Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

2nd September 1995 (63:5:16)
— Contact minus 00.00.00:00.45

As always, the rush to pack up and leave for King's Cross was a loud, chaotic mess. Ron and Gin running back and forth looking for one thing or another, pounding up and down the stairs, the noise more than enough to wake up the horrid portrait of Sirius's horrid mother, the half-muffled screeching slipping out from Kreacher's room. The twins weren't making it easier on anyone, apparating around for the hell of it — Sirius had admitted to her that he could tweak the wards to stop them, but he preferred Mrs. Weasley having someone besides himself to yell at. Mrs. Weasley was indeed yelling again, distracted from helping her panicky kids find one thing or another, voice trickling down to the kitchen. From the sound of it the twins had spelled their trunks to shoot down toward the door...apparently not realising Gin had been halfway down the stairs at the time. It didn't sound like Gin was seriously hurt, but one of their trunks had slammed her over the shoulder and sent her tumbling down the stairs, so. Very reckless, but what else could you expect from Fred and George, really?

Beth spent the whole storm sitting at the kitchen table, sipping at a cup of tea while Sirius, Remus, Dora, and Moody chatted around her. Most of it was nothing interesting, normal adult stuff. The only thing even tangentially related to the war was that one of their guards — Sturgis Podmore, a Hit Wizard and veteran of the first Order of the Phoenix — hadn't shown up yet. Apparently he'd missed multiple check-ins over the last couple weeks, Moody, paranoid as ever, suspected something was wrong, he and Dora planning a 'visit' to his house later tonight to check him for the Imperius. Remus thought they were being ridiculous, but Sirius agreed it was worth checking — Sturgis had always been a little flakey, but this was too much even for him. Better safe than sorry.

As they waited, listening to the chaos going on upstairs, Beth tried to keep the exasperation and confusion off of her face. This wasn't the first time she'd been exposed to the Weasleys' usual pre-Hogwarts rush — she'd stayed with them the second half of her first summer holiday, and she'd kind of indirectly heard about it last year — but she didn't really understand it? She would assume it was just boys being messy, but that couldn't be it, Gin was just as bad as Ron. Maybe this was just a her thing. She meant, she'd never had a lot of things, really, and now that she actually had money (more than she could ever spend in a lifetime) she still didn't — she was used to not having things, so she just...didn't want to. She had what she needed, to wear and for quidditch and duelling and for school, and more than that just seemed kind of pointless. Hermione and Gin both brought way more shite to school than she did — they both had more clothes than she did, and Hermione had a lot of additional school and organisational stuff, and Gin had extra books (fiction, for fun) and music stuff and, like, potions and cosmetics and the like — so she guessed it kind of made sense that they took more time to get it all straightened out than she did. She just didn't really get it.

Petunia being very particular about everything being clean and in its proper place might have something to do with it — Beth realised she could be slightly neurotic about being tidy, but it wasn't until Sirius said something perfectly innocuous about his mother that it'd occurred to her that it might be related. Obviously, she'd been punished more times than she could count for making the tiniest of messes, it only made sense that it would have just become the natural thing she did at some point. And her awful excuse for a childhood at Privet Drive probably also had something to do with Beth, just, getting by with far fewer things than most other girls.

She'd been thinking about that sort of thing more, recently. Part of it was from spending more time with Sirius, he'd say something about his own childhood — he kind of couldn't help it, they were living in the house he'd grown up in — and Beth would immediately get it...and then step back for a second and think why she got it, and oh hey, her childhood was shite, what a shock. (Sirius obviously got her too, for the same reasons, which was just convenient, not having to explain her hangups all the time.) Hermione had also... She didn't want to say "helped", since thinking about this stuff kind of sucked, but she knew Hermione thought it was a good thing. Hermione was probably the first person to realise there was something wrong with her — apparently, leaving for Christmas first year, when Hermione had given her an unexpected good-bye hug and Beth had gone all tense and uncomfortable (literally nobody had ever hugged her before) — though they hadn't actually talked about it until third year. And Hermione wouldn't leave it the hell alone, seemed to think Beth needed to talk about it, to work out what had happened to her and how it affected her even years after, if she was going to get better.

Hermione had even recommended Beth get therapy — thankfully, there were serious problems in actually doing that, so she hadn't needed to come up with an excuse to get out of it.

So, watching everyone else get ready to leave for school always left her in a really...weird mood. She wasn't sure what to call it, exactly, just uncomfortable.

Unsurprisingly, Hermione was the first to join them downstairs — her face was noticeably flushed, even sounded a little out of breath. Beth noticed the shiny new prefect badge, the pin run through one of the button holes in her blouse. "It's a bloody warzone up there. Do we have time for me to have a cup before we leave?" she asked, pointing at the teapot sitting on the hob.

Moody flicked his arm, his sleeve dropping to reveal the fiendishly complicated, multi-hand watch around his wrist. "If you're quick about it."

A moment of rushing around to fix herself a cup later, and Hermione was plopping down into the empty chair next to Beth, letting out a little sigh. "Hedwig came back in, by the way. I didn't want to lock her in the cage before it's time to go, last I saw she was perched up on the hatstand."

Beth nodded. "Yeah, she hates that bloody cage." And she didn't like shoving the poor girl in there either, but she'd have to at least until they got to the platform — walking around muggle Islington with a big damn snowy owl perched on her shoulder would get a few funny looks, to put it mildly.

It turned out, Hermione had barely enough time — she was maybe only halfway done with her tea when a rather harried-looking Mrs. Weasley came thumping down the stairs. "Alright, we're just about done up here — I'm at my wits' end with the boys, honestly..."

"Don't be too hard on them, Molly," Remus said, as he spoke a flick of his wand zipping cups and saucers off toward the sink. (Hermione lost her saucer, but she still had a hold on her cup, quickly finishing it off.) "We were hardly better at their age, if you recall."

Sirius let out a low bark of a laugh, lips twisting into a smirk. "I seem to remember an incident over one Yule involving a lost hairbrush, but the details slip my mind — ringing any bells, Cousin?"

Beth had no idea what Sirius was referring to, but Mrs. Weasley's face and neck abruptly went very red. Not in an angry way, as happened sometimes — Mrs. Weasley's shouting made Beth kind of uncomfortable, honestly — no, that was definitely embarrassment. "Sirius, honestly, bringing that up again, I don't— Hermione, dear, you should put that badge away."

Hermione blinked, her hand reflexively coming up to her prefect badge. Swallowing a mouthful of tea that was probably too big to be comfortable, she gasped, "Why?"

"We'll be walking to the station, there will be muggles about." Mrs. Weasley said it with a faintly condescending tone, like Hermione really should have been able to figure that out for herself.

"...So? This isn't obviously magical."

"It has the Hogwarts coat of arms on it, dear."

Hermione shot Beth a helpless look, probably thinking the same thing Beth was — the design might seem magical to them, but muggles obviously wouldn't recognise it. Sirius got to it before Hermione could figure out what to say. "Molly, how many muggles you think know what the Hogwarts coat of arms looks like? Nobody will have any bloody clue what it means, it'll be fine."

Mrs. Weasley looked a little flustered by Sirius pointing out the obvious, but they nonetheless immediately erupted into an argument. That seemed to happen all the bloody time these days, they could hardly be in a room for a couple minutes without yelling at each other — which, to be completely fair, Beth couldn't really blame Sirius for. Sirius had fixed up the house a year ago now, with some help from Remus, so Beth would have somewhere to come 'visit' him. The place had kind of been a mess at first, since Sirius was still a fugitive and couldn't get someone professional to come in and fix it up properly, but it was better than staying with the Dursleys, Beth had come over for her birthday last year and just never left. Sirius had been very reluctant to let her stay, especially with Dumbledore babbling about some protection she got staying with the Dursleys, but he didn't really want to be here alone, and they couldn't make her go back, so.

(Beth was extremely sceptical about this supposed protection she got staying with the Dursleys. Far as she could see, the only reason she hadn't gotten killed at some point over her first three years at Hogwarts was an absurd streak of Gryffindor dumb luck — whatever protection she might or might not get clearly didn't do shite, it wasn't worth it. She'd rather stick with the over-the-top Black wards, thanks.)

So Beth had stayed here with Sirius for August last year, and then a couple weeks this summer, before Grimmauld Place had been turned into a safehouse for the Order of the Phoenix. It wasn't the only one either — there were several, but the only one Beth knew about was the guest hall at Rock-on-Clyde, which she only knew about because Rock-on-Clyde was the bloody Potter family manor. (She still wasn't over the revelation that she owned a huge bloody manor, filled with house-elves that could have taken care of her just fine, but had been stuck with the Dursleys for some inexplicable reason.) She could have moved into Rock-on-Clyde, but the place was huge, all the bathrooms all weird with unfamiliar fixtures, the kitchen designed to be used by elf-sized people, she'd rather stay here with Sirius. She'd only even been there once, to ask the elves there to add Sirius to the wards so he could invite people through to stay in the guest hall.

Sirius had agreed to let Dumbledore use the house as a base for the Order, to the point that he hadn't even complained about Dumbledore making himself their Secret Keeper. (Unlike most wards, the ones here were designed to let things like the Fidelius go over them, so Sirius's permission was still needed to let people in.) He fully agreed that the Weasleys were obvious targets for the Death Eaters, so it was probably a good idea to let the whole family stay here — the Grangers too, but they had jobs to get to, so the Order had simply warded their house instead, and gave them emergency portkeys to carry at all times, they'd be fine. Sirius had known Mrs. Weasley before they'd even joined the first Order — they were actually first cousins, which was a wild coincidence, seemingly all the purebloods were related to each other somehow — but he'd maybe underestimated just how annoying having her living in his house would be. She was used to being in charge in her own home, and was always telling people what to do, trying to assign chores, even to Beth and Sirius — despite her being a guest in their house, it was very annoying.

When the Weasleys had moved in, it was far enough into the summer that Beth had just gotten the kitchen the way she liked it, and then Mrs. Weasley stormed in and tried to take over like she owned the place. Beth had even gotten into shouting matches with her at least twice, and she didn't even like arguing with people, like it seemed Sirius did sometimes. It was her fucking kitchen, okay, just, she did appreciate that Mrs. Weasley was just trying to help, but she was such a bossy bitch sometimes...

(Not that she'd ever tell her that — complaining to Hermione about it in private afterward, sure, but she'd never call Mrs. Weasley that to her face. She was nice, she just tried too hard, sometimes.)

The argument between Sirius, Mrs. Weasley, and Hermione — Dora and Remus also jumping in now and then with their own comments — lasted all the way through Remus finishing with the dishes, the group filing up the stairs into the entryway. Their trunks were all stacked against the wall, more or less in order — Beth noticed the hem of a robe was sticking through the seam of one, but that was fine, she guessed, if they weren't worried about it getting dirty or torn or whatever... (Boys.) While the argument continued raging on, Moody set down his expanded briefcase and started loading the trunks inside, shrinking them one by one as he went, while Beth tried to coax Hedwig down off the hatstand into her cage. (She came as far as Beth's shoulder easily, but she did not like being shut up in a cage, not even a little bit.) Moody's packing was only delayed for a brief moment as Ron quick dove back into his trunk to find his own prefect badge, pinning it to his tee shirt to match Hermione's.

He gave her a sort of sheepish smile as he did, Beth just shrugged. For whatever reason, both Hermione and Ron (and various adults) had assumed Beth would be jealous about both of her best friends being made prefect while she wasn't — honestly, she had absolutely no idea where anybody had gotten that impression. She had enough going on, and being a prefect looked kind of miserable — especially as a Gryffindor, who weren't really known for their respect for authority — and there was simply no way anybody with half a brain would pick Beth for the job while Hermione was around. That McGonagall had picked Ron was kind of a surprise, since he was nearly as much of a mess as she was...though it wasn't like any of the other Gryffindor boys would be better. Maybe Neville, he'd really gotten his shite together this last year, but that was pretty recent, maybe McGonagall hadn't noticed yet. But yeah, she had no interest in being prefect, and Hermione did — at least in part because it was a school-related thing her parents could fully appreciate — and it'd given Ron a hell of a confidence boost, which he really could have used, so. Yeah, not bothered about it.

(Besides, Beth was pretty sure she'd be quidditch captain after Angie graduated, so.)

While Sirius and Mrs. Weasley continued arguing, the twins only making it worse with an occasional comment, Dora and Moody got ready to leave. The packing done, the suitcase was handed over to Remus, Moody pulled an old-fashioned looking hat — like the sort of thing everybody wore in photos from the 30s and 40s — out of seemingly nowhere, plopped it down on his head, skewed enough to cover the Eye. He tended to dress relatively normal (by muggle standards) to begin with, and today his usual gnarled staff had been swapped out for a perfectly normal-looking cane — the only odd thing was the cloak, but it wasn't that weird. Put together how thoroughly scarred he was, how he walked with a limp, and his apparent age, and muggles would most likely guess he'd been badly injured in the War, so they were assuming nobody would make a fuss about a few little quirks. War was hell and all that, some people had come out a bit fucked up, people were used to dealing with a few little quirks from that generation.

At the same time, Dora was shrinking, her skin developing wrinkles as she went, her clothes transfigured into a long, old-fashioned dress. The scarf she'd been wearing was transformed into a long quilt, which she then threw over her shoulders, knotted closed at the corners under her chin. Her hair had gone mostly grey, but there were still a few subtle streaks of reddish-brown, hinting at a mostly-faded natural hair colour. After only a few seconds, the illusion was complete, and Dora looked like she could be Moody's age — which was only appropriate, because their cover story was that they were husband and wife.

