Harry watched the quest "The Chamber of Secrets" appear at the top of his log at Dobby's pronouncement, and guessed, "Does the mortal danger have anything to do with the Chamber of Secrets?"
"So great! So wise!" Dobby gasped. "Dobby even heard tell that Harry Potter met the Dark Lord for a second time, just weeks ago… that Harry Potter escaped yet again."
"I didn't just escape," Harry explained. "I defeated him. Wait. Where did you hear tell? From your family?"
"No, from the Hogwarts elves, they tell Dobby of the great deeds and great dangers of Harry Potter at Hogwarts. And with the Chamber…"
"Can you tell me what you're worried about with the Chamber of Secrets?" Harry asked.
Dobby shook his head, "Dobby mustn't say. Only that Harry Potter is in grave danger. Dobby has known it for months, sir! There is a terrible plot to make things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year."
"Did the other elves tell you about it?" Harry asked. He waited for the head shake and asked, "So it was your family? The ones that treat you like this?" It about figured that his owners were dark wizards, treating the poor elf even worse than the Dursleys treated Harry.
Dobby made a choking noise and then banged his head frantically against the tree again.
"I understand. Please stop!" Harry said, again grabbing Dobby. The poor elf had orders to punish himself if he even thought badly about his family, but had somehow managed to try to warn Harry and protect him, if in a mad way. They must be Voldemort's followers. And probably Dobby would have told him who it was exactly if he could. Harry tried something and thought, "Inspect."
A pane of information appeared next to Dobby:
[Dobby is a Level 9 House Elf, and would
easily defeat you in a fight using his elf
magic. He is currently fighting his ownership
geas. Your Divination skill is too low to
determine his owners.]
Huh. Maybe there was a reason to learn Divination even without buying the Sight ability, then. He needed to look up the unfamiliar word "geas," but thought he could basically figure it out from context. He probably wasn't going to get any more direct information out of the poor elf, and didn't want to have him keep trying to knock his brains out on the tree. But he also needed Dobby to stop trying to keep him from going to Hogwarts. He tried putting together the information they'd already discussed. "Dobby, there are other elves at Hogwarts who would also be in danger, right?"
"Possibly," Dobby agreed.
"And you believe I've already defeated Voldemort–" Dobby wailed at the name so Harry corrected, "–You-Know-Who twice?" The elf nodded, so Harry finished, "And you agree that I'm a great wizard with powers beyond my years?"
"So great!" Dobby agreed.
Harry went for the snitch. "You need to stop trying to keep me from school, Dobby. I have to save everyone there. That's what I do. All the elves and the students. I can't do that if you're interfering with me. Instead, why don't you help me as much as you can with your… geese?"
"Harry Potter means the elven geas?" Dobby asked, pronouncing that word in a way that Harry would never be able to mimic. It sounded Welsh or Irish, maybe, and he'd never been able to figure out Gaelic words. "Dobby would be free of it, if he could." The small being considered carefully and said, "Dobby cannot convince Harry Potter to stay away from Hogwarts?"
Harry shook his head, "If there's a problem at school, I think I'm meant to solve it." The quest log made that pretty stark, even if he hadn't totally accepted his lot in life as a chosen hero.
"Then, yes, Dobby wishes Harry Potter would stay home and safe, but will help as much as he can. For now… keep… keep an eye on friends, both old and new." That appeared to be all that the elf could manage to talk around.
"Thank you, Dobby," Harry said, pretty sure that he wasn't going to get anything else around the mystical compulsion. "I'd like to think that you are a new friend of mine. And I'll do my best to free you of your… gesh?" That was closer but still not perfect.
"Harry Potter claims Dobby is his new friend!?" the elf wailed in joy, wrapping his arms around Harry's legs and sniffling, as Harry absently patted the deranged creature on the head. They stood that way in the woods for a few minutes before Dobby finally got himself together and said, "Dobby must go. But Dobby will search for more ways to help Harry Potter defeat the darkness!"
