"I. Will. Kill. You!" Hermione threw a copy of Hogwarts, A History at Hari's head. To her dismay (although not surprise) it was dodged and nearly hit Blaise. It skidded on the floor and tripped a Hufflepuff who was too tired to see it in time. She pitched forwards and knocked a companion into a Ravenclaw, spilling several students into the scrambled eggs.
Hari cocked his head, not looking around. "Hm? Why?"
"Look what you did to me!" she snarled.
"I haven't done anything to you recently. You haven't made any further progress in your studies, I admit, but that's not—" Hermione bared her teeth at him. "Hey, cool! You look like Uncle Kisame!"
"You gave me a ritual that did this!"
"And?"
"And I look like a freak!"
"You look like my uncle! Although he's a bit of a freak. As I recall, you asked for the ritual, didn't you?"
"I know it didn't say anything about teeth like this!"
"It certainly did."
"Perfect recall, Hari. I know it didn't."
"Of course it did. On the second page."
"Second . . ."
"I tried to warn you, didn't I? But you didn't want to hear it."
Hermione gritted her teeth. They were bright white and all pointed. Each curved slightly inward and had what could best be described as blades on the inner edges. They were also perfectly even.
"I feel certain I will regret this," said Snape as he walked over. "But since you decided to have this discussion at a volume the whole hall could hear, I thought it prudent to find out what you were talking about." He glanced at Hermione. "Self-improvement rituals are generally discouraged before sixth year, when—Merlin's staff with the knob on the end, what did you do?"
"This is just a guess," said Hari. "But I'm thinking it was a ritual to make teeth even or something."
"I won't bother sending you to Hospital," Snape told Hermione. "We won't fiddle with ritual magic for a few months at the least. Then we can see if it's settled enough to meddle." He ignored Hermione's tearing eyes. "You can try looking around to see if there are any rituals that can undo this."
Hermione sniffled and punched Hari's shoulder. "Ow!" she shook out her hand. It was like hitting aged oak.
"Hm?"
"Shut up."
"See you tonight then."
"If you think I'm continuing lessons with you after this . . ."
"I would be completely right. I don't recall asking you." Hari patted her on the cheek. "Don't bite your tongue off and bleed to death, okay?" He rose and walked out of the Great Hall as Pansy began to snicker, only to be smacked by Millicent.
"Ow!"
X
X
Despite Hermione's resolve not to continue studying with Hari, he was as good as his word. For the next three months, she would go to bed and find herself dragged from her sleep and bludgeoned about the head with her wand while she worked on levitating a pebble because Hari wouldn't let her rest until she made progress.
The worst part was that she was making progress. She had begun to move the pebble around now, something that should have been impossible for someone without an OWL to do—and that was using a wand. It was infuriating to find that Hari was right about ignoring codified rules for the most part. It was invalidating about two-thirds of the books she'd read on magic.
On the other hand, she was beginning to understand the more complex texts on the subject despite her total lack of formal grounding beyond reading. She didn't know the specialized terms, but the elaborate explanation of how magic worked on a more esoteric level was unfolding for her, even if only parts of it made sense.
X
X
Hari patted Hermione as she dozed off and strolled out of her bedroom. She had made progress despite herself. He was feeling confident that he would manage to get her started on how to properly use magic by the end of the year. Or maybe next.
Regardless, he had been meaning to do a bit of investigating into the Corridor of Not at All Scary and had kept getting distracted by the interesting passageways and so on. But he had finally decided to just deal with it.
The dog had apparently gotten wind of his interactions with the dragon, judging from how it tried to back through the wall when he stepped into the corridor. He opened the trapdoor and walked down one side of the shaft and along the ceiling of the passage down below.
There was some sort of plant growing at the bottom of the shaft. Since it looked like something he'd seeing in Aunt Konan's art collection, he decided to avoid it by using the walls again.
Keys. It was odd, really. He looked at the giant door and frowned. If you wanted to keep someone out, you locked the door and then kept the key near you, or gave it to some trusted guard. Or maybe hired a bunch of ninja to hide it somewhere. Regardless, the one thing you didn't do was leave it anywhere near the lock. That would defeat the purpose of having a lock. The worst part was that he could see which key matched the door.
Actually no, that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that there were no traps on the keys or the door. That was inexcusable as far as he was concerned. As a ninja, his specialty was extracting things from places like this, but that still meant he had to know how to protect them first. The only reason he could think of to have the keys here was to trap either them or the door. And even then, he wouldn't have a key that could open the door. For that matter, he hadn't discovered the way yet, but he expected that magic could be used to lock doors without any sort of physical key.
