Chapter 12: Astrium RW
“Oh well hello there,” Petunia began, after opening the front door in response to the doorbell. On her doorstep was a young witch that hadn’t even tried to dress in non-magical clothing when visiting a non-magical home. Her hair was a bright, candy-apple red as it flowed down her back and out of sight behind her pale blue robes. Her appearance might’ve been okay, as it probably looked from behind like she was wearing a trench coat or perhaps a dress, if it hadn’t been for the large, scarlet-and-gold bird sitting on her unprotected shoulder.
This bird was a phoenix… which was very definitely not an ordinary animal.
On the other hand, thanks mostly to the color of her hair, Petunia recognized this girl instantly. It was Ginny Weasley, the girl that had accompanied her and Hailey through Diagon Alley the year before.
The girl Hailey had supported so thoroughly through that entire visit.
The last time she’d seen the girl had been over a month prior, at King’s Cross- where Hailey had given Ginny a strange black crystal that seemed to warp the light around it, causing her to stare after them until they were long out of sight, her mouth forming a perfect circle and her eyes just as wide.
“Hi,” Ginny greeted her, giving her a nervous smile and a little wave. “I’m Ginny Weasley. Is Hailey available?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You could at least try to blend in,” she informed her, gesturing lightly at the phoenix as she stood back.
Ginny blushed, looking down and accepting the silent invitation into her home. “Uh, yeah… sorry about that, it, um, didn’t cross my mind.”
“Of course it didn’t,” Hailey said suddenly, emerging from the kitchen with Philomena riding her shoulder. “I only told you last time we met!” She sighed. “But anyways, it’s good to see you.”
Ginny flinched away from her, averting her eyes nervously. “Er- sorry,” she muttered.
Hailey sighed, marched over, and wrapped her in a hug. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up over it. Just don’t let it happen again, okay?”
Ginny returned the hug. “Okay.” Then she pulled back. “So why haven’t you answered my letters?”
Hailey sighed. “I haven’t been receiving them,” she answered. “Hedwig is more than a little peeved about it too. She’s taken to hunting for whatever’s stealing all my mail.”
Ginny scowled. “Of course you haven’t,” she grumbled. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s some Noble overreaching their authority.”
“Probably,” Hailey agreed. “I’ve actually debated asking Philomena to play middle-phoenix with my mail, between Hedwig and here, via phoenix fire; all the mail disappearances seem to be around here.” She shrugged. “But in the end, I’m not sure that that would do it either.”
“It’d probably all get delivered properly if we had Philomena and Phoebe take it directly to each other,” Ginny offered.
She snorted. “Of course it would, basically nothing can interfere with phoenix fire. But if we’re going to have them carry our mail, we might as well just have them carry us instead and hand-deliver.” She paused. “Nevermind that you simply don’t use phoenixes, they serve of their own free will.”
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s true, isn’t it?” She sighed, looking up into Hailey’s face. “So, how on earth did you make Nocturnic Astrium on the platform?”
“Nocturnic Astrium?” Hailey asked, tilting her head. “That’s the one that warps the worldwall with its mere existence, isn’t it?”
Ginny raised an eyebrow. “Yes, and the one that you have to warp the timeline to create. So how did you just… make it on the platform?”
She shrugged. “I just made it. Didn’t even have to apply my powers.”
“So you just… did the impossible, without even trying.” She paused. “I don’t even know why I’m surprised anymore.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I’m really not all that surprising anymore, am I?”
Ginny snorted. “More like I’ve come to expect to be surprised,” she answered. “Too bad it doesn’t tone down the surprise when it does come, because you’re too- too- predictably unpredictable!”
Hailey chuckled. “Oh, I’m a lot less unpredictable at Hogwarts these days,” she informed her. “I stopped discovering new powers every other week in February sometime; now it’s more of a monthly occurrence.” She shrugged. “I’ve got a spell in mind that’ll give us some nice little offices when we return to Hogwarts; I expect Bonbon’s going to be happy about it.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course she will.” She paused. “I know you’re trying to keep your Royal powers secret- so why do you keep using them? Genderflipping necklaces aren’t exactly subtle, and neither is punching the train off the tracks!”
“That necklace also gives her some minor divine powers,” Hailey answered, completely ignoring the question. “I wonder how long it’ll take before she learns them?”
“Uh… what?” Ginny asked, evidently thrown for a loop.
Hailey giggled. “Fun fact, the human wellspring loves to learn and grow. I didn’t put anything in that necklace to keep hers from doing that with the powers it gives her, so at some point, her wellspring is going to start giving her those powers without the necklace.” She paused. “The transformation is like that too.”
Ginny blinked. “Wait. Does that mean that Animagus-?”
