Mist of Shadows
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Travels in the Multiverse Part 4
🕑 Added 2020-09-07 15:18:35 +0000 UTCHarry scowled as he hung up the phone. "Her phone is disconnected or I got the number wrong, three times."
"That's not good," Myst said as he handed Harry a chocolate bar, not sure why her phone would be disconnected considering Hermione should be with Sirius and the Weasleys at Grimmauld Place. "Maybe they got a new number?"
"My luck isn't that good," Harry grumbled and took a bite of his chocolate bar, knowing he was probably still suffering from dementor exposure.
"Maybe they moved or turned the phones off before they went on vacation," Amy suggested, knowing Hermione's family liked going on vacation during the summer so it wasn't out of the question that they'd merely turned the phones off, just weird.
"Let's find Sirius," Harry said, trying not to worry about the fact that he couldn't get in touch with Hermione and failing as she hadn't mentioned any vacation plans on the train.
"Give me a second." Myst focused on Big Ben and used his precog to check the area to see if he could find a safe place to drop everyone. 'Cameras and more cameras. Yeah, I should have expected that for downtown London.' He pictured the area above the clock and focused as if he was teleporting there and smiled when he got a flash of precog of the city looking down at it. He focused to the north and swapped to looking at a teleport point a mile to the north.
"Getting closer," Myst muttered as he 'walked' his point of view to the north and east until he was in the right general area. "I'll be right back." He vanished from sight then teleported and blinked when his dimension detection senses noticed a pocket dimension where Sirius's house should be. "That's certainly one way to do it."
He focused on the pocket dimension and caught a flash of a drawing room and a wizard in his thirties looking at the Black Family portrait with a girl that looked a lot like Amy. "Good, she's alive." He teleported back to the corner shop then teleported to the drawing room with Harry, Amy and Noelle then dropped his invisibility as they spun to look at the group. "Surprise?"
Sirius's hand paused on its way to his wand as he saw Harry and a second Hermione. "What's going on?" he asked as he grabbed his wand and pointed it at the newcomers who shouldn't be able to get into the house with the fidelius up.
"Dementors," Harry admitted, relieved to see Hermione was safe even if she had her wand pointed at the group.
"Harry's cousin had his soul ripped out by a dementor and we figured there was no point letting his aunt and uncle kill him," Myst explained, fairly sure Harry didn't actually want to explain the entire mess.
"Prove you're actually Harry," Hermione ordered as she glanced between Harry and the red haired version of herself, that was wearing a silk dress that clung to her curves that she'd never have worn anywhere near the wizarding world, even if it did look amazing.
"I'd solemnly swear that I'm up to no good, but Pettigrew is Voldemort's bitch so I'll just have to go with you used a time turner to take extra classes in third year and we saved Sirius by cheating time," Harry offered. "I could also mention all of the times you nagged me about homework but I think the entire dorm knows about that one."
Hermione jumped forward and pulled Harry into a hug. "It's good to see you!"
Harry hugged his friend, feeling his ribs protest the pressure a bit but not caring as he'd had a long day. "I tried calling."
"It wouldn't have helped," Hermione admitted, her voice hitching as she thought about her dead parents, "my house is gone."
"What do you mean gone?" Harry asked in concern.
"Death Eaters attacked and burned it down with my parents inside," Hermione said with a sniffle, clinging to Harry for support.
"When?" Harry demanded, looking at Sirius.
"Last night, we tried to call but Petunia said you were out, I guess I shouldn't be surprised she didn't bother telling you," Sirius complained.
"Do they have any suspects?" Harry demanded.
"Tonks said one of the neighbors mentioned one of the cloaked figures had long blond hair but muggle testimony isn't exactly proof of much in the wizarding world," Sirius explained, feeling like sneaking over to Malfoy's house and burning it to the ground or doing something equally drastic.
Harry held Hermione, wishing he could turn back time and save them but knowing they'd never be able to get a time turner in time. "Please tell me that he's not getting away with it."
"There's nothing legal we can do about it," Sirius admitted reluctantly.
"How about illegal?" Harry demanded.
"Lots," Sirius replied with a slowly growing grin, glad that Harry was finally showing some Marauder spirit.
"Including mind reading, tossing a truck through Malfoy's house and a fair amount of character assassination," Myst offered.
