Chapter - 66 : Sanctuary Part - 5
April 26
"Count on it," Harry sobered. "He'd borrowed this cloak from my father, and probably only gave it back to see if myself, a bloodline heir, could discover powers in it he could not. But since he is obsessed about secrets, I wouldn't doubt he had methods to track whatever I did despite wearing this. Frankly, I'd count on him have spares around, just in case he'd needed to arm his followers with ways to find me if I ever got out of hand."
Far away, in a heavily warded house, Alaster Moody sneezed, then spent the better part of half an hour dosing himself with disease prevention potions, and casting spells to determine who'd spoken of him.
Harry swirled the cloak he was holding around his shoulders, inadvertently causing Moody's detection spells to fail in their efforts to find him and vastly increasing the old auror's paranoia. "You know what?" he told the girls. "In my first year I did something stupid and dropped this cloak on the floor when I was finished with something and needed my hands free. Then I didn't have it later when I needed it, lost House points and got a nasty detention that put me in this forest, face to ugly face with Voldemort. To avoid stupid mistakes in the future, why don't we get cloak clasps to secure them around our necks, and charm our shirt collars to be like our expanding bookbags, so that when we don't want to be invisible we can retract our cloaks into storage under our collars?"
"Brilliant!" Hermione declared.
"Lets do the wand-work now." Harry picked up his wand, shooting off sparks when he did so and getting a grin out of the boy, who then suited action to words and began casting spells to accomplish just what he had said, so they could wear those cloaks always, but only be invisible when they wanted to.
Luna had been inspecting hers closely. She sniffed it carefully, then touched a corner to the tip of her tongue, before spitting vigorously. She scowled, and declared, "Harry, I don't think wearing these all the time is going to be a good idea. Whoever had this cloak before you dipped it in malaclaw venom. Have you had any unlucky accidents while using it?"
Now it was Harry's turn to scowl. "Plenty! Practically every time I used it. The one time, I told you, I forgot it on the floor. Another I triggered an alarm and nearly got caught by my breathing. I've been chased and hounded under it, even caught by Dumbledore once or twice."
"Soaked instead of dipped then," Luna concluded sourly, spitting once more to try and get the foulness out of her mouth. "Whoever did that wanted the person wearing this cloak to be easily found. They couldn't dim the powers of the cloak directly, so they made it unlucky to increase the chance for anyone under it to stumble into mischances that would reveal themselves."
"Dumbledore," Harry spoke the name as if it was a curse. "He didn't want me using it too often, so counted on unhappy accidents building up until I had a natural aversion to using it. Plus, he couldn't get the cloak back from me unless he could find me first, and if I had bad luck that made his job easier when he decided to end his experiment of letting me own my property."
The girl began sadly nodding. "If you have been found by Dumbledore wearing it, and he had it before giving it back to you, then not only did he likely treat it with the unluckiest substance known to magic, but we can more strongly suspect that he has the Elder Wand, as according to the Fairy Queen he seeks to destroy you, and would not let you have this unless he could track you despite it - which only spells from the Elder Wand could do."
"So the cloaks are unlucky."
"Only when used," Luna quickly offered. "Malaclaw venom is harmless when carried in a vial or some sort of container. Contact with living material activates the bad luck. I'd guess you'd had no problems with the cloak when it was in your trunk?"
Nodding, Harry sighed and removed his cloak, shrinking it to stuff deep in a pocket (a bit amazed that this outfit even had pockets, as they were a comparatively modern invention out of keeping with the era this style dated back to). The others quickly followed suit.
Hermione perked. "What about that stone? Could it detect the cloak or meet the wand on equal terms?"
Luna considered that question thoughtfully. "It is a source of unfathomable power, so it's bearer could likely do such a thing. But we have so few records of it I couldn't say for certain what it does or does not do, save for calling up the spirits of the dead when turned three times in the hands. That much we have in the original legend."
Finished with her recitation, Luna picked up her wand. Having collected their attire and picked up the last of the tools and implements they'd left around the clearing, as well as used their wands, the scenery around them morphed like fading mist back to the clearing as it had been the morning before they'd arrived to put that ritual into motion.
"What happened?" Harry stared around.
