only have repeated things all the rest of you kept making a big deal out of, Harry looked like he was about to climb the walls! I could either gang up on him alongside the rest of you, or play it cool so he didn’t have everyone condescending to him, even though I think this is a bad, terrible, horrendous idea!”
Harry froze with his head in the wall, his ghostly ear the only part of him inside the room, listening to-
“You can still veto it,” Doctor Strauss said, sounding outright hopeful. “Until he turns 18 you still can.”
“And then he’ll resent me the whole time and do it as soon as he’s old enough anyway, only he’ll never respect or trust me again and might even move away to cut all ties, who even knows?”
“You’re exaggerating-“
“Sacrifices are part of parenting,” Charlie interrupted the doctor, despite him being entirely in favor of the surgery. “If you, as his legal guardian, disagree with what your ward thinks is best for himself-“
“I should sacrifice my relationship with him for his wellbeing, duh!” Sirius scoffed loudly, talking right over Charlie in turn. “See, that’s the thing, I don’t know. I trust his judgment, curse me.” Sirius fell in a chair, rubbing both hands over his face. “Flamel could veto him too,” he said bleakly.
“Your reasons are the same as mine.”
“… And if he changes,” Sirius said quietly. “If he becomes unrecognizable?”
“Charlie was not my first choice,” Doctor Strauss said just as quietly, not looking at his former patient. “And he was Nemur’s last. We wouldn’t even have considered him, if not for Miss Kinnian’s recommendation.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“There are character traits entirely divorced form intelligence,” Strauss was reluctant now, but he didn’t lie even though he was more on Sirius’ side than the others. “Before the surgery, Charlie had an IQ of 68. Most people of such low mentality are hostile and uncooperative, or apathetic and dull. All hard to reach. But he had a good nature, and I see the same nature in your godson. If I didn’t, I would have left already, even if it relegated me back to my retirement home in disgrace, with my mind wiped clean of all this.”
“His motivation is plenty strong too,” Charlie added. “Not many would survive everything he has, never mind grow instead of break. He won’t have my issues either, he doesn’t lack all the essential knowledge I was too stupid to understand or remember before the surgery. He won’t become delusional about how hard it is to be a polyglot, for example. Or social interactions.”
“Probably?”
“Probably.”
Harry eavesdropped a bit longer, but the talk didn’t go on much further before the men also dispersed to rest. Harry flew back to his body in a daze, shocked at how ignorant he’d been about how conflicted everyone actually was about allowing him to make his own decisions, never mind about something so life-changing.
He’d prove it to them.
He’d prove to them that it wasn’t a mistake to believe in him.
“-. January 10 .-“
Out of worry that they’d guess he spied on the argument, Harry didn’t tell anyone that he had cracked astral projection. Huge mistake, the draught of living death didn’t rob him of consciousness and instead only trapped him in his paralysed body fully aware. When he saw Doctor Strauss rev the medical drill, he – well, he could only console himself that it wasn’t the worst accidental magic episode of all his lives. Just this one.
Doctor Strauss and Charlie were both thrown against wall, and every piece of equipment smaller than a stress ball was destroyed. The only silver lining was that the outburst managed to knock Harry out of the panic that had prevented him from remembering the mnemonics he’d developed for leaving his body, like he’d just learned to do.
“I panicked!” Harry blurted the moment he was sure they could see and hear him, almost giving both men a heart attack. “I’m really, really sorry!”
Unfortunately, sorry wasn’t good enough to fix the electrical machinery, which Charlie had painstakingly re-engineered to swap copper for silver. Reparo went a long way, but they still had to put off the surgery for another day while he re-tested the equipment, and Doctor Strauss got some medical attention of his own for a change.
“-. January 15 .-“
This time, the doctors didn’t start until Harry manifested in spirit form to let them know he was out, and even then they waited until he left the room and busied himself far away.
Harry spent the whole time wondering how a smarter brain would make for a smarter spirit, if he could literally split one from the other at will.
“-. January 19 .-“
The operation was a success, and magic took care of the injuries almost instantly afterwards. A magical healer’s license was just one of many things Niolas and his wife had gotten over the years, and Nicolas even kept up to date on the latest techniques, regularly going through training to get re-certified, sometimes under false identities. Even so, the doctors kept Harry sedated for a few days anyway, just in case.
Harry wasn’t entirely enthused about being a spirit for so long, the lack of physical sensation wore off fast, and they weren’t sure what would happen if he tried to force his way back into his brain before the new neural configuration solidified. But flight never lost its charm, so he took to amusing himself flying everywhere he’d never thought of getting to before, scaring squirrels and birds and racing airplanes.
He was a lot faster than airplanes. In fact, he thought he might be able to fly all around the world in the blink of an eye if he really pushed it. That was how quick you got around in normal dreams too, come to think of it. If he was so fast, could he even fly into space? Should he? Still though, he accepted everyone else’s advice not to take added risks right now.