Beth still thought it was very silly that they needed a cover story just to walk the mile or so to King's Cross, but Moody was a paranoid old bastard, so she'd just kept her mouth shut and played along. In case anybody asked along the way, the Weasleys were her siblings, Mrs. Weasley their mother, Hermione their cousin, Remus their uncle (Hermione's father), and Dora and Moody their grandparents. Nobody was going to ask, of course, but it wasn't like it made any difference, it was easier to just not argue.

(Beth wasn't sure if she and the Weasleys looked similar enough to be siblings, cousins would probably have been better — obviously, they actually were, like, third or fourth cousins or something, she'd forgotten exactly — but she and Hermione looked even less like each other, and definitely wouldn't pass for siblings, so. As long as nobody looked too closely, Beth and Ron or Gin could maybe pass for fraternal twins, at least if the Weasleys weren't all so bloody tall, but nobody was going to look that closely, it was fine. She wasn't sure Remus and Mrs. Weasley were believable as brother and sister either, but she guessed it didn't matter — after all, nobody was going to ask, honestly, Moody...)

After what felt like fucking forever — at this rate, they were barely going to get to the platform on time — they were finally pouring out onto the street. Grimmauld Place was in a pretty nice neighbourhood, though it was kind of crowded these days. There was a tonne of council housing around in other areas of Islington, packed in where bombs had conveniently cleared blocks during the Blitz, but the area they were in was somewhat less dense, with little rows of trees or tiny little green spaces here and there. The houses on Grimmauld Place itself, and a couple nearby streets, tended to be huge and ancient-looking, with overly fancy-looking decoration along the edges and the roofs and around the windows — most of these houses were from, like, the late 18th or early 19th Century or something, back when Islington had been mostly dominated by a bunch of poncy bastards. They were closer together than they used to be, newer houses (copying the old style) packed in between the original structures dotted around. According to Sirius, the Black house had once had a pretty sizeable lawn around it, but the neighbours had gotten closer and closer over the few hundred years since it was built, today leaving only tiny alleys between them, barely enough room to fit Sirius's motorbike through.

Speaking of Sirius, Beth was just wondering if they'd get a moment to say goodbye or whatever? She mean, she had spent all summer with Sirius, and... Well, he couldn't come to the train with them, and there were too many people around, it'd be embarrassing. But before she could worry too much whether Sirius would be offended if she, just, left, a huge shaggy black dog weaved his way out the door, nearly bowling over Remus and one of the twins.

"For heaven's sake, Sirius, Dumbledore told you no! It isn't safe for you to be out in the open, remember?"

Sirius reared back, chin dipping down over his paws, his butt stuck up in the air, his tail energetically waving back and forth. As bloody huge as he was, if she were standing close enough that big fluffy tail could probably whap her in the shoulder. That was a playful sort of pose, Beth thought — she didn't know, not really a dog person — kind of teasing Mrs. Weasley, maybe.

Turning her back to the street for a second, Dora reemerged with a bright green tennis ball, a flick of her wrist sending it bouncing down the pavement. Sirius, of course, bolted after it, letting out excited yips, Gin and the twins laughing. "Oh Tonks, don't encourage him, he shouldn't— Fine, then! On your head be it."

They started off down the street to the west, Sirius occasionally bringing the ball back to be thrown again, tearing off after it with another storm of cheerful barking. Whenever he was dog-shaped, Beth thought he acted very naturally dog-like, apparently it just worked that way sometimes — the transformation came with the instincts, Sirius claimed it could be a hell of a trip if he wasn't trying very hard to think human thoughts. After a few times back and forth, Beth noticed that Sirius always brought the ball back to one of the Weasleys, and once Hermione, but never Beth. Sirius had been a little disappointed to learn Beth wasn't really a dog person, but in her defence, Marge's dogs hadn't left a very good impression — whenever Sirius came rushing at her she was hit with a flash of completely irrational fear, had to talk herself out of it, it was only Sirius, she was fine, honestly. It didn't help that Sirius was fucking huge in dog form, even when he was being all pathetic and snuggly she was never entirely comfortable with it.

The whole time they were playing, Mrs. Weasley was hissing under her breath about Sirius being irresponsible, and a bad influence. Remus, staying close to Dora and Moody — if they 'needed' his arm getting over a kerb or something, Beth guessed, playing the attentive son — just kept telling her to leave it...but not exactly jumping to defend Sirius either, sounding rather exasperated himself. Beth realised it wasn't the safest thing in the world for Sirius to come out with them, since there were people in the Death Eaters who knew about Padfoot (and they might have slipped it to collaborators in the Ministry), but they were only walking around muggle Islington, it'd be fine. If worst came to worst, Sirius could just shift back to human form and apparate out. Dora and Moody, at least, didn't seem to think it was a problem, and they were kind of the experts, being Aurors and all — Moody even said he was glad for the extra wand, since Podmore hadn't turned up, because he was a paranoid bastard like that.

After a little bit of walking, they started to get to busier areas, more people on the pavement and cars in the street. Dora asked for the ball back, and pretended to tuck it into her purse — Beth was pretty sure she actually vanished it. Instead of running around like a crazy person (or rambunctious dog), Sirius trotted back to their group, inserting himself between Beth and Hermione. They followed the A1 for a little bit — Moody tensing at the noise of the traffic, passersby giving the big bloody (unleashed) dog curious looks — before reaching Pentonville. They halted at the corner for a bit, cars rumbling through the relatively busy intersection, waiting for the signal to change.

They were halfway there already. Beth couldn't see King's Cross from here — the street curved too much, too many trees in the way — but she knew the station would be along this street, maybe a little over a half mile ahead. She thought Sirius was noting the same thing. Crouched on his haunches next to her, his head turned up — at a rather shallow angle, sitting like that Sirius's head was over her elbow. Canine eyes big and watery, Sirius let out a little whine.

"I know." Beth reached over to scratch at his ears — even as she did it, she realised it was kind of an odd thing to do, but Sirius was a dog at the moment, so whatever. "I'll miss you too."

It had been awkward at first, getting to know each other and all, and the house had not been in very great shape that first August. But it was...nice. Having a home, with someone who actually gave a damn about her one way or the other. Almost like being a normal person with a normal life, for once. It was nice.

This was probably the most ambivalent she'd ever felt about going back to Hogwarts. She did want to keep learning magic, obviously, and there was quidditch and all...but with how fucking stupid the Prophet was being about her and Dumbledore and Voldemort and all, she had a nasty feeling it was going to be miserable. (At least until everyone got their heads out of their arses — people always got with the programme eventually.) And, this summer at Grimmauld Place had been...pretty good, honestly, she felt no urge at all to escape the real world back to Hogwarts, it was... Well, she did want to go back to school, yes, but she also kind of didn't, which was a new feeling for her.

She would miss him, was the point, which was also a kind of new experience. She didn't like it.

(That Dumbledore had wanted to send her back to the Dursleys kind of annoyed her, when she thought about it, but it wasn't like he knew how bad it was, so.)

The signal changed, they spilled through the crosswalk and went on. The pavement was rather more crowded now, which wasn't really a surprise — it was a Saturday, but the shops should be open by now. Not that there was a lot on this street, but the area was pretty dense with housing (and there were several restaurants that probably did breakfast or tea or whatever), and the nearest tube station was this way, so. They did get a fair bit of attention — it wasn't often you saw a dog as big as Sirius walking around, especially without a leash (there might actually be a rule about that?) — but he was clearly 'well-behaved', a few kids who got nearby even sidled over to sneak some pets when their parents weren't looking. Moody seemed slightly paranoid with all the eyes on them, but he seemed to buy Dora's talk about cover and the right kind of attention, so he didn't do anything about it but grumble under his breath.

They'd been walking some minutes, far enough Beth could see the big open intersection the station was at in the near distance ahead, when she heard a... Was that a helicopter? You know, that rattly buzzing noise, she hadn't been able to identify it at first, too far off. Actually, she could hear buzzing at multiple different pitches, she suspected that was more than one helicopter. Didn't know what that was about — hearing one helicopter now and then was perfectly normal, but multiple at once was unusual — but it probably wasn't a big deal, Beth just brushed her curiosity off.

(She did wonder what flying in a helicopter was like, but it almost certainly wasn't as much fun as a broom.)

They were once again waiting for a signal, the little open courtyard right in front of the train station across the street straight ahead, when the air raid siren started. Beth was familiar with the sound, of course — she'd heard it at least a couple times every summer, when they tested the things, for her whole life. And it was just for tests, of course, Britain had never actually been attacked since the War. (Unless you counted the occasional IRA bombing, anyway.) Supposedly, there'd been talk about decommissioning most of the sirens and taking down the handful of anti-aircraft emplacements still sitting around ever since the 50s, cropping up again and again from time to time, but there were enough people who were completely paranoid about the Soviets attacking at any moment that it never actually happened.

Beth wasn't exactly a politics expert, but she was pretty sure that wasn't going to happen? Things had been a little tense for a few years straight after the War — especially with Churchill around threatening to nuke the shite out of Russia and generally making an arse of himself — but things had cooled off, for the most part. There'd been a scare now and then, Beth vaguely remembered from history class back in bloody primary school, but the two big international blocs had split up the world more or less peacefully. They did have a bunch of guns and fucking nuclear weapons pointed at each other still, but, from what little Beth could tell, nobody really expected war to break out. All the military posturing shite was just a formality at this point.

World War II had been bad enough — nobody wanted a third one. Besides crazy paranoid racist bastards like Vernon, anyway...

It was possible this was a test, they sometimes went on into September...but this was the rising and falling two-tone one. Normally it started with the high, steady, single-tone one, before transitioning into the two-tone one. She'd been told that was because the two-tone one was the alert, and the single-tone one was the all-clear signal — the tests started with the single-tone one, so people would know it was just a test. But Beth hadn't heard the single-tone one first this time.

...But, that had to be a mistake. Who the hell would be attacking them?

A lot of the people wandering back and forth around them slowed, frowning in confusion up at the sky — the mages were too, Moody hissing through his teeth, but by their politely baffled expressions Beth assumed they didn't know what the siren meant. Hedwig probably didn't either, but she clearly didn't like the noise, shuffling nervously in her cage. "Hey," Hermione muttered, reaching over to tug at Beth's sleeve. Her eyes were wide, her voice barely a hiss, clearly unnerved. "Did you hear the all-clear first?"

"No, I didn't."

"...It's not a real alert, is it? There hasn't been one of those since..." Hermione trailed off, not sure how to finish that sentence. Beth didn't know for sure either — there might have been one or two after the War, but definitely not since either of them had been born.

Beth shrugged. "I have no idea. But, maybe we should, you know." She nodded across the street — there was a set of stairs down to the Underground just over there, and getting down onto the platforms was probably safest. You know, just in case.

"Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. Um, Professor Moody?" The signal changed, their group lurched into motion. Looking around, Beth saw other people — hesitantly, still confused more than concerned — start turning inside, a fair number of people heading toward the Underground as well. "Er, I think we should get below ground, just there," she said, pointing toward the tube station.

Moody grunted. "Why's that? Got something to do with this racket?"

"Yeah, that's an air raid siren. From back in the war, you know, to warn people there were bombs coming in?"

There was silence in their little group, just for a second, before one of the twins said, "You mean we're being attacked? I didn't know the muggles were even at war..."

"We're not, I don't know what's happening. We should still get to shelter, just to be safe, you know."

"If there is an attack," Remus started, "it might be better to split up and appa—" Remus didn't finish the sentence — he was cut off by a high-pitched screaming of engines, rather quiet but still grating, all of them glancing up at the sky all at once looking for the source. Beth didn't see anything, too many buildings and clouds in the way, but, were those bloody fighter jets?

Only a couple seconds later, thin and muffled from distance, Beth heard a harsh percussive rattling, brrbrrbrrbrrbrrb, the sounds coming so quick she could barely tell them apart. And then more and more, coming from multiple sources at once, overlapping and clashing against each other into a confusing mess. Now people in the streets were concerned, rushing toward the nearest shelter, scooping up children to move more quickly — only a few voices rising in panic, moving in a quite orderly fashion, all things considered. But then, bombs hadn't actually started dropping...yet.

Beth had obviously never heard it in real life, but she'd overheard Dudley watching enough war films to know what that sound was — machinegun fire, like the kind on bloody fighter jets. "Er, I really think we should get inside. Right now." She'd started moving before she'd even quite finished talking, she could see Hermione coming with her in her peripheral vision. After a couple seconds, a glance over her shoulder showed most of the rest of the group hadn't followed them right away, muttering to each other and trading confused, concerned looks. Turning around to walk backward, "I'm not joking around! We need to get inside until we know what's going on. This way, come on," she insisted, waving them toward her with her free hand.

Somewhat reluctantly on the part of the confused purebloods, they joined the stream of people heading into the tube station. (Beth and Hermione were hardly the only people who'd had the thought of getting down to the platforms, obviously.) There was a lot of chatter and hissing in the crowd of people, some whining from children here and there, an edge of fear on the air — though not as much as Beth might have expected, honestly. She guessed they hadn't actually seen anything yet, it was possible the RAF or whoever would intercept the planes or missiles or whatever coming at them. Beth assumed that's what the still ongoing machinegun fire was, presumably the good guys were already up there taking care of it. It was possible things would get through, but the sounds were still distant, it didn't seem like there was anything to be too immediately freaking out about yet.

