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The Next Lord of Kobol

Chapter 10 – Culture Shock

-x-x-x-x-x-x

"Are you feeling better, Dobby?"  Harry asked as he watched the elf gnaw on a couple of biscuits that were part of his lunch.  They tasted somewhat like oatmeal raisin, but had a bit if a gritty texture to them.

"Dobby is a bad elf.  He makes his master take care of him."

"Do you really think I believe that?"

"No," the elf answered.  "Harry Potter is a kind and generous master who sees the best in people and elves."

That made Harry laugh.  "I'm not sure about people there Little D, but I know I can count on my elf.  The only thing I worry about is how I'm going to keep you busy when you're back on your feet.  They've got a pair of maids who come in and clean the room."

His small friend looked crestfallen, so he added, "But they're nowhere near as good as you are, so you'll have to go back behind them. The biggest challenge is making sure you're never seen."

"Dobby will not let the strange Muggles see him," the elf stated.

"Good.  I'll probably have you help me do the landscaping."

"Dobby did the landscaping and gardening for bad Malfoy's."

Harry took a swig of his midday glass of butterbeer and said, "You did?  So do you know how to recognize magical herbs?"

His servant nodded.

"Good.  Once you're all healed up, I'm going to have you go looking for what you can find in the local area.  I need to see what kind of potions I can make here, so I can use the cup's abilities for the more complicated brews."

"Does Harry Potter have a proper cauldron?"

"No, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.  We'll also need a hidden place to grow these plants you find.  I'll be able to ward a spot once we find we can use.  Let me know when you're better and I'll give you permission to start looking for a location."

He added that last part knowing Dobby would leave the moment he could stand.  Up in the mountains there should be plenty of out of the way, maybe even inaccessible, places where he could hide a small greenhouse and enhance it with charms and runes.  Herbology wasn't his specialty and Harry was fairly certain that the elf's knowledge easily outstretched his own.

Dobby nodded.

"Good, now you finish resting and be sure to stay out of sight.  I gave Maggie the museum brochure at lunch and said I want to go there.  She's supposed to be asking her mother if she can take me there.  So if you sense me leaving the property, that's where I'm going."

-x-x-x-x-x-x

"So he gave this to you and asked if he could go there?"

"Yes," Maggie replied.  "I figured I'd better ask you first, since he's not of age.  Do you actually know how old Harry is?"

"No, we've never been able to turn up any records on him.  Unfortunately, I can't let you take him by yourself and this has nothing to do with our argument.  That's where he was attacked.  He could be on the verge of remembering something and it might not be a very nice memory."

The young woman hadn't considered that, but her mother was right.

"Still if he's asking to go, it is definite progress.  I believe he should go, but it will have to be supervised.  It might help him get past some of the mental blocks he's erected.  Let me see what my schedule looks like."

-x-x-x-x-x-x

It was amusing watching Maggie try to convince Mrs. Edmondson that she should take Harry ahead on her motorcycle.  Truthfully, he wouldn't mind, but it wasn't in the cards.

They ended up piling into a white van with the facility's logo on the door for the trip.  He'd been out several times at night, but this was really the first time he'd seen the city of Delphi properly.  The architecture was suitably Greek influenced and Harry had the impression that the city tried to rival Caprica City in vying to be the cultural center of the planet.

Delphi could have been almost any Muggle city on Earth, except for the large number of flying vehicles traversing the skyline.  There was a strong military presence in the northwest part of the city by virtue of the Colonial Airbase.  Watching all the vehicles darting about made Harry long for his Firebolt and the open sky.

It was a luxury he couldn't afford.

Once they arrived at the museum, it took conscious effort for Harry to restrain himself.  He wanted to go straight to the veil, but knew that would be a bad move.

In addition to the mother and daughter, there was a rather large orderly, who was their driver and kept watching Harry.  The wizard knew the man's presence was in case he had some kind of breakdown.

Considering his Animagus form could make short work of the surly man, Harry found the whole scene rather amusing.

"Mom, I'm going to the bathroom," Maggie announced.

Nancy Edmondson nodded, looked at Harry, and said, "Do you have to go as well?"

