Switched

On Saturday the third of August, there was, according to Professor Snape, a shopping excursion planned for all of the muggleborn and muggle-raised students who would be starting at Hogwarts in September. It would be chaperoned by the Deputy Headmistress (and Head of Gryffindor House) Professor McGonagall, which meant, to Aunt Petunia's immense relief, she did not need to participate. She could simply drop Harry off at Saint James's Square in the morning, spend the entire day shopping for herself, and pick him up again at half-past four.

Harry had assured her that he could find the pub where the wizards were supposed to meet on his own, and he had money to change at the wizards' bank — Professor Snape said he already had an account and Dumbledore would have the key (because apparently this Dumbledore bloke Harry had never met was technically his guardian as far as Magical Britain was concerned...as well as the Headmaster and the head of the bloody government), which he would presumably give to Professor McGonagall to give to Harry, but as Aunt Petunia said, wizards were notoriously flakey and couldn't be trusted to follow through on that, or anything else.

Honestly, Harry wasn't entirely sure he wanted to meet up with the group at all. He could just go get all his things by himself, he was sure, and if anything Snape had told him about the end of the war was true (and Harry had no reason to believe it wasn't), he suspected the professor and anyone she introduced him to would be really bloody annoying. See, apparently, Harry was famous in Magical Britain. For no good reason. Just...not dying, when he was a year old and his mother somehow killed (or mostly killed) the Dark Lord.

Snape was not annoyingly reverential, as he implied other people might be, because he firmly believed, like any sane person, that one-year-old Harry had absolutely nothing to do with the Dark Lord's downfall.

Well, he might've been used as bait.

The professor had pretty obviously been close to Lily until he'd been recruited into the Death Eaters, so presumably he had liked her, but his opinion of her seemed to line up with Aunt Petunia's pretty well — see: that sarcastic comment about Professor McGonagall regaling Aunt Petunia with tales of her nobility and self-sacrifice. Everything Harry knew about his mother pointed toward him getting his tendency to be a disturbing little monster from her. Of course, the only thing Harry knew about that Sirius Black bloke Snape thought was his father was that he was a dangerous madman in prison for murder, so maybe he got it from both sides. Whatever. Point was, Lily was definitely the sort of hard bitch who would use her one-year-old kid as bait to blow up an evil psycho bastard like the Dark Lord. Harry had had nothing to do with it, and the fact that people talked about him like bloody wizard Jesus was just...mad. Completely bloody mental.

Fortunately, they didn't really have a good idea what he looked like (there were a couple of pictures of him from when he was a baby that had been in the papers, but that was it), so if he was just walking around no one should be able to pick him out of the crowd, but if the Deputy Headmistress was introducing him to people as they shopped he was sure word would get around quickly.

Plus, it was always annoying shopping with other people. It was annoying shopping with Dudley, at least, and Harry had no reason to think that shopping with three or four other kids and their parents and a bloody teacher would be any less agonisingly slow. He could just go to the bank, change the money Aunt Petunia had given him, do his shopping, and then find the group (Harry never had trouble finding anyone or anything when he was looking for them/it, which was one of the cooler things about being magic), get his key from the professor sometime in the afternoon, and go withdraw money in pounds to give back to Aunt Petunia. Professor Snape had annotated his supply-list with reasonable price-ranges to expect things to cost, so it wasn't like he would get completely swindled, and he was betting he would see a lot more of what the magical world was really like if he wasn't with a bunch of other kids and parents playing tourists.

So when Harry reached the Leaky Cauldron, a pub maybe ten minutes' walk from the Square, he walked straight past the little knot of people he was clearly supposed to be meeting — the professor was talking to a very enthusiastic couple who looked to be about Aunt Petunia's age and didn't notice him, though Harry thought the girl who must be their daughter had, her eyes catching his as he slipped through the door.

From the outside, the pub looked very old and out of place. It was situated between a bookshop on one side and a record store on the other, both of which were obviously normal, modern businesses. Harry might actually go so far as to say the pub looked a bit shabby. The paint on the sign could use a touch-up, and the windows were positively grimy. It felt magical, though, energy flowing and twisting through the walls, tingling in the air as he passed through the door, sparking and alive in a way no other building he'd ever been in was.

And on the inside it was a bit dark, after the bright morning sun outside, but it was clean and cozy, all dark, heavy wooden furniture. There was a fire crackling merrily in the midst of a swirl of magic that was, Harry thought, keeping the heat from the rest of the room, and there was a pleasant smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat and muffins baking somewhere out of sight, and just a hint of old pipe-smoke, a few patrons chattering to each other at a table by a window which was, from this side, perfectly clear.

"Can I help you, Miss?" the man at the bar asked.

It took perhaps half a second for Harry to realise he'd been addressed, distracted by the way the magic moved in everything in here, bright glimmers condensed to do things shining clearly through the haze which generally made everything clearer and brighter than just seeing with his eyes. It sort of leaned toward the barman and his patrons and the witch outside, just like it did toward Harry himself, like it was paying attention to them, that was normal, but seeing magic — spells — working, on everything, that was just wild.

"Oh! No, I'm good, thanks," he said. Because he knew where he was going. He honestly couldn't say how he knew. Not the same way he knew that one thing was connected to another or where Uncle Vernon's lost keys were, just something about the way the magic was moving in the walls and the air was like a big flashing sign saying go this way.

He followed it through the main room and out the back door, ignoring the barman's doubtful expression. In the small back garden/courtyard area, there were two small, unoccupied tables under faded umbrellas, and a couple of small rubbish bins. The magic led him toward these, to a twisted little spot in the wall. The wall itself looked perfectly normal, just regular red bricks, but Harry...wasn't entirely certain they were real?

Because the bricks looked and even felt normal, when he reached out to brush his fingers across them, rough and warm from the sun, but the magic...sort of felt like someone had taken a pinch of space itself and sort of...twisted it up, drawing together a little bit of wall as though it was a flat piece of cloth, and sort of...painting reality back over the resulting ripples and ridges and irregularities in space. He could feel the magic of the pub flowing through a single point at the centre of the twisted little whatever it was, as though it was part of a circuit that continued on the other side of the wall, regardless of the fact that there seemed to be another perfectly normal building on the other side of it, too.

Curious, Harry poked at the odd spiral, not just with a finger, but with magic too, pushing just a little of his own power into the system.

For about half a second he thought he had broken it, the spiral uncoiling like the spring in the starter for the lawnmower that Harry had had to fix last week. A hole appeared in the brick he had touched, growing as the magic uncoiled further — as space went back to normal, irising out like the aperture on a camera lens, and the fake reality fell apart.