Though Beth did have to wonder what the fuck was going on. The Soviets couldn't actually be attacking them, could they? She didn't spend much time in the muggle world anymore, true, but she hadn't heard anything about relations between East and West going to shite — and that seemed like the kind of thing she'd pick up pretty quickly, just walking around London. (She'd needed to buy muggle clothes, and Sirius had taken her out for lunch or to the cinema a few times, so.) A lot of Tories liked to talk like that could happen at any time, but Beth didn't think anybody really believed that...but Beth wasn't an expert, she didn't pay attention to this shite. Nudging Hermione, she asked, "Hey, this isn't the Soviets, is it?" Hermione was much more informed about muggle politics than Beth was, and her parents were even Communists, so she might know something Beth didn't.

"I can't see how it could be — I mean, there are multiple countries between us and them, and we've all got nuclear missiles pointed at each other." Good point. "And, things have been fine, internationally. Not perfectly friendly, you know, but not bad. I guess the Soviets and the Chinese have been annoyed with each other lately, but..."

Beth was under the impression that the Soviets and the Chinese being annoyed with each other was kind of an always thing — just because they were all Communists didn't mean they liked each other, like how English people didn't naturally agree on everything — so, yeah, nothing out of the ordinary there. But she couldn't think of anyone else who had the means to attack Britain out of the blue like this...besides the Americans or, what, the French, she guessed, but that definitely wasn't going to happen...

They were only a handful of metres away from the stairs down below the pavement when Beth heard shouts of surprise and screaming from somewhere — reflexively, she looked up. There were trails of smoke in the sky, dozens and dozens of them, bursting through the spotty cloud-cover to stream down toward the ground. Almost like comets, long tails given off by...big balls of fire? That's what they looked like, anyway, they were still too far away to get much detail, Beth squinting up at the sky, little pinpricks of orange-yellow light, shifting as dark grey-black smoke billowed out of them, a high whistling just at the edge of hearing, slowly growing louder...

The fuck were those?

While Beth was still looking, a handful of tapered, triangular wedges dove through the clouds after the descending fireballs — tiny in the distance, but Beth could tell those were planes, at least five she could see chasing after the odd smokey comets. They levelled off, splitting up to streak off at different angles, more muffled brrbrrbrrbrrb of far-away guns, the fighter jets were shooting down the fireballs, one and another and another bursting from the impacts — though they weren't destroyed completely, clouds of tiny red-hot specks sprayed all over the place with much thinner trails of smoke, continuing the long way down...

Now people were freaking out a bit, Beth's ears ringing with screaming and crying — she managed to hear Mrs. Weasley over the noise yelling for her kids to stay together — the crowd surging rather more insistently toward the tube station. Linking her arm with Hermione's, they got a bit squeezed getting onto the stairs, Beth hugging Hedwig's cage to her chest, turning her shoulder against the press of the crowd to shield her, the poor girl rattling the bars and screeching in offence. She twitched at a hand on her shoulder, but it was only Ron, the rest of their group pressing in close behind them, the bodies squeezing in from all sides so tight she could barely breathe.

It loosened a little bit on the stairs, the walls cutting off the people pushing in from left and right, though Beth was still jostled some, people tripping on the stairs or navigating around clumps of more slow-moving families. But before too long the press of the crowd loosened even further, as people spread out across the ticket hall. The floor curling in a little arc, sort of like a croissant, all the surfaces relatively plain concrete and brick, walls plastered with more colourful advertisements and noticeboards and Underground maps, sunlight and fresh air let out through holes in the ceiling behind the ticket counter, it wasn't a huge open space, but there were several platforms accessible from here, there were plenty of directions for people to go. The staff had come out from behind the ticket counter, shouting instructions Beth could barely hear over the noise of the panicky, confused crowd, splitting them up and waving them toward this platform or that.

Before Beth could decide where to go, Moody shouldered his way through their group, stomping along across the hall, Remus and Dora right with him, so the rest of them followed. One of the staff people tried to turn him off, but Moody growled something back, pointed up at the signs for the lavatories — the woman looked slightly concerned, probably told him to hurry it up. When his whole 'family' followed after him, she just gave them all an exasperated look, but didn't try to stop them, focussing on another group coming up behind them. Once they got to a relatively clear spot in the corner by the toilets, Moody lurched to a stop, turning to face them. "Alright, Granger, what the hell was that?"

"Were those bloody fireballs up there?" one of the twins asked. "I didn't know muggles had weapons like that!"

"We don't! I have no idea what's going on!"

Glaring off toward the crowd, Sirius was inexplicably human-shaped, Beth hadn't even noticed he'd changed back at some point until he started talking. "Those things looked like Sunflame, but I don't know who would—"

"Sirius! What are you doing, you can't be—"

"Oh piss off, Molly, nobody cares! In case you didn't notice, we have something rather more important to worry about!"

There was a crashing and screeching, muffled and distorted by the structure around them, the floor under Beth's feet shivering just noticeably, as though to emphasise Sirius's point — she would guess the first round of fireball-things had just hit the city.

"We should evacuate," Remus said. "We can duck out of sight here and apparate the children somewhere safe — Hogwarts, perhaps."

"We don't even know what's going on, how do we know Hogwarts isn't—"

Dora was cut off with a loud squelch of static bursting out of the loudspeakers, followed by a deep, slightly rushed, somewhat breathless-sounding masculine voice. The rush of people slowed somewhat, the noise dampening as they paused to listen. "—repeat, this is not a drill. London and urban areas from Merseyside through Leeds, including the Greater Manchester area, are under attack by unknown forces. All residents are advised to seek shelter immediately.

"At approximately eight-thirty this morning, the Americans alerted allied Democratic governments that their space agency had detected unknown objects near the moons of Jupiter, which soon began a quick approach toward Earth."

A whole-body twitch shooting through her, Beth blinked. "Did he just say we're being attacked by space aliens?" Hermione shushed her, frowning up toward the ceiling, her face noticeably paling.

"The attackers first targeted satellites in orbit — satellite telecommunications infrastructure has been obliterated, but radio broadcast and wired networks remain operational. Before international communications were lost, the Home Office was alerted that all available allied and Communist air defence forces were moving to intercept. Unknown craft began to enter the atmosphere in the last ten minutes. The bulk of their forces are targeting major population centres, but with long-range communications crippled we cannot be certain of the breadth of the attack. Domestic detection systems have identified concurrent assaults centred on Paris, Rotterdam, Cologne, and Hamburg. Bombers have already begun striking major cities, and there have been sightings of what appear to be infantry landing craft on approach to London."

By this point there was a lot of confused chatter and panicked yelling from the crowd across the ticket hall, but they'd cranked up the volume on the loudspeaker enough Beth could still hear it. "All active-duty personnel and reservists are to report to the nearest military installation immediately. Volunteers may present themselves at any installation or, in the affected areas, the first Army unit they find. A general mobilisation to defend London and Manchester has already begun, and is expected to continue through the foreseeable future to reinforce our allies overseas.

"Residents of the affected areas are urged to seek shelter immediately, preferably underground and far away from windows and doors. Be advised, landings of ground forces are expected after the initial bombardment; barricade yourselves in with whatever you have. Whenever possible, keep the streets clear to allow passage for military vehicles. All available forces are already en route to affected areas. Help is coming — stick together, watch each other's backs, and stay alive until it gets to you.

"This message will repeat; stay tuned to this channel for further updates. Godspeed, and good luck.

"This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This is not a drill or a test. A general state of emergency has been declared covering Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and all overseas territories. I repeat, this is not a drill. London and urban areas from—"

As the emergency message repeated, Moody drew his wand, waved it in a swish over his head — the recorded voice and the noise of the crowd immediately cut off, the only remaining sound the faint rumble of impacts hitting the city overhead. "Did that message say what I thought it said?"

"If you heard Earth is being attacked by fucking space aliens, yeah, I think it did." There was an edge of tension to Sirius's voice, but he still sounded remarkably casual about it, almost drawling. "How do you want to play this?"

"We'll need to evacuate the Ministry." At some point, Dora had shed her old lady disguise, her clothes transfigured into trousers and a vest, easier to move in. She'd shifted into what Beth thought of as her duelling form — tall and androgynous, without any excess curves that might get in the way, slight hints of slim muscle along her arms, her hair cropped short and coloured a riotous, angry red. "And as many of the residents out of Old Town and Charing as we can, but that might be a problem, especially in Knockturn — most of them can't apparate."

Shaking her head, clutching at Gin — who was struggling, trying to twist out of her grip, telling her mother to let go — Mrs. Weasley insisted, "They're under wards, they'll be fine. We need to get the children out of here."

"Hey, we're of age—" "—if Britain's being attacked, we want to help." "Unless you think the space aliens give a damn about the Statute of Secrecy." "Because we're gonna bet they don't."

Mrs. Weasley glared over at the twins, but before she could respond Sirius cut in with, "Molly, the wards over Old Town and Charing are designed to repel muggles — how the hell do you know they're going to work on whatever these things are?"

"Besides, avoidance wards work on people — bombs will go straight through them. They did in both of their World Wars, at least," Moody added in a grumble. Beth did remember something about that from history class, now that he was mentioning it... "We should also help evacuate the muggle government — they might need help getting their people out, and I don't want to see what might happen if the muggles' leadership gets taken out in wartime."

Nodding, Remus said, "Of course, but it's Saturday — will Parliament even be there?"

"They're off on summer recess right now," which was of course something Hermione knew off the top of her head, "but the Prime Minister and most of the other Ministers should still be in Westminster."

"What about the Queen?" Moody asked.

"Um, I think she's overseas at the moment. Yeah, there was a state trip to...Egypt, I think, she should still be there. But I think Princess Mary and Prince William were left behind — they should be at Clarence House, in Westminster."

"Ain't that just perfect. We'll need to split up, to—"

Moody cut off at the sudden appearance of a patronus in the middle of their group, the cool, soothing feeling of its magic on the air taking the edge off of the nerves crawling over Beth's skin. A bird of some kind, she didn't— Oh, light and graceful, broad tapering wings and long tail, narrow pointed beak, that was a phoenix, this must be a message from Dumbledore. "Kingsley has asked for assistance evacuating the government. Once the children have been brought to safety, go to Old Town. I will meet you there." With a last too-slow flap of its wings, the apparition dissolved into wisps and faded away.

"Thank you, Albus," Moody drawled, "I never would have figured that out myself. Sirius and I will back up the muggles — you can't show your face in the Ministry, and I'm known to their security. Tonks, Remus, Molly, to Old Town. Unless you'd rather come with us, Remus?"

"I'd better — I'm not certain I'll be much more welcome than Sirius." Because he'd been outed as a werewolf, he meant. He handed the briefcase over to Ron. "Here, hang on to this. Any of you who aren't wearing your wands already, get them out. I hope you won't need them, but better to be prepared."

Ron took the briefcase, but didn't bother opening it — they already had their wands in wrist-holsters, obviously. Or, Beth, Hermione, Ron, and Gin did, she guessed she didn't know where the twins kept theirs. "What about Secrecy?"

"Don't worry about it. Sirius is right, nobody's going to give a damn. As big as it sounds like this attack is, there's no way Secrecy is going to come through it intact."

...So, the Statute of Secrecy was just ending, just like that? That...seemed like a big deal...

Not that it was quite registering properly to Beth, just... She wasn't even freaking out that much about the fuckling alien invasion, honestly, just, kind of numb. Like, it was bloody surreal, okay, she couldn't quite believe it was happening — despite having seen the weird bloody fireball things streaking down from the clouds, the heavy shivering booms reverberating through the walls and under her feet, trickling through the vents the sound of distant fire roaring and engines screaming and guns shooting and shooting and shooting. It didn't feel quite real, like a dream, Beth was hardly reacting, just blankly listening to the adults argue about...

...what to do with them, by the sound of it. While Remus had been handing the briefcase off to Ron, Mrs. Weasley had said something about getting the kids to Hogwarts or something. Dora had made the very reasonable point that they didn't know what all the targets were, nor whether their wards worked against the actual bloody aliens — putting all the magical kids in the country in one place made that one hell of a valuable target.

"Dora's right, Molly," Sirius snapped, raising his voice a little to cut her off. "They should stay here. They'll be safe from the bombs underground, and they have a whole crowd of people here to watch out for each other. They can conjure up some barriers covering all the entrances, shut this place down tight. Once we have a better idea of what's going on, we'll know right where to find them, we'll come back and move them somewhere more long-term."

"Hey, we can help!"

"Sure you can — by keeping the people here safe."

The twins made identical irritated faces at Sirius, but then nodded in reluctant agreement. Mrs. Weasley looked even more unhappy with the idea, but apparently didn't want to try to apparate them all out on her own — Beth suspected she'd have trouble apparating back to pick up the next person, since she wasn't exactly very familiar with tube stations — but she was also apparently done arguing about it, giving Gin and then Ron suffocating hugs, telling them to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. And then moving on to the twins, who joked about them being perfectly fine, honestly, Mum was the one they were worried about — she had to go deal with politicians, far more dangerous than hanging around here.

Beth only heard part of that because Sirius stole her attention, stepping up close, a hand reaching around Hedwig's cage to settle on her shoulder. "I'll be back soon." He paused for a second, fingers squeezing tight on her arm, eyes burning dark, his face rigid, she was pretty sure he was clenching his jaw. Finally he forced a very fake-looking smirk. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Summoning the best smile she could through the surreal numbness hanging over her, Beth said, "That doesn't rule out very many options, does it."