He shrugged. Someone was up to something. He didn't just rely on his eyes, despite the temptation. He tossed a kunai at the door and watched the effects. Most traps left traces if someone knew what to look for. The blunt end of the weapon struck the door. Nothing happened. He picked it up and tied a length of wire to the ring before flinging it up. The wire wrapped around the key that matched the door and he dragged it down as it struggled.
He prodded it with the tanto from his shoulder. Nothing. He opened the door. There was a chess set on the other side. He didn't think it would let him pass. So he walked up the wall and along the ceiling. The stone figures began to toss their weapons up at him without any luck. Hari whistled to himself as he strolled to the far side and through the door there.
"So that's where Professor Stutterfaces put the other Troll." He debated killing it, but didn't see the point. It was tempting, just to be sure, but he decided against it. Besides, the thing was too stupid to look up and see him, so it probably wasn't worth worrying about.
The path to the next room, though . . . it gleamed to his eyes. The whole area was trapped to high heaven. And he hadn't the least idea what most of those effects did. Unlike secret passages, most rune-work didn't have instructions written into them.
Hari formed a pair of Shadow Clones and sent them ahead. The first one stepped into the hallway and paused. "So far, so good, Boss." It continued into the room at the far end. "There are flames, Boss."
"Thank you, Number One, I can see them." Hari frowned. "Is this what Professor Snape has to deal with? Nah."
"I don't know if there's an off-button in here, Boss. Everything looks like it's trapped, too."
Hari sighed.
"There's a room on the far end of this one, Boss. I can't see into it, though."
So his choices were to go back or poke around with his clones and find out what the traps did. He'd have to hope that none of them hit outside the trapped hallway of doom. He could try going outside the maze, but even then, there was no guarantee that he could get through that second wall of fire. Oh, and someone probably had the traps set to alert him or her to their triggering and would come to find out what was happening.
He could use the cloak to hide from detection, but that would only get him to the neutral point of "not caught". Unless he was really lucky and the person who set this up was incredibly stupid and decided to go check the other side of the traps while he followed . . .
Yeah. That wasn't happening. Let some other idiot find out what they'd put at the end of the trap-nest. That also explained why it was so easy to get around the other 'traps'; someone wanted people to reach this one. Of course, whoever designed this thing could have saved a lot of effort by having it at the beginning. Hari wasn't sure the point of lulling someone into the trap when they would walk into it anyway. Just put it at the bottom of the shaft and the person would be trapped anyway.
It wasn't his problem, so he headed back the way he came. The Troll was no more intelligent than it had been the other direction, and was ignored likewise. The poor chess set was still sorting out whose weapons were whose and were distracted. Hari was tempted to drop down and offer his assistance, but decided it might not be welcomed, given that there were stone fists being shaken at him. Instead, he gave them a cheeky wave and used the key in his pocket to lock the door behind him. He let it free and it fluttered away to join its companions—if it had been able to make sounds, he felt certain it would have made a happy chirp.
He ignored the giant dog that was now sitting in a puddle of its own urine and left the corridor. It had been a tremendous disappointment. It hadn't been scary to start with, and then it turned out to be a letdown until the end. He wished he'd been able to see what was being kept in there, but there were levels of danger that he'd been taught to avoid and anything where he would definitely get hit with unknown traps was pretty high on the list.
Maybe something interesting would happen if he came back tomorrow night?
X
X
"Hello, Professor," said Hari. Professor Stutterfaces gave a little shriek as he jumped a foot into the air. "What are you doing here at the Corridor of Not Dangerous One Bit?"
Professor Stutterfaces whirled, clutching his chest with one hand and wheezing a little. He found Hari leaning against the wall, one leg over the other, hands in his pockets. Those stupid robes of his fell around him. There was the disconcerting aspect that he couldn't see the boy's eyes. His hair fell around his face like a shroud.
"What are you doing here, Potter?" he snarled. Sort of. It was a lot less snarl-y and much more gasping than he'd intended, but he added a pained glare to try and bring the fearsome-level up a bit.
"Leaning against the wall?"
Stutterface's eye twitched. "Why are you here, then."
"I'm taking a stroll, Professor."
The man's eyes narrowed. "At two in the morning?"
"Best time for it, Professor. No one bothers me."
"And you don't think you could show me the same courtesy?"
"I was wondering if you were planning to see what's at the end of the maze, that's all."
"What?"
"That's what's beyond the giant puppy," Hari replied. "No idea what's at the end, though." That was interesting. Professor Stutterface's body loosened slightly when Hari said that. His eyes showed him the muscles relaxing.
"How would you know?"
"Well, I poked my head down there, just to see, you know. But I didn't get to the end."
