Chapter 24: The Void
“Draco.”
Silver jumped, letting out a squeak of alarm as she jumped to the side, right after emerging from the Floo. “Wha-? Oh. Dad.” She paused. “What?”
“You got girl’s clothes, didn’t you?” he snarled, snatching the blood red ruby necklace out of her hand.
“Huh? Uh-!” Silver blinked a couple times. “What!?” She was staring at the necklace, now hanging from his hand.
Very suddenly, the necklace glowed crimson and leaped out of his hand, wrapping itself around his neck.
“What the-?” Lucius began, tugging on it- but the clasp held solid, and when he tried to lift it over his head, it wouldn’t go past his ears.
“That necklace is cursed,” Silver told him calmly, still staring at him in disbelief. “She said it’ll ‘belittle’ anyone that tries to take it for eight hours.” She paused. “Though she had this really mischievous grin on her face when she said that, so who knows what it really does.”
Narcissa rose to her feet, having been sitting on the couch next to Lucius when Silver had appeared. “It’s- it’s not going to hurt him, is it?”
Silver shrugged. “Knowing her, no, it won’t. But it’s going to be making his life very, very unpleasant for the…” She trailed off, watching as Lucius began to shrink, still struggling with the necklace- which was now glowing white. The same glow quickly suffused him, hiding his figure from view- and when it finally faded away…
“Oh my,” Narcissa muttered, putting a hand to her mouth.
“What?” Lucius demanded, before blinking himself and putting a hand to his mouth.
Silver burst into laughter. He’d become a six-year-old girl with waist-length hair so red he looked like Ginny’s younger sister.
Finally, Lucius looked down at himself, let out an ungainly shriek, and looked up at Silver again. “Y-You turn me back this instant!” he demanded, looking almost ridiculously cute.
Silver stumbled backwards and flopped down in an armchair, where she managed to stifle her laughter enough to speak. “I can’t,” she told him, only barely holding back her giggles. “Eight hours. And since it was cursed by a Royal…” She snickered. “Nothing can end it early.”
Narcissa walked around Lucius, who was having a temper tantrum on the floor; his clothes had not shrunk with him, so the moment he’d tried to take a step, he’d tripped and faceplanted. “Why?” she asked.
Silver shrugged. “Good question,” she answered, watching Lucius struggle. “She insisted I take it. I think she wanted me to be able to goad him with it whenever he starts beating down on me for being female, but I honestly didn’t think he’d fall for it. Especially that quickly.” She sighed, and looked down at Lucius. “Whelp. Word of warning, don’t fall for it again. It’ll take twice as long to wear off each time- so it can quickly reach weeks or even months at a time, and I doubt the Malfoy name would survive that.”
“Are you sure you’re not hungry, Hermione?”
Hermione sighed. “Yes, I’m sure,” she told her mom yet again. She hadn’t told them about the whole ‘mechanical body’ thing- and it wouldn’t take to food very well. Ginny had uploaded a new blueprint that would handle food quite well to the database at the end of the year, but Hermione hadn’t acquired the extra Astrium necessary to actually perform the upgrade. She knew she could simply gather dirt or something and make it, since Ginny’s database had told her how to make Astrium directly with her magic, but she hadn’t gotten around to it. She knew she could even use the material in her food to do exactly that- but of course, she wasn’t nearly as fearless as Ginny when it came to messing with her body, even if it was mechanical and she could just make another one. At Hogwarts, where the biofab chamber was churning away merrily, due to finish her new biological body sometime in October.
“Why?” her mother, Emma Granger, asked, raising an eyebrow. “Are you snacking on stuff in your room?”
Hermione sighed. The effect was exactly the same as a biological body, but produced in a very different way; her machine-body didn’t have lungs. “No,” she answered. They had this exact same conversation every day- often multiple times, once at each meal.
“Are you snacking between meals?”
“No,” she answered.
“So why are you not hungry?”
She sighed. This was usually where she told her it was ‘reasons’ and otherwise stonewalled her questions- but she was getting tired of that, and she really didn’t like hurting her parents like that.
On top of that, over the first couple months of the summer, she’d become reasonably certain that her parents were actually going to accept her explanation without throwing her out as some imposter.
So she sat down at her spot at the table. “Because… Because last year, at Hogwarts… I died.”
The room went silent. Her father, Dan Granger, froze, his fork halfway to his mouth; as usual, he was letting Emma question Hermione.