With a sharp bark of laughter, ringing in her ears, "Got me there! Look out for yourself, kid — I'll be back as soon as I can."

Beth just nodded, not sure what to say — this still didn't feel quite entirely real, dazed, the moment passed before she caught up — Sirius's hand moved to the back of her head, he dropped a quick kiss on her forehead before backing off, waving at the other adults. "Come on, let's get out of here. New Palace Yard?"

"No, we're going to Whitehall. Do you know the memorials across the street from the Cabinet Office?"

"Er, no, I don't think so."

"Then I'm side-alonging you. Remus?"

Sirius and Remus each took one of Moody's shoulders, a brief pause and a sharp pop-pop-pop and they were gone. Mrs. Weasley gave her kids a few last tight hugs — Beth was still holding Hedwig's cage, but she dipped behind Hermione just in case — before, with a last admonishment to keep themselves out of trouble and not do anything reckless, she disappeared too. "You might want to make an announcement, make things easier." Dora gave them a wink, then turned on her heel and popped away.

The palings cutting off the noise had disappeared along with Moody, the nervous chatter of the crowd and the still-repeating emergency message again buzzing around her head — she thought the announcement was quieter than it'd been before, one of the staff must have turned it down after they'd all heard it once. Though, Beth noticed there were far fewer people moving through the ticket hall than before, no more than a few harried singles and groups. The people who were coming this way must have already all gotten here.

"So, downstairs, back that way?" Whichever of the twins that was, his voice seemed firmer than usual — glancing at their faces, they'd gotten a lot sterner all of a sudden, apparently taking this all very seriously. Which was slightly ridiculous to begin with, because, an actual alien invasion? like in one of Dudley's stupid comics or something? Honestly, this was so surreal...

"Right." Beth started moving away from the bathrooms, toward the middle of the ticket hall. They had no idea whether alien bloody soldiers would come to them here, but they had to assume they might, just to be safe. Beth also had no idea what those soldiers were going to look like, what kind of weapons they were likely to have, but she figured transfiguring the concrete and bricks and shite around to cover the entrances would be fine no matter what. Trying to power through how completely insane this was, just don't think about it, Beth tried to push a bit more steel into her voice, "Right, okay. Those stairs," pointing to her left, "go down to platforms, and there are no exits that way, right?"

"Um, I think there are tunnels from the Piccadilly and Victoria line platforms up to the Thameslink station across the street." Well shite, Hermione, not making this easy for her. "And the Met and Circle line platforms are that way," she said, pointing ahead to the right.

"I was getting to that. Are there stairs up to the train station over there? Not King's Cross, the other one, Saint Whatever."

"Pancras — and, maybe? I know there's an expansion planned to connect all the different stations here, but I don't know if there's a way through open yet."

"Okay, okay. So, we transfigure the turnstiles here into a wall, and close that hallway right there, and—"

"Not the turnstiles — see that door right there? That leads over to the entrances across the street. Also, I think there's a staircase in there leading down to the Met and Circle lines."

"Well, fuck." Beth thought about it for a second, but the only way they'd be able to seal everything up and make sure it stayed sealed was to split into at least three groups — she didn't want to do that if she could help it. "We're going to have to move everyone on that platform over to this side," she said, pointing from the Met and Circle line platforms on the right and then to the stairs going down on the left.

"Makes sense," Ron agreed, probably figuring out the same problem she had, "but how do you plan on getting who knows how many panicky muggles to go where you want?"

"By making an announcement." Coming to a stop in the middle of the ticket hall, now practically empty (just a frantic-looking worker waving for them to follow her downstairs), her wand fell into her hand with a flick of her wrist. A tight swirl, coming in to point at her own throat, a muttered vocem vecta, the spell taking with an unpleasant tingle in her chest and through her neck. She willed the spell to carry her voice to everyone throughout the platforms down here, which might or might not work, she wasn't sure — she'd never tried to use this to talk to people she couldn't actually see before. "Alright, everyone, I know you've already got enough crazy shite going on, with bloody aliens and all, but in case you couldn't tell by me talking straight into your ears, magic is real. Yeah, I know, wild, right? Me and my friends are going to make some barricades, but we can only cover so many places at once — if everyone on the Met and Circle lines could go ahead and move over to the other side of the station and, er... Which platform is the furthest under street level?"

Hermione seemed vaguely exasperated with Beth, just, casually announcing magic was real like that — the twins were snickering, Gin's lips twitching with a smirk — but answered the question after a second of thought. "Northern line, I think."

"Right, everyone fill up the Northern line platforms first, and work up from there. If anyone down here happens to be armed, come up by the ticket hall, we might need the help. Once everyone is in place we'll start blocking off the entrances, so get moving, please. Finiat."

"You think they listened?"

"Let's hope so. Fred and George, what's the range on your weird twin telepathy thing?"

The twins smirked a little at her calling it weird, amused — Beth was aware they thought it was funny how creepy some people found the bonded twin thing. "If there is a range we haven't found it yet." "Why?"

"We're gonna need two teams, one blocking off the stairs here and the other one the tunnels Hermione mentioned before. I want one of you to take Gin and go over to the tunnels, and one of you to stay here with the rest of us, so we can stay in contact." She assumed the tunnel over there was narrower than the hall here, so they could cover it with fewer people, but she didn't really know...

"Oh, that's clever," Ron muttered, "I wouldn't have thought of that..."

The twins both stiffened, standing ramrod-straight, throwing her sharp, sarcastic salutes. Apparently, their ability to take the situation seriously had its limits. "Yes, ma'am." "We'll get right on it, ma'am." "Come on, Gin," one of the twins said, hooking her by the elbow.

"Wait!" Gin shouted, digging in her heels a little. "Where's this tunnel thing?"

The twin standing with them started, "Hermione will tell me—"

"—and I'll know where to go," the one dragging Gin continued. "We'll get there, don't worry." Gin let out a huff, letting herself be dragged off, the two of them easily jumping the turnstiles.

"Take the stairs on the right," Hermione started immediately. "There should be a set of stairs around the middle of the platform, tell me what you see when you get there..."

Around that time, people had started pouring out of the hallway leading to the platforms Beth had decided they couldn't properly defend — good, she'd been worried they might not listen to her announcement. Another swish of her wand, "Vocem vecta. Alright, everyone, right on through here. We'll seal it up behind you once you're all through. Finiat." Beth, Hermione, Ron, and George — because of the weird bonded twin thing, it didn't matter which name you used for which, but she decided to call the one with Gin Fred for now, meaning this one was George — backed up a bit, leaving the way toward the stairs down clear. People were giving them a lot of funny looks as they passed, but nobody slowed down to confront them about the whole surprise magic is real! thing, the blob of bodies moving straight across the ticket hall, swarming over and around the turnstiles — the gates to either side were hanging open, presumably the staff had unlocked them — to continue on down the stairs.

"You know what, let's get rid of this." Beth unlatched the door of the cage, reached inside. Hedwig stepped onto her wrist — she didn't pull Hedwig out of the cage so much as move the cage away from around her, dropping the useless thing on the tile. "Stay out of the way, okay? I don't want you getting hurt." Hedwig let out a little chirrup, leaned in to give Beth's nose a quick nip, before taking off — she easily sailed over to the turnstiles to settle above one of the gates, the muggles passing by jumping in surprise and pointing up at the big bloody bird. Glaring down at the people pointing at her, she let out a low little hoot — Beth got the very clear feeling she was chastising them for their rudeness — a kid somewhere breaking into giggles.

That bird, honestly...

The crowd started thinning way quicker than she'd expected — either some people had decided not to trust the mysterious magical voice, or fewer people had gone that way to start with. If the mental map Beth had made was anywhere close to accurate, the platforms over there were closest to street level, so that made sense. The noise of the crowd tapering off as they moved past Beth and her friends, she could more clearly hear the rumbling of impacts and crackling of flames; the guns hadn't stopped either, the occasional scream of an engine passing by, a low, distant boom-boom-boom she assumed was some kind of artillery or something. She honestly didn't know what kind of weapons the army had around London these days, she couldn't guess what the hell it was, but she thought it sounded like a big muggle gun, anyway? Whatever, not her problem...

They tucked in behind the crowd, Hermione turned off to move through the open gate but Beth just planted a hand on a post and hopped over a turnstile, Ron and George copying her. Just as she landed, there was a boom-crash-fwoosh, very loud — the ground shook under her feet, nearly pitching her off balance. There was a deep roaring of fire, intense enough Beth could barely hear the still-repeating emergency message over it, a messy crashing and clattering, some of the sharp, splintering noises sending shivers down Beth's spine.

"Fuck me, that one was close." The voice was a man's, unfamiliar — Beth looked up to find a handful of men and a couple women, probably all in their twenties and thirties. One of them was actually in an army uniform, so, she guessed these were the people who wanted to come up and help. She couldn't see obvious gun holsters on them, but...

"We're sitting under a train station, if they're trying to cripple us..."

"Makes sense. You lot the ones with the bloody magic?"

Amused despite herself, Beth said, "Yeah, we're the ones with the bloody magic. Um, we need to block off that door too, so I was figuring we'd put the wall right here — can you conjure enough for that?" she asked George.

He shrugged. "Probably, but I think it'll be easier if we do this." Ducking low to swish his wand at ankle level, he cast a slicing curse toward the turnstiles. He cut most of the way through a pair of the posts, wrenched them the rest of the way out of the floor with a summoning charm, the hunks of twisted metal and plastic slamming down against the tile a few feet in front of him. "Use them for transfiguration material, you know? The spells will hold for longer this way too, we can carve some runes into them for extra protection without destabilising the transfiguration too much."

"Good idea." Beth glanced back at the muggles — a few of them looked rather unnerved at the display of magic, leaning over to mutter with each other, but they hadn't reacted that badly, really. Which was good, because Beth was pretty sure they were all armed. "Right, let's get to it, put it straight across here." She cast her own slicing curse, instead of summoning the post to her moved on to the next one, casting one curse, and another, and another...

Now that they'd gotten started, their defences came together in pretty quick order. While Beth, George, and Ron ripped up all the turnstiles, Hermione suggested a couple of their muggle friends head over to the tunnel Gin and Fred were at — after a short discussion, some volunteered to go, disappearing down the stairs. Beth wasn't really sure what they wanted to make for a barricade — they could just block off the whole thing, she guessed — but the muggles, once they got over their nervousness from the spells flying around, came up to offer suggestions. They'd want to stop anyone from coming through, but they'd also want to be able to see what was going on on the other side — it wouldn't be hard to charm the wall transparent, but if they were attacked it'd be handy to be able to fire spells (and bullets) through without having to take the whole wall down. After some discussion, they decided on a wall that came up to Beth's ribs or so (only waist-high for the tall people), in most places a barrier on top extending all the way to the ceiling, but every couple metres leaving a narrow gap. Too narrow for a person to climb through, but plenty of room to watch or aim through. George and Hermione started carving runes into it, setting some extra protective spells that would hopefully let their transfigured wall take more of a beating than the metal and plastic it was made out of should.

Once that was more or less all settled, Beth apparated to the other side, standing alone out in the ticket hall. (Sirius had taught her to apparate earlier this summer, she just didn't feel the need to show off like the twins did. Also, Mrs. Weasley would have nagged them about breaking the law.) Setting some trap hexes and shite out here wasn't a bad idea, and she could give the others an early warning if they were being attacked. There were some shouts for her to come back — mostly from the muggles, who were obviously uncomfortable with how young Beth and her friends were — but she just waved them off, jogged over toward the stairs up to the street level.

Transfiguration wasn't Beth's best class — she could do the magic just fine, but she didn't have the same talent for transfigurations she had for charms. Still, it was well within her abilities to cut the railings into a few pieces, and fiddle around with several separate transfigurations to twist them out of place, stretch them out across the stairwell. After a minute or two she had a tangled web of metal stitching across the stairwell, layered with whatever trap hexes she could think of — she didn't expect that was likely to keep bloody aliens out forever, but it'd definitely slow them down. There was a hallway leading off over here, Beth followed the tunnel — crossing under the street, she thought — it ended in a T-junction, another staircase up just to her right. She repeated the process, a little quicker now that she sort of knew what she was doing, and there was another staircase up a few metres behind her, let's go take care of that one while she was at it...

Beth couldn't help it, before blocking off this one she skipped up the stairs, slowing down as she neared the top — crouching close to the stone steps, she carefully peeked her head up over the edge of the pavement. She couldn't see very far, too many buildings crowding in on both sides of the street, but there was a lot of smoke, dozens and dozens of grey-black streamers stretching to the sky...mostly concentrated to the south, toward the river, the roar of fires burning almost deafening even from this far away. Or, maybe that was mostly King's Cross, actually, a glance over her shoulder showed it'd been hit, the roof collapsed in and debris scattered over the courtyard and into the nearby streets, the sagging structure belching a thick tower of smoke, flames flickering through orange and yellow here and there. There were still sounds of gunfire and explosions in the distance, but there wasn't really much to see, the worst of the fighting closer to the city centre.