He was more than ready to wake up when the time came, though he also had an all-new resolution to figure out Voldemort’s unassisted flight magic as fast as possible.
“-. January 18 .-“
It was a mistake to be outside his body during the operation, it only made the adjustment twice as hard because it had to happen – well, twice. Once relative to his own brain structure, and once relative to his spiritual body when it automatically tried to reimpose the old brain structure on the new and improved one, before his psychometry told him what was happening and he forced his subconscious to stop. Somehow. Maybe Magic did it for him instead, he wasn’t sure, he was seeing white at the time, and hearing agony.
If not for the drugs and potions Charlie had developed, and used in the sealing post-operation just to make the healing process better, Harry might have suffered permanent brain damage, if not an outright aneurysm. As it was, he just had to endure a few good days of pain.
Migraines were awful.
His friends were all there when he was finally past the worst of it. They’d been there the first time he woke up too, but he had been in too much suffering to register. All of them tried and failed to act like they hadn’t been worried at all. Well, except Neville, who really hadn’t been worried about Harry at all. He always assumed things with him would work out. Harry supposed he hadn’t been wrong yet.
Unlike Charlie back in his time, Harry didn’t need to stay blinded by bandages for however long. Magic was a great tool.
With luck, Harry would come out of this smart enough to finally figure out how to stop Magic being a great burden too.
“-. January 22 .-“
He was feeling better now, so Doctor Strauss made him re-take all the tests from before.
Harry didn’t feel good about them. While he solved some additional problems on the IQ test, he felt like he’d only done it because he didn’t spend as much time on the ones he solved before. He felt a bit better about the completely different IQ test Charlie made from scratch just for him, at least until he was a tenth of the way in and realized how much harder it was than the first one.
Harry got a new headache by the end of the Apperception Test too, this time. Harry didn’t know if it was because of lingering trauma from everything, or because he tried too hard to remember the stories he made up before.
He knew he was just being anxious, it took Charlie and his little mouse friend a long time before they became three times as smart.
None of his friends came by, which made it worse. It was all because the new school term had finally finished loading students up with the normal amount of homework, where normal was completely unhinged in Harry’s personal opinion. But knowing why didn’t really help with his feelings that everything was just a painful waste of time, so far.
Charlie told him he’d gone through the same thing, and that he’d even gone back to work at the factory for a while before the difference really started to show.
Harry figured he may as well get back to his regular life too, or whatever passed for it these days.
“-. Jaunary 26 .-“
For all that he was still a minor and technically fostered by either Nicolas or Sirius depending on how the three of them negotiated time shares, Harry still got to spend a lot of time at the Pottery with no one but himself telling him what to do. Charlie and Doctor Strauss were supervising him a lot more these days, but that was just common sense.
Harry was writing daily journal entries like they’d told him, and had even managed to turn his chicken scrawl into something that actually looked like proper cursive. But that was owed a lot to Nicolas always letting him use a proper fountain pen.
He decided to start writing with a quill again, just to prove to himself he could improve that too. He didn’t have a little genius mouse friend to lose puzzle races against, so this would have to do until his friends were able to start coming around again.
It would be nice not to be so far behind Hermione all the time.
“-. February 3 .-“
“What’s this?” Harry asked as Charlie wheeled a television into his bedroom that evening, along with one more thing. “A VCR?”
“With integrated CD-rom player too, took a while to rework them for Magic with everything else going on, but it’s finally ready: your very own media player for learning things while asleep. I can personally attest it works, a VCR on fast-forward is how I did most of my learning after the surgery. That is, assuming you haven’t completely lost the taste for sleeping normally?”
“Can’t afford to, the surgery wasn’t a one-off.” It was annoying, but once again Harry had to put off using his latest breakthrough for safety reasons. “If I spend too much time spirit walking it’s hard and even painful when I go back in, it’s like forcing my brain to adjust twice, sometimes in opposite ways.” Psychometry was almost nauseatingly graphic about that, when he really delved into it. “I’ll have to cut down on the nightly Prongs rides, maybe go entirely without until the convalescence period is over, one or the other.”
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“Good to know.” Charlie didn’t chide Harry or admonish him to also put that stuff in his journal like Harry expected. He just set up the devices. “We’ll test to see what you retained from sleep listening in a few days. If it goes as well as I expect, your friend Hermione says she’ll have a special surprise for you.”
She does? She did?
Maybe this wouldn’t be such a drag after all.
“-. February 4 .-“
Thankfully, Charlie didn’t bring any of the usual telly brain rot. Just documentaries and teaching sessions for stuff. It was all muggle, but it wasn’t like Harry had much cause to complain. Geography, arithmetic, all the sciences he could have learned in school, and highschool and beyond too, everyone should know those if they could. He was more surprised it was supposed to teach anything at all, the footage was all really sped up. There had to be be the equivalent of a dozen different tapes on each CD disk, and Charlie had even rigged an automatic disk swapper.