Hailey blinked. “Animagus…? Yeah, right about. When someone becomes an Animagus, their wellspring learns-in a self-transfiguration spell, which…” She paused. “Same is true for apparition. That’s why you have to train so long for both spells, and why they’re so dangerous to learn- in both cases, you’re forcing your wellspring to evolve.”
“... Huh,” Ginny muttered.
Petunia backed away slowly. It didn’t sound like a conversation she had any part in.
“Here,” Hailey told Ginny, tossing something to her as she returned to the living room. They’d moved their conversation there- then she’d remembered something, and headed upstairs to fetch it. “I made it out of all the rest of the Astrium you gave me,” she informed her, as she sat back down.
Ginny held it up to look at it… then stared at it, and finally looked at Hailey again. “Wh-Where the hell did you get a Void Weave Drive?” she asked. She didn’t know how she knew what it was called- or why she suddenly knew what it did and how to use it as well… and the blueprint necessary to actually use it. Even as she asked her question, some small part of her brain directed some of the Astrium in her pocket- she’d brought it in case Hailey had some ideas for experiments and didn’t have enough- to flow up through the weave of her clothes to the Drive in her hand, and attach itself to it as an ‘Astrion Generator’.
“I made it,” Hailey answered simply, with a shrug. “A few days after I got home, I felt like playing with the rest of the Astrium you gave me, and that was the result.” She gestured towards the device.
Ginny finished building the Astrion Generator, and began magically heating its Nocturnic Astrium core to a plasmic state; once she finished, a little shock of electricity would fire up the combined device, after which it would sustain itself. “So you just sat down and… built an interdimensional warp engine?” she asked. Not that that one was large enough to actually breach the worldwall, nor even to function as a reactionless drive; it was too small to be useful for anything other than a power generator.
Hailey smiled. “Yeah, I guess I did, didn’t I?” She tilted her head. “How would you use it?”
She fed it that little shock of electricity, and felt as the Drive powered on and began sustaining its own Astrion Generator with only a tiny bit of its full capacity. “It’s simple,” she muttered. “If your ship is made of Astrium, that is, and you can interface with it.” She looked at the device in her hand. “This one’s miniaturized to a level that shouldn’t even be possible, putting it well below the point where it will no longer actually be useful as an engine, instead serving as a decent megawatt-range power generator.” She paused. “So, where did you get the other materials for it from? Iridium and Orichalcum, to name a couple, aren’t very easy to get.”
“You mean it works?”
“Yup. I turned it on.” She sighed. “Yes, it seems like I can interface with the Astrium. But we already knew that, didn’t we?” She paused as several more blueprints just… appeared in her mind, alongside…
She put a hand to her forehead. “Oh,” she muttered.
“What?” Hailey asked.
“No, I just-!” She paused. “You know how I just… suddenly knew what Astrium was called, and suddenly knew what a Void Weave Drive was called, and how to turn it on, and all that?”
Hailey nodded silently.
“Well… I just figured out where all that has been coming from.”
“Lemme guess, one of your Royal powers?”
She let out a chuckle. “No, actually. And I suppose I’m technically not a Royal either, for that matter- my powers don’t come from that… portal or whatever.” She looked sideways at Hailey. “Have you ever wondered what’s beyond our universe?”
“Not really,” Hailey mused. “This sector of the Multiverse really isn’t very busy- but it’s positively crowded when compared to this sector of the Omniverse.”
“Uh… Okay. I’ll take that to mean you haven’t wondered because you know. Well… out there somewhere is a multiversal explorer that, um, can’t just show up at a universe and enter it. They need special data of some sort to get in… but they can launch a little machine in, called a Seed, which can gather that special data on the way out.
“That Seed… planted itself in my head long before I was born, and is what gave me all of my powers. Including the Astrium. And that’s where it’s all been coming from.”
“So it’s been a part of you all along, huh?” Hailey chuckled. “I wonder why it waited so long to tell you about itself?”
“Um…” She paused. “I don’t get the idea it’s telling me everything just yet, and it is saying most of it’s a bit early, and being unlocked mainly because I now have access to all five forms of Astrium and need to know how to use them.” She paused. “The last one is Luminous Astrium, which this Drive will let me create, albeit slowly.”
“Anything else?”
She scowled. “It’s telling me that, even though a larger Void Weave Drive would let me leave the universe, doing so would be… strongly inadvisable until I find something very specific. It, uh… isn’t explaining what it is just yet, but whatever it is is way up north.”
“That’s the direction Hogwarts is,” Hailey observed.
“Yeah,” Ginny agreed, “it is. Doesn’t feel like a significant difference in compass heading between here and the Burrow, though, so it’s quite a ways.”
