Chapter 16

The first of September had come and gone, and Harry and Hermione were missing their friend Dora since she went off to her school in Scotland, but they did not have much time to do so. With Dora and Hermione learning Harry’s technique for reading in the real world and then studying and learning the material in their mindscapes, it was decided by the adults in their group to see how far the children could go. It was arranged for the Grangers and the Smythe sisters to take sabbaticals from their jobs for the year so they could travel the length and breadth of the British Isles in pursuit of knowledge for the little sponges they cared for. Andi met with Professor McGonagall, the Assistant Headmistress of Hogwarts, and convinced her to let Dora leave with her mom or dad every Thursday afternoon to meet with a teacher who specialized in training metamorphs of all levels to control their gifts. Since Dora was the only known class 5 metamorphmagus that Britain had seen in centuries, it was definitely something that would be approved. Even Albus Dumbledore approved, as he hoped that he would be able to use her abilities for his own purposes in the future once she left Hogwarts. It was generally agreed by everyone that her future lay in working for the ministry as an Auror or an Unspeakable, and any extra training that she acquired could only benefit the nation as a whole.

While that excuse was valid, it was only one weekend a month that she would be attending training by Chief Atsa Ahiga of the Navajo, who was a Native American skin-walker and had agreed to travel to England once a month to train Harry and Dora in their shape changing gifts. The rest of the weekends were spent learning, having fun, and spending time with Susan and her brothers, since they had sort of been adopted into their family group that surrounded Harry. They spent the first few weekends exploring the Museums in London and its surrounding burrows, both the mundane and the magical sections of each. It was decided that they would spend their weekends in October going to the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, not only for their wonderful exhibits on history, but also for the Magical sections which had pensieves that projected memories from historical figures going all the way back to the time of Merlin. One memory that fascinated the group, and especially Dan and Emma, was a servant’s memory of serving the nobles in the court of Camelot. Dan and Emma were both lifelong Aurthurians and had passed some of their fascination with the legends of the Once and Future King to their only daughter. Hermione went to the attendant for that section and asked a question which when answered, made the Mundane among them shudder with the casual way people without magic were treated throughout the history of Britannia.

“Excuse me sir, could you tell me why there are no memories from Merlin or any of the Knights of Avalon?” Hermione asked the attendant.

“Well miss, when Avalon vanished with all of its knowledge and magic, the wizards of the world descended on our island in search of answers to where it went. Some were seeking it for the knowledge that Merlin was rumored to have compiled in his long life, others for the artifacts and legendary treasure housed inside the castle, and still others were there out of curiosity. The memories that we have are from the peasants and servants who were left behind when Avalon vanished into the void, taken for study by the wizards who sought to understand what had happened.”

Dan spoke up with a question of his own. “Were all of the servants and staff magical?” When everyone looked at him for clarification he continued. “It was my understanding that you had to be magical, at least to the level of a squib to give your memories for viewing and study. Was there another way of getting memories from muggles that has been lost to history?” Dan asked the attendant with little hope that he was wrong about what he thought happened and the attitude it would show, unfortunately his fears were confirmed by the attendant’s answer.

“In the search for answers, everyone was questioned and those that had memories that were needed for study were encouraged to give those memories up for the good of the people who needed to get answers. In the case of muggles whose memories were needed, their families were often obliviated about the fact that they were even missing a family member. It made it easier for them since in their simple minds, they could not comprehend the sacrifice that was needed for the good of all wizards. It is unfortunate that to this day there has been no method found by which a muggle’s memories can be taken for a pensieve without the muggle losing all of their memories and intelligence. When we in the wizarding world must acquire those memories, we try to make the donor comfortable, usually in an institution that can take care of them in their own world.”

“What kind of institution?” Harry asked.

“I believe they are called sanitariums or mental hospitals. It is so clever of the muggles, coming up with places where their lesser minds can be taken care of, all without magic. They are such clever animals, aren’t they?”

Dora and Hermione grabbed Harry and hurriedly led him from the room once they noticed that his eyes had begun glowing green and his fists were clenched so hard, his fingernails were cutting into the skin of his palms. It took very little time for the adults to catch up with them, Dan having to practically drag Emma with him since she wanted to give the attendant a very vocal and vociferous piece of her mind.

“I think that we are done here for the day.” Andi said as she looked around at the faces of the people in their group. When she saw agreement on everyone’s face, she pulled out a rope for everyone to grab and when they had, she activated the portkey to take them to the apartment that Lady Abigail had procured for them in the heart of London.