Harry didn’t think he’d go with documentaries tonight though. He didn’t much like the dreams of being chased by lions, they blended with Lorne’s more unpleasant mission memories of running away from the wraith. And jaffa. And the replicators too.
Harry put in a tape about teaching Latin instead.
“-. February 5 .-“
The incantations taught at Hogwarts weren’t Latin at all! Why?
He had to get to the bottom of this, but he didn’t want to bother Dumbledore or the Hogwarts staff on a whim, and the tapes were of no help.
Thankfully, Charlie had scanned a lot of books into his computer over the years – he was corresponding with some Brewer person to launch something called the ‘Internet Archive’ later that year – and Nicolas had books about everything too, in his library.
Harry was able to procure a complete Latin dictionary and a bunch of related books along with it. This could not go on.
“-. February 6 .-“
Harry knew Latin now.
It was all messed up! It was all Vulgar Latin instead of Classical Latin. He supposed the ancient Romans would still understand him if there were any around to talk to, but that wasn’t saying much when he could see all the words and rules that weren’t from Latin at all.
Was English as bad as this?
“-. February 7 .-“
Good gods, English was even worse!
“-. February 9 .-“
So much worse, and not just because they tried to turn it into Latin and it backfired horribly, they did it with French too! And even with German a bit, even though English was already a Germanic language because more of it came from the angles and saxons and not the native Britons and what else! Herla would be rolling in his grave if he hadn’t already reincarnated as Harry, bloody hell.
Damn that fool Riothamus, why couldn’t he have left Bran’s head alone?
“-. February 10 .-“
Classical Latin was messed up too, it was just different words and sounds that were changed from different languages they interacted with back then. It wasn’t as bad as Vulgar Latin, but it wasn’t perfect either.
There had to be a way to figure out the pure form of the tongue, maybe if Harry learned all the other languages they borrowed from? Or at least the phonemes and grammar rules to be able to tell apart which of them wasn’t Latin.
Harry Potter maybe wouldn’t have cared, but Evan Lorne had heard and even read the tongue of the Ancient Alterans. With the benefit of hindsight and actually knowing what all those words meant now, Latin’s fall from grace was painfully evident. It was clearly descended from Alteran, but not first-generation, there was another language in between – Goa’uld influence?
Compared to the original, so lovingly and painstakingly built from the ground up over ages by the ancestors to make full, proper sense by having words for literally everything, Latin was like a hot poker in his brain.
And he didn’t mean actual pain, that hadn’t come back since the last time.
Harry couldn’t wait for Hermione to come by with her surprise, she’d be all over this for sure!
“-. February 12 .-“
Harry was at loose ends. All the adults had been pulled away for various reasons, leaving him with just Doctor Strauss for company, and the man was more interested in observing Harry than interacting with him.
Harry would love to do more language reverse-engineering, but he’d hit the wall there because he was out of recordings. At least until Charlie was able to make more sped-up tapes some new ones. He himself had only had tapes for the same major languages to learn form, when he had his own surgery – Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Hindustani, and Mandarin Chinese. Harry already had it better with the addition of Arabic and Japanese. Any others would take a while, since they couldn’t easily find pre-recorded courses anymore – they no longer made them due to empirical studies that they just didn’t work for the overwhelming majority of people.
Doctor Strauss said Charlie was probably making new tapes from scratch, personally dictated for the various languages he’d had to learn the normal way in the decades since.
Harry considered visiting the Flamel home, but only Perenelle would be there and she’d probably try to feed and quiz him about all the stuff he wasn’t interested in at the moment. That left Raptor Mountain – too dangerous for the elderly doctor – and home.
He’d already finished cleaning the manor, and fixing the last of the structural damage from the war and twenty years of neglect. The greenhouse barely needed any of his attention too, between Neville and Dobby regularly looking in on it. The grounds were as acceptable as they could be in Wales’ winter weather too.
The surgery had cured Harry’s understated aversion to books at least. He was headed to the Potter library when he ran into Sirius, whose own business away from home had turned out to be just another attempt by reporters to score a juicy interview.
Harry’s godfather was going to refill Osiris’ tank with nutrients, so Harry decided to go with him where the Goa’uld was stashed these days.
The creature still hadn’t made any progress forming a new consciousness, but clearly the subconscious was all well and fine since it was still alive after all that time. Sure, the nutrients were dissolved in the water, but the snake did have a mouth to eat with, didn’t he? Since he was still alive, he had to be using it. And whatever else it had for a digestive system. Right?
Harry had already blended psychometry with legilimency by accident once, and that was before the surgery. While he waited to actually get smart – languages didn’t exactly count, everyone knew the brain kept them apart from everything else – he figured he’d try to see if he could do it again. It wasn’t like there were any other acceptable test subjects.
If psychometric legilimency didn’t work out, he’d double down on the normal psychometric divination instead and see what happened.
“-. February 13 .-“
Neither option gave anything useful.