It was a doorway — an arch leading into a twisting, cobble-paved street which couldn't possibly exist here.

Harry squinted, peering through it, purely reflexively. He knew he didn't actually see magic, he could see it just fine with his eyes closed completely, but that didn't mean that his first instinct coming face to face with "Diagon Alley" (Professor Snape said the whole little magical settlement was called Charing, but the shopping area was Diagon Alley...because wizards liked puns, apparently.) was to squint and recoil slightly, like he might turning on the TV after Dudders left the volume all the way up. Just, holy crap!

The pub was definitely the most magical place Harry had ever been in his life (or the most magical place he remembered), filled with spells and enchantments, but compared to the hidden street the Leaky Cauldron might as well be Privet Drive. His eyes adjusted quickly (or whatever the magical equivalent of eyes might be), but he still hesitated long enough, taken aback by the sheer amount of magic harnessed to do things and the bewildering array of things it was doing — making signs flash with colours and lights; carrying shopkeepers' voices and the scent of something savoury through the air; woven into the clothes of nearly every person in sight, running through the walls of the buildings like blood in their veins, even glowing in the stones of the street, each footstep sending ripples through it; people casting spells to shrink their bags and keep their children close at hand; flexing wildly as someone disappeared (disapparated, that was what Professor Snape had called it) right in front of Harry — that the doorway started to spiral closed again on him. The fake wall was already back almost to his knees when he hopped over it.

From this side, when he turned back to see, the spiral aperture didn't close all the way. There was a sort of window in the middle of the wall (under a sign proclaiming this to be the Leaky Cauldron), surrounded by glowing symbols, through which Harry could see the courtyard he'd just come from, distorted as though by a fish-eye lens.

"Oi! Watch where you're going!" An old witch snapped at Harry, nearly tripping over him despite the fact that he hadn't actually moved — clearly she should watch where she was going — but it occurred to him that he should, actually. Move, that was. He didn't know how long Professor McGonagall and the rest of the group would take to make their way here, but he wanted to be well on his way by the time they did.

"Excuse me, would you be so kind as to point me toward the bank?" he asked another passer-by. This one was a mumsy-looking redheaded witch with a small gaggle of equally redheaded children — two a few years older than Harry, and two about his age. Harry had judged her as the sort who would likely be helpful and not give him shite directions just to have a bit of fun, what with having children of her own, and she also looked like she was sort of in a hurry, so probably wouldn't give him much of a hassle over whether he really ought to be shopping by himself. (That had happened several times in normal stores, it was always annoying.)

Unfortunately, she apparently wasn't in such a hurry that she didn't have time to give Harry the third degree.

"My goodness, dear! I didn't even see you there! What was it you asked? Where are your parents?" Asking those questions apparently gave his appearance (specifically the fact that he was wearing his usual non-magical shirt and trousers) time to sink in because she added, "How did you get here? Boys– Boys! Will you stop for one minute!" (The older boys, twins, were teasing their younger brother, something about a rat.) "Sorry about that, love. My name's Molly. Are you lost?"

"No, not as such." Harry was pretty sure one had to go somewhere before one could be lost. At this point, he would have no trouble at all finding his way back to the pub. "I'm looking for the bank."

"Ah...but where did you come from, exactly? And where are your parents?"

"The Leaky Cauldron, and what does it matter to you?" Harry asked, losing patience with this conversation very quickly. "Do you know where the bank is, or not?"

The witch huffed. "Well you can't just wander around on your own, Miss..."

"Harrison," Harry lied, giving his mother's mother's maiden name rather than Lily's, because according to Professor Snape Evans wasn't as common and unremarkable a name in the magical world as it was in the real world — Harry's mother had been a bit...notorious, even before (mostly) killing the bloody Dark Lord. Not enough that everyone knew who she was, or would put the name together with Harry's distinctively green eyes and figure out who he was, but with his luck this Molly would be someone who'd known her personally. He didn't bother informing her that he was a boy. Really didn't seem worth it to drag out the conversation. "I'm not on my own, I'm meeting someone at the bank. Where is it, please?"

She definitely didn't believe him, a concerned little furrow creasing her brow, but she gave a little sigh. "It's this way," she admitted, tipping her head in the direction she and her family had already been travelling. "We're going that way, I suppose we can walk you there and make sure you find whoever you're supposed to be meeting..."

"That's really not necessary, Ma'am."

"Nonsense, Miss Harrison. Come along, now."

And then, Harry wasn't really sure how, he was surrounded by her children, swept away with a flurry of introductions. He managed to catch that the twins were George and Fred, their brother was Ron, and their sister Ginny, before he let slip his own name, and opened himself up to a flood of teasing. Ron had slipped ahead a bit to pester his mother about something — Harry managed to make out something about an owl and that the family couldn't afford one (Harry still thought the idea of carrier-owls was absurd — in the best possible way, but absurd) — but the twins had a field day with the idea of Harry Harrison, engaging his attention so thoroughly with their teasing he barely had any to spare for the wonders of the magical shopping centre they were bustling through. (Harry really should've thought that one through a bit more... Oops.)

"Harry?"

"I thought it was Harrison."

"Harry Harrison?"

"Who names their kid Harry Harrison?"

"Is that short for Harriet?" Ginny asked. She looked like she was about the same age as Harry (which meant she was probably a year or two younger), and seemed much more interested in actually getting to know him than the boys, likely because they thought he was a nine-year-old girl with whom they expected to have nothing in common. (They had to be at least thirteen or fourteen.)

"Like Harriet Harrison's any better?"

"It's a family name," Harry said, as straight-faced as possible.

"Are you,"

"having us on?"

"No?"

"More than one generation thought it was a good idea,"

"to name their kid Harry Harrison?"

The girl glared at her brothers. "You're being rude! I think it's a fine name, Harriet."

"Just Harry is fine, Ginny," Harry assured her. "And I don't mind, really." Compared to the freak-out he imagined he would get being Harry Potter, this was fine.

"What are you doing on your own?" the girl asked, changing the subject anyway. "And why're you dressed like a muggle? Were you out in muggle London?" She and her brothers were wearing robes, of course.

"Er...yes, I was. I'm muggleborn, so—"

"Oh!"

"She's muggleborn!"

"That makes sense!"

"It must be,"

"a muggle thing!"

"Sandy Sanderson!"

"Erica Ericson!"

"Tammy Thomson!"

"Ignore them, Harry, they're always like this," Ginny said, rolling her eyes.

"Willa Wilson!"

"Bobbie Bobbison!"

"Alexa Alexanderson!"