Once everyone had steadied themselves, or in the case of Harry, picked himself up off the ground where he had gone sprawling on arrival, Ted suggested that they all move to the sitting room and talk about what they had learned about wizards. It was Emma who started the conversation.

“Is that really what wizards think about us, that we are just clever animals that have no real intellect?” Her tone was both furious and disbelieving as she asked Ted and Andi for clarification.

“I wish I could tell you otherwise, but to most purebloods and even many half-bloods, the only world that counts is the wizarding world. As we told you all in the sitting room at Downing Street, the wizarding world here in Britain and Europe will use everything they can to influence Hermione, Dora, and Harry to look down on anything and everything that is not magical in nature.” Andi sighed as she looked at the three kids present before she continued. “When I first started talking to Ted, he was hiding in a hidden cove on the far side of the Black Lake, upset that he had not received any letters from his family in more than a year. At the end of our fifth year, he had gotten off the Hogwarts Express, only to find that there was no one to greet him or take him home. Ted got a ride on the knight bus and when he arrived, he found that his family had moved away during the school year and no one could tell him where they went. It was not long after he arrived there that a ministry official who ‘just happened’ to be in the neighborhood, told Ted that he would help him find his family and then took him to one of his roommate’s home where the family offered to let him stay for the summer.”

Andi put her hand on top of Ted’s hand and then continued. “During that summer, and the next year at Hogwart’s Ted sent owls over and over, but they all came back with his letters undelivered. When I found Ted by the lake, I was looking for a place to get away from the people in my house which was Slytherin, because I had just received a letter from my mother telling me that I was to be married after I finished my seventh year to a pureblood idiot who was in the glorious service of the Dark Lord. To avoid thinking about my problems, I asked Ted about his, and he told me that his family would have never abandoned him since they loved him and he was their only son out of five children, and there was no other family to carry on the family name. After getting the whole story, I drew some conclusions from the information he gave me and I became very suspicious about what had happened to him. We agreed to meet in London a week after we returned from school, so that I could help him with his search. He didn’t want to go to the home he had stayed in the year before because he felt that he was only there to meet and be encouraged to court the sister of his roommate, who was a walking advertisement against inbreeding, being ugly and not even having enough magic to do more than the most basic of magical skills. I suggested that he go to Gringotts and have an Heir test done on him to see if he was related to any magical families that might be willing to help him.”

“It was the next day when he sent me an owl telling me that he had found out that he had an uncle who was a wizard who had been killed along with his family during the war with Grindelwald. Since Ted was the only remaining magical relative, he inherited his uncle’s estate which included a modest house outside of London and a small amount of Galleons that would help him be comfortable in the magical world. When we met up, I asked him if he would take me to his new home and he was more than willing to show it off to me. We arrived at the house and I was very surprised to feel very powerful wards which scanned me for any intent to harm their master. I knew that only the most powerful and light associated families in our world had intent wards as part of their protection, since there was only one family who knew how to cast them, and once cast, only those of noble intent could pass through them. There was many a pureblood family who had to move their family homes when one of their precious idiot sons swore his life and soul to a dark lord, and then came home and was banned from the house by the very wards set to protect him. The Black family is rumored to have a family estate and manor somewhere in England, but no one has seen it for generations since it can only be opened by a True Black Lord who is not steeped in the dark.”

Ted continued on from where his wife left off. “My uncle and his wife had left a letter in the library for their children that had instructions for the different defenses and features that had been placed around the house. It explained about keying people into the wards, with a warning about not trusting everyone with access. It also gave instructions for gaining me access to the family Grimoire, which leaned heavily to interrogation and fact finding spells, either with a bent toward law enforcement or in my case, becoming a lawyer. I very wisely shared the family spells with my friend Andromeda Black, though my Uncle and Aunt’s portrait castigated me on more than one occasion for doing so, since the book was full of family magics that were our family’s trade. At the time, I did not realize that family spells were guarded very heavily, to give the family advantages in certain areas of commerce, or livelihood.”

“What do you mean by that? Shouldn’t all knowledge be equally accessible to all who want to learn?” Hermione asked with a tone of incredulity at the nerve of people hiding knowledge. “If you hide information from others, than how is knowledge and understanding supposed to advance if everyone has to do the same experiments to gain the same information. That must have set the magical world back centuries at least.”