The real breakthrough came in combining legilimency with the pensieve enchantment. Harry managed to piece them together by psychometrically studying the magic that affected his past self, in those many times he drew memories or used a pensieve in the past, and the Room of Requirement. The end result was psychometry made recursive and interactive through being holographically projected in the air. Critically, this included the ability to zoom in. A lot.
It was an excellent medium for active examination of pretty much anything.
Such as Osiris’ very DNA.
Maybe now he could figure out what made these serpents tick.
“-. February 14 .-“
LETTER TO DR. STRAUSS (copy)
Dear Dr. Strauss,
Under separate cover I am sending you a copy of my report entitled: “Emergent versus Inherited Consciousness – the Case of the Goa’uld.’
As you see, I have been running a study on Goa’uld cognition, which I would like you and Dr. Gordon (whom I have also sent a copy) to read and keep for eventual publishing, when Disclosure regarding the matters of Magic and Extraterrestrials has finally been carried out to the world at large.
To summarise, Goa’uld used to possess emergent consciousness like other sapients, which developed through maturation and interactions over time. However, either they or something else induced artificial changes to their biology, which invested them with genetic memory instead. Comparative examination of phenotypes and chromosomal gene distribution suggests this occurred very early during the existence of Goa’uld as a species. Perhaps it was technology, perhaps it was magic or whatever else passes for it out in the stars, mayhap one of them found a host with genetic memory and was able to integrate the trait into itself.
It is unlikely that the Goa’uld Ur-specimen would have realized the potential of the trait, never mind conceive of ways to modify themselves for the same. As such, if it occurred without external meddling, it most likely would have been accidental.
I bring this up because the memory-dedicated genetic material in its cells is extra-nucleic. This affords the possibility that the genetic memory functionality was integrated as a side-effect of the blending by-processes, or through a process not dissimilar to the one that integrated mitochondria into Terran cellular structure billions of years in the past.
Goa’uld cannibalize much of the tissues they cannot outright displace during the body-snatching process. Contrary to what their appearance would suggest, this is done mainly through phagocytosis – little wonder since they cannot afford to actually feed on the brain, and that is where their mouth is permanently lodged thereafter.
There is a vestigial digestive system, hearkening back to their origin as alien eels for lack of a better term, but its maturation is arrested half-way through the childhood-equivalent stage. This would correspond with the time when the larva is removed from the Jaffa pouch and made to take a host. Osiris’ dedicated digestive system in particular appears to have been unused for centuries before his entombment in the canopic jar.
‘Instead’ is the key term in all this. Whatever caused it, the alteration to achieve genetic memory came at the expense of Goa’uld ability to grow their own personhood as before, at least once they have reached maturation. Though they are mostly nervous tissue, they suffer from the same issues with lessening neuroplasticity that all other complex carbon-based life tend to endure.
What we now have in that tank is an autonomous, living but utterly empty drone. Having explored the manner through all scientific and magical means available, I can say with a strong degree of confidence that Osiris has no soul now. It either departed or unraveled when his identity was unraveled.
That being said, I propose that it is possible to determine what memory went where, throughout Osiris’ many cells. At the least, it should be possible to return Osiris’ memories to their proper place, or at least enough to render him functional if needed. Since Divination is a function well enough integrated into the broader Magic energy field – at least relative to scrying the past – a purely magical solution will be easier to develop than a purely technological one. I expect I will be able to do it myself through creative application of divinatory psychometry, if necessary.
Alternatively, the Confundus and Obliviate spells – proper incantations pending – could be turned to the purpose of manufacturing entirely new memories and thus an entirely new personality. Individuals such as Horace Slughorn and Gilderoy Lockhart have shown the capability to manufacture, share and implant altered and entirely fake memories. Going one step further, perhaps memories could be copied from a human into the Goa’uld outright.
That said, I would advise pursuing a purely technological process regardless, if only for redundancy. Developing a scientific, replicable process should be possible through appropriate neurochemical deconvolution techniques. Success carries obvious possibilities that cannot be overlooked.
I trust I needn’t espouse the implications thereof, or of proceeding to the logical conclusion of combining such a feat with that of cloning.
Yours truly, Harry J. Potter
encl.:rept.
“-. February 15 .-“
Harry’s friends came by again, finally. They looked like they were glad to see him again, and Neville in particular seemed to take the ‘new’ Harry in stride (even though Harry himself still didn’t feel all that smarter). Ron pretended he was only faking being freaked out at seeing Harry turning into a second Hermione, which was par for the course. Hermione… she was glad to catch up in person again, but looked a bit scared too.
Harry told her not to worry because he wasn’t smarter than her yet. She laughed and told him she was going to test that for herself, thank you very much. To do that, she brought out a shrunk package, which upon being brought to normal size proved to be a trunk stuffed full with books, because of course it was. This was Hermione Granger.
