Chapter 2
"Report Tenno."
Talis looked up at Natah's form, and could tell from the shifting of the various parts of her chassis that her mother was just as uncomfortable with this formality as she was...but also that she needed it as much, if just for this moment, as Talis did. An in person debrief like this had become something of a tradition for them after every mission that involved...them.
The Narmer Cult.
A gold tinged reminder of the worst time in their recent memories, neither of them were healed from the New War. They'd barely begun to heal, even now, almost half a decade later, and any time the mad cult became a problem again, the deluded people who wanted to bring the two's personal hell back into the origin system. It hurt them, it hurt them in ways no physical pain could ever come close to.
"Remnants of the Narmer cult took control of a Corpus Absolute Advantage class Production Frigate. If successful they would have been able to nearly triple their production rate of veils as well as nearly every kind of tech they desired. My mission was to sabotage the ship while creating enough chaos before leaving to give the illusion that I had been there solely to attempt to exterminate the Narmer cult Presence and that they had managed to drive me off. The Sabotage was a success, and roughly thirty minutes after my extraction I confirmed the detonation of the ships primary drive cores, resulting in the complete destruction of the frigate."
"Good job Tenno, the job is complete, you are relieved from duty," Natah's entire chassis seemed to wilt, "Now please come here."
Talis didn't hesitate, transferring out of her warframe and into Natah's waiting arms, curling up against her mother's warm Chassis as she shook with suppressed sobs.
~~~
Dumbledore wore a smile as he walked up to the Goblet of Fire, though his mind was awhirl with turmoil, he so hated to twist the purpose of something as storied as the Triwizard Tournament to his own ends, but he had no choice. When Harry Potter hadn't arrived at Hogwarts all those years ago he'd nearly lost everything. Over a decade of work would have been wasted, and he'd had to burn up far more of his influence and built up favours to perform damage control than he'd liked, but perform damage control he had. Thanks to his efforts magical Europe was awash with rumors of young Harry's life, secreted away for any reason from being trained into a great warrior to protect the world, to simply being kept out of public eye due to crippling shyness. The most important thing however, was that no one thought that their child saviour was dead, and if there was one thing Dumbledore could be sure of, it was that the boy wasn't dead, the instruments in his office were still good for that much at least.
Unfortunately however, he himself had no more idea where the child had wound up than anyone else, all he knew was that the Dursleys hadn't seen the boy since he was six years old (and hadn't that been an unpleasant shock to learn, though he assumed that it was worse for the Dursleys after he'd leveled proper punishment for their...care. He'd known that they wouldn't necessarily be the best family for Harry, but what he'd seen in their minds...). After that though, he'd exhausted every method he could find to locate Harry, magics new, old, light, dark, anything he could try he had, and nothing had worked. The closest he'd come to making any progress was when the owl carrying Harry's first acceptance letter went out and seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth, but since it never came back and the tracking charm he'd put on the owl had broken mere seconds after sending back a burst of nonsense information it hadn't helped at all. Thus, the Goblet.
It'd been no small feat to get the tournament reinstated, and more difficult still to use his contacts to get certain...lost facts about the Goblet circulating in the right communities. Rumors about the age and power of the Goblet, that it was an artifact from before magical history was truly written, that it's power was immense and seemingly unable to be denied...that it could draw those it named champion to it no matter the obstacles it faced. He was certain that the rumors had reached their intended audiences, and while he was loath to allow a death eater in the castle he had no doubt now that Harry's name was in the Goblet, and he'd even made sure, quietly, that the job had been done right, with the Artifact believing there to be a fourth school to which only Harry Potter belonged, and now that the foul man had done his job and wasn't as worried about a tail being discovered and spooking him, he could set a dedicated house elf to watch him, freeing the elves he'd had watching the students in case he had thought to act outside of what Dumbledore expected. Honestly, it irked him that he couldn't just remove the man from the premises, but to do so now would put too much at risk...