Aaaand she'd spoken too soon — rapidly coming in from behind her was... Well, she didn't know what the fuck that was, actually. An odd orangeish-greenish creature, bloody huge, looking kind of like a misshapen fish, its head a big round blob with a long, delicate tail trailing behind, too narrow for the size of the head. Beth only saw one at first, but then there were two more, bloody weird-looking things, the surface looking like an odd cross between craggy stone and scales — looked pretty sturdy, but it was also flexible, the things slowed as they came in for a landing in the courtyard, the tails whipping around sending them in graceful turns, and—

Red-orange light bloomed at the front ends — there was a little open gash there, Beth had been thinking of them as mouths — she ducked her head under street level. There was a series of glub-blurp-fwoosh noises, overlapping each other into a mixed-up mess (in a way, almost reminding her of someone chugging a drink, or three people doing it at once, but louder and deeper), once, twice— Beth grimaced at a metallic shrieking, her hands jumping over her ears, quickly followed by a roar of flame and an ear-splitting crunching and clattering, dust and smoke billowing out overhead. The weapons fired a few more times, before finally going quiet again, leaving only the rattles of settling debris and the crackling of fires.

Beth hesitated for a moment before, cautiously, poking her head back over street level. The faces of half of the buildings around had big holes punched through them, a chaotic flickering of light from fires deep within, the structures sagging inward around the gaps — Beth could hear shouting and screams coming from inside the terrace on this side of the street, there must be people in there. (Gritting her teeth, she squashed down the impulse to go running off to find them.) One shot had missed the buildings, digging into the street a dozen metres away from where Beth was standing, a car parked against the pavement tipping perilously into the crater, smoking as the insides caught fire...

She could see underneath the car, at the centre of the crater, what looked like a sizeable blob of fucking lava, a few drippings sloshed out over the pavement, a nearby lamppost sagging from the heat — what the fuck...

The three weird little ships had sprouted claws underneath, gripping the ground hard enough they'd cracked the concrete. Openings had formed at either side of the bulbous heads, these funny tubes spilling out down to the ground — they kind of looked like the tubes they docked spaceships together with, like she'd seen in propaganda videos, but oddly...fleshy, the material a glistening orangish-pink, veins showing where the light passed through, supported with yellowish-white ribs. Before she could spend much time thinking how fucking weird that was, figures were spilling out of the tubes, Beth ducking further to make sure as little of her head was showing as possible.

Fucking hell, those were ugly little things. Thick and stooped and scaley, they looked like lizards, or fucking dinosaurs or something. Covered in dark green scales, in some places more yellowish or greyish in patches, they moved somewhat awkwardly on two legs, almost waddling — they were kind of squat and silly-looking, but Beth had a nasty suspicion that a lot of that girth was actually muscle. Sprouting out of the back of their long, thick neck and their sturdy arms were these irregular spiny growths, Beth was pretty sure those weren't a natural part of their bodies. They didn't poke out in the same patterns in all of them, and the colour was...weird, an orangish-whitish-yellowish sort of thing, smooth in places and pitted and craggy in others. Kind of like bone, but not quite, Beth thought they were some kind of implants poking up through their skin, but she had no idea what the fuck they could possibly be for...

After watching them bustle around for a little bit, a second kind of alien came out of the tubes — these were tall and slender, edges sharp and jagged, and more colourful, but Beth didn't hang around very long to look. She noticed the group was splitting up, some heading toward the surface train stations...and others toward the Underground entrance in the courtyard...

...which led into the ticket hall, between Beth and their barricade.

Beth skittered down the stairs, practically falling and nearly tripping more than once, "fuck fuck fuck," she hit the bottom running, flying down the hallway in seconds, taking the turn toward their barricade fast enough her muggle trainers squeaked against the tile. Overbalanced, she staggered a couple steps before she got her feet back under her, darting off toward the barricade. There was a hissing and growling coming from up the stairs, to her right, harsh voices barking out in an unfamiliar language — too far away for Beth to hear it properly, not picking up anything. Running full-out, Beth tried to slow down before reaching the barricade — shining steel and black plastic, faintly shimmering with rainbow not-colour, a hint of the magic from their haphazard enchanting — but she started too late, ended up running into the surface pretty hard, banging her elbow on a bit of metal, ow, fuck. She peeked through one of the gaps, picked an empty spot on the other side, and apparated across.

She staggered on landing, her head spinning, took a moment to suck in a shaky breath. Her hands fluttering over herself, it didn't feel like she'd splinched anything, right, good. (She hadn't been apparating very long, she really should have paused a second to think about it harder.) Once she had her breathing more or less back under control, she gasped, "They're coming. Fat little lizard-looking things, ugly bastards..."

"How many?" That was one of the adults, Timothy...something, Beth had forgotten. Their volunteers were all military, unsurprisingly — civilians weren't likely to have firearms on them, for legal reasons (Beth was pretty sure even these people shouldn't be carrying them into the tube, but whatever) — and at some point while they'd been making the barricade Timothy — a tall, bulky man of maybe thirty at the most, dressed in perfectly ordinary slacks, tee shirt, and leather jacket — had ended up in charge of the group. George had already been making a nuisance of himself, calling him Major Tim — Timothy said he was actually a lieutenant, but George insisted "Major Tim" was funnier.

(Beth assumed it was a pun or something, but she didn't get the joke. She also assumed George was trying to put the muggles at ease about the magic thing by being silly and generally non-threatening, so she hadn't told him to shut up about it.)

"Um, I don't know, a few dozen, probably? Maybe fifty? I didn't want them to cut me off, so, I didn't stick around to count."

There were a few hisses from the muggles, throwing each other worried glances. Beth had overheard them wondering whether they'd have enough bullets if they did end up being attacked — there were only five of them here, and they only had fifteen shots each. (They might be carrying their firearms, which she wasn't certain they were even allowed to do in the first place, but they hadn't brought extra ammo with them.) If there were fifty attackers coming, that meant they'd need to kill two weird lizard things for every three shots fired, and, Beth wasn't an expert on bloody guns (this was literally the closest she'd ever gotten to one before), but that didn't seem very likely.

Of course, the adults were assuming Beth, Ron, Hermione, and George would be pretty much useless — Beth fully expected she would kill most of the aliens who attacked them herself, but the muggles didn't realise how good she was with combat spells yet.

"What kind of weapons were they carrying? Alien technology, sure, but take a guess what we're looking at."

"Um..." Beth frowned. "I don't know, I didn't notice anything that looked like rifles or whatever. I think I saw some, like, swords, little ones, about this long?" she said, holding her hands about two feet apart. The muggles plus Hermione gave her a variety of baffled looks. The idea that they might be attacked by people with swords wasn't so weird to Ron and George — goblins mostly used melee weapons — but obviously aliens were a science fiction thing, so shouldn't they have, like, laser rifles or something? Beth didn't know. "The guns on their ships spit out fucking blobs of lava, though, so, is this thing shielded against heat?" she asked George, jerking a thumb over her shoulder at the barricade. Apparently not, George sharply snapped his fingers and slid down to his knees to start carving runes into the surface again.

They settled in to wait, noises still spilling down to them from the stairs, growling and hissing, an occasional screaming and clanking of metal as they cut through Beth's transfigured railings. The noise was pretty loud, but Beth could still hear the bombing continuing, fires burning both nearby and in the distance, the occasional retort of muggle guns somewhere out there. Apparently they hadn't found the entrance across the street, carving their way through the near staircase instead of going around — Beth probably hadn't needed to rush so much, she'd expected them to easily cut their way through with fucking lasers or something, honestly. Watching the empty ticket hall, it didn't take very long before Beth was starting to get rather impatient, one foot anxiously tapping against the tile, the skin at the back of her neck and across her shoulders crawling. Honestly, what was taking them so fucking long, she'd like this to just be over already...

(Beth hated waiting.)

"You know—" Ron's voice was unexpected, Beth jumped, bumping her knee against the barricade. "—maybe holing ourselves up under a big sodding train station wasn't the best idea."

"...Yeah, maybe not." If these aliens were trying to conquer the planet, Beth guessed at the top of their checklist would be knocking out communications, so they couldn't talk to each other and coordinate a defence — they'd shot down all the satellites already — kill as much of their leadership as they could get their hands on, and destroy all the industrial stuff that might be used to make new weapons and stuff they could — she guessed those were probably why they were focussed on population centres? That made sense. Another big important point on the list would be crippling transportation, so, a big damn train station like King's Cross was actually a pretty big target.

That probably should have occurred to Beth before — Sirius had been talking to her about how the war with Voldemort might go, she'd been thinking about this kind of stuff lately — but she just... It hadn't felt real, like this was really happening, she hadn't been thinking straight.

...She hadn't even said goodbye to Sirius. She'd been so out of it, just, dazed, and... There was a bloody alien invasion going on, either of them could easily die at any moment — he was out there in the open, he was in far more danger than she was — and she hadn't even said goodbye.

It probably didn't make any difference, but she still felt...weirdly bad about that. She'd never even thanked him for letting her move into his house, she didn't think...

Beth was shocked out of her thoughts by a loud spang-crackle-crackle from the stairs the aliens were cutting through — that would be one of her trap hexes, they were at least halfway through now. Unthinkingly, her free hand shot out, finding Hermione's wrist. Her breath caught in her throat, odd hot-cold shivers running over her, she hadn't even said goodbye, she—

"I love you, Hermione. I mean, um..." Beth bit her tongue to stop herself from blurting out something about not meaning it like that — as far as she knew Hermione had no idea that Beth was pretty sure she was gay, so that would be an odd thing to say. "I don't think I've ever said that before, and, you know, just in case."

"You don't have—" Beth had her right hand, Hermione reached around with her left hand to squeeze Beth's wrist. "I love you too, Beth, but I wish you wouldn't— You don't have to be so dramatic about it. We're going to be fine. Just in case, honestly..."

...She wished she had Hermione's confidence. They didn't know shite about these actual fucking aliens, who the hell knew what would happen once they got down to the ticket hall...

Actually, how tight Hermione was holding on to her arm, the wideness of her eyes, her face still unusually pale, Beth suspected Hermione was as worried as she was. She just didn't want to say they might die soon out loud — Hermione could be very optimistic like that sometimes.

"Oi, what am I, chopped liver?"

"Oh, you— Come over here." Hermione let go of Beth's arm to tug Ron closer, tipping up on her toes to give him a one-armed hug. Ron just gave Beth a nod over Hermione's shoulder which, honestly, was about as much physical affection as they were comfortable with — she was getting better about it, slowly, but she still wasn't really used to hugs and stuff, and obviously Ron was a teenage boy, so.

(Of course, Ron would take the hug from Hermione, but Beth was pretty sure he had a crush on her, so that didn't count.)

After a couple seconds of the hug going on, George sidled closer to her other side. "Hey, Beth, how about me? You love me too, right?" He followed the question up with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows, because of course.

"...You're okay, I guess."

"Ach!" George clapped one hand over his chest, pulling his face into a comical mask of pained shock. "You wound me, fair lady — how cruel is love..."

Another trap hex went off with a sizzle and a dozen whip-cracking sounds, Beth looked up in time to see a couple stray pieces of the railing clatter down to the tile floor. Finally letting go of Hermione's wrist, "They're almost through. I'll try to keep them back, you lot take out the ones that get through my curses," she said, nodding at Major Tim to her right. He still seemed rather dubious that their magic was going to be very helpful, but he just nodded back, started talking to the muggles about...taking turns with their shots so they didn't waste bullets all shooting at the same target, good thinking.

"I'm going to hit them with Sunflame as soon as they're through, and I'll keep on the big spells, try to pick off the ones I miss. Don't bother with human-targeting hexes, we have no idea if they'll work on these things — destructive spells, piercing, blasting, cutting."

"Ma'am, yes, ma'am," George barked, snapping off another sarcastic salute before sidling over to another one of the gaps, so he could toss spells without getting in each other's way.

Ron asked, "Distona?"

"Oh yeah, that one should work too. Hermione, if you want to focus mostly on shielding and keeping the barricade up." Of the four of them, she was probably the worst with combat spells, but she was brilliant with other stuff, so.

"I thought I might slow them down with conjured animals and the like?"

Of course, she was also the only one of them (except George) who could do much conjuration at all. "Sure, whatever works."

Another trap hex was triggered with a heavy whoompf, some guttural shouting as the aliens caught in it were slammed against the walls and the ceiling — that was the last big one, just a few tripping jinxes at the bottom of the stairs left. They were almost through.

"Here they come."

Chapter Text

With a chorus of harsh, grinding snarls, the first rank of weird reptile things poured into the ticket hall...and then immediately fell as their feet were yanked out from under them, slamming hard against the tile face-first. Now that they were closer, Beth could see they were actually bigger than she'd thought — some had to be as tall as Ron, and much thicker, their size at least rather more intimidating than Beth had thought from a distance. She heard a few of the muggles cursing, Ron hissing through his teeth, yeah, they were ugly fucking things, weren't they. She waited a breath for the next rank to come through, the first lizards still picking themselves up off the floor, before beginning a circular swirl of her wand, "orbem solarem," a little sizzling ball of bright yellow-orange fire gathering at the top of her wand. An underhanded flick sent it sailing through the gap, flying in a shallow arc to drop right in the middle of the pack of reptilian aliens.

Boom-fwoosh!