Well, copies of books. Dumbledore had prevailed on Madam Pince to forbear while he temporarily added an exception to the wards on the library, so that Hermione could go wild on them with the Geminio charm. With Dumbledore there to veto of course.
The books were just a drop in the bucket compared to the full Hogwarts library, and Harry had many more books than that in the Pottery’s library too, including a bunch of the ones here.
But Hermione had also gone through the trouble of charming all of them to read their own contents aloud, even modifying the spell with the help of Professor Vector to let him adjust the speed at which the book read itself.
Looking through them revealed a motherlode. General magical theory, war theory, spellcasting primers, potion manuals, potion ingredient reaction tables, spellcasting instructions for individual spells, magizoology in utmost detail written by Newt Scamander, Dumbledore had even tossed in some of his own research journals, including the ones from when he learned under Nicolas himself, way back.
Harry wanted to try them out immediately, but pretended not to. Instead, they got the rest of the Wesley children to visit, along with Cedric and Cho, and played a few games of quidditch.
By evening, Harry decided that processing speed had to account for more of someone’s IQ than even the experts thought. He aced literally every game, even after he switched to something other than seeker because he was too good at it, much better than even before. Not necessarily at flying a broom, but at predicting the snitch’s path and location even after he lost sight of it.
The Snitch was enchanted to be truly random, it was actually impressive when earth technology wasn’t capable of doing that even in the Stargate reality’s future. But that still wasn’t enough when you could use the eye’s full frame rate, along with the process of elimination to figure out everywhere the snitch didn’t go.
Unfortunately, matches became too unbalanced with him on any team, so he had to bow out of the last few. He spent his time on the sidelines reverse-engineering the flight spells on his broom just so he knew how not to break them when he fixed everyone else’s, some were really old and worn out.
The flight spell worked by using the witch or wizard as something between a reference point and lever hinge – or perhaps pulley – relative to the gravity of the earth. That explained why flying carpets needed a designated ‘driver’ even if it was put on autopilot, and why the same charm couldn’t be used by a wizard or witch to just… well, fly.
Harry could see how he might be able to adapt the spell for clothes though. Or maybe a belt? Come to think of it, didn’t Snape look like he turned into his robe in that first Harry’s future? When McGonagall and the Order of the Phoenix chased him out of Hogwarts? He almost looked like a Dementor when he streaked out through the broken Great Hall’s big windows.
Still felt like giving up though. It wasn’t really unassisted flight after all, like Voldemort demonstrated. Unless he was being flown around by his robe too? Or a hidden harness?
Harry decided it didn’t matter. He would figure out true, proper flight regardless, and nothing would stop him.
“-. February 25 .-“
Harry knew for sure, now, that he was getting smarter every day, because it wasn’t just languages anymore. He absorbed everything on Hermione’s books too, faster than everyone other than Charlie thought he would. He’d had to reverse-engineer and audiobook charms to make a version that fast-forwarded even faster, but compared to the flight charms it wasn’t even hard.
When he was done with those, he went and devoured the Pottery library too.
He reckoned that he could sit his NEWTS right now and get O’s in all subjects. And he did mean all subjects, all the ones taught at Hogwarts and elsewhere. He knew all sorts of charms, jinxes, hexes, curses and what have you, dark and not dark, DADA and not DADA. Wards, enchantments, potions too, you name it. Actually, he got all the spells right on the first try, and all the transfiguration too despite not having had his Dad’s talent before. If he wasn’t so attached to his self-image he might try to see if he could achieve the animagus transformation.
He knew all the magical history in the books by heart, all the herbology, care for magical creatures and magizoology, arithmancy, runes, all sorts of magical staves runes they could be used for too. That last one he’d had to go at it alone, staves mostly weren’t in any of the books, the Scandinavians and Icelanders seemed to be pretty protective of them. Which was fair enough, even though it made the Ancient Runes course a lot less practical than he thought it would be, but didn’t stop Harry from inventing his own from first principles.
Germanic languages were mostly intact and unspoiled, unlike Latin. So was original ancient Irish. Why was that one so different though? To the point of using a completely different alphabet you wrote vertically, from down to up? Even aside from that, the thing with the runes was strange, there were some commonalities in the magic symbology used in magic circles and staves all over Albion and Scnadinavian lands, but they seemed to have been already there before the Brittonic and Germanic people actually came in contact for the first time. What could have made that possible?
Harry didn’t want to go straight for ‘time shenanigans’ but they seemed determined to go straight for him.
“-. March 01 .-“
Doctor Strauss was upset at Harry for not writing any of his daily reports in over a week. Harry mollified him by producing them on the spot with his new mind-to-page transcription spell. It was like a dicta-spell, except you didn’t need to say anything and it was almost instantaneous. All it needed was for you to have a clear mental record of what you wanted written down, which was easy to do once you advanced the mind arts to the point of holographic eidetic memory. At that point, you could just confect mental models on the fly, and even store them long-term in your episodic memory.