"What about just regular assassination?" Harry asked.
"We'd have to get through the defenses on his house and those aren't easy, especially since Voldemort has probably improved them and may even be in residence," Sirius admitted then looked at the stranger with glowing purple eyes. "Then again we have someone that apparated through a fidelius charm."
"Technically I teleported, I can't actually apparate as I'm not a wizard, or at least your type of wizard. I also knew where to find your house for various reasons which is why the fidelius wasn't as much help as it should be. But yeah, if you have a decent plan that doesn't involve charging at a dark lord head first, I'm all ears," Myst offered, not wanting to risk his life on a dream and a hope even if it was for revenge, something he could appreciate and understand.
"Not yet," Harry admitted.
"I want the Death Eaters dead," Hermione said, her voice sounded strangely cold.
'This's better than the book,' Noelle thought as she studied Hermione and Harry. "Do you have a plan?" she asked Myst.
"I know some rituals that should let us increase our magic and I know some people that don't need their magic," Myst offered.
"What's in it for you?" Sirius asked warily.
"Beyond the magic I'm going to pick up helping you and the satisfaction of seeing a bunch of terrorists dead, nothing really. I mean, I'm sure you don't need all of the gold the Death Eaters have stashed away, but that's not really what I'm after."
"What are you after?" Hermione asked as she glanced at the unfamiliar glowing runes floating over the stranger's head, wishing she had her books with her so she could decipher what those runes actually meant.
"Mostly magic. I'm a dimensional traveler and have some interesting magical abilities, I could really use someone to teach me a couple spells or at least cast a fidelius charm on my future base or some space expansion charms. I figure if I help you, you can help me."
"Dimensional traveler? Can you prove that?" Sirius asked.
"I could take you to a different world, tell you secrets about your own world that none of you know or I could do something you can’t like," Myst floated off the ground, "fly, but there's no guarantee that any of the secrets would match up or that you don't have an easy way to fake flight. Do you have any veritaserum?"
"I could ask Snivellus but he left when I kicked Molly out and Albus told the order to work on their missions or go home and get sleep, I can't see him helping," Sirius admitted, slightly annoyed that Severus had been one of the few reasonable people about the whole mess.
"Why did you kick out Mrs Weasley?" Harry asked in confusion.
Sirius scowled as he thought about Molly Weasley. "Molly thought it was a good idea to put Hermione to work cleaning this shithole by hand and was arguing that we shouldn't tell you about Hermione's parents, so that you would be more careful about leaving your aunt's house. She also implied that I was after your girl. The old bag is lucky I didn't set her on fire."
"After what?" Harry asked.
"She implied that I shouldn't be alone with Hermione," Sirius said.
"Why?" Harry asked, not understanding why the hell that mattered.
"Probably because she thinks I'd try to seduce her or something," Sirius complained. "Even ignoring the part where she's less than half my age, breaking the half plus seven rule, I know you'd kill me for taking advantage of her and rightly so."
Harry shook his head. "I doubt she'd need help."
"That was so not the point," Sirius muttered, thinking of Molly's rant. "Either way the daffy bint is lucky I didn't set her on fire."
"If it makes you feel better, I probably know where the rest of Riddle's horcruxes are and we can toast them for magic," Myst offered.
"Do you have proof?" Sirius asked in surprise.
"Normally I'd say no, but this is the House of Black and your brother was named Regulus, right?" Myst asked, hoping the locket was somewhere in the house.
"What does my brother have to do with anything?" Sirius asked.
"He stole one of Riddle's horcruxes after he realized just how insane Voldemort was," Myst replied.
"How would you prove that?" Sirius asked.
"Call Kreacher and ask. Regulus told him to destroy a locket, but he never managed to destroy it because you need something like a basilisk infused goblin silver sword, fiendfyre or a magical ritual of destruction to destroy it, stuff that house elves generally don't have access to even in the House of Black," Myst explained.
"Kreacher!" Sirius called out. "Come here!"
Kreacher popped in. "Bad Master calls Kreacher?"
"Did Regulus give you a locket to destroy?" Sirius asked.
"Kreacher is bad elf, Kreacher couldn't break it," Kreacher whined, fingers digging into the dirty pillow case he was wearing.
