Lovely Lie

Skirting the topic of the hitchy start to their… partnership… sees a much more productive time between Harry and HK-47.

HK-47 is a “font of knowledge” – as Hermione would say – about Coruscant and its lower levels, although the robot-head admits that it is much more knowledgeable about Taris’. But, even with the admission of lack, it has already given Harry so much information.

Alarming information, at that. Because, a planet wholely covered by a city? A city built on top of one another, layer by functional layer? Thousands of levels to go in order to just be able to see the sky?

It's enough to make anyone from earth insane, really. So Harry tries not to dwell on it, even as he transcribes the important points from their “chat” to give to the assembly of… his people, he supposes, who need this info if he wishes them to help him in any way in this new life of theirs.

And those people are yet another topic that could very much make him insane, just by pondering the very concept of people willingly accompanying him in a one-way, potentially fatal trip to a new universe while he would have never hoped for – let alone expected – them to do so even in his wildest imagination.

Fortunately, no one of them has taken up on his offer to explore the tent yet, so far, and it’s been… what? A day? Two? He’s changed Teddy’s nappies six times in the meantime, anyway, and finished his interrupted meal, taken another shower while Teddy’s asleep, changed his clothes into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, snacked on a few of the mangos he picked, brushed his teeth, cleans his and Teddy’s things, and stubbornly resisted going to bed.

It's deceptively timeless, living mindlessly like this. It scares him a little, now that it suddenly occurs to him.

But he skitters away from it quickly, too. There’s no use fretting over what he currently can’t change, after all.

Now, he just needs a way to reach the top level of this city. Then he needs to adapt his clothes to the general trend of this planet’s society, rent or buy transport off-planet – Teddy isn’t going to grow up well in a place like this! – and figure out a way for him to make a living and support… everyone.

`Huh. “Just.” What an understatement!`

Still, action must start somewhere. So, however reluctantly, he heaves his rear off the swivel chair, puts a slumbering Teddy into the sling and attaches it to himself, scrutinises the crib to see if he can somehow bring it along down the trunk, detaches it – through trial and error, but thankfully Teddy is not inside of it! – when he finds the series of activatable runes carved near where the crib meets the cabinet that could turn it into a cradle and a baby buggy and… a car seat of sorts, looks like, then he drops the “datapad” purportedly containing info about Coruscant’s lower levels and his notes and Hermione’s catalogue onto it, plonks HK-47 on top of it all, refreshes his waistbag’s supplies for Teddy and attaches the bag to him, and trudges out of the bedroom driving the multifunction baby holder on levitation mode in front of him.

Into the neighbouring storeroom he slips next, then down the lift on the bed of the still-open trunk he goes, though he notes that the golden lettering is no longer there now, and off he sets towards the hall where he met the people he is responsible for for the first time in his life some time ago.

Well, there’s nobody in the hall now, of course. He didn’t ask for a meeting to be set up, after all, and it’s still predawn down here, apparently. But, hopefully, being there now when it is empty and silent, while those large, open windows occasionally send in some cool, tropical-morning breeze that smells of all those fruit trees, will give him a fresh and tangible perspective on his mockery of a plan.

And it… sort of works. Just, HK-47 won’t shut up and let him think.

He Silencios the damned robot-head, in the end, and stuffs the baby bed plus its reluctant, silenced passenger on the far corner of what was the stage area. “I’m going on a walk,” he snaps as farewell, then stalks huffily back to the main door. It’s nice outside, after all, and he could spend it strolling about with Teddy instead of listening to a damned incomplete robot’s whinging.

He ends up murmuring his personal stories about Remus and Tonks to a stirring Teddy while padding on dew-covered grass growing on the paths between the rows of trees, listening to it crunching and the occasional breezes ruffling the leaves overhead, smelling its sharp, earthy scent that mixes well with the cool dampness of predawn and the heavier scent of the plentiful damp vegetation, feeling the touch of water-laden air on the skin of his face and forearms and calves and neck….

`Damn it. I should’ve just camped down here right from the start! I don’t have anything special in the tent, anyway, right? Just need to renew the wards outside and check if there’s anything new in the corridor.`

The thought lightens him further, and even brightens him a little.

The day is even brighter to him, and not just in the artificially physical sense, when Nada jogs up to him after a while and asks what she can help him with.

This saves him from trying to hunt her down and ask. But, well, he has learnt the hard way to speak carefully with anyone from here. So he firmly if politely requests for just single representatives from all the different properties to meet with him whenever they are ready, to help with the course of action he has just come up with, preferably not in the hall but outside among nature. He’s finished with being cooped up in a room!

“I know I meant to meet with them personally one by one, and I said it,” he tells her ruefully when she asks if there’s more. “But I just thought of this, and the plan needs fixing as soon as possible, so we’ll hopefully not be in trouble a week from now.”

She nods, and he deflates with a sigh when she’s gone. “I do hope we can do something about this, Teddy-bear,” he tells his back-asleep godson. “We’ll be in heaps of trouble, if not. And I’ll be in trouble if they don’t have the place out here we can use. I don’t think I can think while indoors right now.”