Harry nodded, and Dobby suddenly disappeared.
[QUEST COMPLETE
20 XP Earned + 20 Optional XP]
Grinning, the Boy-Who-Lived assumed he would remain the boy who didn't get locked in his room for the rest of the summer (though that particular title would defy hyphenation). He was down to three active quests, only had a few hours left on the quest for the Masons, and no longer had Dobby trying to get him in trouble. He worked out that Dobby might have deliberately ruined the party to try to keep him from going to Hogwarts, and felt that was definitely a bludger dodged.
He walked back down the lane and into Privet Drive, rather than attempting to climb the back fence (it was faster, but Aunt Petunia hated it), slipping quietly into a house that was starting to smell pretty good as his aunt cooked dinner. Not quietly enough, apparently. "You've been out all morning," Aunt Petunia accused as she spotted him from the kitchen as he tried to climb the stairs.
"Yeah," he told her, and was going to leave it at that, but figured lip would just risk getting him in trouble, and that quest failure possibility still loomed over him. "I thought I'd stay completely out of the way, so there's no chance of things going wrong with the Masons. I was just going to feed Hedwig then head out again?"
Petunia narrowed her eyes as if trying to figure out how that would be worse for her than him hiding in his room, but then nodded, "I supposed that's fine. But you won't be getting dinner if you're out."
"That's okay," Harry shrugged, not admitting that he'd probably had a better lunch than she'd had, due to his quest reward earlier. Maybe he could pick up another quest to get dinner back in town.
"Very well, then. Be quick about it," she dismissed him.
As she turned away, out of curiosity, Harry inspected his aunt.
[Petunia Dursley (formerly Evans) is a Level 9
Homemaker, but is only dangerous with a frying
pan. She is the older sister of Lily Potter
(formerly Evans), but was not born magical,
and, thus, hates magic out of "sour grapes."
She spoils her son, Dudley, to prove that he's
better than his magical cousin Harry.]
Harry blinked at that whole psychological treatise. He had been vaguely aware of the maiden name of his aunt (and thus his mother), but hadn't really put together that she didn't hate magic as much as she hated that she and her son didn't get to be magical. It explained a lot, really. He thought about it as he headed upstairs, managing to get into his room without running into Vernon or Dudley.
"Hey girl," he said to his owl as he closed the door behind him, "you're never going to believe the day I've been having."
]HEDWIG
Post Owl]
"You haven't got a level?" he wondered aloud, then tried to inspect her.
Hedwig is Harry Potter's personal post owl.
She is not yet bonded as a familiar.
Harry frowned, "You're not my familiar? Is there something I need to do to make that happen?"
BIND FAMILIAR: HEDWIG THE POST OWL?
"Yes, of course," he agreed. He heard a faint tone and thought he saw a burst of light around Hedwig, and her name changed to:
HEDWIG
Post Owl Familiar
[HARRY POTTER]
He could almost sense her, and could tell that she was happy as she tilted her head and made a soft "Prek" noise. He inspected her again and saw:
[Hedwig is Harry Potter's post owl familiar.
Her abilities improve based on her master's.]
"Guess you don't need a level, huh, girl?" he told her. "I wonder if I can get you out of here in my inventory." He opened the pane and tried putting her and her cage into the grid, but got the warning:
[CANNOT STORE INTELLIGENT CREATURES IN GENERAL INVENTORY.
RETURN TO PERSONAL MENAGERIE?]
"Yes?" Harry said, and gasped as Hedwig suddenly disappeared into thin air. He hurriedly shoved her cage into his inventory, noticing absently that the oversized container took up two of the grid slots. He needed to make sure he could get her back out again, and that she'd be okay.
Rushing downstairs, Aunt Petunia yelled at him about running in the house and not coming back until after the Masons had left as he cleared the front door. He ran back to basically the same place he'd talked to Dobby and opened the inventory screen again, sighing in relief as he noticed a "Menagerie" tab that had appeared and switching to it. There was Hedwig, seemingly as frozen in time as the milkshake had been. He moved her icon off of the pane and she appeared standing on his wrist and looking about quickly. He could tell she was confused.