"What's muggle London like?" the girl asked, trying not to laugh at Bobbie Bobbieson. "I've never been..."

"Oh, well...it's just a city, really? This area, outside the Leaky Cauldron, I mean, is sort of nice shopping and tourist things. There's not a lot of magic around — magic that's doing things, I mean. Obviously there's still ambient magic. But that was the biggest difference to me, coming in here, it was a little overwhelming at first, you know?" There were other differences too, like the way people were dressed (in long, flamboyant robes) and the things the shops were selling (cauldrons, dragon liver, telescopes, little machines made of magic and clockwork, owls, flying broomsticks) and the architecture (like something out of the Sixteenth Century, buildings of brick and cobble on the first floor and plaster and lathe above, but all a little too neat to actually be that old) and the size of the shops (there were no magical department stores, Harry was pretty sure — a lot of the "shops" were actually stalls people had set up in the street) and of course there were no cars. The air smelled different, more organic — sometimes more like the meat and fish department at the grocer's, and sometimes more herbal, but less like fumes from engines, anyway — and it was actually quieter and less crowded, despite Harry's initial impression of a lot going on at once (he was pretty sure that was just because of all the magic around, now that he'd had a little time to adjust).

"Um, no?" Oh, right, she was probably surrounded by magic like this all the time. Harry shrugged.

"Little Harry Harrison has magesight?" one of the twins said.

"Jealous!" The other added.

...Or not. "You mean you can't see magic? I thought that was just part of being magic..."

"Um, no."

"Well, kind of."

"Most people are at least a little aware of magic around them, or being used on them."

"But it's kind of rare to be able to see any active magic around yourself."

One of the boys grinned. "If you think this is overwhelming,"

"wait 'til you get to Hogwarts."

"Wait, Hogwarts?" That was Ginny, and she sounded awfully disappointed.

"Well, she said she's muggleborn, right?"

"So she wouldn't know about magic unless she was starting school,"

"and she has to be going to Hogwarts, right?"

"Yes, and yes. I'm here to do school shopping," Harry informed them. "I just need to change money, first."

"Oh. I thought you were my age...but I guess maybe we'll be friends when I get there, next year."

Harry really had no idea what to say to that. He couldn't remember the last time someone had wanted to be friends with him, especially when they'd only just met. It might never have happened before, actually. "Um, sure?"

The boys laughed. "Poor Ginny-kin's"

"not looking forward to spending a whole year at home,"

"alone,"

"with Mum."

"You wouldn't be, either," she snapped, glowering at them, but keeping her voice down enough that her mother might not have heard over Ron offering to forgo textbooks if his parents would buy him an owl instead.

"Don't be ridiculous, Ronald, you'll be using the same books Percy and the twins used!"

"But Mum, those books are ancient, people will laugh at me! I bet I'm the only person in the entire year who'll be using second-hand books..."

"I will be," Harry volunteered. "Professor Snape said they're a fraction of the price used, and who cares if someone already wrote notes in the margins, or whatever?" Harry was planning on buying as many things as possible second-hand, actually, to save as much money as he could for extra books or clothes beyond his school uniform — he didn't want to have to wear his school clothes on the weekends — or anything he happened to find that was just cool, and not necessary.

"See, Miss Harrison will be using secondhand books too, Ron."

"But Mum..."

"Professor Snape?"

"They sent the Dungeon Bat to tell you about magic?"

"What'd he do to prove it was real?"

"Make you sit there for an hour while he brewed a potion at you?"

Harry giggled. "No, we skipped that part of the conversation. I already knew I was magic, so." He shrugged. "And yes, he said he drew the short straw. But," he added, as inspiration struck, "he said he knew my mother when she was in school, so he'd help me with my shopping instead of going with the other muggleborns."

"Wait, if you're muggleborn, how did Professor Snape know your mother?" Ginny asked, more confused than shrewdly, though it did sort of come off like she was trying to trap him in a lie.

"My mother was muggleborn, but she died in the war. I was raised by her muggle sister, I'm pretty sure that counts as muggleborn, too?"

The twins shrugged and nodded.

Ginny said, "Oh, that makes sense."

"So you're meeting Professor Snape at the bank, then?" Molly didn't quite seem to believe him, but Harry pretended not to notice her scepticism.

"Yep," he chirped, pleased to have come up with a good excuse for Molly and her children to leave him there. "He might not be there yet, I left early in case it took some time to find it and change my money, but you can just leave me there, I'm sure he'll show up eventually. He really didn't seem like the type to make a promise and then blow it off, or even to be late."

"No, he's not," one of the twins agreed. (Harry had lost track of which was which almost immediately.)

"He's also not the type to help a student."

"Especially not outside of class."

Harry just shrugged. He actually had been very helpful, telling him loads of things about Magical Britain and how much things should cost, even if he hadn't offered to actually take Harry shopping.

"Maybe he thinks you're going to be a Slytherin."

"What time was Professor Snape supposed to meet you, love?" Molly asked, all annoyingly motherly concern.

Shite. Harry didn't know what time it was now. He'd been meant to meet the other muggleborns at nine, and he'd met these people pretty close to that time, he thought, so...probably not much later than nine-fifteen or nine-twenty? "Ten." Surely she wouldn't want to waste at least half an hour just sitting around with Harry waiting for a professor who definitely wasn't going to show up...

She sighed. "Well, we really should go, but the goblins won't like you loitering... I don't know. Maybe you should stay with us until ten. We're going to an apothecary just a few streets away..."

"No," Harry said firmly. "You've done more than enough. If the goblins tell me to bug off, I'll find a café or somewhere to wait."

She hesitated. "Are you sure, dear? I know everything must be very unfamiliar..."

Well, yes, obviously. But he wasn't an idiot, this wasn't brain surgery, it was just shopping. He'd been doing shopping on his own, just running down to the corner store to get a few things between grocery trips and trying on and paying for his own clothes while Aunt Petunia took Dudley to nicer shops (which had sections catering to "husky" lads), for years. It wasn't really a difficult concept.

"Molly, do you really think my aunt would have let me come here alone if she didn't think I could mind myself for an hour? I'll be fine. Thank you for showing me the way here." Harry could see the bank now, a massive white marble building with guards standing outside who were definitely not human. "I won't keep you any longer." Translation: piss off.

Molly got it, though she still didn't seem entirely comfortable leaving him, for some God-unknown reason. She thought he was meeting a professor in half an hour, for Christ's sake! And she didn't know him well enough to just assume that was plenty of time for him to get in trouble, either!

She and her children wasted another several minutes with "are you sure" -s and "nice to meet you" -s, and Harry had to promise to look for Ron and the twins on the train to school, but he did eventually manage to extract himself.