Well, fortunately for him, the people here do have such a space, for Nada then comes back with two of the clunky-looking “brooms” trailing after her, and off they fly towards a large grassy clearing surrounded by fruit trees and… tent poles?… with picnic blankets of various colours and patterns covering much of the patch of grassland.

So. very. Cosy!

He beams at it, and at the various people trickling into the clearing or already seated on the picnic blankets, and for once voluntarily makes a beeline towards the single, tennis-referee-type chair placed at one end of the space. He Accios the multifunction baby bed when he and Teddy are properly seated up on the chair, and grins ruefully when someone afar yelps as the said baby bed whizzes by.

“Sorry!” he calls to the voice whose owner is still hidden among the trees. “Won’t do that again!”

Yup. He’ll use Apparaccio from now on. Unless Teddy would like a fly-by across the room or something, or the item he’s summoning is within sight.

Now, on to business, unfortunately.

He drags his notes from under the still-silenced robot-head, duplicates the parchments a handful of times, makes sure his notes are intact on each packet with Nada’s help, then sends them soaring to the picnic blankets.

“One to a group, please,” he calls to the now-interested audience. “And please tell me if your group don’t have one yet.”

The morning sun has begun to touch one side of the clearing when there’s no more individual trickling into it, and every few individuals finally have a packet of notes. Well, and he is feeling tired again after expending the magic needed for the duplication and banishing spells, but he ignores it for now and forges on, as usual.

He begins the meeting by stating that the notes are what he has gotten out of a conversation with the silenced robot-head perched in the hovering baby bed beside him.

“Basically, we’re in a planet-wide city, and there are billions of solar systems out there, and people can travel across all the solar systems – well, the star systems, they call it here – using spaceships,” he summarises, after that, even as his audience get busy reading. “We’re quite down below, so we must get up there first to get ourselves a transport off this planet, and we got to make a living after that.”

He fishes out Hermione’s letter, next, and waves it briefly in front of him. “I got here what Hermione detailed about what she included in the tent and pack. The pack itself is still upstairs in the tent, but I hope the list is okay for now. I can’t duplicate it, since she put lots of charms here and I doubt I can duplicate the charms as well as the parchments, so you’ll get it later after I’ve manually copied the relevant pages.”

Well, and the letter is too attached to the original list, and he isn’t about to let anyone read it, but he isn’t about to tell them that, either.

So he bulldozes onward, “The contents are enough for me to live well for at least a decade, I reckon. It’s probably enough to support Teddy too, but probably not others, not for that long. So we got to find a way to support everyone. I thought of trading… but the common language here is weird.” He grimaces. “It’s like… if we’re listening to Old English or something, but not really that language. And this robot barely got what I meant when I used certain words, and not others. So we got to learn the language first before even thinking of getting into the galaxy at large.”

Then, after some thought, he adds, “We got to think what we’d like to trade, too, and how we’ll go on in the meantime, who’s going to front the trading, if we’re going to take turns in that as well, all those. The rest are going to be support group and learn more about this galaxy, I think.”

Suddenly unsure, he falls silent and just watches on as people crowd round his notes and sometimes feverishly jot down something on pieces of parchment – or even lined paper – they must’ve whipped out from somewhere in their persons. And only now does he realise that those are his notes, and people value what he’s saying in this matter unrelated to defence, and none of them treats him like a child or a hero.

It daunts him, and humbles him, and makes him want to burst with so many different emotions.

But only the daunted feeling remains when the audience apparently realise that he’s stopped speaking, and, one by one, heads rise up from the pieces of notes and all the eyes gaze expectantly at him.

`Ah, hell!`

His face feels too warm and too cold, all at once, and he squirms in place for a moment before deciding to slide down from the chair that makes him feel all too visible at this point.

To hopefully ease the attention off of him, or at least relax his own tension, he motions Nada – who is writing down… something… on her clipboard – to the chair to replace him, then asks the audience if any wishes to ask or suggest something, even as he begins to pace on the sliver of grass between the chair and the first of the picnic blankets.

The few hands that immediately rise is gratifying, in a way, but also heightens the daunted feeling he’s gripped in.

Both feelings evaporate quickly, though, when the individual he points at – a tall, burly man with Slavic features and pale skin but dark colouring otherwise, clad in a sleeveless woollen tunic dyed dark red and purple – bluntly suggests that they transport vertiliser out of this planet, because, “Many people live here  and in de city. People have vaste. Ve can process de vaste and sell vertiliser back. Ve always do dat in Black farm to make de soil better. Good for all plants and trees. People like it.”

`Ewwww!`

Harry makes a face. And he is not the only one.

Well, it’s not that the suggestion doesn’t have merit! But, eating fruits and veggies that are vertilised by people’s bodily wastes… `Ewww!`

Still, he did ask for suggestions, and the man did give him a suggestion worthy of consideration, so he gives the latter a tight nod.

And, unexpectedly, the man replies with a knowing grin and an equally knowing chuckle. “Vhat different between people vaste and sheep vaste?”

Harry scrunches up his face, with more than a tinge of rueful acknowledgement. Before he can say anything, though, the man continues, “Standart magical household make vaste into bricks. Dis is more usevul, I say.”