The second it hit something the ball of fire immediately burst, flinging liquid fire in all directions — splashing all over the pack of aliens. At least five of them were practically coated with the stuff, flailing and screeching, a couple others only got a little bit of it, slapping ineffectually at the flames. One was smart enough to drop and roll — he managed to spread it out enough that the remains were easier to choke off — and the other was hit with a...blob of...goo? A greenish-blueish colour, it splatted against the burning lizard-person's back, and kind of...spread over him — stretching out little runners and dragging itself forward, almost like it was alive. It hissed and shrivelled a little where it touched the fire, but in the process also suffocated the flames, in a few seconds both of the lizard-people that'd only gotten a little fire on them were fine again.

The ones that'd gotten a lot of fire on them were still screeching and flailing, though — Beth could barely hear the muggles muttering curses under their breath.

There was some more chatter from the things, in a low, harsh, barking language — she got a vague impression that they were passing back details about the barricade to someone in charge, getting back orders to proceed — after gathering themselves together (leaving their swiftly dying friends to burn) a pack of lizard-things spilling out of the stairway and sprinting toward them. Jesus, they moved fast — as big and awkward-looking as they were, Beth wouldn't have expected them to be able to move like that. "Cumigne lacera!" The bright yellow-orange spellglow zipped away, striking one of the lizards in the chest, burst with a boom and a roar into a cloud of flame — a good chunk was blown out of the lizard's chest, spraying greenish-blackish blood, the damage bad enough to nearly take off the arm, the fire searing the two just next to him — spells from the others cutting into the group at more or less the same time, blowing them back or stabbing into chests or snapping bones. "Orbem solarem," Beth tossed off another ball of fire, the lizards scattered out of the way, the spell sailing over to land at the base of the stairs, coating the area with bright hissing flames — there was some shouting from over there, but she didn't seem to have hit anyone, the rest of the attackers hanging back for now — more spells laying into the lizard-people, a few harsh bangs as their muggle friends put carefully-aimed shots into heads.

Beth noticed a couple odd, bright pings, bullets ricocheting, lizard-people rearing back as though smacked over the head. Were those shots just blocked by the rocky growths sprouting out of their heads? Were those supposed to be armour? The lizards didn't seem to be wearing any, just simple knotted loincloths, the only protection they had these shiny colourful panels strapped to their shins and forearms...and it didn't look like the growths covered enough to be useful as armour, just bad luck the muggles had hit those spots...

Whatever, they were bloody aliens, don't think about it too hard. They didn't seem to be carrying any guns or anything at all, just those short swords Beth had noticed before, so killing the pack of eight or so that'd rushed at their barrier was very easy. A piercing curse to the head finished off one crawling toward them — despite its legs already not working due to a distona from Ron, pulling itself along with its arms, letting out a long hissing snarl, black reptilian eyes cold and empty — and that was it, they were all down already. The results were kind of gross, their already ugly bodies torn apart, showing misshapen innards, greenish-black blood pooling on the floor or sprayed onto the walls. And the smell was bad too, a sweet-sour that was already making Beth vaguely nauseous, ugh...

Hermione cast some kind of wind charm, blowing the smell away from them, which Beth definitely appreciated. Glancing that way, Hermione looked rather ill, pale-faced and shaky, cold sweat visible on her forehead and her neck — she wasn't even looking out into the ticket hall, turned to lean against one of the tall parts of the barrier, one hand covering her mouth. Beth didn't think of Hermione as particularly squeamish, but it was pretty gross, she guessed...

There was some more chatter from over there, but with all the noise of the battle over the city and the fires more nearby she couldn't really hear much. Beth waited, her wand held ready to start another Sunflame, and waited, and waited, George muttering under his breath and some of the muggles shifting in place, fuck, what was taking them so long?

(Beth realised they'd just killed a bunch of their people with literal magic, but they were bloody space aliens, they didn't get to be freaked out about that..)

After what felt like far too long, there was a little commotion over there, flopping out of the stairwell... They kind of looked like that strap flung over one shoulder carrying grenades that some action hero Dudley liked wore in this one film series — Beth had no idea what they were called. These ones might even be made out of some kind of leather, though a more greenish-orange colour, she could— Oh hey, some of the lizard-people they'd already killed had these things too, she hadn't noticed. The straps flopped to the floor, sliding across the tile a little, four or five of the things. A couple seconds, and then with a deep buzzing sound — like a bee or a fly or something, but much deeper — dark blots lifted off of the straps, floating up into the air...

What the fuck...

Beth was squinting through the gap, trying to make the things out — some kind of bugs, maybe, with hard glittering green or blue-purple or red shells — but then, with sharp little zip noises— "Down!"

Moving so quickly she could barely even see them, the small cloud of objects darted across the several metres from here to the stairs in a blink — a few hit the barrier, some with deep thumping noises, the metal set to ringing, one with a harsh blast of fire, but most of them found the gaps, flying right through. Beth hadn't gotten down fast enough, she felt a tug at her left arm, and then a slicing white-hot pain, she grit her teeth but ignored it, glancing around. One of the muggles had gotten nailed right in the chest, knocking him off his feet — he was winded, gasping, but Beth didn't think he was hurt — but the rest of them had missed.

...Or, maybe not — as she watched, the buzzing colourful blurs slowed, wheeling around right at the top of the stairs toward the platforms— "Shields, now! Steðjinn detti!" Ron, Hermione, and George all cast shield charms more or less simultaneously — Ron's and Hermione's, overlapping, would cover the three of them, George had spread his out to cover a couple of the muggles — Beth's stonehammer charm slashing through the air to blast the ceiling. The energy released in a gust tearing through the room, Beth's hair whipping almost painfully around her head, one of the muggles even lost his balance — but the weird bug-things were thrown off course, spinning away to plough into walls and the floor, some splattering themselves against the stone, shells shattered and guts colouring the tile in blotches, but others just bounced and skittered. One landed near one of the muggles and exploded in a gout of fire, his clothes catching, the man yelling in pain and diving into a roll. He was only on fire for a couple seconds before George hit him with a fire-suppressing charm, but it looked like he'd been burned pretty badly.

"Transige, transige, transige," Beth rattled off, stabbing her wand at the still-living bugs — the pale white piercing hexes hit one after the next, punching through them easily. "Hermione, help him!" She was the best of them at healing magic by a long shot, so. "Transige, trans—" The last she'd hit burst into flame, intense enough Beth staggered back from the heat, thumping against the barrier. Fuck, stupid... "Transige!" George and Ron had been picking some off too, she thought that was all of them...

"Beth, you're bleeding!"

"It's nothing, go help him." She hadn't actually looked, as Hermione rushed past her — shuffling over bent in a low crouch, the aliens probably wouldn't be able to see her from the other side — she pushed the sleeve of her tee shirt over her shoulder, prodded at her arm. Yeah, this wasn't so bad, just a cut — it was bleeding pretty bad, deep, a little torn and ragged at one end (which stung like hell, but she'd had worse), would definitely scar, but it wasn't an emergency. Waving her wand over it, several mutterings of, "ĭoto," and the bleeding trickled down to practically nothing...though she should probably get someone who knew what they were doing to look at it later...

Beth jumped at the sound of gunshots, painfully loud in the enclosed space. "We got more incoming!" Shite, of course, don't just sit around like an idiot, Beth. She lurched around to one of the gaps in the barrier, another Sunflame had the pack of lizard-people diving out of the way, she threw blasting curses and a couple castings of distona at them before they could recover, backed up by more curses from Ron and George, those ones weren't getting up again.

And Beth heard a buzzing noise from behind her, they'd missed one of the bugs! Before she could spot the thing, a white blur was slashing across the air — the bug's momentum made Hedwig wobble a little, but she still managed to catch it, a second later crushing it against the tile floor. Thankfully, that wasn't one of the ones that fucking exploded when they died, that would have sucked. Hedwig started picking at the dead bug, its shell crunching in her beak...

...which, Beth maybe shouldn't let her eat that? It was an alien bug, it might be poisonous. It was kind of too late now, but...

They'd barely put down all of the reptile things when there was another chorus of buzzing — they must have thrown out another round of bug-grenade-belt...things, while Beth and the others had been distracted. Major Tim actually put it together before Beth did, shouting for cover, Beth banged her elbow on the floor this time, hard enough her wand actually went clattering out of her hand, she summoned it back. (One of the few wandless spells she could cast, Sirius considered being able to summon your wand back to your hand to be a basic self-defence skill.) Thud-thud-thump-bang-clang, thud, once the noise of the bug-things hitting settled down a little Beth popped back up to her feet. The ones that'd missed were wheeling around again, "Deprime!" her wrist burned as she pushed as much power into it as she could — the bugs were all slammed down against the tile, hard, the reddish ones bursting into flame on impact, thankfully far enough away nobody was caught in it. "Adure!" The scorching hex, a blast of flame scouring that side of the hall, took care of about half of them, a few piercing hexes from Beth and Ron finishing off the rest.

It wasn't until after they'd cleared them all out that Beth realised more of their people had been hit — at least two of them, George and one of the muggles. At a glance, Beth had a feeling the muggle wasn't going to make it.

After two rounds of the bug-things, Beth thought she'd figured out how they worked pretty well. Once they took aim, they moved stupid fast — she didn't think real bugs could move that fast, must be some weird alien technology or magic or something — and were smart enough to circle around to take a second shot if they missed. (Maybe even keep trying again and again, but none had survived taking two shots so far.) They were kind of beetle-looking things, with hard colourful shells, coming in three colours — dark reddish, a dark blue-purple, and bright green. It was the red ones that blew up as they hit, sort of like a blasting curse. The greenish ones kind of seemed similar to a bludgeoning hex — they made a hard, deep thud when they hit things, they'd just winded one of the muggles the first round, one of them had probably clipped George and pitched him to the floor. (He was fine, rubbing his shoulder and grimacing.) But the purple ones, flatter and more jagged-looking than the others, were like a slicing curse — Beth had barely dodged one in that first round, just getting clipped had dug into her arm pretty bad.

One of the muggles, the one in uniform, had gotten a much more direct hit than Beth, right at the join between his neck and shoulder. There was a spray of blood across the tile, gushing out of the wound to pool around him. Hermione was already there, free hand fluttering panicky over the man — leaning back with a shout, a banishing charm flinging away a purplish bug, must have still been caught in the wound (one of the muggles exploded the thing with a single brilliantly-aimed shot) — her wand flicking and swirling, incantations spit out one after another after another.

Part of Beth kind of wanted to tell Hermione not to bother — Hermione was the best of the four of them at healing spells, but she was still just a student. Beth was pretty sure he was going to die no matter what they did. But part of her could only stare, the breath stolen out of her lungs, the sight burning into her.

(She didn't know if she'd ever seen someone die before. Quirrell, she guessed, and according to Snape one of her stray curses, running for the Cup, had killed one of the Death Eaters in the graveyard — meaning she'd actually killed two people, though she hadn't known it at the time, either time — but...)

There was more harsh growling and screaming from behind the barrier, startling Beth out of her daze. Lurching back around toward the wall, Beth nearly cast calōre vindicāns before breaking off with a hiss, she couldn't cast that through such a narrow gap. "Cumigne lacera! Sectumsempra, distona, transige transige..." They only had Beth, Ron, and one of the muggles at the wall (Major Tim), but they still managed to hold the wave off, the bodies strewn across the few metres leading up to the barriers starting to pile up. (Very gross, and Hermione had let off the wind charm, ugh, the smell...)

Just as the last dropped, Beth noticed they were tossing more of the bug-belts out into the ticket hall again — oh for fuck's sake. They couldn't hold off the bug-things and the lizard-people forever, at this rate they'd be overwhelmed eventually. Maybe not before the aliens ran out of people, at least the ones on the three weird-looking landers she'd seen up there, but...

Fuck it. Beth dug in her heels and apparated out into the ticket hall. "Adure." The bright white scorching hex struck the belts, exploding into flames — a rather larger explosion than she'd expected, staggering back from the heat slamming into her, the red bugs must have gotten caught up in it too. There were at least a dozen lizard-things in the stairwell, waiting their turn to charge, along with a trio of the slender, jagged aliens she hadn't gotten a proper look at yet. She didn't pause to gawk at them, though, sucking in a breath, "Calore vindico!" A stream of intense blue-white light poured out of her wand, quickly broadening into a wave of hissing flames, easily wide enough to fill the whole stairwell. The slender aliens moved shockingly quickly, but the lizard-things were slower — it didn't help that they were carrying some kind of equipment, a tube with a sack attached to it that... Maybe a gun? Like one of those lava-spitting things they apparently had on their ships, carrying it down so they could melt the barricade.

Oh well, it didn't matter now — Beth couldn't see exactly what was happening, the fire blocking her view, but most of the lizard-things definitely hadn't gotten out before the spell hit. She pushed even more power into the spell, her wand arm sizzling with hot-cold sparks of pain — calōre vindicāns wasn't necessarily lethal, but it could be if she wanted it to, just took more power — hot wind surging through the ticket hall, stinging at her skin and yanking her hair back, fluttering noisily around her head, she squinted her eyes shut and shielded her face with her free hand. She kept the spell going until the harsh screeching of burning aliens stopped, the fires splitting into swirling white wisps before quickly dissolving away, a quick wind spell chased off the lingering smoke.

The lizard-things had been burned so badly they were hardly recognisable, misshapen masses of black and ashy grey, only a few wetter glistening spots here and there (ugh), and they were all definitely dead. Their big gun was still there, though, a bit scorched but otherwise fine — if it spat out fucking lava, yeah, she'd guess it was meant to withstand heat. "Transige." The piercing hex struck the sack, which Beth assumed was holding whatever the hell the thing used for ammo, a little circular divot appearing in the surface, but it didn't seem to have done much damage. Let's try the Lance of Modestus, then — one of the spells Sirius had taught her this summer, a multi-stage piercing curse originally designed to punch through steel armour, like muggle knights used to wear — that should do the trick...