Next time, he vowed, I will ask the skeeziest, least trustworthy-looking person I see for directions. If they tried to kidnap or rob him...well, he'd take his chances. It wasn't rude to punch muggers in the face or run away from kidnappers, neither of which were (reasonable) options to end a conversation with a perfectly nice lady who was trying to be helpful, but had mistaken Harry for a Dudley-type character who couldn't find his own arse without help.

He would have liked to take a minute or two to compose himself before heading into the bank — he was a little annoyed, and he really did need the goblins to cooperate with him. Losing his temper because the bankers wanted to know where his parents were before they changed his money or some shite would not be conducive to getting the silly, un-decimalised magic currency he needed for his shopping.

But Molly was watching him, as though she thought he was going to run off and it was for some reason her responsibility to make sure he didn't — honestly! he'd barely met the woman, and she was acting like he was her kid to take care of! — so he headed straight up the steps.

The bank had two sets of doors. The first set, burnished bronze blinding in the morning sunlight, was flanked by a pair of goblins — short, humanoid beings (even shorter than Harry, though not by much) with an extra joint in their long fingers and neatly trimmed goatees, wearing a very formal-looking uniform and carrying equally formal-looking bronze spears. (They still looked sharp enough to cut someone, though, even if they were mostly ceremonial.) They took stock of Harry as well as he climbed toward them and nodded when he reached the top, ushering him through the first doors. They were much larger than he'd thought from the ground, enough that they'd only opened one leaf maybe a quarter of the way, and there was still plenty of room for Harry to walk through.

The second set of doors was similarly guarded and ajar, though these were smaller and both open about halfway, and covered in mirror-bright silver except where words had been elaborately carved into them. Those, Harry thought, had probably deliberately been left to tarnish so they were easier to read — a poem, in English on the right-hand leaf, threatening unspecified horrors against anyone who might attempt to steal anything from their vaults, and...Harry had no idea what the words on the left meant. He was pretty sure they were words, but not in any alphabet he'd ever seen before. Presumably they were in the goblins' own language. The second set of guards — these armed with very shiny swords instead of spears — nodded as he passed as well, entering a massive marble hall.

There were about two-dozen goblin tellers sitting behind a high counter, though one could be forgiven for thinking at first glance that there were far more than that: both ends of the room were covered in mirrors, reflecting infinite goblins. Most of them were weighing piles of coins or scribbling in ledgers, a few were evaluating loose gemstones or jewellery. There were very few humans around (Harry suspected the bank had just opened at nine), and most of those who were were being escorted by goblins into or out of the thirteen doors lining the side of the hall opposite the tellers' bench. There were three goblins, out of the two dozen, who seemed to be helping the handful of other customers who weren't already assigned to a goblin to attend to their business beyond one of the doors.

Harry had never really been to a bank on his own before, but he had been brought along when Aunt Petunia was running errands, and even if he hadn't the first step was pretty self-explanatory: he joined the short queue of wizards waiting for a teller. About ten seconds after he walked up, one of the tellers with a customer shouted at another goblin to...escort her to her vault, Harry was pretty sure. Why he thought that, he couldn't say, since he definitely didn't speak whatever language goblins spoke...unless that was the weird language Uncle Vernon said he spoke when he was dumped on the Dursleys, in which case... No, he was still surprised that he remembered enough of it to even get a vague sense of the meaning.

If 'seeing' magic wasn't normal for wizards, Harry realised, he probably should've asked the twins and Ginny if it was normal for wizards to just sort of know things sometimes, or be improbably good at practically everything. And, apparently, be able to understand languages they had no business knowing, though obviously he hadn't known that until just now... Still.

The man at the front of the queue waited until the witch and her escort cleared out, then approached the counter without waiting for the teller to wave him forward. He, it seemed, was making a deposit, dumping a small pile of gold and silver out of a bag it couldn't possibly have fit in onto the counter. The teller passed him a form and began counting the coins.

The man in front of Harry headed halfway down the room to the furthest teller who was dealing with customers — Harry hadn't noticed the wizard down there finish his business, but he was walking back toward the main doors now. The third goblin with a customer, this one a witch, seemed to be in a heated argument with her, one Harry sort of expected to be able to overhear, but the little dividers between teller-stations extended a few feet out into the hall with magic and seemed to be stopping their voices from carrying. He wasn't at all surprised that the bloke making a deposit finished up before her. He waited until the man passed him, heading back toward the street, then stepped forward himself.

He had to stop quite a way back from the counter to be sure the teller would see him, beyond the point where the magic dividers stopped, but when the goblin did finally look up from her paperwork — making a few notes related to the last customer, Harry thought — she waved him closer, leaning forward and staring down at him as though she'd never seen a human child before. For a long moment, Harry thought she was going to call for a guard to throw him out or something, and he was going to have to go find Professor McGonagall after all, but then she said something in her own language that Harry recognised as...a formal greeting to an enemy with whom one has a long-standing truce?

He parrotted it back, since he was pretty sure it implied they were equals, and if he was her former enemy she should be his too, right? tongue stumbling slightly on the unfamiliar sounds. "Ah, sorry. That wasn't quite right, was it? I don't actually speak...whatever your language is called."

"Humans call it Gobbledygook," she informed him. He got the impression that behind her little close-mouthed smile she was laughing at him, though he didn't quite know why. "My apologies, I mistook you for someone else."

"Who?"

She tipped her head to one side in an odd sort of shrug. "A child of the House of Black." Oh, right. Apparently there was a family resemblance between Harry and the bloke Snape thought was actually Harry's biological father. Harry found that somewhat hard to believe, since it suggested his biological father also looked like a girl, but he hadn't thought it important enough compared to finding out literally everything else he knew about the magical world to question it. "Though that you are not explains why you are dressed as a muggle. What brings you to Gringotts today, child?"

"I need to exchange muggle money for galleons. School shopping," he explained, handing a wad of notes up to her. After much consultation with Professor Snape on the expected prices, and negotiating with Aunt Petunia, Harry had secured three-hundred quid to use in the event that the wizards failed to give him the key to his bank vault. This was decidedly less than Professor Snape had recommended, and much less than Aunt Petunia had spent on Dudley's kit and school supplies (and Harry could almost guarantee that he wouldn't look nearly as ridiculous in his uniform), but still more money than Harry had ever had in his possession in his life.

"The exchange rate is five pounds sterling to one galleon, less a one-point-seven-five per cent exchange fee, for a total of fifty-eight galleons, sixteen sickles, four knuts." Harry nodded. That was about what Professor Snape had told him to expect. "One galleon for a purse with featherweight and expansion enchantments to hold it."

