Chapter 6

The next few days flew by, with the day starting with breakfast together before the group went their separate ways. The Grangers would head off to their conference and Ted would leave to go to his office or to court since he did have other clients beside the Smythe sisters and Harry Potter. Andi and the three children would go to the park where the kids would play until it was time for the library to open, they would then spend until lunch feeding Harry's cerebral needs. Sometimes the sisters would join them, and at other times they would have to leave to attend meetings that were extremely important to their future with Harry. After lunch Andi would take the children to the cinema, where Harry got to see his first movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Harry was amazed at what they were able to do with movie magic, and when they watched Willow the next day, he wondered if there were freaks like him in the movie industry since the spells that they did seemed so real. After then seeing the movies Beetlejuice and Big, Harry was more convinced than ever that there were others just like him out there, hiding their talents from the world around them. Why else would so many movies and books be about Magic and ghosts and fantasy creatures unless they were trying to prepare everyone who didn't have special gifts for when their secret world was one day revealed. Harry decided at that moment that he would develop some way to sense others with gifts so that he would know who he could talk to about the things he didn't understand.

Following their after lunch cinema excursions, they would head back into the depths of the library to continue meeting Harry's educational needs. Often, when dinner time came, the three friends would have to be practically dragged from the library to go meet Hermione's parents and Ted Tonks at where ever they had agreed to meet that night. After dinner, it was time for Harry to try and teach Dora and Hermione how to meditate and enter their mindscape. In this area, Harry met his first failure and disappointment, when he could not get either one to sink deep into their own mind. He forgot that he did not have his own breakthrough until he had been meditating for almost eight months. Wednesday night in a fit of frustration, Harry called out for help from a source that Elric had said might be able to help.

Harry made sure the door to the study that they were using was closed so as not to disturb the adults who were speaking in the sitting room. Once he was sitting and once more comfortable, he called, "Hedwig, I need your help if you could spare the time please."

With a flash of light, accompanied by both heat and cold, Hedwig appeared above him and came in for a landing on his shoulder. Both girls were startled and threw themselves back with a cry of fright. Hermione was going to go into her interrogation mode that she went into when something that she didn't understand upset her carefully ordered world, when Dora spoke up with awe and excitement in her tone.

"Harry, do you know what that bird is?" Dora was practically vibrating in excitement, and suddenly her hair began to cycle through different colors as she stared at Hedwig. This pretty much shut down Hermione's thought processes, as she knew that neither the bird appearing in a flash of ice and flame, nor her friend Dora's Technicolor hair were possible which led Hermione to the conclusion that her mind had broken, and having friends was just an insane dream.

Harry was delighted though, and spoke up. "Dora, you're a freak like me!" Harry could probably have used a better word to describe Dora and himself; gifted, unique, talented, any of those would have worked better than freak but that was what he had been called for his gifts so that was what he associated with others like him.

Hermione snapped out of her musings about insanity, and chastised Harry. "That is not something you call anyone in polite society Harry. Calling someone a freak is like, is like, well it is just impolite and downright rude. Apologize to Dora right this minute." Hermione emphasized her demand by stomping her foot, and that was too much for Harry and Dora to take. Both of them began to howl in uncontrolled laughter, each having to lean on the other to remain standing; Harry even developed a case of hiccups which made Dora laugh even more. Hermione began to pout as her friends laughed at her, not understanding that their laughter was as much a release of hidden tension as it was in reaction to the surfacing of her 'little miss bossy' personality trait as her friends would call it from that day forward. Once Harry and Dora realized that they were hurting Hermione's feelings, they were once again able to get control of themselves; though a giggle escaped from time to time.

"Hermione, stop pouting and come over here." Dora directed her friend, and pulled her into a hug when she drew close enough. "Harry reacted because he doesn't know the right terms for what I can do. I am going to tell you a secret that you can't tell anyone, even your parents. Harry and I are Magical." Dora had been looking into Hermione's eyes, trying to communicate how serious she was, and how important it was for Hermione not to tell others since she was non-magical. Dora didn't think it was fair to keep a secret from someone who was quickly becoming one of her best friends. Neither of the girls was paying attention to Harry at that moment, and if they had been, they would have just seen a look of intense concentration on his face; either in deep focus or constipation, it was hard sometimes to tell the difference.