“You are not necessarily wrong, but you are thinking in terms of things like medicine and science. The context that the family Grimoires land in are more along the lines of research that leads to the atomic bomb. If your family or country found a way to make a more powerful weapon, would you then go share it with others who might then pass it on to one of your enemies who might use it against you? There are feuds that go back over a thousand years in the magical world between families, and the mindset of European wizards is locked into a more feudal mindset. What you have to realize is that the average magical user can live to around a century and a half, with some living even longer, depending on their power and the life they live. The man you call Whiskers was born around 1805 and is not even close to the oldest wizard or witch in our society. Madame Marchbanks is the one in charge of administering our magical exams, and she was not young at the time she gave Dumbledore his N.E.W.T.’s in 1823, and that is not even counting people like the Flamels. This means that right now, you could go and talk to people who remember back to the time when the colonies in America were revolting against England. To the Magical world, Merlin and the Founders are only six or seven generations back in time, and a witch’s child bearing years are from puberty till around 120 years old, give or take a couple decades. That is why change does not come easy to the magical world; to them, things like the car, plane, and television are just fads that will soon disappear into the ashcan of history.”

“How can they survive in the modern world if their attitudes are so archaic,” asked Emma.

“For the most part, most wizards and witches choose to emulate the ostrich in their approach to the modern mundane world. They bury their heads in the sand and believe that the problem will go away if they just ignore it.”

“That is a recipe for disaster, every day the mundane world comes up with new ways to see what their enemies are up to, and one of these days that will include the magical world.” Dan stated while looking bewildered at the thought of the blind stupidity that was willfully practiced by magical society as a whole. “When I was in Sport And Social, we were getting new toys that enabled us to see the body heat of people in a building, and there were rumors that they were putting up satellites that could do even more than that from Low Earth Orbit. You have to assume that their abilities have only gone up in magnitude in the years since I retired.” Everyone in the group agreed on the blindness of the wizarding world, and that there would come a day soon that the whole mundane world and not just the governments would be able to see the world that hid inside their very midst. The only question was how would the American or Soviet people would react to an unknown threat that was in the very hearts of their country in the middle of the cold war.

“Did you ever find your family,” Harry asked?

“It took a few years,” Ted answered, “But Andi and I found a spell that allowed parents to find lost children using a blood ritual and a runically carved device. We used Arithmancy to disassemble the spell and ritual and were able to make it work in the reverse so that a child could find his parents. At the time, blood rituals were looked down on in England, but they had not yet made them illegal, so Andi and I preformed the necessary steps and it pointed west, even at the most westerly point in England. Andi made some excuse to her family about needing some time before she got married to her betrothed, and then we went to America, the long way to lose the two men her family had sent to keep an eye on their daughter. She popped all over Europe, starting in France, then Italy, Greece, West Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia before meeting me in Reykjavik, Iceland where we got a portkey to New York.”

“In New York, the pointer still showed mostly west, but when we tried it in Boston the angle had changed a little, so we went to Grand Rapids, Michigan where there was a significant magical community, and the pointer now was as much South as West. We finally found them in Kansas City, Missouri, and they were stunned to see me since they had been told that I had been killed in a magical accident. We all decided that for their safety, they should stay in the states, since there was very little of the blood prejudice that infected the magical societies in Europe. After staying with them for a couple of weeks, Andi and I decided to explore America before we went back to England, and we ended up in Las Vegas, Nevada where a wizard named P. Aaron Sivle informed us that betrothal contracts were outlawed in the US and that we could be married and it would hold up in England under the laws of the ICW. We went back and retrieved my family from Missouri by portkey, and the next day we were married, spending a two week honeymoon in Santa Barbara, California courtesy of my parents.”

“It was when we got back to England that everything went to Hell in a Hand basket.” Andi chuckled. “We had every intention of leaving England and joining Ted’s family in America, but while we were gone, the Wizengamot had passed a law that restricted muggleborn and half-bloods from leaving England without a pureblood sponsor. We tried anyway, since I was from a pureblood family, but our marriage had been recorded and I was now Andromeda Tonks, not Black. My family tried to get the marriage annulled, but I was pregnant with Nymphadora, and the family scion I was betrothed to would not accept someone who had been sullied by a ‘mudblood’s spawn,’ and so they tried to claim breach of contract. I was thrown out of my family, and Ted and I barely escaped a death eater attack in Diagon Alley that was aimed at killing us both. We retreated behind the family wards at Ted’s house and made sure to practice the vigilance that Alastor Moody constantly preached. We were sort of at loose ends as to what to do, until we heard that one of our friends was about to be convicted and sent to Azkaban for selling merchandise that he had obtained in the mundane world. Ted and I presented ourselves as his lawyers, and we got the charge lowered to a fine and a slap on the wrist for selling without a permit, since there were stores in the alley that sold the same materials. It was then that we decided to become solicitors, and we began attending law school less than six months after our daughter was born.”