"Sorry, girl. New powers. I didn't mean to spring that on you. But now I can take you outside without Uncle Vernon noticing. Did you want to go hunt?"
Adapting quickly with the ease of an animal, Hedwig fluffed her wings, gave him an affectionate bite, and then flew off into the trees. But he could somehow tell she was still nearby, and would come immediately if he needed her.
That crisis handled, Harry glanced at his log. Unless he wanted to try to get to Hogwarts a month early, there was nothing he had to work on actively other than staying away from the Masons for a few hours. Time to try to pick up some extra quests. Even if he didn't get any food out of it, he'd get some more XP, and he had over a pound left, which would be plenty to buy a sandwich or something.
Thinking about his XP, he realized that his bar wasn't anywhere near full, but it seemed fuller than the events of the day should indicate. Thinking back, he realized it was maybe 5% or more full when he'd started. He thought about that as he walked back toward town, and guessed that the major quests in his log had been a factor. Though he'd have to wait and see how much XP he got from day to day life at Hogwarts, he knew for sure that none of the other students had been through anything like what he'd done with Ron and Hermione. Maybe they were a little bit ahead of the curve, and they'd eventually start leveling faster than the other kids at the school.
Well, that would especially be true if Harry started doing quests deliberately, yeah?
Assume that most people got enough XP to level up after every year of school. That wasn't a perfect assumption with Harry's sample size, but nothing he'd seen so far contradicted the idea. But if he was right, that meant that just going to classes, doing homework, and having common interesting things happen must basically equal a level every year. Maybe some people got a little more and some got a little less, but surely seeking quests out must make a big difference, especially at his level.
Maybe he should track down more soldiers and others that had seen fight or exciting times and see if they were higher level than other people their age. The highest level person he'd seen in town he had been pretty sure was a veteran. It was so hard to guess ages for anyone over, like, twenty. To a just-turned-twelve-year-old, adulthood was a vast and undifferentiated smear of wrinkles and graying hair.
He'd wandered down the main strip of Little Whinging when he suddenly saw:
[SAVING SEVEN YEARS
Timed Area Quest: 0:00:30
Catch the mirror before it breaks!]
Area quest? Would he just get those from being near something he could help? He looked around and spotted the glassmaker's shop down the street, with a shopworker trying to load large pieces of glass onto the back of the store's delivery truck. That had to be it! He started sprinting down the street, barely remembering to keep an eye out for cars pulling off the road into the various parking lots.
"Uh. Uh oh!" he heard the young man saying to himself as he was trying to lever the piece of glass into the truck, while another piece that hadn't been secured properly started to slip.
With only a couple of seconds to spare, Harry managed to run in and put both of his hands on the edge of the custom closet door mirror and keep it from slipping any further. "I've got it," he assured the worker.
"Thanks, kid," the man, a tall and lanky light-haired guy that had the reach if not the upper body strength to be slinging around glass panes. He managed to get the piece he'd been carrying strapped in, and then was able to take control of the glass from Harry, sliding it back into place and tightening its holder properly. "You saved my arse, there."
Harry shrugged and told him, "I was just down the sidewalk and saw you were in trouble."
"Glad you were. That could have been a mess. It was cut custom." He smiled and cracked open his wallet, passing Harry a £5 note. "Thanks again."
[QUEST COMPLETE
20 XP Earned
Quest Reward: £5]
The bill evaporated in Harry's hand as the man got in the truck and drove away, and he checked to make sure it had been added to his inventory total. Now he could definitely buy dinner. He seemed to be getting 20 XP for most quests, though more for ones that had goals to check off. And 20 XP didn't really make an appreciable change on his XP bar, though it had visibly shifted over the several he'd already done that day.
Maybe he could help out enough around the town over the last month of summer to make a big difference in his school year?