MKNB 30: International Travel (Patreon)

Chapter 30:

International Travel

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Harry stepped out of the phone booth and into the main lobby of the Ministry of Magic. His newly won chest pin declaring his purpose there to be "wanderlust." That cool, female voice in all of the ministry's facilities was one cool gal. Great sense of humor for a robot. He didn't understand why more people didn't come in through the visitor's entrance.

Instead the many public sectors workers were rushing in and out of the fireplaces lining the wall, as usual. Bureaucrats. Always in a hurry, never getting anything done.

Harry marched passed the tacky fountain and towards the check-in station with the shortest line and waited. Then waited. Then waited some more.

"Next." The man at the stand ordered.

Harry finally reached him and proffered his wand. He took it and placed it on the now familiar scale, which then produced a slip of parchment on the unused half.

"Professor Hadrian Morrigan?" The Auror confirmed.

"Yessir." Harry said politely.

"International Portkey?" He clarified further.

"Right again." Harry said.

"Department of Magical Transportation, Level Six. Next!" The Auror commanded, handing harry back his wand and the slip of paper.

Harry got out of the way and advanced through the turnstile and meandered through the crowd towards the lift. Arriving in time to squeeze in he packed himself into the sardine can with barely enough room left for the cage to close behind him. And down they went, stopping at each level to deposit and uptake more people. Unfortunately for most of the people there, the elevator had to go down one level before coming back up, as it was all automated. Which begged the question as to why they would bother to get on before it started to come back up, but these were wizards and witches after all.

And so, down one level they went before the bell dinged and the cool female voice announced their arrival.

"Level 9: Department of Mysteries and Courtrooms." She said.

Harry got off. The slick, familiar black walls greeted him like old friends as the lift went back up, leaving him alone in the hall. He took a deep breath, enjoying the musty yet somehow clean smell of the less often walked hallway. Then he marched straight on towards the door that once haunted so many of his dreams. Reaching it, he raised a fist to bang on it, only for it to open before he could.

Who should be facing but Prophecy herself. Head of the exact department he was looking for. Now wasn't that an amazing coincidence?! Almost as if she knew he was coming, but that would be ridiculous. That would require her to have precognitive abilities or something.

"Good evening Mr Potter." Prophecy greeted in a silly attempt at intimidation.

"Good evening Mrs Polkiss." Harry greeted back.

He felt her death glare and confusion from beneath her obscuring cloak just as clearly without Ghillie Dhu as if he were actually using the sixth sense. His poker face had gotten really good over the years, and he was somehow managing to maintain it in that moment.

"How... In the world?!" She asked.

Harry lifted both hands to his face and made spirit fingers.

"Psychic!" He whispered, dropping his poker face to grin at her.

The sighed and reached one hand beneath her obscuring hood to pinch the bridge of her nose.

"Why are you here, "Hadrian"?" She asked annoyedly.

"A student turned in a post cognitive dream and I would like to register it with your office." Harry said, now serious.

He handed her the letter and twine bound vial and she took it skeptically.

"Under what basis do you think it genuine?" She asked.

"A subject in the dream spoke perfect parseltongue, which the child in question could not." Harry explained. "Nor could he have faked it."

"I see." She said.

Prophecy then produced from within her cloak a clipboard with a form for dream visions.

"Name of dreamer, date on which the dream occurred, yada yada." She asked boredly with quill suddenly in hand.

"All detailed in the letter around the vial." Harry said.

She sighed, but diligently undid the twine and opened the letter. The way she managed to do this with a clipboard in one hand and quill in the other spoke to her many years doing office work. With all these things still in her hands - quill, clipboard, vial and letter - she then managed to hold a wand and tap the letter, casting a series silent word duplication charms to copy all of the details onto her form. Pocketing everything except for the clipboard and quill she signed the dotted line and tore the page out to hand to him.

"Here. This form recognizes that I received the dream and the details you've shared with me. You will get a letter detailing our decision on it's validity by owl." She said curtly. "Did you need anything else, Professor?"

"No. Did you?" He offered.

"No." She said, before closing the door in his face.

"Give my love to Piers!" Harry yelled through the door, knowing it would annoy the woman to be let wondering how Harry knew her son.

Chuckling to himself, Harry folded the confirmation slip before pocketing it then went on his way.

"You sure took your sweet time." Alastor Marchbanks greeted Harry as he got off on the sixth floor.

The old man looked significantly better now that he wasn't mummified from his fight with Voldemort wielding a flaming sword of god. No, Harry still couldn't get over how awesome that was. Speaking of flaming swords of god, Alastor had brought the remains of his in a transparent case. Based on the many tags taped onto it Harry could tell that the British customs had already gone over and every inch of it and okayed him to take it on the trip. That must have been a headache and a half.

"Had to make a pit stop. And I hate waiting in line, coming just in time means I get to rush right in and get a move on. It's not like they ever leave early." Harry told the old man.

And it was true, they had less than two minutes to file through and get to the portkey. Hence why Alastor didn't waste any more time yapping at them as they instead rushed through the check-in station and to the double doors for portkey ME6. Saudi Arabia Layover.

They were let into the large, circular room filled with well over a hundred people gathered around a rope. A very long rope shaped into a ring with Knotted handles to grab onto.

"Portkey set to leave in forty-five seconds." The cool female automated voice declared from somewhere above them.