Fighting back a laugh at being addressed like a toddler, Harry nodded his head.

"Okay, Harry.  Mr. Hitchens will take you."

They followed Maggie to a silver door.  Harry stopped when he stepped inside.  It was a loo alright, but it was a female one.  There were no stand up urinals.  Maggie didn't seem angry they were in there with her.  She just went into a stall.

"C'mon!" his burly escort said.  "I don't have all day."

"Is something wrong?" Maggie asked.

"The kid's acting funny."

"Funny?" Harry thought.  "Funny is men and women not using the same water closet!"

He hadn't really thought of it.  The bathrooms at Amanda's Open Arms and the other place he'd briefly stayed at were for patients, so he'd never really considered it.  Apparently, this culture didn't build restrooms for the different sexes. 

Despite the inhabited planet in the sky, the space travel, and the whole gridbox thing, this was the most disturbing thing Harry had encountered.  Maybe it was because this was the first time he was directly interacting with something.  Harry thought his Uncle Vernon had said something about having same sex bathrooms in France or something.

"Don't worry, Harry," Maggie said.  "No one is going to hurt you."

"If you only knew, Maggie.  If you only knew."

Shaking off the memories of a professor being burnt to death by his own hands and going full circle to the point where he used magical fire to kill Tom Riddle, Harry walked slowly into an open stall.  Bathrooms might be different, but fortunately toilets were a universal concept.

-x-x-x-x-x-x

When the group rejoined her mother, Maggie pulled her aside and said, "I think something happened to Harry in that bathroom.  He was really acting odd."

Both looked over at the young man who was staring at a display describing farming on the planet Arielon.

"Thanks for telling me," she replied.  "I know you can take care of yourself, but keep a safe distance around Harry while we're here."

Maggie was skeptical.  "Harry's harmless."

"The dead woman with the poisoned knife had a broken neck.  It might not have been Harry, but we can't say for certain that it wasn't."

The young woman scowled, trying to imagine Harry intentionally killing anyone.  Pasting a smile on her face, she walked back over to him.

"I went to Arielon once," she said.  "It was nice."

"You like Virgon better," Harry said.

"Naturally," she said and pointed at display about the Virgon royal family.  "We lived in his suburb of Boskirk named for Queen Charlotte.  Other colonies say having a monarchy in this day and age is stupid...they just don't understand."

Harry nodded and the sincerity in his eyes made her wonder if he was really from Virgon.  Mom believed he might be from Gemenon.  She seemed to think that he was being sacrificed in some kind of religious ritual.  Some of the nurses thought Sagitteron was more likely, because they hadn't seen signs of childhood immunizations on his arms.

Whenever she asked, Harry shrugged his shoulders and didn't have an answer.

As they moved though the exhibits, Harry had her reading them aloud to her.  If any of her friends saw her now, they'd give her no end of grief seeing her playing tour guide.  Fortunately, the odds of any of her circle of friends turning up at this museum were roughly the same as the 13th tribe making contact with the Colonies.

Harry listened attentively and often asked a question or two in his halting Colonial.  Even though he sounded like a six or seven year old, Maggie found herself starting to treat him more and more like a peer.  She stopped underestimating him in their gridbox sessions and she'd never had such fierce competition playing her favorite games.

At the moment, he was very interested in one display case and tugged gently on her arm.

"Let's see what we have here," she said and stared at the plaque.  In the case, were a couple of old books, some sticks, and a few pieces of a loose paper like material that looked odd in a complete rectangle rather than properly trimmed paper.  There were also pictures of a mummified arm baring strange symbols.

Clearing her throat, she said, "The Mystery Cult of the Minoan Arch.  When the arch located on the opposite wall was found by archeologists decades ago, a number of bodies were found with it and some of the objects that were also found there are on display here.  The books and the pages inside are blank, but some have claimed to be able to see odd symbols if they stare at the pages long enough."

Maggie stopped and stared down at the pages as intently as Harry was.  At first there was nothing, but after about a minute, she thought she saw something.  Shaking her head, the strange characters vanished.