"Time moves strangely around the fey." Luna considered, "The Fairy Queen promised to send us back to the morning we began our ritual, she just never said when she would do it. Since we have just been picking over the site as we left it after that ritual concluded, and retrieved all our belongings we care to carry with us, we were dealing with the aftermath of that ritual. Now we are standing where it would happen before it began."
"She kept her promise, she just let us collect our things first," Hermione concluded. "That saves us a great deal of awkwardness."
"And arms us with our wands," Harry grinned. "I'd say let's go nab our dear old Divination teacher right now! The longer we delay before doing this, the more likely our nemesis is to learn of our plans from his pet oracle and find some way to thwart them. Now is the best chance we'll ever have, I think."
"I can't go," Luna cringed. "I'm sorry, but having tasted that malaclaw venom while identifying it, I shouldn't be involved in anything risky, as it's sure to go against me. A normal dose would wear out in two weeks, and this was far less, a few hours at most, but just to be careful I really shouldn't do anything chancy for several days, just to be safe."
Hermione nodded briskly. "Then Harry and I will go. He's right. The sooner we get this done, the better chance we'll have. No need to go surrendering any advantages. We'll never be able to keep a secret until his oracle is gone."
Chapter - 67 : Strategy
April 26
A loud growl interrupted the teens' conversation.
Harry looked embarrassed. "On reflection, I am reminded that this body has never eaten anything in the entire span of it's short existence. Anyone care to join me in breaking it in?"
Hermione became aware that her own stomach was trying to gnaw a hole through her backbone. "Sure! I'm game. What shall we have for breakfast?"
"Hogwarts is out," Luna cautioned. "We can't hold private conversations there, no matter what we do. And we have to plan."
Harry acquired a sly grin. "I was thinking Kentucky Fried Chicken."
------------
Somehow, the girls were not certain how, Harry found a college town where the fast food stays open all night, and side-along apparated the two there. It was a combined KFC/A&W, so they had hamburgers and fries on the menu as well as the traditional biscuits and fried chicken. Seeing as how their entire digestive tracts were empty from one end to the other, intestines as vacant as their stomachs, they wound up ordering a lot, and quite a variety.
Harry also proved able to conjure muggle currency, which put Hermione into fits about honesty, until they had a lengthy talk over their cheeseburgers and chicken legs about the world financial system and how, with fractional reserve banking, that was essentially what the banks, mortgage institutions, and lenders of all types were already doing: conjuring money out of nowhere.
This led to Hermione being deeply distressed about the stability of the world economy, as the entirety of the world banking institutions ran on principles that a hundred years ago were prosecuted as fraud; things that could, would and HAD gotten bankers lynched, strung up the nearest tree for robbery.
The poor girl started muttering about getting her parents to move their assets over to wizarding currency, as at least that was gold, which had enduring value and was considerably more difficult to counterfeit.
Appetites sated at last, Harry pocketed the coleslaw containers no one had been interested in. Refilling their sodas before they left (ironically, Harry had never tasted one himself, but Tom Riddle HAD. But there was no reason for the Dursleys to part with money for a soda for him when there was perfectly good water in the tap), they left for a muggle park to do their planning.
Luna left to go attend to business of her own, and so she would not influence their choices negatively as part of her own bad luck. Harry gave her a dose of polyjuice and a hair summoned off the head of a coed so she could take the Knight Bus and not be recognized, then he and Hermione went off on their own.
And Harry felt it a good idea, to get back into the spirit of things, to pick up right about where they'd left off.
"All are supreme, yet equal. Only Dumbledore's wand can always find my cloak. How fair is that?" he grumbled jokingly.
Hermione positively glittered, and rushed in to explain what she'd already figured out on her own. "Oh! I found that part easy to understand. It's simple, really.
"You have three equals. Let's describe it mathematically, maybe that will help. A, B, and C are equal, they all have the same value. So the wand isn't greater than your cloak or the stone. However, a wand is also boosted by the magic of its wielder. So A plus X is greater than either B or C. A, the wand, cancels out the value of B, the cloak, and you are left with X, the magic of the person who wields the wand. So long as you have nothing to counter X, the spells of the wand wielder could find the cloak. But say you cast your own spells to hide yourself, on top of what the cloak was already doing. A and B would still cancel each other out, then it would be a contest between your magic, Y, and the magic of the wand wielder to see who emerged victorious."