Harry made a face. If the bank was selling them for a galleon, there was probably someone a few blocks away selling them for half as much, but he didn't really think he was going to be able to fit that much change in his pockets to get a few blocks down the street. He knew wizards didn't use notes. He should've thought to borrow a purse from Aunt Petunia, but it was too late now. He nodded again. He'd also been told to ask, "Can I get the seven galleons in Morgens?"

Technically, there was no quarter-galleon coin, nor a quarter-sickle for that matter, but it was fairly common for traders to just...cut coins into pieces, to work around the fact that it was terribly awkward making change when the units of currency weren't just un-decimalised, they were actually prime numbers. A "Morgen" — also called a piece — was a quarter-galleon, worth four and a quarter sickles. A bit — a quarter sickle or "Mordred" — was seven and a quarter knuts. There actually was a quarter-knut coin, a little pewter thing called a clip, but according to Professor Snape no one ever used them. The magic the goblins worked into the metal of the coins to stop them being duplicated or counterfeited or melted down (though they weren't really gold and silver anyway, just gold and silver plated) didn't stop them being cut into pieces, so it was generally thought that the goblins didn't actually disapprove of the practice.

They still made a show of disapproving, though. The teller frowned down her long, pointed nose at Harry. "Next you're going to tell me you want half of the sickles in bits!"

He gave her his most charming smile. "If you've got them, sure."

She rolled her eyes, but began counting out coins, setting them on the counter in little stacks where Harry could see, and had him sign a receipt before sweeping them all into a little bag not unlike the one the man before Harry had had. She even included what had to be a handful of clips. "Anything else, mage-child?"

"No, thank you," he said, standing on tip-toe to take the bag. "Oh! Wait! Yes! Is there anywhere you'd recommend for robes? Preferably second-hand, though I'm going to need Hogwarts uniforms, too..."

The goblin laughed, but five minutes later Harry wandered out of the white marble bank into the sunlight with a little map drawn on the back of his copy of his receipt and directions to a few less expensive shops for various school supplies in the main Alley and a couple of second-hand shops that might have used clothes down a side-alley called Knockturn. His plan was to find something to wear so he wouldn't stand out quite so much, then go get a wand, because those were the two most expensive items on the list — the wand and then a new wardrobe, collectively — then a trunk to carry everything, and then everything except books. He wanted to save the bookstore for last, so he could spend any extra time and money there.

Well, last save finding the Muggleborn Shopping Group and withdrawing money to repay Aunt Petunia. He made it out of the bank just in time — he spotted the Deputy Headmistress and her party headed his way from the top of the stairs (probably coming to let the muggle parents change money too) and barely managed to slip away into the crowd before they spotted him.

Finding relatively cheap robes to throw on over his muggle shirt and trousers wasn't difficult at all, but it ended up taking much longer to replace his wardrobe as a whole than he'd expected — the first shop he stopped at had a couple of plain, unenchanted (apparently most clothes were enchanted in one way or another, some in ways that made them impossible to resell), and therefore cheap robes in his size. They didn't seem much different from the things he'd seen wizards on the street wearing in terms of cut and decoration — one was black, with a little white design embroidered on the cuffs and around the neck and hem, and one a shimmery sort of fabric that looked maroon in some lights and a dark purple in others — so he figured they'd be fine. But then there were clearly under-robes and things that went with them, and he realised pretty quickly he didn't actually know what all one was expected to wear at once, and there seemed to be a few different kinds of robes — some with two pieces: shorter, tunic-like tops and overly-full, knickerbocker-like trousers; some with long, paneled over-robes — so he figured he should probably go to one of the more reputable looking places out in the main alley to get an idea of how he should dress and then come back for the other stuff.

He bought his Hogwarts uniform over-robes and hat from a witch called Madam Malkin, because he thought he should give her some custom for teaching him how to dress himself — apparently the black robe was an apprentice owl-breeder's robe (that was what the white design meant), so he probably shouldn't wear that one in public until he had time to tear the embroidery out — which probably only took half an hour, but by the time he'd found underclothes and shoes and a couple more robes to wear outside of classes it was almost half past eleven. (Unfortunately time and money spent shopping were inversely related.)

It was worth it, though, since he only spent half what Professor Snape had told him to expect on clothes, which meant he could afford to get a fancier trunk than he'd expected to be able to. Well, technically it wasn't a trunk at all, it was an enormous carpet-bag with about a dozen different pockets and compartments. It was bigger on the inside and enchanted to weigh only a fraction of what it should, and shrank — it couldn't be opened while it was small and smelled vaguely of mothballs and cabbage (he found it at the same second-hand shop as most of his clothes), but it was still awesome, and came with a shoulder-strap to carry like a slightly-oversized duffle.

He decided to skip lunch for the sake of time, and was, all in all, in a very good mood when he reached the shop of a wandmaker called Ollivander — the only place to go for a first wand, according to the half-dozen people he asked between Madam Malkin's and Odd's Bodkins and Other Strange Notions (the second-hand shop, which didn't actually sell anything for sewing at all) — whereupon that good mood took a sudden nose-dive.

"Hello?" he called, over the silvery tinkle of a little bell somewhere in the depths of the shop, squinting again against the brightness of the enchantments all around him. This had to be the most strongly magical place he'd been yet, the air tingling with potential positively itching to do something, walls lined with hundreds of boxes — thousands, maybe — each glowing with barely-contained energy. The feeling of constraint, of being locked down and held back, was so great that Harry actually felt a little claustrophobic (which was weird, because he wasn't actually claustrophobic at all), and the overwhelming brightness of so much magic started giving him a headache almost instantly.

"Hello?" he called again, a little more loudly, and a little more annoyed. He didn't care if this was the best place for a wand according to every other bloody person in Britain, he'd only been here for about thirty seconds and he already wanted to leave.

"Good morning," a soft voice said, a man appearing out of the depths of the shop, surrounded by a purposeful cloud of magic so thick Harry was honestly having trouble making out the man himself. Old and thin and a little stooped, with bright silver eyes. "I am Garrick Ollivander, and you are..." He trailed off, coming closer, those odd eyes fixed on Harry's face.

"Er...Harry—"

"Harry Potter, yes, I'd know those eyes anywhere. It seems only yesterday your mother was in here buying her first wand — long, swishy...willow and phoenix, a unique combination. But there's something...untethered about you. Something...hmmm..." He frowned.

"Ah...untethered?" Harry repeated, perhaps a bit confrontationally. His voice sounded far too loud in the quiet little shop.