Harry looked at her.  "Sorry, I was trying to see if I could see anything."

"Did you?" he asked.

"Not really.  Silly, I guess."

He kept looking at her for a second too long and it made her feel uncomfortable.  She turned her gaze back on the plaque.

"Leading scientists claim this group was one of the many cults in that area and that the passageway they used to access the two arches collapsed during an intense period of seismic activity last century."

"Two arches?"  Harry asked.

"That's what it says.  Let's go see what it says at the arch over there."

Walking over to the arch, she sensed a nervous energy about Harry.  She couldn't put her finger on it, but it was definitely noticeable.  Her mother’s warning came to mind as he pointed to a picture of an excavated temple with two arches.

"The Temple of the Gods on the island of Minoa.  The arch to your right is one of a set reputed to be the fabled doorways of the gods.  These doorways were said to lead to and from the citadel of the gods in their city of Atlantis and to the world of Kobol itself.  Unfortunately the other arch, the Temple of the Gods, and the city of Minoa were destroyed in the war by the Cylons."

-x-x-x-x-x-x

"Harry?  Are you okay?"

Harry sat down on the same bench he'd occupied with his injured elf and ignored Maggie's question.

Stunned, he thought, "Destroyed!  The other arch is gone.  It sounds like it went to Atlantis anyway and that's gone as well.  All I've got left is a one way door from a British Ministry that a bunch of pureblood supremacists are in charge of."

Nancy Edmondson had moved up and she inspected him closely.  Maggie came back with a paper cup filled with some water.

"Here Harry, drink this."

He did as she instructed as Nancy said, "I think we should go.  This might have been too much for him to take in."

"No," Harry said, cancelling his pity party or at least postponing it.  "I'm better."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes.  I'm better."  Harry answered and somehow forced a smile onto his face. 

"In the cases, I saw pictures of Azkaban tattoos on the mummified bodies.  I wonder when the Ministry stopped sending people through.  Sometime before it was unearthed..well I guess that's not the right word now is it...uncapricaed?  No, that sounds stupid.  The wands and the charmed journal probably belonged to some Unspeakables who decided to see what was on the other side."

Their horrid fate could have been his if not for luck or perhaps destiny.

He didn't want to think about that.

Harry could read the damaged pages, with some difficulty.  The book probably had a privacy charm on them to keep the words on the pages a secret.  It looked to be notes on the arch back in England and he suspected that the book was really some Unspeakable's journal.

Maggie looked like she saw something on those charmed pages.  Between that and how she was sometimes able to get through his wards made him wonder if she didn't have a touch of magic about her.

Standing and continuing to smile for the benefit of Maggie and Nancy, Harry made a mental note to see what was in that journal at some point.  The wands he didn't really need at the time - he had plenty.  A couple of the metal items look like they would have been at home on Dumbledore's shelves.  They were instruments of sorts.  Everything else appeared to be broken.

"C'mon," Maggie said trying to look cheerful.  "I want to show you Apollo's Arrow."

He responded by faking his own enthusiasm.  His hopes of immediately returning to Earth had vanished.  There were two long term options.

The first was to learn enough about the arches and the magic that ran them.  Maybe he could find a way to make the arches turn on themselves and temporarily make that doorway go in both directions.

The only other option involved getting his own starship and go looking in the outer arms of the spiral for a yellow sun with nine planets around it.  With a good deal of luck, the third planet will have a single moon and seven continents.

However, neither of those plans sounded like they were going to happen anytime soon.  Whether he liked it or not, Harry knew there was a long road ahead.  The spirit of his mum once told him that the people who accomplished great things were able to break down their problems into manageable chunks.

"Currently," he thought, "I'm not sure my bottomless bag is big enough to hold all the chunks my problems break down into."

-x-x-x-x-x-x

Dear Maggie,

So I was digging my way through the grid the other day, when I stumbled on the latest cultural sensation here in Charlotte City.  It seems there's this pretty girl from Virgon, who is going to school with those stuffy, overbearing, obnoxious, bigoted, Capricans.  When this blonde girl starts insulting Virgons in general, the pretty girl whips the other one's frakking ass and leaves poor Blondie drenched in a fountain.