Dan summed up all of their feeling when he sighed and asked, “And you want our children to live and attend school in this bass ackwards society?” In between the laughter and trying to breath at his tension breaker, Andi and Ted were shaking their heads in a negative fashion.

XFXFXFXFXFXFXFXFXFXF* It was finally time for Harry and Dora to get their first lesson on morphing from Chief Atsa Ahiga, and they could barely contain their excitement. All three of the hyper children were at the breakfast table shortly after the sun arose, and the noise their chattering made soon woke the adults and drove them out of bed. Emma decided that the entire crew would go out for breakfast, since none of the adults wanted to cook that early, and Harry had been limited to cooking only two breakfasts a week since he still cooked enough to feed two whale sized humans which always meant there was waste since their entire group could not eat that much all together. It was only on the days that Ted or Andi were set to join them that they allowed Harry in the kitchen since one of the two adult magicals could cast a conditional stasis charm on the food that froze it in time; hot, warm, and ready to serve the next time it was needed. Harry had tried to use his own ability to emulate their charm, but through experimentation and scanning of the food Harry had cast his own stasis charm on, Ted and Andi had come to the conclusion that the food would be frozen in time for at least a millennium before the charm was weak enough to dispel. Dora’s quip about putting it in a time capsule so future historians would have the opportunity to feast on a traditional English breakfast did not make Harry feel better no matter how much Dora and Hermione were laughing, he was secretly scared that one of the adults would beat him for wasting food. While Harry’s heart now knew that he was cared for and probably even loved by his new family, the emotional scars of his childhood with the Dursleys still affected him in his subconscious mind.

After a nice breakfast full of Dora telling the others about her first month at Hogwarts as a third year and the new classes she was taking, it was time for them to meet their new teacher. The arrival of their group by portkey in a field that had been recently mowed was the first sign for the three that this might be a different lesson than they expected. The second sign was the fact that there was a giant wolf and an only slightly smaller black dog staring at them from about twenty feet away. Dan and Emma pulled the kids behind them to try and protect them, relying on Andi or Ted for protection, at least until the dog seemed to start laughing and then morphed into the man they had been introduced to at the end of summer.

“Stubby,” Harry and Hermione shouted together in surprise before Hermione went into her interrogation mode and began firing questions at him with the staccato repetition of a machinegun.

“How are you doing? Are you healing up from your illness, did the Doctors let you out early? Have you been eating enough? You look better, and better groomed, but you still look tired and drawn; are you sure you should be out of bed?” She would have kept going if she hadn’t been interrupted by Dora and Harry bursting into laughter at the stunned look on Stubby’s face, each using the other to remain upright.

“Hermione, take a breath and let the man answer at least one of your questions before you bring out the thumbscrews.” Dan said as he laughed along with his daughter’s friends.

Stubby looked at the little girl in front of him and wasn’t quite sure if the crack about thumbscrews was really a joke, based on the intense way she was looking at him. He decided that it was in his best interest to answer her as soon as possible.

“Thank you for your concern, Hermione. I have been at a private clinic in the south of France, along with my sister, getting over the years of neglect that our bodies went through from improper care and lack of real rest. Someday I will tell you all about those years, but for now I am here to help with your lessons in morphing. The two of you are metamorphmagi, which are the best of the morphing styles at least when it comes to people. I am an Animagus just like Harry’s parents, which means that I can transfigure myself into an animal form.” Stubby told them.

“That is so cool, I always wanted a dog,” Hermione squealed. “Harry, be a big dog, maybe like a mastiff if you can.” She commanded Harry while looking at him expectantly.

Harry shrugged, and before any of the adults, who knew it was impossible, could tell him so, changed himself into a large Saint Bernard. He looked happy when Hermione dove down and locked his head into a hug, happy as any of them had ever seen her. It was only the thump of Stubby falling over in stunned silence that drew notice to the four magic raised people who were staring at Harry’s canine form in disbelief.

“How did you do that Harry?” Dora asked.

“Do what?” Asked Harry’s human head, which was now on the Saint Bernard body.

“No, no, no Harry, either be Harry or the dog. You are going to give me nightmares if you keep your head on that body. Can’t you talk as a dog?” Hermione cried indignantly.

“I don’t know, I just thought I needed a human head to talk.” Harry paused in thought and then grinned, before changing into an overly large grey parrot and flying up to perch on Dora’s shoulder so she could scratch him under his chin. “Is this better? I can definitely talk in this form, and I think I could really fly if I got used to this body.”