"Bring me the locket, we'll destroy it," Sirius said.
"Bad Master thinks he can do what Kreacher can't," Kreacher complained as he stalked out of the room, unable to ignore a direct command.
"Yes," Sirius replied flippantly.
Myst shook his head. "There is something seriously wrong with that elf, beyond the fact that he hates you."
"You could fill a book," Sirius muttered. "So, where did you get a second Hermione?"
Amy grinned. "I just look like her."
"Metamorph or polyjuice accident?" Sirius asked as he studied Amy's face.
"Shape changing and she's hot," Amy replied unrepentantly.
Hermione stared at Amy. "What?"
"In my world I'm a famous healer, I wanted to have some fun and look like someone else, I wasn't expecting to actually run into you," Amy admitted.
"Let me guess, it's a natural ability?" Sirius asked.
"No, mine comes from a bracelet," Amy said as she gestured at Myst. "He has the ability to create magical crystals that give people copies of his powers," she explained, trusting the group of magic users she’d spent so much time reading about and may or may not have written some shipping fics for.
"What type of powers do you have?" Hermione asked as she looked over Harry's shoulder at Myst, curious about an ability she'd never heard of.
"Healing, crystal growth, telekinesis, power nullification…" Myst trailed off as he realized he could actually prove something. "Actually, I should be able to remove the portrait of Sirius's mother with my power nullification ability."
"Considering Albus refuses to remove the painting, I'll take the help," Sirius said, happy with the idea of removing his mother's portrait.
"Why won't he help?" Harry asked.
"Because I'd burn the portrait and he thinks family is important," Sirius said, fairly sure that Albus could have transfigured the wall to water or ripped out that section of the wall and repaired everything if he was serious about getting rid of the portrait.
"Let's deal with her portrait then we can toast the fragment of Riddle's soul in the locket and see about rounding up the rest of his soul anchors," Myst suggested, looking forward to picking up wizarding magic to expand his capabilities.
"How sure are you that the ritual won't cause him to possess you?" Sirius asked warily.
"One of my abilities protects me from mental influence…" he trailed off as Sirius hit him with some type of charm. "Was that really necessary?" he asked, not sure what he'd hit him with, just that it wasn't dangerous or his precog would have warned him.
"Sirius!" Hermione snapped. "You can't just randomly hit people with jinxes."
“Obviously he can,” Noelle said quietly, amused.
"It was just a cheering charm, I wanted some proof," Sirius explained unrepentantly, glad that the stranger wasn't taking it personally. "So, you can hand out crystals with copies of your powers. How long does it take to make them?"
Myst shrugged. "A minute or two a crystal, but I can only make five crystals a day and I've already made five today, so I'd have to wait until tomorrow to make more. I need to make a wand to boost my own powers which will cost one, but I'm willing to make four crystals with useful powers tomorrow for help learning magic."
"That's it?" Hermione asked, surprised that he wasn't asking for more.
"I have a decent collection of interesting abilities, but they're basically natural abilities, I don't have anything that passes for formal training," Myst admitted.
Sirius glanced between Amy and Noelle. "What about you two?"
"Our abilities aren't magic," Amy replied. "I can heal people and Noelle copies creatures and people when she touches them."
"But don't touch me, my creations are insane and homicidal," Noelle warned them.
"You couldn't have said that earlier?" Sirius asked as he took a step back, not that he was all that close to start with.
"I'm not used to having to warn people," Noelle admitted, thinking of her previous appearance.
"On that note, can you show me your mother's portrait so we can get the show on the road?" Myst asked as he gestured towards the door.
"This way," Sirius replied as he led the way out of the room, trying not to get his hopes up in case the stranger couldn't remove his mother's portrait.
Myst followed Sirius through the creepy house and to the entrance hall where Walburga's portrait was hanging on the wall.
"Mudbloods in my house!" the portrait screamed.
Myst focused on the threads of off white energy he could see clinging to the edge of the portrait. "This should work…" he trailed off as he used his suppression power on the threads and Walburga's face froze. "Oops?" he muttered as Kreacher walked into the hallway and the portrait fell off the wall, crashing to the ground.
"Mistress!" Kreacher blurted in shock as he stared in horror at the painting on the ground, having seen it freeze in place before it fell over.