It wasn’t ideal because the mind handled that differently from semantic memory, episodic memory needed a lot more space and, most critically, was a core part of your personality. This was opposed to semantic memory, which only stored information. This was also why it was possible to develop amnesia without actually losing all your knowledge and skills.
Charlie was impressed, saying that he could also close his eyes and think of a page and it would all come back like a picture. For him, though, it worked best for things he learned before the nerve-regrowth potion. Best as he could figure, the potion seemingly healed his brain to its most stable post-surgery state, not the most powerful.
Charlie said he was relieved that his brain adjusted downwards on its own, instead of him having to run head-first into the storage limit of episodic memory, assuming there really was such a thing. There was an inherent tradeoff when trying to ‘overclock’ something.
Harry didn’t know what that meant beyond it being computer-related, so he switched that night’s CDs accordingly.
“-. March 15 .-“
Doctor Strauss and Charlie had begun to change what questions they asked. And how they asked them. They expanded the range of tests too, trying with increasing rates of failure to catch Harry wrong-footed. It was obvious that they were attempting to determine if Harry was experiencing any sort of mental decline, without actually coming out and saying so.
It was nice of them, but they really didn’t need to worry so much. He wasn’t backsliding, but Charlie wasn’t wrong about the Algernon-Gordon Effect either. Harry should be seeing his artificially increased intelligence deteriorating. In fact, it was happening at precisely the rate of time directly proportional to the quantity of the increase, just as Charlie’s paper had concluded back in the 60’s.
Unlike him, though, Harry had psychometry, and the ability to self-transfigure at will thanks to maybe-actually-a-god dwarf’s crazy training. Also, his magic hat.
Upon receiving that explanation, Doctor Strauss was conflicted. Charlie was more hopeful, since this was what he’d hoped for and expected, but he was also wary of dismissing the concern yet. Harry didn’t exactly disagree in principle, even if he had it under control.
At this point, it was wait and see.
“-. April 18 .-“
Mental Log 42 (copy, downloaded to memory orb)
I must not become emotional. The facts and the results of my self-examinations over the past four weeks are clear. The more sensational aspects of my own rapid climb cannot obscure the fact that I am unsuitable as a reference subject for assessing the practicality of the surgical technique carried out by Drs. Jayson Strauss and Charles Gordon.
As I run mental models of my progress were I to not actively buttress my new neural structure with metamorphmagic – and homeostasis in general – results are as clear as they are grim. Neural structure collapse, brain tissue decay, synaptic disconnects, all these are occurring and require on-the-fly correction. Glandular activity also needs occasional adjustments via the same method. My newly gained intelligence should be backsliding rapidly, and I should even be seeing impairments to my motor control. There are also strong indications that I would begin to see the onset of progressive amnesia in a matter of weeks at most.
As will be seen in my report, these and other physical and mental deterioration syndromes are fully in line with the results predicted by Charles Gordon’s formula for the Algernon-Gordon Effect.
Admittedly, this is only a stopgap measures, as the new neural structures are not exhibiting any signs of establishing metastability as of now. But as my intelligence grows, I expect to be able to determine an ideal neural configuration and impose it deliberately, if it does not do so on its own.
What is not in line with Charles’ formula is me experiencing two occasions of loss of co-ordination unrelated to any of the aforementioned. Additionally, I have experienced days where I performed magic wandlessly – sometimes without even realising it – only to be unable to cast anything at all the following day.
As the concepts of ‘mana bar’ and ‘energy reservoirs’ are not applicable when magical feats are all carried out by an omnipresent energy field rather than the caster himself, I must conclude that, on the latter occasions, Magic did not recognize me as magical.
“-. April 20 .-“
“What if you don’t?”
Harry paused mid-way through magically reassembling a computer he’d just finished modifying to use silver instead of copper. “What if I don’t what?”
“Figure out how to fix your brain,” Hermione said. She was visiting for the weekend. Neville was sleeping off one of his Raptor Mountain all-nighters, and Ron had gone down to the kitchen for a snack. “Well, fix it in place at least, or whatever you’re trying to do.”
“Try again until I get it right.” Really, it was obvious. “As long as I induce regeneration via self-transmutation, my brain will constantly heal magically until it doesn’t have to anymore. Through psychometry combined with diviner’s premotions, I should be able to sustain this process until I become intelligent enough to figure out the most ideal, stable brain structure possible.”
At which point it will finally become possible to complete the ‘intellectual superman’ experiment successfully.
“What if you don’t, though? Become smart enough?
Harry paused, then carefully resumed the reassembly process.
“The surgery only makes you three times as smart,” Hermione pressed. “What if three times isn’t enough?”
“Then I suppose I’ll suffer through the mental degeneration until I become my old self, or a simpleton like Charlie used to be. At which point Nicolas will feed me the nerve regrowth potion and my brain will heal, again like Charlie’s did.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Not yet.”
Hermione made to say something else, but that was when Ron finally returned with food.