"Hmm, yes. From your destiny. Your place in the Tapestry. Removed from the line of your forefathers and ignorant of your place in history... Continuity has been broken. I think we shall have to approach you as though you were a stranger to our world..."

Harry, as far as he was concerned, was a stranger to Ollivander's world, and all this cryptic muttering was only making his headache worse. The shopkeeper — wand maker? — pulled a little silver measuring tape from his robes. "Which is your wand-hand, Mister Potter?"

"I don't know."

Ollivander gave him a smile that was probably meant to be kindly, but which struck Harry more as patronising. "Which hand do you write with, Mister Potter?"

Harry shrugged. He was pretty sure he'd been left-handed when he'd started school, but he'd been taught to write with his right and practised more with it, so now he could write with either hand pretty much equally well. He still used his left more for throwing things or chopping vegetables or whatever, but he did normally use his right for writing. Using his left smudged the words, since English was written left to right. "Right, I guess?"

"Ambidextrous? Interesting..." The old man hummed. "Though not unusual, I suppose, given..."

"Given what?"

"If you do not already know, it is not my place to tell you, Mister Potter," the infuriating old coot said firmly. "Perhaps you will find you excel at techniques which require two wands to master."

"No offence, but I'd like to just get one wand and get out of here, Mister Ollivander. I'm not used to being around this much magic," he added, in an attempt to soften what he immediately realised was a rather rude statement.

"Oh-ho, sensitive, are we?" he chuckled, which was not helping Harry's headache, or his mood. "Very well, hold out your right hand for me. Palm up, if you would."

Harry did as he was told. Ollivander flicked back the sleeve of his shimmery, maroon robe to reveal his wrist, measuring from the tip of his middle finger to the crease at the base of his palm, then to the crook of his elbow, and armpit to floor, around his head, and across his shoulders, muttering about proportions as though Harry's were somehow unusual. (He didn't think they were, aside from just being generally small. It wasn't like his head was freakishly large or something.)

"Somewhere in the range of eleven to twelve inches, I think," he announced at length. "And when is your birthday?"

"Thirty-first July."

The answer earned Harry a narrow-eyed look. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I don't actually remember it," he snapped, "but that's what my birth certificate says."

The old man chuckled again. "Apologies, Mister Potter, you simply do not strike me as a summer child. Is there any time of the year you particularly enjoy, or any time you feel particularly close to magic? Drawn to something, some force you can't name, perhaps?"

"Er...I like springtime," he admitted. "Around the end of April and beginning of May, you know, when things really start growing again? And..." Feeling drawn to something he couldn't name made him think of the Dark Night, the night every year when he was overcome by a need he couldn't explain, when his dreams were filled with a woman — though she wasn't really a woman. She might have seemed like a grown lady to Harry when he was a little kid, but these past few years he thought she didn't seem that much older than him, maybe fourteen or fifteen...though she was also ancient, and not so much a person at all as she was rage and cruelty and destruction given form (but that made her sound scary, and she wasn't really, she loved Harry, wanted to help and protect him and was almost as frustrated that she couldn't as he was that he couldn't help her, and he couldn't help loving her back) — starving and pleading with him, trying to make him understand that she needed him, that she needed him to help her, kill someone for her (just tell me who and where and how, I'll do it, I promise...) — she needed life, or she would die—

"And?"

And Harry probably shouldn't go around telling people that there was a voice in his head that wanted him to kill people. Aunt Petunia hadn't taken it well, and she knew him. She'd been scared of him, which was absurd — Harry had been all of seven when he'd finally managed to articulate what happened on Dark Nights, and physically and mentally exhausted from an entire night spent crying, completely defeated by his inability to do anything to help the woman in his dream and the lingering knowledge of the importance of doing so, by the wound in his very soul which grew a little deeper and sharper every year he failed the voice, which was actually a part of him, or maybe he was a little piece of it, of some dying magic he didn't understand. But he wouldn't hurt his family, no matter how little they understood him, or how scared they were of him. It would be counterproductive to kill any of them for the voice for one thing, like eating his own leg, and for another...

They were his family. He didn't know where or when he'd learned it — maybe before his own parents had died, even — but family meant he was one of them. He had to take care of them, and they had to take care of him, because they rose or fell together. Of course, since Harry was a child, taking care of him meant teaching him how to be a person, and since he was a questionably sane demon-child, teaching him meant a decade of beating the concept of consequences into his head (and his arse), and he might hate that, but that didn't mean he hated them. They had a place in each other's lives, and as much as they might hurt or scare each other, they weren't actually a danger to each other. Not really. They'd never really talked about it, but Aunt Petunia had to know that, or she wouldn't dare ask Uncle Vernon to hit him for breaking the rules or ever let him be anywhere alone with Dudley.

And she was horrified when Harry told her about Dark Nights. Ergo, it was not a thing he should tell anyone else.

"The winter solstice," he said shortly, leaving it at that.

The old man nodded. "Yes, yes...Walpurgis and Yule, two very powerful times of the year, indeed... But not associated with any particular wand-wood. How would you describe yourself, Mister Potter?"

"Er..." Generally speaking, he wouldn't?

"Loyal? Intelligent? Aggressive? Protective? Kind?"

"Er...yeah? I guess?" Honestly, he had no idea. "Well, not kind, probably, but..."

The wizard sighed at him. "You are not making this easy for me, Mister Potter."

"I'm sorry, I don't know what you want from me, here!"

"Let us try this another way. Are you particularly patient?"

"No."

"Quick-tempered?"

"Er...maybe?"

"Clever?"

"Yes."

"Arrogant?"

"Would I say yes even if I were?"

The old man chuckled. "Probably not, I suppose. Adventurous?"

"Yes."

"Self-sufficient?"

"I can take care of myself and work things out for myself, if that's what you mean." He didn't necessarily think he couldn't rely on other people, he just didn't need to very often, which he thought was the difference Professor Snape was talking about the other day, between Harry and a kid he would expect to go to Slytherin, even though he was pretty sure most people used self-sufficient and self-reliant interchangeably.

Ollivander nodded. "Trusting?"

"Er...I don't really think I'm untrusting, but I'm not an idiot..."

"Conformist?"

"Ah, no." Definitely not.

"Stubborn?"

"Aunt Petunia says I am..."

"Impulsive?"

"Sometimes, maybe, yes."

"Prone to melancholy?" There was something about his tone, there, that made it seem like that one might not be directly related to the wand thing, but Harry didn't know what it might actually mean.

"Um, no?" Other than Dark Nights, Harry couldn't actually remember ever being sad or down. He got angry sometimes, or bored, but not melancholy.