Harry grimaced, getting it. "And Dumbledore is not only extremely powerful, he possesses a vast arsenal of spells and devices to choose from to aid him, so X, whatever he is adding to that wand, is an enormous value."
"Far greater than Y, I'm afraid. We're all still students," Hermione agreed, glancing aside at Harry in concern.
Harry, in spite of having Voldemort's memories and spell arsenal, had to agree. Most of what the Dark Slytherin knew was Dark Magic, which by its very nature was weighted heavily towards combat magic, torture, and so on.
He knew a great deal of other magic, but Dark was his specialty.
In a contest of information gathering or concealing, things would naturally go to the Dark Ravenclaw as the one who had every advantage of inclination, but also time and resources.
That was his special area.
But Hermione wasn't done explaining. "And the way they can all be different, yet equal, is simple as well! Just compare it to economics, think of it as fifty pounds worth of gold, fifty pounds worth of flour, and fifty pounds worth of ... I don't know, something else, stone maybe. I know those values fluctuate in the muggle world, but just ignore that for now. Each one is worth exactly what the others are, but each is used for different things. You wouldn't want to make a semi-conductor out of stone or flour, nor would you want to eat gold or rock, and you couldn't make very much of a house out of dry cakes or gold leaf. All equal in value, but suited to different purposes!"
"Thank you, now on to stealing Trelawney from Dumbledore," Harry put the real item on the agenda back on track. "What we are trying to do here is called 'stealing a march', or acting before our enemy has a chance to find out what we are up to and react to counter us. It's our only possible chance against someone like Dumbledore, to be honest. He's got too many resources to counter once he starts to realize that we are in play against him. So long as he thinks we are merely pawns he is moving about at his whim, we have some measure of freedom - only so long as he doesn't realize we are using it, of course. Once he accepts the fact that we are resisting him... well, things will get much harder. As he effectively holds ALL legal power in Britain, he makes up the rules. We are opposing a petty tyrant on his own turf, and the very least of all actions he could use to discipline or control us would be to make every single thing we want to do, that he doesn't want us to do, illegal."
Chapter - 68 : Strategy Part - 2
April 26
Hermione paled. "I hadn't realized it was that bad."
"It isn't. It's worse." Harry grimaced. "But according to the Queen it's a war we've got to fight regardless of how we feel about it. We're in the war. Whether we fight back and try to win it is up to us, but we're already in it."
His girlfriend looked at him in fright, before nodding soberly.
Harry shot her back a grin. "Oh! It really is not so bad! Dumbledore has a bad habit of thinking far too much over every possible aspect of a situation before he does anything. Now we can use that against him, as it makes his reactions extremely slow to anything he hasn't planned out ahead of time. All we really have to do is go in, grab Trelawney, and jump out a window onto a set of brooms. We'll be gone before he knows it."
"Only we'll never be able to return to school, and he'll turn those laws against us, like you said." Hermione frowned in concentration. "No Harry, like you said, it's best if he never knows we're resisting him. We should at the very least go in under a disguise, or something."
Now it was Harry's turn to grow serious. "Hermione, I don't think you know just what we are up against. I'll tell you later how it happened, but over the summer I became an expert on wards and how to break them, and once you do that it becomes almost reflexive to study any you come across. The ones around Hogwarts have been turned into an information network, much like a spider's web. But the ones on the Divination tower are extremely overdone in that aspect. They make the ones over the rest of the castle look tame. It's clear that Dumbledore's hiding a treasure there, I just never thought that he could consider Trelawney that treasure, not until the Queen told us, anyway."
He sighed. "Hermione, we can't even go to class there without setting off soft alarms, and that's after we got keyed in with a certain degree of permission, because we do have class with her. Strangers would set off far more extreme alarms, and that's if we could figure out how to fool them."
Hermione was nodding, deeply considering this. "But I'm already known for getting excited about lessons and asking teachers for extra work to do, or trying to get ahead. So you and I could go in on that pretext, and any alarm we set off he would likely ignore. If what you said is true, about anything and everything setting off alerts of some sort, then I'm sorry but sooner rather than later it would all just become background noise. The wards you describe would be spamming the Headmaster with several hundred messages a day! If he couldn't learn to ignore them they'd drive him mad! So routine messages like scheduled students arriving to class early would get ignored. They'd HAVE to be! All we'd have to figure out how to do is leave without any traces of our having kidnapped her!"