~~~
Hermione Granger grumbled and put her book down, placing it to her right between herself and the rest of the table. Always the right, she knew better than to sit anywhere but at the edge of the Gryffindor Tables, she knew better than to be boxed in here. She shifted, attempting to get a better position to watch the selection of the champions, and honestly she hated that she had to pretend to care, but everyone else was and she already stood out too much, she couldn't risk being the only one not watching, and grimaced as her leg refused to cooperate, requiring her to push her cane to the side and reach under the table to rub at what was left of her knee after the Troll in first year until it released itself and let her reposition.
Even as she turned her attention back towards the Goblet, she couldn't stop herself (and didn't want to stop herself, never again) from surreptitiously looking at her housemates around her, attempting to see if any of them were paying attention before she palmed her wand out of its holster and muttered a quick battery of detection spells on her food, making sure there weren't any 'pranks' from her classmates. She found herself biting her lips to keep the tears at bay as she found three different spells on her food and utensils, and quickly set to clearing them while everyone was distracted. She didn't know why she still let it hurt her, it's not like everyone hating her at school was a new thing. Just the reasons why...
As the flames danced in her eyes Hermione couldn't help but wish that she wasn't so alone.
"The first Champion, from Durmstrang, is Viktor Krum!"
~~~
Draco Malfoy clapped politely as Viktor Krum was called, but couldn't help but feel detached from the proceedings. Truthfully, he couldn't help feeling just plain detached most days. The last few years had been...hard on him and his worldview, and things only seemed to be getting worse as he got older. Ever since second year when he'd been petrified by the basilisk and his father, months later when he'd finally been restored, had the gall to tell him that he should feel honored to have been used as an instrument in the attempted (and failed, but his father's cane had taught him not to mention that after the first time) resurrection of the Dark Lord rather than betrayed and horrified, ever since he'd found himself finding less and less reason to parrot his father's beliefs in the face of a reality that didn't match up, ever since he'd realized that his life was a shell crafted by his father to be what he'd envisioned for his son rather than anything Draco himself wanted...everything was just...muted.
It was like he was observing someone else's life, reading a book about a stranger. It wasn't him who spent his days socializing with idiots and sycophants, it wasn't him that spouted outdated views like a trained bird for the amusement of people with their heads permanently up a dead man's ass, it wasn't his body he watched change slowly in the mirror in more grotesque ways every day.
At least he had his mother, Pansy, Tracey, and Daphne. It wasn't often but they could make the fog lift sometimes.
"And the Second Champion, from Beauxbaton's, is Fleur Delacour!"
~~~
Severus Snape was not a good man, and he knew it. He had done horrible things, things that haunted his nightmares and left him screaming for mercy and forgiveness on a regular basis. He'd allowed himself to be used by not just one madman, but two. He was a failure as a teacher and had earned a reputation as the bat of the dungeons through nothing but his own lack of self-control and willingness to teach. And worst of all, he'd failed to protect the one last piece of Lily Potter that had been in this world. Oh he knew what he had felt for Lily, how he'd treated her, it had been toxic and he felt shame from that. Though he felt far more shame in the fact it took him until the disappearance of her child for him to actually examine himself and grow the fuck up. It had taken the disappearance of Harry Potter, and his own investigation into the conditions the child had last lived under, for him to clear the wool he willingly accepted from his eyes. Learning that the lies he'd believed from Dumbledore had been nothing but honeyed words meant to direct his opinion of a child by attaching his grudges with the father onto the son had forced him to reexamine everything. And the realizations had been painful, but…
But he would be better. Already his classes had become, while not pleasant, at least safe and informative, and it had been his hand that had torn the obscene remnant of his old master's soul to pieces with a fang of the very monster that had been said remnant's weapon of terror. It had been he that had sat down with one of his own greatest fears and gotten to the bottom of the situation with Sirius Black, and was instrumental in the discovery of Peter Pettigrew...who got away in no small part due to the incompetence of the Ministry and what he suspected was sabotage, but at least, and to his eternal ire, Black was a free man. As long as he continued to freely stay as far away as possible from Snape anyway. But as Dumbledore grabbed the third slip from the Goblet he found a feeling of dread pooling in his gut telling him that soon his guilt wouldn't be the most pressing thing in his mind...