Myst quickly focused on the furious house elf and used his suppression ability as Kreacher raised his hand to blast him or curse him. "None of that."
Kreacher stared in disbelief at his hand then gestured more forcefully. "What did you do?" he demanded as he glared at Myst.
"Blood traitors attacked me!" Walburga's muffled voice called out from the face down portrait.
"No attacking anyone here," Sirius ordered, slightly disappointed that his mother's portrait hadn't been destroyed or at least stunned longer than a couple of seconds.
"Bad Master!" Kreacher spat.
Myst used telekinesis to lift the locket out of Kreacher's hand while he was distracted and floated it into the air out of Kreacher's reach.
"Give that back!" Kreacher shouted as he jumped for the locket, not used to being unable to just snap his fingers and levitate things.
"No," Myst replied absently as he studied the locket with his magical sight. He scowled as he saw the black lines of energy stitched into a silently screaming twisted fragment of a ghost that was stretched over a rather elegant multicolored web of magic that was most likely the original enchantment. "This is worse than I was expecting."
Hermione pulled her attention off Kreacher, who'd gone back to trying to pick up the heavy painting without magic and having little success. "Worse?"
"Riddle stitched a fragment of a soul over a work of art, with magic that makes my skin crawl," Myst explained as he studied the black lines of magic.
"How do you know that?" Hermione asked.
Myst turned and looked at Hermione. "True Sight, or at least that was what The Traveler called his magical sight. It basically lets me see magic and pierce illusions."
"Traveler?" Sirius asked.
"The person I got my abilities from," Myst replied as he examined the soul fragment stitched to the locket once more. "Remind me to make you a True Sight crystal tomorrow, you'd probably get a decent amount of use out of it."
"I can do that," Hermione agreed.
"Now what?" Harry asked, not sure what he could help with.
"The soul fragment should be 'alive' enough for the ritual to consume." Myst turned to look at Sirius. "Do you have somewhere we can set up?"
"That depends, how much space you need?" Sirius asked.
"That depends on which ritual we want to use, some of the personal rituals don't take much space while most of the group rituals require a decent amount of space." Myst shrugged. "I know a couple of rituals but most of my knowledge about rituals involves building rituals to fit particular worlds which means for the best results I'm going to need a star chart or a few weeks watching people cast magic."
"How does a star chart help?" Harry asked.
"Some rituals require the proper alignment of celestial bodies or at least the moon to be in the proper phase. If you want to skip the work, I know a quick and dirty group ritual that involves dancing naked under the light of the full moon and sacrificing a magical creature that generally gives about five percent of the creature's magical power to all of the participants, but it takes at least a dozen magic users to power and will generally leave everyone exhausted the next day."
"You want us to dance naked?!" Harry blurted out.
"No comment," Myst replied with a grin as he glanced between Amy and Hermione. "Joking aside, that particular ritual would be a really bad idea to use to destroy the locket, it doesn't have enough safeguards."
"In that case, let's hit the library, we have an entire astronomy section and a large collection of information on rituals that might help," Sirius suggested as he turned and headed towards the library, glad that he'd locked it when he overheard Molly talk about tossing out anything dangerous.
"Sounds good," Myst agreed as they followed Sirius, fairly sure he could come up with something to boost everyone's magic without turning them into Voldemort clones.
0o0o0
Myst glanced up from the star chart he'd been studying for the last couple of minutes and glanced over at where Harry was whispering with Hermione at another table. "That should be enough to cobble together a basic ritual, but we're going to have to do something about Harry's curse scar before he uses the ritual."
Sirius closed the book on dark rituals he was looking through. "Do you have any ideas?"
"Amy is a healer, if I focus on suppressing his scar while someone cuts it off, we can probably break the link without any lasting damage and Amy can regrow the skin," Myst offered, not sure Harry would go for something that required them cutting on his face.
"That's a terrible idea," Hermione complained.
Harry turned to look at Myst. "I’d love to get rid of my scar, let’s do it now."
Sirius pulled his wand out and pointed it at Harry. "Stupify."
Hermione turned and glared at Sirius as Harry slumped in his chair, having to force herself to release her wand which she had grabbed for when Sirius had hexed Harry. "Was that really necessary?"