"Rescued, more like," Harry corrected. "If Dumbledore has meddled with her mind to the point of almost irreparably destroying her gift, then Trelawney can't be happy with whatever he is doing to her."
"Point," the girl conceded.
Harry kicked back on a bench and thought. "Okay, to do this we're going to need to do several things. First is some method of invisibility, so we can creep past most of the regular guards, otherwise our steps will be tracked too completely for Dumbles not to know the entire story. Too bad the fairies used up all of our demiguise hair, or I could've made cloaks out of that."
"Harry!" Hermione shot up in her seat excitedly. "Didn't Luna say that they'd incorporated demiguise hair into the outfits they made for us? The outfits we now have on?"
He looked at her in dawning recognition of her point before hurriedly checking his own outfit, and, after fiddling with it for several moments, vanished. His voice then appeared out of thin air. "Got it. The clothes come with both a broad-brimmed plumed hat and a hood," he stated unnecessarily, as she could observe that on her own. "Obviously, those are redundant. You don't need one if you've got the other. But when you wear both together, as well as the gloves, you activate that power and turn invisible."
She followed suit and soon vanished herself. The gloves on her outfit were more slim and feminine, the hat and hood a different style than his (just as her outfit was a dress and his included trousers) but the effect was the same: total coverage of the body invoked the invisibility power. All they really had to do was put on the gloves and pull the hoods over so they covered their faces. Due to the old-fashioned nature of the clothes, they already had neck to toe coverage, as that was just the way those styles worked.
Of course, they still had a hat, and the easiest place to leave it was still on top of the head. So Harry could be forgiven for thinking that wearing the hat and hood together was the key. Hermione quickly sorted him out on that.
They could see out through the hoods just fine even when they were pulled down to cover their faces. And, the pair found that when they both had their hoods down that way they could also see each other as dim outlines, clearly not visible to others, but just as clear as ghosts to each other.
So they began to have an invisible conversation.
Harry was grinning strongly now. "It's not the super-invisibility of a supreme and ancient magical artifact, but it will do nicely."
"And this doesn't have a bad luck curse on it," Hermione agreed.
"And Dumbledore's wand lets him detect the super-cloaks anyway," Harry tossed off a shrug. "So back to the subject of our raid," he discussed with his partner as they both sat invisibly on a bench in a park. "Next on the agenda is obtaining a means of taking Trelawney without resistance, as we can assume that any interlopers can't just carry her off from the life she's had for the past dozen years or so without explanations we have no time for, and wouldn't want to speak out loud in that castle in any case."
"Harry," Hermione admonished, shaking her head. "Any number of spells would serve just fine! Why, there's Stupefy, and Petrificas Totalis..."
Chapter - 69 : Strategy Part - 3
April 26
"And none of those would serve us in the least, as we don't dare use wands." Harry shook his own head. "Those wards would detect it, and wand use is not a regular part of Divination, so would stand out as abnormal - especially any and all combat spells. They'd flag our Headmaster with alarms he could not ignore, because they'd be of a much more strident type than the standard 'student going to class' warnings. You can ignore car alarms and telephones ringing, but this would be an air raid siren going off in his ear. The wards are set to give a very high priority to any spell we might use to disable her. Any combat spell at all would have him rushing that tower in moments, sure that the worst had happened, and in our case he'd be right - not something we want if we are trying to disguise our presence."
"Oh. I hadn't realized," Hermione spoke softly, getting an odd look from a passing college student who heard words from a bench no one was sitting at.
Conversation resumed once the early morning jogger had departed.
"No worries at all. You can't read wards. Most can't." Harry shrugged. "And before you ask, yes, I'll explain later how you can, and where I learned. But I just got struck by an idea. Dumbledore is too good by far at identifying people and tracing magic through signatures left by their wands. But devices don't leave the same kind of traces, none at all, really. That's why he carries things like a deluminator, because wand use can be detected, but devices can't. So he can darken areas under heavy wards without being detected."
"So, we need some kind of device to subdue Trelawney," Hermione muttered, putting her great brain to work on it. "Too bad Hogwarts suppresses muggle devices. This would be a perfect opportunity for a tazer."