Well, he can’t refute that, can he? The thought of living in a house whose walls are made of people’s processed waste is even more disgusting than the first option, somehow!

Still, he nods again at the man and deliberately moves on to the next individual who raised a hand, namely the woman he firstly met when he went here for the first time.

She smiles at him, nods and offers, “We have surplus. Other have surplus. We can sell the surplus. Right now the surplus in warehouse in stasis. Less surplus, less magic to maintenance.”

`Huh. Do they experience how drained I can feel after doing magic here, too?` Harry wonders worriedly. But then, after some thought, he regretfully tells himself, `Well, take a note, Harry. Discuss it later. We can’t digress right now.` And, following that, he approaches Nada and quietly asks her to help pen him a note about it.

The next hand-raiser – a brown-haired, midnight-blue-eyed man with American accent – asks about the robot-head, in exchange, and Harry shortly, reluctantly, grumpily introduces the damned thing as, “HK-47, claimed to be some assassin robot. We communicate through Parseltongue, so far, because it’s the only language we both know, although the more modern concepts are still untranslatable. I hope none of you object to me using it?”

Well, none does, for a change! They just look surprised, and some even look intrigued. So, even more reluctantly, he offers to translate questions that are related to their current plan from the audience to HK-47 and vice versa. And only when they take him up on the offer does he cancel the silencing charm on the robot-head.

And the first thing the damned robot-head says is, “Exclamation: Finally, Master! Whatever wrong did I do to you?”

Well, apparently something of that aggrevated tone is audible to even non-Parseltongue-speakers, for snickering runs through the audience before the same man from before addresses the sulky robot-head, “Hello, HK-47. I’d like to ask: Do you know about magic?”

`Oh, damn, shite, I didn’t think of that!` Harry hits himself on the head mentally, even as he translates the greeting and question to the addressee. `The benefit of working together, I suppose?`

Well, how derogatorily the damned thing views magic causes him to conjure a mirror in front of the sceptic heathen instead of translating, and the surprised squawk it nets is awesome, even though it saps more of his magic – greater than other spells so far, in fact.

He asks Nada to take a note on that, too, before returning to his former spot and translating for the American. Verbatim. And there’s no doubt in him that the vindictive smugness portrayed on the man’s face is mirrored on his.

“let’s tell it what we can and can’t do first, then,” another individual suggests from amidst the crowd at the back. “Just the general things. And the plan. Then we can ask it for suggestions.”

Harry nods, but also scrunches up his face, remembering the advice the damned thing gave him, which netted him stolen money and interactive book and a gun.

Now he shares it with the audience as a warning.

The contemplative silence the bit of information is greeted with is not encouraging, given that!

The American man’s polite argument that, “We do need to adapt to this galaxy, as you noted here, Lord Potter, so we do need to at least see what we will be working with, from money to weapons,” is even less encouraging.

But it does make sense. So, however reluctantly, Harry promises to summon things for them, but only those that people have lost, abandoned or discarded. The audience are welcome to formulate the spell accordingly, or ask others to help.

“I’ll go about it some time,” he finishes. “But, for now, I think we ought to learn from HK-47, and it ought to learn from us, including languages, and… we should study the list of what we have now, and what we need, and what we should summon. I don’t think I can summon much at once, even if the power requirement is low. So please prioritise the things we need the most.”

He ends the meeting at that point. Because, well, he suspects his audience’s attention has dropped to ten percent at most after that conclusion. They are now so busy looking at the list he’s duplicated for them, and gesturing at it and each other and the surroundings, and writing things down feverishly. The American man even comes up to him to politely request that HK-47 be left down here for the moment, for the man and his friends to see if it can learn English by immersion.

HK-47 suggests that he donate the pilfered Guidebook to Coruscant’s Undercity to those who wish to interact with it, to act as additional learning media, when he informs the robot-head about the conclusion and the request at the end. And when he asks why, it says, “Explanation: I can guide one of your minions to hack into the ‘datapad’ and create a word-processing programme that they can use to teach me their letters, and hook me up to it so that I can write my own words. Lamentation: It will be excruciating, Master, and I expect it will happen for some time yet, unfortunately, given the poor processing power of meatbags.”

Then it audibly perks up, complete with some added shine in their eye-facets, and adds hopefully, “Request: I would like to choose my own weapon when you call for those lost, abandoned and discarded items, Master, Please. You could it a payment for my services.”

Well, suffice to say, Harry shakes his head, then flees the clearing before any more outrageous requests could be made, driving the now-passengerless baby bed, with Nada trotting after him and Teddy dozing in his arms.

It’s up to his “minions” if they’ll let themselves be manipulated into summoning a weapon for the damned robot-head, but he won’t, and he’ll caution everyone against it, too.

Later.

Now he’s just going to retrieve the pack, duplicate the full catalogue, and perhaps tour another trunk through the Doorway that the trio of greeters from his first visit said connects between this trunk and others.

Well, and put all the various containers crowding the common room of the tent away somewhere, too, come to think of it again. Damn, but seeing all those things piling up is stress-inducing!

`Merlin! I want my rest!`