Harry vividly remembered the day that his Aunt Petunia had shaved his head after school, because his hair was sticking out in every conceivable direction and that was unnatural and she was going to fix his freakish hair. Harry knew what would happen the next day at school, and that everyone would join Dudley and his gang in picking on Harry, since she had shaved him down to a fine stubble. He could hear the cries of Q-ball, Baldy, monk, and sharky echoing across the school yard. Though Harry would not have minded being called sharky since that could be a cool nickname, he couldn't guarantee that that name would be the one to stick with him on a semi-permanent basis. As Harry was falling asleep, he wished that his hair was back to normal. The next morning when Aunt Petunia let him out of his cupboard to prepare breakfast, she let out a small startled sound and then hurried back up the stairs after calling him a freak and giving him his instructions for the morning. It wasn't until he was at school, that Harry finally discovered that his hair was back to its regular untamable norm. Now that he had seen Dora's hair go through the different colors in her excitement, including blue, purple and pink; Harry decided that he wanted to do that with his hair.

There is an old saying that goes, 'If you want to control an adult's behavior and creativity, teach him as a child what is impossible for him to do.' Children are taught what they cannot do from the day they are born, through chastisement, instruction, and observation of the adults and world around them. It is the rare individual who can step past those cultural boundaries and ask the questions like, 'why can't it be done a different way than the way it has always been done?' Those are the innovators who can change society and even the world if they are not quashed in their creativity, for to them, there are no limits in the approach to solving a problem. Even if one way works, there could be another way that works even better and more efficiently; or at least a way to make it more fun. Vernon and Petunia Dursley had done everything in their power to squash any creative thinking in Harry Potter, all with the approval of Albus Dumbledore since he wanted Harry to be his willing pawn. The rules that Harry had thrust upon him were made to make sure that Harry's independence and creativity were crushed. Don't ask questions, don't voice your opinion, don't talk back to your betters, and don't speak up since no one wants to hear from a freak. If not for that fateful day when the Smythe sisters came into his life, Harry would have been an entirely different boy when he reached eleven.

Lady Abigail and Ms. Prudence not only encouraged him to ask questions, they urged him to find his own answers to the questions he asked. When Harry came up with an answer from a book, one of them would be right there with another book that had either a different answer to the same question, or an answer that was a variant not thought of by the first author. This showed Harry that all books were biased to the author's perspective, and that no one person or source ever truly had the completely right answer. So when Harry saw The Sword in the Stone, his first thought was not that it was impossible to do those feats of magic, it was how he could learn to do them himself. Though he had really only been sure that magic in fact existed in others besides him for a little more than a week, Harry truly believed that he could do anything that any other magical person could do. So it did not really surprise him when his hair grew down in front his eyes with alternating streaks of neon yellow, orange, green, blue and red. He was trying to look like a circus version of Cousin It that he had seen in an Adams Family comic book that Dudley had thrown away. While Harry expected that he would succeed at what he was trying, the sudden screams of two astounded and frightened girls made him believe that his friends did not share his confidence in himself.

Before he could reverse his change in appearance, the door burst open and six very concerned adults all tried to get through the door at once. The Grangers and Smythe sisters thought that Harry had found a bizarre costume wig in one of the bench chests that were in the office they were using, while the Tonks were wondering whose accidental magic had caused it to happen, and why it had happened. Then they noticed that Dora's hair was pure white, which only happened when she was too stunned to cope with what was going on around her and her form went into a default blank slate. Confusing them even more was the fact that Hermione was backed into the corner of the room and seemed to be passed out underneath a beautiful stuffed white bird. All of their preconceptions flew out the window, when Harry rushed across the room to tend to Hermione, his hair rapidly going back to its former black messy style.

"Hermione! Hermione! Please wake up. I am sorry I scared you. I thought that you and Dora would think it was funny for me to Look like circus clown Cousin It." Harry was near tears as he pleaded with her to be alright. He didn't have many friends, and he would never purposely hurt any of the ones he had. Harry turned to the adults, with a look that hoped they could do something for his friend. He should have kept his eyes on Hermione.