Before she got off the spell, she saw a crouching figure cautiously but steadily pick down the stairs, hard boots clacking against the tile: one of the slender aliens she'd noticed before, but hadn't gotten a good look at yet. These one were more human-shaped...though they only seemed like it compared against the lizard-things, they definitely weren't human. The proportions were wrong, his (she was pretty sure) body too long and narrow, skull sloping back in a weird curve, making his forehead look too small. The ears were longer and pointier, almost goblin-like, eyes disproportionately large, but somehow still looking narrowed, slanted, surrounded with tiny little ridges of bone (protection from glancing blows?), extending up from the outside corners back in two little trails across his curved forehead, just over his ears. The nose was a tiny little stub, two little gashes for nostrils, the mouth completely lipless. Also, his skin was a sickly, ashy grey, nope, definitely not human.

He was wearing some kind of armour, stiff boots and panels over his legs and arms and chest...though they didn't look like metal — the colour a blue-ish purple, and the sheen it took in the light reminded her of the grenade-bug-things, actually, which was bloody weird. Was their armour made out of some kind of shell? There were jagged little hooks and spikes sticking out, at his knuckles, from wrists and elbows and knees, Beth first thought those were pieces of his armour, but there were little gaps in the shell(?) around the joints, so maybe the spikes were actually part of his body? or maybe implants, like the craggy stone bits coming out of the lizard-people? Where his skin showed, it wasn't only the plain grey, there were also plenty of tattoos, practically covering his face and framing the edge of his armour, black and purple and white, jagged switchbacking lines and curlicues...

Also, the bloke was scarred to hell — Beth could only see his face, but there were little slashes of paler scars here and there...and one of his ears was mangled and misshapen, his bottom not-lip had multiple holes in it — not like a lip ring or anything, just, holes, for no apparent reason? — she noticed his eye sockets weren't symmetrical, like he'd fucking broken his face and the bones hadn't set correctly, making him look noticeably lopsided...

Huh. And Beth had thought the lizard-things were ugly fuckers.

Beth adjusted her aim upward. "Fixam iaculor." The yellow-white spellglow, longer and thicker than most point-spells, lanced across the air between them in a blink, the alien barely had time to rear back in surprise before it struck him right in the chest. The first hit knocked the alien back, falling as his heels hitched on a stair, the spellglow shifted to a bright pinkish colour before piercing through the rest of the way — the shout of surprise was quickly choked with his own blood, the alien, now laying sideways on the stairs, shaking with a wet cough.

Her second Lance of Modestus successfully pierced through the sack thing, and it burst, spraying orangeish liquid all through the stairwell — fuck, that was hot, Beth grimaced and reared back a step even from this far away. The alien's coughing and angry, strangled growling cut off immediately, Beth assumed he'd been caught with some of the lava stuff. It was dribbling down the stairs, spreading across the tile, right, that was enough for now. She jogged back toward their barricade, once she was close enough to see through one of the gaps Beth apparated over to the other side.

"What's going on out there?" Major Tim asked as soon as she appeared.

"Um...I killed all the lizard-things in the stairwell, maybe another dozen of them. They were bringing down some kind of big gun, but I broke it — that lava stuff is the ammo they use for it," she said, pointing out through the gap. It was already slowing down, turning a cooler red, Beth wasn't worried it'd spread all the way over here. Turning back toward Major Tim, she belatedly noticed that the uniformed man was definitely dead. Someone had conjured a sheet over him, a patch of it already stained red. She twitched, turned back to Tim. "I'm pretty sure there are still more of them out there, but unless they have a way to cool off that stuff they're gonna have to take a different staircase."

Major Tim nodded, gave her a quick, hard clap on the shoulder. "Good work, kid. Some of the civilians broke into the vending machines and brought up snacks, go ahead and take a breather. I'll keep watch."

...Beth wasn't hungry, but it had to be well after the time the train would normally have left, she should probably try to eat something. "Thanks," sounded like a kind of odd thing to say, but she couldn't think of anything else — she lingered there for an awkward moment before lurching into motion, heading for...Ron and Hermione, huddled up by the stairs back there.

Hermione looked like she was kind of in shock, face blank and eyes wide, sitting stiff and hardly moving. Beth noticed there were spots of blood on her blouse, a patch on her skirt — didn't see any injuries or anything, probably that muggle man's. Ron was sitting close, muttering to her and offering a packet or something, but as Beth approached he stood up. Once she was close enough, he tugged her closer, arms wrapping tight around her. "Don't do that to me, Beth — I can't apparate out after you if you get in trouble, I about had a heart attack when I saw you out there."

"...Oh." She hadn't thought of that, honestly, she just knew they had to stop the bugs from coming in. Slowly, a little reluctantly (still not comfortable with this stuff), she hugged him back. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking about that."

Ron let out a little huff, then let her go. "Come on, you've had a hard go, you should eat something."

"You know you just sounded like your mum for a second."

He rolled his eyes. "Drink something, at least, it's getting hot in here."

As Beth took the last few steps toward their corner, the lights flickered out, plunging the area into darkness, lit only by the weak sunlight and glow from the lava stuff slashing through the gaps in their barricade, muffled shouts of surprise and fright rising up from the platforms. She guessed the aliens had finally managed to knock out the nearest power station. Before she could even draw her wand, the emergency lights clicked on — they were a different colour, a cooler orange, and didn't fill the whole space as well, shadows clinging to the ceiling and in corners, but she could see well enough. "Hey, Tim, can you still see out there?"

"Yes, we're all clear."

Right, good. Beth took the last couple steps toward Hermione, awkwardly sank down to a seat — her legs felt too stiff, but at the same time too shaky. Food didn't seem very appealing just now, but she summoned a bottle of water from the row set out between the stairs, quick drained maybe half of it before stopping for breath. "You alright, Hermione?"

Hermione blinked at her for a moment, uncomprehendingly, as though she hadn't heard — Beth was just about to repeat herself before she finally spoke, her voice low and thin and absent. "Sam didn't make it."

Must be the uniformed soldier's name — Beth wasn't sure if she'd ever caught it, too focussed on their preparations. "That hit was pretty bad, I don't think you could have saved him. It's not your fault."

"It's not about that. I don't... How many other people are dying out there, do you think?"

...Beth had no idea. That announcement seemed to be saying that the whole world was getting attacked at once, so...probably millions? Hermione was obviously freaking out about that a bit, but, honestly that just didn't... It didn't quite feel real, to her. It was too big. This tube station, the hundreds of people down on the platforms, their little group of defenders here, that was about all she could deal with, she couldn't think of anything else just now. And, sure, they'd lost one of their people, and it'd been pretty brutal and bloody, but...

Well, maybe she was just a heartless bitch, but, she didn't know the bloke, so. It was shitty that he'd been killed, and it was kind of wild that there was a dead body sitting just over there — a man who she'd talked to only a few minutes ago, and he was gone now — and Beth was a little rattled by all this, sure, she hadn't missed how stiff and twitchy her own legs were, her fingers shivering just a little. But she wasn't, like, she didn't know. She couldn't freak out about this, the aliens might attack again at any moment. Maybe cold, but that bloke was dead now, he didn't matter anymore — Beth was more worried what might happen to Ron or Hermione or George, and all the people downstairs (dozens and dozens of little kids) if she didn't keep her head in the game. So.

(Of course, she'd never freaked out in emergencies, like Hermione did sometimes, and most of their classmates seemed to all the time. Even going all the way back to that troll first year, and Beth was even better at it than she'd been then. She didn't know why that was.)

"It's all... Everything's going to be different. Everything."

"...Yeah." Shitty response, maybe, but she didn't know what else to say. Hermione wasn't wrong — there was a bloody alien invasion going on, supposedly world-wide, and Secrecy was pretty much done for, so. Yeah, everything's going to be different pretty much covered it. Hermione was definitely feeling something about that, was saying it for a reason, but Beth didn't really get what or why? Personally, she was more concerned with making sure they got through this mess in one piece, she didn't have time for all that...

A few minutes passed in awkward almost-quiet. Some low muttering here and there, the battle over London still ongoing in the near distance, the roaring and cracking of a hundred fires. Beth was halfway through a packet of crisps Ron had forced on her and nagged her to actually eat — she was struck with a random memory of Ron bringing snacks up from the kitchen when they were studying for exams, badgering them into taking a break, he did just do shite like this, didn't he? She heard Major Tim shuffling in place, was already looking that way when he spoke. "Look alive, we've got movement out here."

Pitching the half-finished crisps aside, Beth leapt up to her feet (staggering a couple steps before getting her balance), rushed toward the wall. "Another attack?"

"...I don't think so. And damn, those are some ugly sons of bitches."

Peeking through one of the gaps, there were several of the slender, spiky, scarred aliens, backlit by the sun peeking through the vents behind the ticket counter, the angled shadows from the emergency lights making them look even more asymmetrical. Two, four, six...eleven of them, ten in a line through the ticket hall — curved, blocking off the over-wide hallway leading to their barricade — and one in front. As Beth watched, he took a few last sauntering steps before coming to a sharp halt, roughly halfway between their line and the barricade. Standing straight and rigid, his hands folded behind his back, he glared across at the barricade, and—

"Ukh-itcnar vīnich, al-plzhālodgu. Imak du, zh tcali rr-si-rr."

Beth blinked — that was definitely speech of some kind, but she wasn't getting anything. She must be too far away. "I'm going out."

"I don't think that's a good idea, kid."

"I think he's trying to talk, but I need to get closer. It'll be fine, just, leave this spot right here open, I can pop back at any time."

Major Tim gave her a very sceptical look, but after a moment of thought gave a reluctant nod. "Alright, go see what he wants, then. Doesn't sound like he speaks English, though..."

Well, no, but that didn't really matter for her, did it?

Beth apparated through the barrier — the aliens twitched, a few in the line hissing and...presumably reaching for weapons? She didn't see any weapons on them...besides some of the weird bug-grenade things, she guessed. The one waiting at the front hardly reacted, though, his eyes maybe narrowing a little.

She'd only walked a couple steps before there was a crack of inexpert apparation, she glanced over her shoulder to see George had followed her. "Figured you could use some backup, just in case." She shrugged, and continued walking.

Not that she had very far to walk, only maybe ten seconds later she was stopping, not quite within arm's reach of the lead alien. And fucking hell, they were ugly bastards — Beth thought this one was even more scarred up than the last. This one's ears were completely missing, fleshy lumps of scar tissue left at the base, and his skull was indented just beneath the little bony ridges running back, making his head seem even more jagged, his jaw was crooked, as though broken and improperly set. This one also had dark blue-ish bags under his eyes, but the other one might have had those too, she might not have been close enough to tell. Just, Jesus, that was all.

She was vaguely curious what their women looked like (assuming they had women), but she probably didn't want to find out.

"Ux-dzhaqor mu junɦo bus-si forqā plzhālodgu-m. Tcurok, al-dzhēdaj, zh tadzi mu-nar i ɦakh."

Beth frowned. She was getting...nothing. Huh.

Back in second year, Beth had discovered she was an omniglot, which was some kind of special inherited magical ability that she still didn't entirely understand, honestly. It could be kind of neat sometimes, it was one of the best (if confusing) things about being her. Basically, omniglottalism was an ability to copy knowledge from other people's heads, automatically. It didn't take any conscious effort, or anything, it just...happened, by itself.

Beth had always done kind of shitty in school, for no particular reason she could put her finger on. For most of her life she'd just thought she was stupid. She could follow what was going on in class...sometimes, but she always had a terrible time actually learning things out of a book — most likely she wouldn't retain anything at all, and when she did remember stuff she didn't necessarily understand it. It wasn't until after she'd started at Hogwarts that she'd started to realise she wasn't just stupid. Well, Hermione had noticed first, and only managed to convince Beth after some badgering. See, Beth might not get much out of lessons, and practically nothing from the reading, but when Hermione went over the material with her one-on-one — or one-on-two, including Ron — then she would almost always understand it the first time she was told, and would remember it, seemingly forever. As far as she could tell, she remembered practically everything Hermione had re-taught her and Ron, huddled up together in the library or the common room, she never forgot any of it.

Which meant her homework and test scores had seen a massive jump starting in the second half of first year — a couple of her professors had even suspected she was cheating at first, it'd made that big of a difference.

And she learned it, and remembered it, because she was unconsciously copying Hermione's understanding of it straight out of her brain, and then sort of permanently burning it into her own mind. There was some kind of complicated magical memory-storage you could do with mind magic, which omniglottalism technically was — supposedly Barty Crouch, who was also an omniglot, spoke over two hundred languages, which Hermione insisted was physically impossible. Mind mages could do that sort of thing on purpose, but had to be careful not to hurt themselves doing it, but omniglots just did it automatically. There were some limits to it — the person she was copying from had to have a certain level of proficiency in whatever the thing was, and it worked best if she had the person's undivided attention (which was why she didn't get much out of classroom lectures) — but basically, she could learn things to mastery just talking to someone about them.