"Actually, I was thinking of potions that could do it," Harry offered. "I have a few that stun or shock, and they only have to be splashed on somebody. But it's still very early. We might easily find her asleep and be able to dose her with something without her knowing."
"That would do it then," Hermione nodded her agreement firmly. "So long as we can avoid leaving splashes. I'm sure Dumbledore could identify potions by their traces, if he found any droplets scattered about."
"Hmm, good point." Harry considered, before bouncing a shrug no one but her could see because of their magic clothes. "Well, then, we'll just have to acquire potions that can't be traced to us, maybe buy some at a store."
The invisible girl shook her head. "Not if we're going to catch her asleep. I've been to Diagon Alley often enough to know most stores don't open until well after breakfast. We'd have had our first Divination class before then, and all chance of catching her asleep will be gone, unless we want to wait a day."
Harry invisibly shook his head. "No. We have to take her as soon as possible. It's our best, and possibly only, chance for success. If the Headmaster learns of our plans getting her out of there becomes impossible."
The bookworm suddenly shot up, her eyes shining with the brilliant inner light of a great idea. "Professor Snape! I know he keeps a stock of completed potions in his office! I saw them once when I was in there asking for extra work! He might have what you need!"
Harry threw on a wide grin, and hugged his currently invisible friend. "You're right! And, considering the kind of person Snape is, he's guaranteed to have the sort of potions we want! Excellent idea, Hermione!"
She glowed at the praise, immediately launching on to the next phase of their operations. "So we can get to her invisibly, pass the wards as students who ought to be going to her class anyway, and dose her with a potion to get her tractable. Then how do we get her out?"
The currently invisible (except to his friend) boy shook his head. "Have to be brooms out a window. He'll know the moment she starts going anywhere. He has wards to track her, and she doesn't go anywhere often enough for him to disregard the spam warnings of her moving about. We can use school brooms so there is nothing to track to us."
"Brilliant!" Hermione declared, drawing attention from a few students on their way to very early classes to this oddly vocal yet empty bench.
Harry eyed a pair of athletic types, a boy and a girl, on their way to an early morning tennis match, and got an idea.
After hurried consultations, the pair made their way back to Hogwarts in the brisk post-dawn light, using their fairy clothing to be invisible, and under the influence of polyjuice charged with hair taken from the tennis couple.
Harry knew Voldemort's memories, and Voldemort knew Snape's proclivities. So they were able to find a narrow corridor through the wards of Hogwarts from a certain point on the grounds through a few twisting passages, right to Snape's office.
From Voldemort's knowledge of the man, Harry knew their Potions Professor would be dealing in black market potions while at Hogwarts, and he had to have a route for his customers to reach him, as he could not go out to meet them without gaps appearing in his schedule that would seem suspicious for a teacher who was supposed to be on hand for kids at their boarding school.
Knowing that such a thing had to exist, and that Dumbledore refused nothing that Snape really wanted, the duo were able to use Voldemort's ability to examine wards to find such a route and follow it in to where it ended: right in Snape's office in the dungeons, next to his classroom.
There stood a potion cabinet that was well stocked with a variety of illegal and questionable potions. Harry spent a moment examining the protections on it, before whispering close into Hermione's invisible ear.
"It's warded, but not very well, obviously the work of Snape rather than Dumbledore. Two parts of this concern us, I can bypass the rest. One alerts Snape if a potion is lifted from a shelf - a fairly standard anti-theft measure so his customers don't help themselves while his back is turned or he isn't here. Next alerts him if any of the bottles are empty when the cabinet doors are closed - obviously he's had a few canny customers use switching spells to nip a potion without taking the bottle."
Chapter - 70 : Strategy Part - 4
April 26
"How are we going to get passed them?" she whispered hotly back.
He grinned in reply. "I have empty bottles from potions we've used before, all we have to do is take the fluid we want and not leave his bottles empty. His wards don't tell him what is in a bottle, only if it is full or not."
Nodding, Hermione looked around and, finding a flexible bit of tubing among the tools left lying around, demanded some empty bottles from Harry, then set herself up to siphon out the contents of some potions.
"What do I get?" she asked over her shoulder.
Harry checked over the contents of the cabinet. "This one, this one, and these four... oh dear."