Harry thanked him, accepted one of the cakes, agreed to play wizard’s chess later – probably the last game between them, now that Harry had so far outpaced even him in his one, lonely specialty – and got back to work.
Charlie’s work on hacking and understanding the underpinnings of magic wasn’t going to complete itself.
“-. May 2 .-“
Mental Log 420 (copy, downloaded to memory orb)
After thorough observation and examination, I can tentatively surmise that my body and my mind are outpacing the development of my spirit to a degree that Magic is not programmed thoroughly or comprehensively enough to recognize, or compensate for. At least, not when these variances all occur in the same individual.
Despite my mastery of psychometry, and the second sight provided by my third eye – both of which remain consistently accessible even when conventional spellwork fails me – Magic itself and its actions remain opaque. I have endeavored to learn all that Charlie has been able to figure out of Magic’s mechanics, starting with the ethereal structure of spell forms, but that knowledge remains theoretical.
The only consistent explanation remains that my spiritual body is where the problem lies. Perhaps it is lagging in development, perhaps it is atrophying, perhaps it is exhausted from overworking itself, perhaps it is literally draining with every shift and change it undergoes in order to remain in step with my mind and body, lest I acquire psychological issues on top of the physical ones, if not outright psychosis.
I already know that Magic constantly taps the spirits of all living beings in order to power itself, draining all which are above a certain threshold of – let’s call it Specific Spiritual Volume, or SSV, the ratio of the spirit’s size to its energy charge.
If Magic does not automatically register when someone undergoes changes that put a greater drain on the spirit, if it can’t tell when progressive gains in intelligence impose constant re-defining of one’s identity, which would naturally exhaust the spirit faster – what is commonly and erroneously called ‘mental’ energy – Magic will not know to accordingly reduce the drain on the individual (if it even possesses this imperative).
(Tangential addendum: For the sake of thoroughness, I have run thaumic measurement tests on every potion I have brewed since the surgery. I can confirm that only the most basic potions contain enough inherent zero point energy to power their effects. The wit-sharpening potion is not among them. This indicates that, as with everything else, Magic makes up the difference… when it is informed that there is a difference to make up for, in this case via the brewing ritual.)
Putting that aside until a follow-through can be done…
If a soul can be mutilated by an extreme spiritual act, does it not follow that something unfortunate may also occur as a result of an extreme physical one? Even if not the soul itself, then perhaps ‘merely’ to the spiritual body?
Ironically, the only way to find out the truth is to explore that perspective that I have denied myself all this time out of fear, however healthy and justified it might be: the same astral projection that almost doomed the experiment at the onset, may become that which saves it at the close.
I cannot speculate how long it might take. Given how much longer than expected my prior experience with grand-scale astral projection ended up lasting, I will not rule out ‘a matter of months’ from the possibilities.
Everyone is worried, Sirius and Nicolas most of all, now that the latter is unable to see into my future. I will go forth on the hope that this means I have advanced enough on the diviner’s path to pass muster, rather than the less palatable possibilities.
Of course, they also worry that I may suffer another incident like in the Astral Diner. I will not deny the fear such thoughts bring, but nonetheless this is something I must do. I know more than before, can do more than before, and can go in fully self-aware. No ‘accidental’ crossing of realities will take place this time. Perhaps there will be another ‘accident’, but I am confident that I can avoid making the same mistakes I did before.
Hermione urges me to contact Misters Ed and Flannhamr before I commit, but that is just childish fear and approval-seeking, both redundant prospects. Their involvement conveyed all there is to know. They themselves have not made further overtures after the latter did everything but outright tell me to stop waffling and make the best of the means I had been squandering for years.
Until I see evidence to the contrary, I will interpret their actions to mean that the most ideal outcome of whatever comes next will only be attained if I proceed without them.
“-. July 11, 1996 .-“
When Harry finally opened his eyes again, back in his room at the Pottery where he’d been cycling through ascetic meditation forms and mudras the whole time, two and a half months had gone by. Half as long compared to the last time, and he hadn’t accidentally ended up anywhere he didn’t want to go this go around, because he’d been lucid and in full control the whole time.
He did try to leave the planet, but couldn’t. Literally. Magic wrapped around the world, a scintillating ethereal field-construct that stretched all the way to low orbit, where it enveloped the Earth and its atmosphere in a protective shell. Both ways. Charlie was right to be worried before, Magic was primed to neutralize any naquadah-bearing objects regardless of approach vector. What he didn’t know was that its outmost layer also prevented spiritual entities from crossing. Those that originated inside it could move freely within it, but that was it.
Sirius wasn’t taking Osiris’ ship anywhere until that stopped being the case, and nobody was flying out into the cosmos as a spirit until then either.
Harry created several reports and associated memory orbs, which he went off to give to Charlie and the good Doctor.