"And we have the third champion, from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Cedric Diggory!"
~~~
Natah...Natah was a broken being, and she knew it. She had lost that which was most precious to her, sacrificed on the altar of war to allow her passage to the Origin system all those centuries ago. She'd orchestrated the fall of her kinds creators, and taken the children they'd turned to war in as her own...and had been unable to save them all. She had directed her new children on mission after mission, all of them trusting her implicitly despite hiding who she was, what she was, and using them just as their old masters had, even if the few who remembered those times told her otherwise. She had watched as her children were killed by the forces that gripped the Origin system after the fall of the Orokin, turned into experiments or sacrificed to the Worm Queens to prolong their wretched lives, her children dying without ever leaving the dream, all the while knowing that if she were braver she could wipe those threats to her children out.
Worst of all. She'd fallen, and been turned against her children. It didn't matter that it was through the machinations of Ballas and her own Brother, she fought...she hurt...she attempted to destroy her own children. The pain, the guilt, it threatened to devour her whole, and yet, her children did not seem to care. They still reached out to her for guidance, offered love and support that she'd never expected. She had room upon room of floofs and noggles sent to her as gifts ever since her return, not one of the Tenno turning against her as she believed they would. As she believed they should. She didn't know how to handle it all, but she did know it kept her going. That and her closest daughter.
Talis, the impossible child, the stranger, the stowaway. The child who'd appeared on the Zariman with no warning (she should really go back to working on that old letter and tracking system, it had been nearly a century since it had arrived…), who had been thrown into a situation she knew nothing of...and yet shouldered the challenges to come just as well as any other. The child who'd been the most adamant, even before...everything...on connecting with Natah, no matter how many barriers she put up.
The child who, even in another life as a drifter among maddening void ridden realities, still would give of herself again and again. The child who dismantled Narmer, who saved her. The girl currently wrapped up around her chassis, seeking comfort in the presence of Natah, of her mother, just as much as Natah found herself seeking comfort in the presence of the daughter who had saved her.
~~~
"There...there is a fourth champion! The Goblet of Fire summons Harry Potter!"
~~~
Talis felt something change in the air, and instinctively she pulled on the void, manifesting her frame within the arms of her mother and bringing her companion to heel, but as Natah began to ask what was wrong, her world lit up in pain and light. Energy arced from her, blasting Natah away, ripping her apart piece by piece in a maelstrom of strange power.
And suddenly, she was gone.
~~~
Natah stared in shock at the place she'd just seen her daughter unravel from. All of her sensors going crazy, looking for anything to use, even though she could barely register the information behind the horror and grief that gripped her.
Natah made jerky movements, attempting to reach out to the spot Talis was just in, before she fell to the ground, anguished screams ripping from her in every emittible wavelength she had access to. Anguish that swiftly turned into screams of rage as something pinged on her sensors. A signature she'd identified from a long dead avian that had kept her company for years before it's death.
The project to reach Talis' home universe had just moved from the bottom of her lists to her top priority, and may whatever gods those who took her daughter pray to have mercy on them.
Because she wouldn't.
~~~
Dumbledore stared from where he'd been thrown to the ground, panic burning in his veins as screams and the sounds of hundreds of people attempting to escape the great hall, and failing due to the hall being sealed for the choosing, surrounded him. Before him, standing on the shattered and scorched ruins of the Goblet of Fire, was a being of gleaming metal that had appeared in a blast of iridescent magic, and while he couldn't understand the sounds it was making he could tell one thing based on the sharp golden talons pressing against his neck.
He had made a grave miscalculation.