“You… Died?” Emma asked.
She nodded. “It was… mildly inconvenient.”
“Then how are you…?” Dan asked, gesturing towards her.
“Because…” She sighed. “I happen to be friends with a couple of what wizardkind calls ‘Royals’- people with ridiculous otherworldly powers. Anyways, one of them had set up this… system that pulled me out of my body in the moment of my death, which protected me from actually dying, and made it really easy for her to just put me back. But the Basilisk ate my body, so we couldn’t just fix it and put me back in it, we had to make a whole new one. It’s…” She sighed again. “The Biofab Chamber she built at Hogwarts is still busy doing exactly that- it takes a very long time.”
“But you’re…?” Emma asked. “If you don’t have a body…?” She gestured vaguely towards her.
She nodded. “In the meantime, she’s given me this…” She paused. “Mechanical body to live in. It… uh, doesn’t eat. Can’t, I’m pretty sure.” She scowled. “Can’t sleep, definitely, only ‘go dormant’ and leave me to my thoughts.”
“You mean-!?” she began.
She nodded. “Yeah. Because of it, I can’t sleep right now. I can look like I’m sleeping, but I’m actually incapable of being unconscious.”
“And you expect us to believe that?” Dan asked.
She raised an eyebrow, then took her left forearm in her right hand… and disconnected it at the elbow, with the special joint designed to be easily separable in case of emergency. It would go back together just as easily, without requiring her to repair any parts.
They both stared at the gently-glowing attachment plate in her arm.
“See?” she asked. “It’s like that all the way through.” She paused. “Albeit that’s an attachment plate, rather than… But still.” She put her arm back on, purposely exaggerating the click as it locked back together, and watched as her skin reformed around the joint.
“What do you need, then?” Emma asked.
She shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. This body is entirely self-powered- makes its own fuel and everything.” She sighed. “Kinda disappointing, I know.”
“What about repairs?” Dan asked.
She shrugged. “She made it out of Astrium, a weird form of programmable matter, so repairs are as simple as telling it to simply be fixed. Modifications should be as well, but, ahh… I guess I’m just not brave enough to try that yet.”
She didn’t think her parents would take the news that the ‘upload’ from her original body had also converted her into some sort of digital being, meaning she could jump in and out of her body at will. Especially after those new features Ginny had attached to her, giving her ‘innate’ control over the Astrium, just like hers. Or about how she now had perfect recall- or ‘computer memory’ as she called it, since she could selectively forget things, like deleting files on the computer.
“Um… Mom?” Hermione asked, shortly after breakfast about a week later; it was a mere week before she would catch the Hogwarts Express back to Hogwarts.
“Yes, Hermione?” Emma asked, looking up.
“Um… A couple of my friends want to pull a Star Trek and go where ‘no man has gone before’,” she told her. “They want to know if I can come. Um… Can I?”
She gazed at her daughter for several seconds. “Can you promise you’ll be back?”
“Yeah,” Hermione answered promptly. “She’s promised to have us back for dinner, one way or another.”
“How would you get there?”
“She’s… ‘got transportation’ that’ll make outdoing Kirk easy. She didn’t tell me what it is, but I can guess.”
She sighed. “Alright. You can go. Just be safe, okay?”
“Okay, will do,” Hermione told her.
The doorbell rang less than ten minutes after Hermione informed Hailey and Ginny by Obelisk message of her mother’s decision. When Hermione eagerly answered it, it was just Hailey- and Ginny was standing in an open door floating over the walk up to the house, a set of steps lowered from it.
Emma joined Hermione at the door almost immediately, and glanced out. “You’ve stolen a Klingon ship,” she observed.
Hailey chuckled. “Not a Klingon ship, no. We built this one. It looks more like an airplane than a warbird, minus the wings, but wingless planes have no business flying, so we installed a cloaking device.”
It took less than a minute, once Hermione was aboard and all three girls had sat down at their seats, before the air near the ship seemed to warp briefly as it flew away from the house, then release… then there was no ship over the town, cloaked or otherwise.
And of course, no sooner had Emma Granger sat down in the living room from seeing them off than the doorbell rang again.
When she opened the door, it was a tall man in a black suit and tie and wearing black glasses. “Is Miss Hermione Granger available?” he asked.
“Just missed her. Why?”