Hari turned and began to walk down the hall. "By the way, Professor, I'm glad to see you're feeling better."
"Thank you, Potter."
"Did the Unicorns help?"
There was a sort of sound not unlike "GRK" from behind him. He saw the man's eyes bulge wide and he clutched at his chest as his heartrate sped up.
"And your recovery helped your stutter, too." Hari began to tap a random bit of wall. "I hope your other face is doing well." He stepped into the secret passage, leaving behind a further shriek as the Professor opened his mouth. Then Hari lost sight of him in the passage's magic. That had been an exceptionally odd encounter—and he lived with his Uncles.
Oh well. The Professor was probably going to be fine, what with one thing and another. It wasn't like the traps were that dangerous in the maze. Well, excepting the end of it, and anyone who stepped in there was stupid and deserved whatever happened to him. Or her, he had to admit—Aunt Konan was just as dangerous as his Uncles, but still . . .
He spent an hour in the library, looking for a book on English grammar to see if there were a better way to phrase that thought.
X
X
The next day, he skipped his classes to go through the library again, this time trying to find a translation charm; he had been meaning to read those books Hermione had gotten him for . . . well, since he'd seen them—there wasn't much literature on the matter and he got the impression that most Wizards cared little for languages other than their own. The rare exceptions were intellectuals who'd simply learned the languages they had wanted to understand.
More frustratingly, no one seemed interested in anything resembling contemporary languages. For some reason, they were all obsessed with Greek, Latin, and Egyptian. Come to think of it, why was nothing east of the Urals represented either? He would have expected plenty from India at the least. Judging from the history of this world, the land he was visiting had once held dominion over India for a time. Surely someone visited the place? Granted, he knew absolutely nothing about Indian writing, but since he knew what the books in the library did contain . . .
Of course, given the nature of the library of Hogwarts, it was always possible he hadn't found the ones he was looking for. There were a couple of areas in the huge room that were hidden by walls. He noticed that pretty much everyone seemed unaware that the walls weren't normal ones. He could tell they had some sorts of conditions to bypass them, but he couldn't read them in the magical glow.
What was worse was that the students who could enter the areas didn't seem to be aware of it. He'd considered asking what was in there, but there was a real chance that they couldn't answer. And given the security around those areas, he didn't want to find out the hard way by triggering some sort of failsafe. Magic was fun, but it left so many dangers . . .
Strangely, Hermione was no help in his search. She hadn't come across anything about translation charms. She had expected he knew at least one of the languages the books she'd sent him were in. She'd taken a good bit of time to find them. She said she'd had to venture into Identic Alley to find a curio shop with books in those languages—no, she had no idea what was in them, but had decided to follow narrative convention (her phrasing) since "that seems to be how the Wizarding world works" and therefore went to a small store operated by a man of unclear-but-definitely-eastern origins and purchased any books he had in languages from what was classically the Far East.
For all he knew, she'd bought him a pile of cookbooks. It didn't seem likely. The things radiated magic. He supposed there must be magical cookbooks, but the ones he'd seen in that Diagon place hadn't had anything resembling this sort of strength of aura. And while he didn't understand her short rant about story-logic or whatever it had been, he was clear that she was certain that the books were more than just random objects in a thrift shop.
When he had time, he would need to take another field trip to get some books on languages.
(A/N John)
Yeah, so Kisame-teeth. I had come up with the idea of the ritual and liked the idea that there was a catch. Then I suggested teeth like the Seven Swordsmen and Spoon loved it. So what the hey, you know? Odds are good that it will be commented on from time to time. I don't expect that it'll get fixed.
(A/N 2 John)
If you people think Hari is going to walk into that trap, you are sorely mistaken.
(A/N 3 John)
I had not intended my last author's note to be a request for pairing suggestions. Yuri is unlikely, sorry to disappoint you guys.
As much as I do not want to get involved in a discussion, it needs saying: there is a vast difference between talking about sex because you like grossing people out and having any interest in the activity itself. And even if we posit that a a person is actually emotionally mature enough to kill (as opposed to just being psychologically damaged) that does not imply either an interest in sex, nor a physiological ability to perform. Mental maturation does not in any way prove that the person in question wants to have sex and, if then, that he is able to do so as opposed to being frustrated a lot.
To put it another way: "old enough to kill, old enough to fuck" just doesn't work. It's not a valid argument. The only people who use it are those inducting child soldiers into their armies and trying to break their minds to make them malleable.
(A/N 4 John)
A few people pointed out the whole Clone option. I honestly had forgotten about that. It's been fixed. So thank you to Pikamew1288 and pax-draconix.