The two were overjoyed to see him back awake. They were doubly overjoyed to see that he hadn’t mentally regressed, and in fact was as smart as he would ever be. Needless to say, the other adults soon arrived to crowd him too. Not long after that, so did his three friends – no, five now, actually six! It wasn’t just Cho and Cedric slowly assimilating into his in-group now, Luna had come too. They weren’t even faking any of their feelings, especially Luna. To a diviner, there was nothing more wonderful than authenticity like hers.
He gladly spent the next while listening to the tale of how Luna won Hermione over. And Charlie too. Harry spent twice as long espousing all about how Magic worked in response. He finally had an answer to the completely nonsensical mess that were incantations!
Magic liked Latin-sounding incantations because it was programmed in the Alteran Language. Latin wasn’t even the closest derivative language, that was actually Dacian, otherwise known as Pelasgian. You know, the actual ancestors of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as opposed to the stuff in the Aeneid that was even more completely made up than the Arthurian stories.
Alteran’s least altered descendent language of contemporary times was actually Romanian, which wasn’t a romance language because it came before Latin, not the other way around like some Roman-obsessed anthropologists liked to claim. The phonemes had changed or fallen off enough to mislead most scholars, but when you looked at the rules of the language and sheer size of the vocabulary, it was all there, plain as day.
People who knew the language could understand all romance languages automatically, and could learn all other languages much easier. Also, its staying power was something else. The language was a lot more spread out than Harry thought, there was Romania but also a bunch of other communities. And still the language drift from the main Romanian strain was minimal, even thousands of years out of contact.
While he was flying around, learning all the languages on Earth as part of his ‘reconstruct Magic’s language’ efforts, he found communities of Romanian dialect speakers all over Europe and Asia, some of which had been there since the time Dacia was still called Hyperborea, or even earlier, before even the Bronze Age! Serbia, Bulgaria, freaking India, there was even a community of them at the foot of Mount Olympus, it was wild!
Happily, Hermione shared his fascination, and so did Charlie and Nicolas. They weren’t interested in learning it – save Charlie who already knew it – but they were very interested in Alteran itself, especially the new incantations Harry had already developed for all the spells he knew. Which was most of them.
But while Harry was waxing poetic about that, he was also considering everything else he’d learned during his time as a spirit, and how he’d best go about dealing with all of it. His mind worked faster than ever, and he could hold two thoughts in his head at once now. The physical and spiritual halves of his third eye were protean mirrors of each other, but they were still separate structures. This meant they could be operated in parallel. Both at the same time, for different streams of thought.
As absurd as it sounded, Magic being based around Alteran as the programming language was just the least of his revelations.
Magic was an intelligently designed system, built on an astral substrate, made of ethereal matter, and completely lacking any form of centralized control. By design.
Harry’s spirit wasn’t decaying. It was growing, like his mind, at an extremely accelerated rate. Magic hadn’t overlooked him because he was becoming less, it had been confused because of how fast his spirit was expanding without the commensurate rise in density (and brightness, for lack of a better term).
Whenever spellcasting failed him, it wasn’t because Magic was mistaking him for a squib or a muggle, it was because he was so wide and diffuse through it that Magic was mistaking him for a part of itself. A part of Magic which was expected to do its own job without oversight or direction from the rest of Magic because Magic was purposely designed to be maximally decentralized. Also, because Magic mistook him for what should be at its very core.
There was no center. There was a great, shimmering, psychedelic absence where the Heart of Magic should be, a pe-prepared socket where a guiding intelligence was meant to sit, secondary systems working on autopilot while they waited for the central processing unit to slot in, a realm without a capital, a castle without a keep, a throne without a king.
All shaped specifically to fit the being that Harry Potter was turning into. Transforming into.
Ascending into, you could say.
It was too neat. Too tidy, too good, too convenient. He wasn’t even half-way done with his yearly walks, but he was supposed to, what? Become Magic’s God? Was always destined to become Magic’s God? Since its very conception thousands of years ago?
Pull the other one! He’d smelled a rat long before he spotted the dimensional fracture that was right on top of that very spot. It was the hole in Hermione’s Wall, and on the other side was the Astral Diner.
Harry Potter looked at his friends. He looked at his loved ones. He thought of the loved ones that were no longer here.
Allowing for a full social experience, reverse-engineering the remainder of the Alteran language – and from there Magic’s fundamental mechanics – would take him until about November. By that point, he should also have mastered all fields of science, magic and physical attainment as well. At least, all the ones possible to Harry Potter within that time frame.
If nothing else changed, Voldemort would lay low until at least that time as well. Igor Karkaroff was a better host for him than the one Tom used to actually reach Durmstrang, not least because they were both men unlike poor Bertha Jorkins. Harry considered informing the adults about it, but divination told him he could solve the matter much better himself if he left it for the Yearly Walk.
How fitting that all Hallow’s Eve this year was on the eleventh of the eleventh month.
He’d have expected Walk Five to be just about the least fantastic of all core seven, never mind the nine he planned to undertake.
Oh well.
It was about time Harry Potter finally embarked on his First Great Adventure.