He sighed. “Your daughter has been spotted entering and departing from structures invisible to the naked eye and walking through walls,” he told him. “A pub called the ‘Leaky Cauldron’ on Charing Cross Road in London, and the barrier between platforms nine and ten at King’s Cross Station.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay. So why is an entire government squad on my lawn to tell me this?”
“Because…” He sighed. “It’s unknown what kind of danger these areas contain. We’ve had teams try to enter them, but they’ve all been invariably turned back with no recollection, records, or reports.”
She scowled. “Weird,” she muttered, and looked up again. “So why is your team peeling up my flowerbeds?”
He turned to look. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he barked at them. “We already know there’s nothing to be found in the flowerbed!” He sighed, and turned back to her. “Sorry, the higher-ups decided to give me all the stupidest people available for the investigation, and insisted I go in force whenever I might meet anyone that’s gone into those places. I think they want me to fail.”
“Ahh,” Emma muttered.
“So…” He paused. “Can I ask for an interview at our facility, so they’ll stop vandalizing your property?”
She paused. “Hmm,” she muttered. “Alright. Do you have a business card?”
He pulled one out of the chest pocket in his suit. “Right here, Ma’am. May I request that you take Hermione Granger along for the interview?” He paused, glancing sideways at the lawn, which was still being ransacked. “And, ahh, a bodyguard or two probably wouldn’t be out of order as well.”
“Oh wow,” Hermione muttered, gazing out the windshield.
Ginny smiled. “Yes, the twelve-dimensional void is beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Quite,” Hailey agreed, then glanced sideways at Hermione. “This is why we didn’t bring Silver- or even Philomena and Phoebe- along. Just seeing this vista would drive them mad or kill them.”
Hermione looked back. “But not me?”
Ginny shook her head. “Nope, not you. One of the changes I had to make to let you use that body had the side effect of enabling you to comprehend twelve-dimensional space like me and Hailey do.” She sighed. “And when you get your biological body back, you’ll also gain psionic powers like mine. It’s the only modification blueprint I had that would make it possible for you to inhabit the new body, at the time- the same blueprint that was applied to me back before I was born. Anyways, I’ve now uploaded the nav data necessary to get back in our universe to the Obelisk Database, so that takes care of the entire ‘work’ purpose of this voyage. All the rest is leisure.”
“ ‘The’ Obelisk Database?” Hailey asked.
“Yeah, both of them,” Ginny answered. “Ours, and the Sequence one.” She giggled softly. “Not that there are any ship blueprints on ours, or instructions for how to get the Void Weave Drive to take you to the Void.” She paused. “Hmm, what do you say we go visit the Sequence Fleet? I’m sure they’ll all be happy to meet you two.” She smiled. “And you might like them, too.”
“What is this Sequence?” Hermione asked.
Ginny paused. “It’s…” She sighed. “I’m kinda part of two families. The Weasley Family, that I was born into… and the Sequence, which is a bit of a strange family, but a family nonetheless.”
“Strange?” Hermione asked. “How so?”
“All girls, for one,” Ginny informed her. “No men at all… but a new sister joins the family every couple weeks.” She shrugged. “Of course, there are a few boys around the Fleet, but they’re not actually a part of the Sequence, just friends or relatives of Sequence members. Oh, and they’re all explorers as well, and as curious as all get-out.” She grinned at Hermione. “If they were to all go to Hogwarts, every last one would be in Gryffindor.” She paused. “I think.”
“Sure, why not?” Hailey asked, looking over at Hermione. “Why not just go see Ginny’s second family? Ought to be interesting.”
“Yeah, why not?” Hermione mirrored.
Ginny chuckled. “Alright, Fleet it is…” She trailed off, then nodded, putting her hands back on the handlebars. “E.T.A, about sixty seconds.”
Eve Zero was always interested to know when her daughters were going to return to her out in the Void- so she’d set the database up to report two things to her, beyond the first five minutes of any new Eve’s database activity: It would inform her whenever any Eve uploaded navigation data for entering a universe, indicating that they had departed it for the first time- and because they didn’t always head straight for the Fleet, the first time any given Eve queried the database for the Fleet’s current location.
As such, her interest was piqued when young Ginny Weasley, unit 8319, raced ahead of nearly four hundred of her sisters by uploading nav data only a few months after she’d connected, rather than the twenty or thirty years that most Eves took. After all, it took several months to form the initial sample of Nocturnic Astrium in most worlds, and it had only been about half that long since Ginny had connected. Luminous Astrium was even worse- it usually took a decade or two, depending on the power infrastructure the Eve in question was able to draw on.