The old wizard, apparently satisfied, nodded. "I think that will be enough to be getting on with." He bustled off into the depths of the shop, stopping here or there to tug a box from a shelf, explaining the different wand cores he used as he did so. Harry was far more concerned with trying to relieve his growing headache than paying attention. Rubbing at his eyes and temples and massaging the back of his neck made very little difference, but it did relieve some of the tension which was a secondary cause of his feeling like shite, beyond the glare of the magic itself. He couldn't do anything about that.

A minute or two later, the wandmaker returned with half a dozen boxes. "We'll start with several wands of the same wood, to determine which core works best for you, then a selection of wands with similar cores to find the wood which best suits your personality, and your specific match. All of these are sycamore," he informed Harry.

Harry nodded, as though that meant something to him.

Ollivander obviously knew that it didn't. "Closely related to maple in its characteristics, but just a touch more adventurous. First, unicorn." He set his stack of boxes on the till counter, then selected one and opened it, presenting it to Harry. His fingers had barely grazed the wood when the wandmaker snatched it away again, snapping the box shut. "No. Most definitely not," he declared — bewilderingly, because Harry hadn't really noticed anything happen. He hadn't even picked the bloody thing up!

That was apparently enough to rule out all unicorn wands, though, as Ollivander removed two others from the pile to try as well. "Dragon will almost certainly be better."

This one, he actually let Harry pick up. It felt warm in his hand, almost alive, and when he gave it an experimental wave, the tip began to glow.

"Perhaps... Perhaps... Let's try the phoenix too, just to be sure."

The phoenix-feather wand did not like Harry. He could tell as soon as he picked it up, it was almost...disdainful toward him, for no reason he could imagine. Could wands be disdainful? The wandmaker obviously sensed it too, though, saying, "No, I think not," before Harry so much as gave it a flick.

"Dragon, then," the old man said, handing Harry the last of the six wands. This one felt more natural in Harry's hand than the first, quicker to react when he swirled it in the air before himself, not glowing, but sort of carving into the ambient magic all around them, giving it a little bit of order and purpose, a brilliant invisible trail left in its wake. "And it seems the female suits you slightly better than the male. Not surprising, female dragons do tend to be more volatile than males."

He gathered up the other five boxes and tottered back into the shelves, leaving Harry with the female dragon wand. (He definitely would not be telling Dudley that his wand was a girl wand.) With nothing to occupy himself other than listening to the old man's muffled babbling about maple and blackthorn and pine and oh, maybe...yes, we could try that one, he entertained himself drawing geometric patterns in the magic around himself.

After a few minutes, Ollivander returned with what had to be at least two dozen boxes — so many he could barely hold them all — which he carefully slid onto the counter.

What followed was a frankly bewilderingly fast paced appraisal of the suitability of a number of combinations of different woods and heart-strings from different dragons, most of which felt perfectly fine to Harry — at least as good as the one he'd been playing with while Ollivander hunted through the shelves — but which Ollivander said weren't quite right. He eventually narrowed it down to ebony as the best fit for Harry's personality — "resolutely individualistic and rigidly non-conformist, paradoxically suited to those destined to find their place in society is that of an outsider," whatever that meant (Harry privately suspected it was complete hogwash, the sort of shite he might expect a fortune-teller at a carnival to tell her victims to lure them in, making them feel special) — but insisted that none of the wands he'd already tried were "the one" (and Harry would know how the wandmaker could be so very sure of that when he did find "the one").

Harry was pretty sure he tried every single ebony and dragon-heartstring wand in the shop before the old man's eyes lit up.

"What?" Harry asked, as he strode determinedly back into the shelves yet again.

"Now, as I've said," the wizard explained excitedly, going even further this time, to the very back of the shop. "I myself work only with unicorn tail-hairs, dragon heart-strings, and phoenix feathers. We do still have several wands in stock, however, from my father and grandfather's days. Grandfather in particular fancied himself a bit of an explorer in his youth, travelling the world in search of exotic wand-making components. This!" he exclaimed, reappearing with a single, very old looking box. "This is the one!"

Like the last fifty wands Harry had tried, it was ebony, but unlike the last fifty wands, when he touched it something like an electric shock ran through him, his magic and that of the wand twining together in a way none of the others had done, a fountain of golden and silver sparks erupting spontaneously from the wand as the bond stabilised. Harry spontaneously erupted in giggles, in spite of his headache.

"Yeah, okay," he said, grinning almost too hard to speak, "I get it now."

Ollivander seemed almost as pleased. "Eleven and five-eighths, ebony and nundu!" Harry had never heard of a nundu. "Ha! Finally got you, you tricky blighter!" Harry was...pretty sure he was talking to the wand. "You will recall, Mister Potter, that I said dragon-wands are powerful, temperamental, and quick to bond to any new owner — provided they are well-suited, of course — reflecting the flocking nature of most dragons. The nundu is a much more independent beast, as one might expect of a feline creature, and far more adaptive than any dragon. Resilient — immune to disease, the worst part of their reputation comes from their propensity to become carriers for deadly plagues which seem not to harm them in the least — and impossible to subjugate — dragons can be trained, like those the goblins keep in their tunnels, broken by extreme abuse, but you will never find a tame nundu, and they are far too clever to keep in captivity. I will admit, I — and my father before me — thought Grandfather mad, to craft a wand from the heart of a nundu — this one was killed in Tanganyika in Twenty-Two, after attacking nearly a dozen native villages — but he swore we'd find a match for it eventually!"

His ranting was interrupted by the tinkle of the bell, as a redheaded witch with the same silvery eyes as the old man walked into the shop, taking in the scene with a single glance. "Grandfather? You did still want me to come by to help with the Hogwarts group this afternoon, didn't you?"

"Zoë! Zoë! I finally found a match for the nundu! Harry Potter! Look!" He pointed excitedly at the wand still in Harry's hand.

The witch raised an eyebrow at Harry. "Congratulations?"

"Damn right, congratulations, girl! Sixty-seven years, that wand's been sitting on a shelf, terrorising the rest of the stock! I should've offered it to Bellatrix in Fifty-Seven, but that black walnut and dragon took to her so quickly..."

"Yes, yes, I know, Grandfather. Here, why don't you go put on the kettle? I'll get the young gentleman rung up, and we can have a cup of tea while we wait for Minerva and her ducklings."

"Of course, dear. Mister Potter, it's been an honour!" the strange old man proclaimed, giving Harry a short bow and retreating into the depths of the shop yet again.