"We're going to be cutting off part of his face. Would you want to remember someone cutting on your face?" Sirius asked as he put his wand back in his pocket, willing to take the risk of some scarring if it severed Harry's connection with Voldemort.
"There has to be a better solution," she complained.
"Like what?" Myst asked. "If it was something simple Dumbledore would have already done it."
"I should be able to numb the pain and fix everything before he wakes up," Amy assured them, having fixed countless scars over the years.
"I'll be right back," Sirius said as he left the library, knowing his great uncle had kept some tools that would help.
"How much of a power boost do you think the ritual will give us?" Hermione asked, trying to distract herself from thinking about them cutting into Harry's forehead.
"Anywhere from eight to maybe fifteen percent?" Myst offered, not exactly sure how much power they'd get from the ritual.
"Wait, you said the other one gave everyone five percent, why is this one so much better?" Hermione asked.
"The moon ritual doesn't have the same safeguards while the one I cobbled together splits the power evenly, but by doing so processes it better like a line of resistors in parallel," Myst replied. "It should also protect everyone from getting corrupted by dark magic, which is a good thing considering I have three dementors to destroy and part of a dark wizard."
"I guess that makes sense," Hermione admitted. "What else are you planning on using it on?"
"Knockturn alley has a number of hags that like eating muggle children, they certainly don't need to exist," Myst replied as he worked on jotting down his notes on the ritual.
"What if they're innocent?" Hermione asked, uneasy about condemning everyone just because of stereotypes.
"I'm a telepath, it's pretty easy to check," Myst assured her as Sirius walked in with a pair of pliers and a scalpel.
"Let's get this over with," Sirius complained as he walked over to Harry. "Tell me when."
Myst focused on Harry's curse scar and used his suppression power, doing his best to lock it down so that they could remove it. "Now."
Sirius grabbed Harry's curse scar and used the scalpel to cut a decent sized chunk of flesh out before dropping the mess of tissue on the table where it hissed and darkened rapidly. "That's nasty."
"A little warning next time," Amy complained as she rushed over and touched Harry's face as he woke up screaming, the stunning spell not enough to keep him unconscious. She numbed the area around where his scar had been then started regrowing the missing flesh.
Harry stared in horror at the black mass of flesh on the table that was quickly decaying. "I could have done without seeing that."
"Sorry," Sirius replied as he set the tools on the table.
"Why do you have old surgical tools?" Hermione asked.
"Most of my family were not nice people," Sirius replied, declining to explain his comment further.
"Is it gone?" Harry asked as Amy pulled her hand back.
"I'm done," Amy assumed him.
Myst focused on Harry's forehead and used his True Sight, wanting to make sure the curse hadn't left anything behind. "You're good or at least there isn't any dark magic in your forehead anymore."
"Now what?" Harry asked, feeling in an inexplicably better mood, though he still wanted to remove the Malfoys from the face of the Earth.
"We can either do the ritual tonight or I can make some mental defense crystals in the morning for an additional layer of protection," Myst offered, knowing he'd feel better if they had copies of his Inviolable power.
Sirius glanced between Harry and Hermione, figuring they could use a decent night's sleep before they tried a dangerous ritual. "Considering how long we've been up, I'd rather not botch a ritual because we got impatient."
"In that case, we'll deal with things in the morning. Can we borrow a couple of rooms?" Myst asked as he looked at Sirius.
"I have plenty of space," Sirius replied. "Is there any of your talents you can actually teach or do we need a bracelet like Amy has?" Sirius asked curiously. “Since you don’t know our style of magic there is the possibility we can actually learn them from either you or the crystals.”
"It's worth a shot to see if you can learn them." Myst turned to look at Amy. "You might be able to talk Amy into letting you borrow her crystal for a few minutes in exchange for helping her charm a bike to fly."
"That would help keep me from running my flight crystal dry all the time," Amy agreed.
"You realize charming muggle objects is illegal, right?" Sirius asked with amusement.
"Only on this Earth," Myst replied with a grin. "Besides, do you even care what the ministry thinks?"
"Not particularly," Sirius admitted.
Comments
Mist of Shadows
Considering he's an unstable sociopathic lunatic, probably a bad idea.
William Jackson
If Noelle's clones automatically hate the original, would it be a good or bad idea to clone Voldemort?