Hermione looked where he was staring. There on a shelf was a collection of small bottles holding hairs, each carefully labeled. "Draco Malfoy, age eleven, Draco Malfoy, age twelve... Pansy Parkinson, same ages... there's practically every Slytherin, and..." she held her breath to stifle a gasp. "Harry POTTER, age twelve?! Hermione GRANGER, age thirteen?! Why?"
Harry covered her mouth to prevent her from screaming in outrage. Fiercely the boy whispered in her ear, "Calm. The man sells polyjuice. It should not seem odd that he would sell hairs as well, although it is reprehensible. Why anyone would want them, though..."
"Themes and role plays," Hermione concluded, looking angry. "There are tons of people who want to be with the real Harry Potter, but if they can't have the real one, why not a fake? It's disgusting, but..."
Harry rolled his eyes. "A magical pimp, hard at work. Never mind, we can use this to our advantage. I'll collect the hairs. You siphon the potions."
Nodding, Hermione got hard at work, draining out several vials Harry pointed out into empties that he provided, making sure not to jostle the originals on their shelves and possibly set off a warning. When she was done she noted that Harry had deftly taken out all the hairs using a set of tweezers, and was now adding spoonfuls of coleslaw, unused since breakfast, into the now empty bottles. Surprised, she even stood aside and let him do that to the potion bottles she had emptied, closing the cabinet on them moments later.
No alarms sounded.
"No Slytherins take Divination, nor does Snape appear to collect hair from many people outside of his House," Harry told her in hushed tones. "So we'll have to go up as Harry and Hermione Potter."
He gave her a wink, and she smiled for him, downing the potion to resume her human looks, not that she needed a potion to do that anymore, but she would follow his plan. They'd known going in here that talking, especially about their plans, had to be kept to a minimum.
Departing out from the Potion Master's office the pair scurried upstairs and thence to Gryffindor Tower, where Harry crept into the second year boy's dorm and stole Colin's camera, then took along a fresh roll of film and some development potions.
He'd make it up to Colin later.
Then it was up to the Divination tower. Dumbledore was still asleep, resting from the poisoned chicken bone wound that Draco had delivered to him, was it only last night? Real time, he supposed it was. Subjectively, that seemed so long ago.
Well, that increased their chances for success to have Dumbledore out of action, for the moment at least.
Slipping inside the wards around the Divination classroom, Harry noticed them sending off a standard alert message to Dumbledore about the arrival of two students, early to class. Hermione was right, Dumbledore had to get hundreds of those messages a day, considering they were sent whether the student was early, on time, or arriving late. Information overload would have killed many a lesser man, although he suspected the Headmaster had used rituals to increase his ability to process such information. He'd had to have done so, to have survived under the information load so long.
But you could feel wind on your cheek, and when it was windy all the time still learn to ignore those sensations.
Alerts for anything out of the ordinary would be another matter, but so far they were just two students showing up early for class. Several hours early, but teachers had to be available at all hours for special lessons or advice. So there were no problems there.
They were inside the Divination classroom before Harry noticed any flaw at all in the wards Dumbledore used to alert him to Trelawney's captivity.
"There is no separate ward alerting him to whether someone steps from the classroom to the teacher's private quarters," Harry whispered especially quietly directly into Hermione's ear, noting the room had several paintings and not wanting to be overheard.
Giving him a quick yet frighted smile, Hermione led as the invisible duo darted into the oracle's bedchambers. The place was a madhouse, scattered about with all sorts of Trelawney's belongings haphazardly stacked in uneven piles or strewn randomly about the floor. It was all well scrubbed, it had to be with House Elves looking after everything, but it had no organization at all, looking like a kindergartner's toybox when no one came through to tell her to clean up after herself.
Sunk completely into an overstuffed bed, under mountains of covers to guard against the chill permeating her drafty tower, the teacher snored softly. Hermione had to poke over the side before she'd believe their teacher had actually sunk a good twelve inches into her super soft, thick mattress.
Harry found the one painting in the room, carefully stood up with his back to it, brought out Colin's camera and shot a picture of the room before waving for Hermione to follow him into the bathroom. Inside, he gave a heartfelt sigh of relief. The chamber was opulent by some standards, fairly average by the ones set by this castle, not even on par with the prefect's bath.
But there wasn't a painting.
"What now?" Hermione whispered.