The woman shook her head watching him go, then tutted at the state of the till counter, littered with boxed wands that hadn't been quite right. "Have a cup of tea and put back half the stock," she muttered under her breath. "Alright, Mister Potter, let's see the box." He handed it over, and she copied a number from the end of it into a ledger, speaking as she wrote. "I don't suppose Grandfather explained the pricing system at any point in the past...however long he's had you trapped here."

"Er, no. Professor Snape said prices generally range from ten to twenty-five or thirty galleons for a first wand." More toward the higher end of the range, usually. That was most of the reason he'd wanted to get this first — he was willing to cut corners on the rest of his supplies if necessary, buying them second-hand and so on, but a wand was obviously the most important piece of equipment on the list, so.

Zoe nodded. "Based on the materials used to craft them, their availability and the cost of collecting them, yes. And while ebony is reasonably widely-available, the nundu-heartstring makes this particular wand even more unique than most. But we also take into account the likelihood that any given wand will be a suitable match for another mage. Matching wands to wizards is a bit like arranging a marriage. There might be five or ten wands in the shop you're compatible with, and one or two you really hit it off with, and similarly most wands here will find a wizard with whom they are willing to work within ten or twenty years of their crafting.

"Dragon-wands tend to be relatively expensive, both because dragon heart-strings are less widely available than unicorn hair and because they're less particular about their mates than unicorns or phoenixes. Phoenix feathers are very dear, but phoenix-wands are nearly as picky as your nundu, so when we find a match for one we generally let it go for less than you might expect just based on the cost of materials. If you don't take that one, it could very well sit on a shelf for another seventy years before another person it likes comes along. We'll let it go for twenty."

Harry gave her his best unimpressed stare, beginning the haggling process which seemed to be a feature of every transaction he'd witnessed in the magical shopping centre. "From what you're saying, it sounds like you should be paying me to take it off your hands. Ten."

She laughed. "Don't insult me, kid. I don't care if you're Merlin himself reincarnated, people died to get the core of that wand. It's worth at least eighty, and that's without considering the wood and the expertise that went into crafting it. Giving it to you for twenty is practically me paying you to take it off my hands."

Harry pouted, but he couldn't really argue with people died, and he wasn't leaving here without this wand. Usually he didn't mind just walking away if negotiations weren't going well, but he couldn't walk away from this one, and he was pretty sure the silver-eyed witch knew it. He attempted to twist his face into a look of contrition, lest she actually raise the price on him for insulting her.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting. I thought negotiating prices was just, you know, what people do here," he explained, pulling out his little coin-purse somewhat shame-facedly. He hadn't imagined that she was opening with an offer seventy-five or eighty per cent below the actual value of the wand.

"Well, it is, but I'm not going to take advantage of an eleven-year-old kid who doesn't know a damn thing about wands. We save that sort of thing for entitled old nobles who think they know everything about wands, see." She winked at him. "Tell you what, I'll throw in a holster for you, since you clearly don't have isolation enchantments on your pockets, gratis."

"Isolation enchantments?"

"Oooh, I guess Grandfather didn't mention anything about wand-care, either?" Harry shook his head. She sorted his coins into the till and started fishing around behind the counter for something, coming up with a leather tube a little longer than the shaft of the wand (not counting the handle) a few seconds later. "Right, well. The thing is, your wand is a very delicate, highly-enchanted instrument. Certain types of magic can be very disruptive to the enchantments and cause the wand to fail catastrophically — exploding or bursting into flame. The most common cause of wand-loss is taking them through the floo without ensuring they're properly shielded. Most mages buy robes with a specially enchanted pocket to shield their wands from floo-damage, as well as from accidental breakage — enchanted or not, it is still a piece of wood, accidents happen. A wand-holster does the same thing, though it's generally considered a bit less convenient for daily use than just being able to pocket your wand. Professional duellists, curse-breakers, aurors, and battle-mages almost always wear theirs on their off-arm, but that requires a special kind of holster with additional space-warping enchantments, since obviously your wand is longer than your forearm. This one you hang from your belt," she explained, threading leather laces through a couple of holes on the back to form loops and holding it up for him to see.

Harry didn't have a belt, but that didn't matter, because as soon as he left here he was going to see if he could find one of those arm holsters — that sounded awesome. Yes, he would probably have to pay something for it, even if they would take this holster as trade too, but he figured the difference probably wouldn't be more than he'd pay for a good belt anyway. For the moment, he just tucked the whole thing into the pockets he had thought were unusually deep when he'd first put this robe on. (It had barely registered at the time, honestly — pockets reaching down almost to his knees were a minor oddity compared to some of the features of various thrift-store clothes he'd seen over the years. It was sort of a pain to fish out his coin purse, but all of the one-piece robes he'd tried were like this, so he'd figured it was intended to foil pickpockets or something.) "Thanks! Is there anything else I should know?"

"About the wand? It should be fine for at least a year. If you start having any difficulties with it, bring it in and we'll see if the runes or varnishing need a touch-up, but ebony is a very stable wood and difficult to chip accidentally. If you do somehow manage to chip it, bring it in as soon as possible. Don't try to repair the chip yourself or get some cheap shop to do it — an inexpert repair will almost always lead to serious fracturing and irreparable damage down the line. Polishing isn't really necessary on a daily basis, but you may find that performance begins to suffer if the varnish starts getting too scratched up. That tends to be an issue more with kids who keep their wands unprotected in their pockets, along with the gods only know what else. Most people bring their wands in every two or three years to make sure it's still in good working order and still a good fit for them — it can be difficult to tell if you're approaching the extreme of the resonance range of your wand once you're already accustomed to working with it. Tends to happen gradually, like."

Harry nodded. "And...not about the wand?" Because about the wand implied there was something else, too.

She grinned. "Five doors down from Borgin and Burke's in Knockturn, on the other side of the alley, there's a storefront with a name you can't read painted on the window. It looks abandoned from outside, but the door's not locked. It's a bookshop. Owner's named Odysseus. Tell him I sent you, and ask him for an occlumency primer."

"Occlumency?"

The witch nodded. "Mind magic. Should help you learn how to sort of tone down your magical perception."

"Oh. Thanks. How did you...?"

She laughed. "I'm a Seer, I know all sorts of things. Like that if you don't get going, I'm not going to have time to tidy up before Minnie McGonagall gets here, so."

Well, then. Harry would have to do that. Both looking for that bookshop, and getting out of her way. "Oh. Okay. Thanks again! And tell your grandfather I said thanks, too." He couldn't remember if he had or not, what with how weird the old man was.

"Will do. Shoo." She waved him back out into the sun just in time to hear a bell ringing one.