“Such as, say, Hogwarts,” Hailey supplied. “It’s only a ten-hour train ride with a magic locomotive that doesn’t need to be oiled every hundred and fifty miles.”
Ginny nodded. “Such as Hogwarts. There’s a part of me that hopes it is at Hogwarts, just because that’d make things easy.”
Hailey chuckled. “Yeah, hopefully.”
She rubbed her chin, thinking, for a minute. “Hmm… I imagine I can use the Chamber of Secrets to hide experiments with Astrium at Hogwarts. Up to and including building a void-capable ship.”
“Chamber of Secrets?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “I assume that it’s full of secrets?”
Ginny laughed. “Nah, it’s just called that. Donno why- I just know it was made by Salazar Slytherin himself, and only parselmouths can get in.”
“Parselmouths?”
“People that can talk to snakes by speaking Parseltongue, snake language.” She sighed. “It’s usually viewed as an evil power, despite being hereditary.”
Hailey tilted her head. “So which side do you get it from?” she asked.
She blinked, snorted, and laughed. “Oh, that. No, I have it as a leftover from my past life, where I was a direct descendent of Salazar Slytherin.”
“Ahh,” Hailey muttered, nodding slowly. “And you know, I’m curious. I’ve yet to encounter a language I didn’t already know- do you think you can say something in Parseltongue?”
Ginny looked at her in confusion, then sighed and concentrated very briefly. It was never all that difficult to do, though it was the first time she’d ever spoken parseltongue in this body, so it didn’t come quite as easily as, say, English. A familiar hissing sound escaped her lips. “Something something.”
Hailey smiled. “Something very somethingy,” she nodded, also speaking parseltongue.
Both girls promptly broke out giggling, even before Dudley wandered in to ask who’d brought a cat inside.
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dies happy
Oh, when’s the last time you spoke to him?
I haven’t seen him here in ages
11356240
I speak to him relatively frequently on my Discord server, which we use for the editing stuff. You're welcome to join too- the invite link is in the author's note.
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... ?
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Do you know why he stoped writeing
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He stopped writing? ... Huh, I guess he has, publicly at least. His profile suggests a reason might be an 'all stories finished' thing or the like... Who knows. Maybe ask him yourself? All I know is that he's still been doing the same thing he's always been doing for me, often without prompting. I think the last time he did that was a couple days ago... which is more recent than the last time I actually wrote anything for him to comment on. Trucking is a busy job.
Ooh, interesting. And also Ginny and Hailey using Parseltongue to joke with each other is adorable
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Died of laughter
I wonder if this void ship going to gather all the characters (from your other Harry Potter Stories), visit other franchises, or just be how the ponies find their way back and forth between their dimensions... it be pretty cool if it was all three, but who knows, no one but the Author.
(Bribes Author with cookies)
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I recently discarded a few week-old cookies that I didn’t have the appetite to eat all week. That’s the wrong food to bribe me with.
That said, that seat-on-an-engine is never used onscreen, aside from only seating one. In a dozen chapters or so, though…
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Week old?
.dogpile.com TRUE / FALSE 1061321617 YourSavedSettings 276W1L4A34B618V_YOUR_SAVED_SETTINGS_NEED_THIS_COOKIE www.zdnet.co.uk FALSE / FALSE 1061320437 Apache 172.194.131.4.298861053544489525 .cnet.com TRUE / FALSE 1061321549 aid CE1000843ECBD483000905C4000034F4 .cnet.com TRUE / FALSE 1061321549 s_cur_1_0 0101sisi1053545603023dd3Jx4+POyJGkrJzKxdHYqKegn5mozpl6a4Pn5crU5M7RxqWknZiXo6mqn6Bv .about.com TRUE / FALSE 1061322942 trailblazer referrer= .about.com TRUE / FALSE 1061322623 referrer http://about.comThere you go, some old cookies.
EDIT: Ok, why does it mess up the line breaks?
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Mine were oatmeal raisin.
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White chocolate macadamia cookies 😎
Let There Be... a divider between old-version-comments and new-version-comments.
For some reason, I find myself thinking of Ben Ten with this line. No real reason for it.
Story is flowing much smoother with the rewrite.
Goddess of versatility?
Did the story just changed from comedic fantasy adventure to sci-fi comedy?
More like boring in any kind of challenge
*Read the story*
Trying to make sense of it*
*Mind crashes, rebooting...*
Next chapter
11725055
Yeah, that's about what my mind did on... was it this chapter or the next, on my most recent rewrite... probably why it's crashing so hard. Maybe if I hadn't tried to ram the Sequence into the story, and let it be less ridiculous... Would have been much easier for me to keep track of everything, up to and including Hailey's early happy-go-lucky attitude that I liked.