The adults were all getting set to protest for one reason or another; the magical wanted to tell Harry that what he was doing was impossible, and the mundane wanted to protest the obvious breaking of the laws of physics such as the conservation of mass and energy since the bird form he was in was obviously lighter than his natural form or the form of the dog he had taken. Their tirades were preempted when the wolf that had stood observing them quietly, morphed into a very large and imposing man who looked like he could crack granite on his exposed abs.

Chief Atsa Ahiga of the Navajo was a throwback to the ancient warrior chiefs of the past who had ruled over vast sections of the virgin wilderness of America before the Europeans had come. He stood an imposing 6 foot six inches tall and weighed close to 300 pounds of solid, corded muscle, with none of the over-bulkiness that people got from going to the gym and using ‘natural’ supplements like the ones championed by the East German Women’s Olympic Teams. He was quite proud of the fact that he had never once stepped into, let alone darkened the door of a gym. All of his size and athleticism had come from working with horses, running the plains, and the odd jobs that creep up on you when you are a farmer trying to survive. It was a few months previous that he had been contacted by a friend of his who had served with him in the US Special Forces Magical Division in their youth, telling him that he had received a call asking him if he was willing to help train three children, confidentially, on the proper techniques to skinwalk or morph. He was intrigued when he was told that two of the children were what the Europeans called metamorphmagi. There were very few people that existed who according to his people, were blessed by the trickster, and to have the opportunity to train two of them was practically unheard of. His only concern had been the fact that he was required to give an oath not to reveal their identities or abilities to anyone without being expressly given permission. He tentatively agreed to meet with them once, giving his oath to keep their secrets, but he said that he would decide whether or not he would train them after their first lesson.

To say he was surprised when he recognized the son of James Potter as one of his potential students would be a definite understatement. He had known James Potter as a boy when he was serving in a joint task force that had been put together to hunt and kill Grindelwald and later, his Lieutenants as they spread out over the world after their master and his mundane puppet were defeated. Their staging area into Continental Europe was the Potter estate, since their commander was Charlus Potter and the Potter’s had a room that allowed them to be undetectably transported to any Potter property in the world in an instant. Those properties included sites in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Warsaw, along with many others dotted here and there out in the country sides of the contested nations. These properties were also used by his wife Lady Dorea Potter to smuggle out magical and mundane people who were being hunted and killed by Grindelwald, Hitler, and the Nazis. After the war had ended, they continued to use the property to hunt those who had escaped justice by fleeing to other countries and when James had been born, he had been named one of his godparents.

Over the years of James Potter’s youth, he had visited the Potter home to check on their family and to help train James in forms of magic not taught in Britain. It was he who had trained James, Sirius, and Peter to harness their animal forms so that they could help to control Remus Lupin’s wolf during the full moon. He had even offered to train Lupin how to have more control over the wolf inside of him, but Dumbledore had assured Lupin that it was impossible to do and so Moony had declined. It was with a broken heart that he searched for James Potter’s son after hearing about he and his wife being murdered. He set out to locate Sirius, only to find that he had been sent to Azkaban for betraying the Potter’s and murdering Peter Pettigrew. He tried to find Remus, but there was no sign of him anywhere in England, and he hit a wall when the trail led to Albus Dumbledore. It was a shock when the day after he had heard that Sirius had died trying to escape from Azkaban, he received a telephone call from ‘Stubby Boardman,’ asking if he was willing to train a new crop of Marauders, two who were metamorphmagus. He didn’t hesitate to say yes, considering he knew who Stubby Boardman really was; he considered it one of the greatest pranks that the marauders had ever played on the magical world. He found it even more impressive when he found out that Sirius Black, using a time turner, had taken a date to one of The Hobgoblins concerts and was heard loudly proclaiming that he could sing better than the no talent hack on the stage belting out tunes. Now it was time for him to once again help to train the future marauders in the best ways to carry on their progenitor’s mission of mirth.

A silent and wandless charm silenced all of the objections the adults were preparing to make and he looked them in the eyes one by one to make sure they knew he wanted them to stay silent. Once he had their nonverbal agreement, he turned to the kids and introduced himself.

“Hello children, my name is Chief Atsa Ahiga of the Navajo people, you may call me Chief Ahiga or sir; and I have been asked by your parents and friends to train you in what the magic users of my tribe call skinwalking.” He smiled at them as they focused on listening to him. “Since it would be ridiculous to train you without ensuring that your inner animal cannot overcome yourself and become dominant, the first thing you must learn is to structure and organize your thoughts. Next we will work on strengthening your sense of self and the knowledge that in your own mind, you are supreme.” He drew a breath before continuing and was interrupted by snickers, followed by giggles, and then breaking out into full on belly laughs from two of the three children.