Rushing to the two open spots on the rope Harry and Alastor made it in time for the ten second countdown. Listening to the robotic voice as it counted down all the way to one. Harry spend each second bracing himself harder and clenching every orifice shut in anticipation of the unpleasantness to come. When it finally did, he was still underprepared.

The feeling of being grabbed by his naval and his center of gravity being pulled in constantly changing directions began his trip through the psychedelically-lit tunnel. A tunnel he and everyone else grasping the rope were flung through at multiple times the speed of sound with barely enough air to breath, so little that it felt like suffocation for the minute and a half ride they had willingly paid for. The few moments it took for a portkey to transport a group from Devon to Dartmoor was killer on people like Harry, so he expected one from London to Saudi Arabia to damn near kill him, and when the roller coaster ride from hell finally ended he fell to the sandy ground like a corpse.

You ever been hungover, concussed and exhausted from running a five kilometer marathon before? That's what this felt like, and Harry was so drained and so pained that he couldn't so much as wiggle a finger. He was ready to pass out, hell, he was ready to die. Just leave him there to bury his face into the sand until he suffocated. But no, fate would not be so kind to him, as somebody rolled him onto his back and forced the a sweet, black-pepper flavored beverage down his throat. Under a normal state of mind he would have recognized it as a pepper-up potion, and a very small dose only effective for several minutes. But he was not in his right state of mind.

"Up you go." A woman with a heavily Persian accent said.

She somehow managed to coax him to his feet, as even with the pepper-up potion in his system he was barely conscious. She slinked his arm over her shoulder and hers under his armpit and practically dragged him out of the arrival room. Away from the magically softened sand and towards sandstone doors that opened for them without so much as a command, to reveal a high ceiling tent enclosing a room filled with hundreds of military style cots.

He was almost tempted to describe it as a circus tent, one meant for clowns like him that were sent into comas from Portkey travel. But the fabric was much too decorated, much too rich, for a circus.

"There you go." The nice portkey worker cooed at him as she wrapped him in a blanket. "We hope you appreciate the complimentary bed and breakfast, and further hope you will travel with us again."

She turned heel, and Harry turned in. Asleep almost before she finished talking.

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Somewhere off the coast of Australia:

Voldemort fell into an exhausted, disoriented and agonized heap on the wooden deck of the boat as the boot he used as a portkey flew aside. It was the single longest portkey he had ever taken, and it had been a mistake. A portkey straight from the Germany to Australia would have been bad enough, but that he had to program it to take circuitous routes around the Netherlands, Russia and Indian Ocean.

Five minutes. Five whole minutes. He thought he could handle it. He had been wrong.

"My lord!" Walburga Black's voice called out to him.

The sound of each of her footsteps against the hardwood ship deck felt like a sledgehammer to his skull, and when she tried to cradle him into a sitting position it felt like he was rising the portkey all over again.

"You ever been hungover, concussed and suffering from a category five flu after running a five k marathon?" Tom asked in his best attempt at humor. "That's what this feels like."

"My god, how many Portkeys did you take?" She asked, genuine concern dripping from her voice.

"Just the one." He groaned out.

She was silent for a few moments after that, and when she spoke again it was with a considerate whisper.

"A single portkey? From Germany to Australia? In one go?" She clarified.

"Yup." he said.

Another moment of silence.

"Where in the world did you get a portkey capable of going ten thousand miles in one trip?' She asked.

"Oh you know..." Tom said in his best imitation of humble. "I made it."

"how?"

"With about twenty pages of algebraic topology." He explained.

Yup. He'd had to graph out the Portkey's route using a three-dimensional model of the earth, a highly detailed one Lucius kept in his mansion observatory, to plan that one out. Plotting functions to weave around the ward lines separating each country and keeping along international waters where no such wards existed had taken the better part of two nights. If he had just taken a straight route from Germany to here he would have made it in half the time with half the pain, but every single nation along the route he passed through would have detected his passing and plotted out his exact course and final destination.

Yeah, they would have had the armies of at least fie wizarding nations shoved up their asses so fast it would have been the end of Voldemort forever.

"Is the object I left in your care still protected?" He asked, still barely conscious but getting better by the minute.

"Of course, Tom. It is exactly where you left it. It's protections unmolested." She told him.

"That's great." He said, trying to prop himself up but failing miserably.

Then, all of a sudden, Walburga did the unthinkable. She side-along apparated him, and he knew nothing more.

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Iram of the Pillars:

Harry woke up the next morning feeling significantly less dead than he had the night before. In fact, He almost felt good. Maybe there was something more in that pepper up potion to help with recovery?

Anyways, dozens of other travelers had been put to bed in the tent hotel, Alastor among them. Though he was already about and walking towards him with a mug of coffee and plate of eggs.

"Long day ahead of us. Wolf it down." Alastor commanded.

Don't you hate it when somebody tells you to do what you were already planning to do? Kinda makes you not want to do it anymore. Burt Harry resisted the petulant idea of taking his sweet time and did, indeed, wolf it down. The coffee was Turkish and included the grounds, by they made it so fine and with the sugar mixed in that it wasn't bad. He drank it to the last grain in damn near one gulp and placed the dishes on his unmade bed.

"Alright." Harry said. "Let's get going."

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Notes:

There was another 500 words here. I was going to turn it into a thousand to complete my 500 words per day goal for this chapter, but I decided to cut it out and save it for the next chapter. Because I deleted a lot of words in the outline that I actuall had hit the 500 words daily and I need a break. So yeah, shorter chapter is the end result, but I think it's okay.