Hermione's eyes snapped open and her hair became even more bushy as little sparks of static began jumping from strand to strand. The first sign that Harry might be in trouble was when he was lifted off his knees and pressed to the wall with his feet dangling eighteen inches off the floor. The second was when Hermione poking Harry's chest and talking in a tone that suggested horrible things if it was not heeded.

"Harry James Potter! You will never do that to me again. I do not like being frightened, nor do I like it when someone defies all logic, just because they have some mystical gifts. It just isn't natural to be able to grow hair that fast, nor in those colors. If you are going to experiment, you will do so with colors that exist naturally in the normal human spectrum. I do not want the government coming and taking away one of my best friends to run experiments on, and that goes for you too Dora." Hermione then broke down into sobs as Harry, who had dropped back to the ground, and Dora both rushed to hug their over wrought friend. At the door, Andy and Ted were having a silent conversation with their eyes, while the Smythe sisters and the Grangers were at a loss at what had just happened.

Coming to a decision, Ted and Andi led the stunned adults and the kids who were still clinging to each other out into the sitting room, since they needed to have a talk with all of them before it was decided where they would go from there. The three children sat together in an overly large chair that was just a bit crowded for them, allowing the Grangers to take the couch and Ms. Prudence and Lady Abigail to share a settee. Before the hysteria or fear could start up, Ted got up in front of them and with a sigh, called their attention to him.

"Lady Abigail, Ms. Prudence, Dan and Emma; what you just saw is an example of the fact that all three of our children are special in more ways than are usually included in the norm. Harry, Dora, and Hermione are magical. This means that Harry is a wizard, and Hermione and Dora are witches; and while we are on the subject, so are Andi and I." With that statement, Andi pulled her wand out of her sleeve and cast light at the four walls as well as the ceiling and floor. Ted continued, "What Andi just did was cast privacy charms to make sure no one outside this room knows what is going on in here. This is for all of our protection as there are laws against letting Muggles, those who have no magic, know about our world. Unfortunately, there are people in the ministry and elsewhere who believe that those who are firstborn and half-bloods do not deserve to have magic, and so they use every opportunity to come down hard on those individuals and their families, often using flimsy excuses to bind their magic which eventually drives the witch or wizard insane. The term firstborn or muggleborn refers to someone like Hermione, whose parents are not magical. Half-blood refers to people like our daughter Dora, who have one parent who is a pureblood and one who is muggleborn. In the case of Andi and me, Andi was born into the ancient and noble house of Black, while I am the son of a nurse and an RAF pilot. When we married, Andi was expelled from her family for defying their wishes for her to marry a pureblood scion and marrying a common muggleborn like me."

"Normally, if nothing happened to you before Hermione's eleventh birthday, then she would receive a letter inviting her to Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft to learn how to control her powers. It is a boarding school located in Scotland and she would attend ten months out of the year for seven years. Once she entered the school, you as parents would no longer have any rights when it came to your daughter's care or wellbeing. A magical guardian would be assigned to take care of Hermione's needs, and anything that interfered with their authority could be legally dealt with in anyway necessary." Ted paused for breath and then continued. "There is a set of curses in the magical world which are considered unforgivable to use on another person or you earn an immediate trip to prison. These curses are the Cruciatus curse which causes pain on an unimaginable level, the Imperious curse which controls the one it is cast upon to an absolute level, and the Killing curse which does exactly what its name proclaims. Normally, when firstborns hear that these cannot be used on people, they feel relief that the three unforgivable will not be used by anyone who does not want to be put in the Wizards Prison Azkaban. What most don't realize, and are specifically not told, is that to the normal pureblood, muggles are just clever animals who are imitating the behavior of real people; they view muggles like muggles view gorillas that learn a few words in sign language. So according to the current laws in the Ministry for Magic, any curse is legal to use on muggles to accomplish what you want. There is an anti muggle baiting law on the books, but it is worded so that the only thing a wizard can't do, is leave them suffering once they are done with them."