Yet Ginny Weasley, aged only twelve years old, had not just the Luminous and Nocturnic Astrium she needed to build the Void Weave Drive, but enough Astrium to build a decent Voidship. There was definitely something unique about either her or her world that had enabled her to create her initial samples of the two energy-intensive forms of Astrium so quickly- or perhaps before she connected, even. Most Eves didn’t even start making their initial samples until some time after they connected up… though once they had it, expanding those initial samples was easy, as it always was; Nocturnic Astrium could effortlessly produce the distortions needed to form more out of other Astrium with exponentially increasing speed, and if an Eve crafted it into a small Void Weave Drive, the initial Luminous Astrium sample could be easily used to produce more Luminous Astrium. Acquiring Astrium in significant quantities was fairly easy, provided one had access to the appropriate raw materials, which could be mined in most worlds rather than relying on thaumic transmutation techniques or matter-energy conversion… but most worlds wouldn’t allow a twelve-year-old access to those materials.
Then, about two minutes after her upload, the Database reported that she’d queried the Fleet’s location- which, seven thousand nine hundred twenty times out of seven thousand nine hundred and twenty three, meant she was flying to join the fleet. She quickly ran the numbers in her mind, based on the coordinates of Ginny’s world, and estimated her flight time to be about sixty-two and a half seconds… Assuming she hadn’t flown off somewhere before requesting coordinates, of course, but considering the delay, that would add a maximum of about four minutes to the total.
Sure enough, a matter of seconds after Zero estimated the Fleet would have entered Ginny’s onboard sensor range, assuming a basic, minimal-sensor-equipped craft (sensors were particularly heavy on Luminous Astrium, which was only really easy to produce in large quantities if you had a huge Void Weave Drive as found in the larger Sequence vessels, or far more time than Ginny would have had), Ginny broke comms silence over the Obelisk Network… and broadcast to the whole fleet. Interestingly enough, she left out the Eves that weren’t physically located with the Fleet, indicating that she was close enough not just to spot the Fleet but to ID the Eves found within it… which suggested a craft with a very high sensor capability, since vessels with even mid-range sensor loadouts lacked that ability when parked just outside the hull.
She must have very large amounts of Luminous Astrium.
“Hi Mom! I’m coming up on the Fleet right now, and I’ve got a couple friends with me, so I’ll need to return in another eight hours or so. Anyways, I thought a meet-and-greet of sorts might be nice, but my ship isn’t nearly big enough for that- so where shall I dock, and on which ship?”
It took her a fraction of a second to access the sensors of her flagship, the Null Star. They reported one tiny ship inbound- which was definitely custom-designed by the Eve in question, and bristling with sensor arrays. She estimated it likely had a single-digit life support capacity, and similar interior space, so she had to agree with Ginny’s statement of ‘not nearly big enough’.
Rather than answering verbally, she picked one of the docking cradles on the Null Star’s through-deck hangar and sent its identifier to Ginny, who promptly consulted her nav computer and the Database to decide exactly how she was going to approach it. Finally, she teleported herself down to meet her new daughter and concealed her amusement as the database disseminated the parking space identifier to the hundred or so Eves that had already requested it. As expected, she got there before Ginny did.
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Poor Emma Granger, she's probably the World's Best Mum just for dealing with all the hectic things her daughter gets into. Interested to know more about Ginny's new relatives though
Not even sub-space, just no space lol
11400309
Hmm... I'm not sure I gather your meaning?
11400349
Kirk: has subspace comms and warps in subspace
Ginny and the Eves: Warp drives? Where we're going we don't need warp drives!
11400400
Ahh! Doc Brown!
... But yes, that is so true. Especially when you consider that the Void Weave Drive does not double as an in-universe warp drive, only an interdimensional drive (incl. Void propulsion) or- if you fenagle it right- low-output reactionless drive in-universe.
The sequence has other tech for that (in-universe warp or in-universe reactionless drives)- and her ship isn't equipped with it.
11400447
Not yet ;)
11400400
At least it's not the Warp from 40K. I hope.
After this chapter, I think I know how drug inducted logic works. You just wing it
👍
I came for Hogwards and got Star Trek
Seriously... They send someone to investigate alien or something similar and give the lead person retarded henchmen? Something is seriously wrong with the gavourment