Did I mention his young lady is currently a cultural phenom on her native planet?  Well, maybe I'm exaggerating, but my former little sis is at least the flavor of the month.  Your grid clip has been viewed on the Virgon channel over two million times and people are using your angry, "I'm not impressed" image everywhere.  My other personal favorites are, "Friends don't let friends go to school on Caprica" and the ever popular "Free Margret!"

So how's it feel to be a grid sensation?  Hopefully, you still have time to chat with us little folks.  It's a shame you aren't coming back to Virgon for college.  Maybe that can be a goal of the Free Margret Movement? 

I guess this is the part where I talk about me.  I'm still working the bar, with the rest.  I'm now the off shift manager instead of just the guy slinging the beverages.  I don't know if it's a reward for a job well done or really they're just letting Father Vance have the time off.  Not a good deal for him since Mother Renee had another boy and his time off is really Renee's.  Other than that, I'm taking a class or two where I can fit it in.

One of these days, I'll figure out if I want to start my own family, but the more I see of the stuff going on behind the scenes, the more difficult it looks.

Ken has started up his band.  The name is Helios Epsilon Vipers.  He blows massive chunks, and doesn't have a clue how bad he is.  We let his band play the bar, but not until the people inside are already too drunk to care.

We added a nice couple to the family last month.  It was the first time I'd ever had a real say-so in who joins.  They're cool and run a couple of bed and breakfast places over in the valley.  Headfather Isaiah seemed impressed by them and hopes the family business will continue to expand into the entertainment sector.

Well, gotta run.  Hopefully, you've got time to answer fan mail from former relatives in between all the mayhem you're contemplating.  Tell Kel and Sue not to be such strangers and say hi to your mom from me.

Love,

Shane

Maggie put the letter down and smiled.  Shane had been her big brother and best friend, even moreso than her sisters, who teased Maggie relentlessly over having a crush on Shane.

When she first started dating Cyrus, Sue kept referring to her boyfriend as "Shane's stand-in."  It was even less funny when Kelsey picked it up.

"Sure they both have dirty blond hair and the same body type, but come on!"

Besides, Cyrus already knew they were breaking up when school ended.  He was going to a technical school in Telsa and she was joining her sisters in Caprica City.  Even by train, they'd be hours away and it just wasn't going to last.

She called up the grid links in Shane's letter and went to some of the places listed.  Sure enough, the clip of her and Rachel's fight was in the top fifty most viewed clips for the past standard day.  Looking at her messaging filters, she saw there were six hundred messages being held because they weren't on her approved sender list.

Sending the links on to her sisters and her friends, Maggie, sat back and had a good laugh reading her "fan mail."

As she did, Maggie entertained the idea of transferring to Virgon after her first or second year at college.  It would be fun to see her former group family again.

-x-x-x-x-x-x

Harry turned the lights out in the lounge as he went back to his room for bed check.  Maggie hadn't come out tonight and he added that to the growing list of disappointments he kept in his head.  He could've used some company and gratuitous violence.  Instead, he made it a little further in his reader assignments.

"Soon, I might even be done with picture books!"  he thought, venting some of his mental frustration.

Opening his door, he went in and sat on his bed.  Seeing the face of his elf pop out of the closet, Harry cast a sound dampening charm and said, “You can come out Little D.  How are you feeling?"

"Dobby is much better now."

Harry knew his elf didn't care whether they could get back or not.  Dobby was just glad to be with Harry and comfortable in the knowledge that his mate, Winky, would eventually come.

The young man knew he needed to start somewhere.  To survive on Caprica, he'd need to learn how to speak.  To make it off Caprica, he'd need money...cubits was what they called them.  Without revealing magic, the best job he could get would be landscaper or other similar types of employment.

He'd need to do better than that.  Harry needed a plan.

• Previous
• Shall We Depart? Paying Delores a Visit Even Legends Must Die Athena's Warning Silver Hands and Silver Tongues Veiled Intentions The Dog Runs Fast Offerings and Revelations An Unexpected Reunion Culture Shock Priorities The Caprica Cowhenge
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