Once she'd had it explained to her, it had kind of made sense, when she thought about it. She already had the experience of suddenly understanding their schoolwork once Hermione explained it to her, and also Cambrian class was dead easy. (For whatever reason, omniglots learned languages the quickest, often going from nothing to fluency in the space of a couple weeks — hence omniglot, "all-tongue".) Also, Petunia had never had to tell her how to do a particular thing more than once, even when she'd been very young...and she knew now that some of the chores she'd been given had been rather complicated for someone her age — she'd started helping with the baking when she'd been literally four — so that probably had something to do with it too...and one of the "freakish" things about her had supposedly been that she'd started speaking really fluently really early, but she'd always assumed Dudley was just slow...

Also, there was that time she'd overheard someone speaking Parseltongue — Gin, possessed by the diary — and had abruptly had an entire language crammed into her head in the space of maybe two minutes. It'd been way too much, she'd actually passed out...and been found a couple hours later lying unconscious next to Sophie Roper and Nearly-Headless Nick, both petrified, which had taken some explaining. Thankfully, when she explained what happened Dumbledore had believed her immediately. It might have helped that, when Fawkes chirruped his opinion on the matter — that her confusion was natural and not due to being mentally dominated by something else, he didn't feel any echoes of anything foreign still clinging to her, because apparently Dumbledore had suspected it would be something like the diary from very early on — she'd suddenly had a second language crammed into her head in the space of maybe two minutes, the strain once again knocking her unconscious.

Apparently, having that happen twice in one day was bad for you — Beth had woken up in the Hospital Wing two days later, and hadn't been let out for another three after that. While getting an explanation of what exactly omniglottalism was — from Snape, who hadn't seemed any happier about getting the job of teaching her all this than she'd been — she'd been told that could happen with magical languages, basically the magic in the language and the ooh-thing-I-don't-know-yet-must-copy-it-now part of Beth's magic kind of plugging into each other, making a self-reinforcing loop. It takes a lot of magical and mental strain, copying that much information that quickly — Pomfrey had been surprised that Beth hadn't also hurt herself from channelling too much magic, but yeah, pretty much anyone would be hospitalised doing it twice in a row like that.

Hermione thought it was basically the coolest thing ever, and was very jealous. But she hadn't been so jealous that she hadn't wanted to help Beth get the most out of it — talking through whatever they'd just done in class was a regular thing now, which had quickly rocketed Beth from practically the bottom of their class to near the top. (It'd had a smaller effect on Ron's marks, but it was good for him too, so.) When they didn't have anything in particular to work on, they'd often just end up talking about whatever nerdy thing, so Beth also knew a lot more about, like, science and history and literature shite than she ever would have otherwise. Not just for Beth's benefit, she was pretty sure Hermione also just liked having an excuse to talk about nerdy shite, because she was a nerd.

Beth spoke English and Parseltongue and bloody phoenix, obviously, but she'd also weaselled enough one-on-one meetings with Professor Smethwyck over the last few years to pick up Cambrian, Gaelic (Irish), Latin, ancient bloody Greek (technically the Koinè dialect used by magical academia, but whatever), and also ǹKhēmi, the language used by Egyptian mages, because Professor Smethwyck spoke an absurd number of languages for someone who didn't have mysterious knowledge-copying abilities. Ages ago now, Hermione had taught her French — her father was French, she'd been raised bilingual, apparently. (It somehow hadn't come up until she told Hermione about the omniglottalism thing and she'd offered to teach her.) While the foreign students were at Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament, Beth had taken the opportunity to learn a bunch more languages, because why the fuck not. She'd already known French, but the Beauxbatons students also spoke provençau and lengadocian (which she thought were just dialects of Occitan?) and gascon and català and piemontèis (some kind of Italian?), and also both varieties of the veela/lilin language (which was more like how men and women spoke English slightly differently than separate dialects); and from the Durmstrangers, she'd learned whatever the hell they spoke in magical Scandinavia (the name in itself literally meant "northern speech," but she had no idea if that was Swedish or Norwegian or what), Bulgarian, Polish (specifically mazowiecki), Lithuanian, Finnish, and two different kinds of German (Platt and Boarisch), and a kind of Russian (novgorodske) which was apparently not the same Russian they spoke in muggle Russia, which was a pain, but whatever.

And yes, she realised that it was slightly insane that she'd already been fluent in twenty-three languages (twenty-two, if provençau and lengadocian didn't count as different things) before her fifteenth birthday — and she'd learned fourteen(/thirteen?) of them within eight months. It sounded completely absurd, but that was life as an omniglot for you.

She'd kept learning things over the summer, but not languages — Sirius had been giving her one-on-one lessons on everything he thought she might need to know to protect herself. And those lessons could be kind of overwhelming, because Sirius was really really good at using occlumency offensively (what he called it), so, when he felt her omniglot mind magic poking around (which most people couldn't feel at all) he could forcibly push information at her, meaning she picked it up way way faster than she normally did. It tended to give her a terrible headache after as little as a half hour, actually. Still worth it, though — it often took people hours and hours of practice to get passable with strong combat spells, but Beth and Sirius spent maybe five minutes on each spell, as long as a half hour for the really complicated ones, and also she'd learned how to apparate in literally two days. (Supposedly when they taught it at Hogwarts it took months?) He'd also taught her a fair bit of enchanting — she hadn't signed up for Runes back in second year, not yet having put together that being an omniglot would make that class stupid easy — a handful of important healing potions, even a little bit of hand-to-hand, and...whatever had seemed useful at the time, really. She'd probably learned more over these two months of summer than she did in an average year at school, but it was also useful, and Sirius kept it from being boring, so she didn't really mind.

Also, these lessons might save her life one day (like today), so.

After learning a tonne of languages all at once over the last year, and her intense lessons with Sirius, she'd gotten pretty good at feeling when the omniglot thing was happening, even if she still had absolutely no control over it whatsoever. Normally, she could kind of... It took her a couple hours, usually, to start remembering words (and a few days to be able to put sentences together at all), but, even if a language was completely new to her, she always got a vague idea of what someone was saying. Not the literal meaning of the actual words, you know, just the general idea. It got clearer and clearer as she heard more and more of it, but even literally the first time she heard a language, she'd still get something.

This alien, talking at her just then? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a vague feeling about what he was saying to her, just...

That was weird. Honestly, it was slightly uncomfortable — the only time she got absolutely nothing from someone was...maybe talking to Snape? He was a mind mage, in the can totally read your thoughts and poke around in your memories sense (omniglots were technically also mind mages, there were different kinds), and had enough control of his mind to shut out Beth's omniglot stuff. Which might have something to do with why she did especially badly in Potions class, but whatever. Even if she wasn't actively learning something it was still, you know, constantly going in the background, picking up random things people were thinking about, kind of...

But, no. Nothing. From the tone he said it in, she suspected plzhālodgu and al-dzhēdaj were insults, but that was literally all she had.

Huh.

Oh well, she guessed they wouldn't be negotiating. Her wand falling into her hand with a flick of her wrist, she flipped him the bird. "Yeah, yeah, go fuck yourself. Distona."

Once again, these ones moved shockingly fast...but not fast enough. The lead alien dipped, turning his shoulders to lean under and around Beth's curse — hands flying out from behind his back, something uncoiling from around his wrist and extending out from his hand (some kind of weapon, maybe?) — fast enough that the sharp orange-yellow spellglow nearly missed him, clipping him on the shoulder. Of course, even a near miss with this curse was still very, very bad — there was a harsh crack noise, and a big chunk of the alien's shoulder just disappeared, dissolving into a cloud of dust poofing up into the air. Spinning to the floor with a clinking clatter, leaking jet-black blood from the jagged and torn wound in his shoulder — the curse had managed to completely take his arm off, yeah, he wasn't surviving this one — the alien let out a vicious hateful snarl, almost sounded like a fucking lion or something, and after a second he was pushing back up to his feet. The length of something in his hand abruptly loosening into a coiling whip, he wound his hand back—

"Distona." Her second shot nailed him right in the head, crack — his face and most of his skull just disappeared, wafting down to the tile floor as a million little specks of dust, the body spasming for a second before limply toppling over.

The other aliens reacted to Beth killing their leader, obviously, things uncoiling from around their wrist into their hands — those were definitely a weapon of some kind, almost looked like a snake or something? — hands reaching for the bug-things at their waists. While Beth was finishing off the first one George threw a piercing curse at one of them — the force of the blow spun him around, but Beth was pretty sure it didn't punch through his armour, like with the ammo sack earlier. "Adure, desecetur, cumigne lacera!"

"Duck! Aigída!" Beth was just about to skip to the side, hoping to avoid the bugs some of the aliens were just about to throw, but she didn't question it, ducked her head and dropped, banging her knee on the tile a little. George was suddenly leaning over her, a silvery shield appearing ahead of them, so thick it was opaque. It shivered as bugs hit it, plonk plonk plonk, and then a boom-fwoosh as one of the red ones went off.

A quick wind charm to whip away the smoke, the aliens that hadn't been taken out with one curse or another — looked like six — were charging at them, bounding across the metres separating them inhumanly fast, she barely had enough time to get out, "Flammam impellens!" Her wand arm burning in protest, a wall of fire, bright red and white, filled the hall one end to the other, just a couple feet in front of them, hot enough to sting at Beth's skin. The wall of flames shivered, undulating like the ripples from a stone tossed into the Lake — she guessed one of the aliens had tried to jump through it, but these flames didn't work like that. A flick of her wand had the flames surging away from them, rearing and curling like a tall ocean wave about to crash down, over the hissing and crackling of the fire Beth could hear the aliens shouting in pain in frustration. 

Under his breath, George hissed, "Merlin's balls..." Which was fair, that was a hell of a spell for a barely-fifteen-year-old.

"Come on!" she shouted, turned on her heel and darted back toward the barrier. After only a few steps she tilted her head to peek through a gap, and quick apparated to the other side, digging in her heels to cut off her momentum. "I think I made them angry, and that fire'll only last a few more seconds." Major Tim seemed faintly amused, but not really surprised, shouting for the soldiers to take positions and be ready to fire.

"I thought you were going to try to talk to them?" George asked, having apparated over a second after her.

"I was, but I couldn't understand what he was saying, not even a little bit."

His mouth hanging open just a little, George blinked at her for a couple seconds — stories about omniglots were all over the place in magical culture (supposedly Merlin himself had been one), he'd know how weird that was. "What does that mean?"

Beth shrugged. "That they're aliens?" Honestly, they shouldn't expect magic to work the same on them as it did everything on this planet. They were lucky their destructive curses worked just fine — the aliens seemed to have a pretty high magical resistance, at least higher than humans, but it wasn't that bad, this could have been much worse.

"We've got movement." Beth twitched at the call, started moving for the barrier, and— "Grenade, hit the deck!" She turned right back around and dove, as she fell throwing a "gemmeam" over her shoulder for good measure, the orange shield flickering into place. And just in time, too — Beth hit the tile, rolled once with her momentum, even as their barrier exploded, a roar of fire filling the hall, debris bursting out in a noisy clattering and clanging. Laying on her stomach, her shield protected her from the few bits coming her way, sparking and shivering, but she saw Ron fall to a nasty hit from something, Major Tim slammed hard in the shoulder with a slab of metal, his gun knocked out of his hand to skitter across the floor.

Beth barely had time to shake the ringing out of her ears before lizard-people were swarming through the hole blown out of their barricade. "Sectumsempra," she gasped, wildly waving her wand as she pushed herself up with her free hand. Multiple aliens were clipped with the curse, greenish-blackish blood spilling out of wounds, slowing them down, but the rest kept coming, "Depelle, orbem solarem—" The banishing charm pushed a few back away from the hole, she tossed the Sunflame over that way, but she didn't pause to watch it go off, she spotted one standing over Major Tim, clawed foot pinning him down and hand rearing back to swing one of the little swords they were carrying— "Lacera!" —but its chest burst in an explosion of gore before it could finish the swing, a silent banishing charm sending Tim's gun sliding back toward him, she was too slow to stop one from burying its sword in one of the muggles' stomach (that was two they'd lost), but a quick "distona!" would stop it from killing anyone else, one was advancing on Ron — scrambling backward, grimacing, his wand arm bending at an unnatural angle, broken — a quick silent tripping jinx had it slamming face-first into the tile, which was all she had time for at the moment, because one had run right through their group and was seconds away from Hermione, a sharp "Cumigne lacera!" blasting it apart in a burst of fire before it could reach her.

By the time Beth had turned around the lizard-person after Ron had a messy hole drilled through its head by a neat shot from Major Tim, the muggle shakily dragging himself up to his feet, wiping away the blood running down his chin with his free hand. (Badly bit his lip in the explosion, maybe?) He stooped over to pick up the gun dropped by the gutted muggle, kicked his way by the gasping man, hugging his blood-drenched middle. Hermione was already rushing toward him, though there probably wasn't any point in trying — the lizard-person's sword had gone all the way through him, and there were too many big arteries and shite in there, he was probably dead already...healing Ron's broken arm would probably be more useful, Beth didn't trust herself to do it right...

Though she barely had time to look around before another wave of attackers was announced by the bang of a gun — Major Tim was the only muggle standing now — a shout of a curse from George, Beth spun around to see another rank of lizard-people pushing through the hole in the barricade, "Cumigne lacera, distona—" She heard some more low buzzing of those damn bug things, she couldn't see any yet, but— "Stedjinn detti!" —she threw a stonehammer charm through the gap anyway, the band of distorted air whistling through to burst apart somewhere on the other side, the roar of wind half-muffling the surprised and frustrated shouts from the aliens. There was some more yelling in their language, she didn't understand it, "orbem solarem," a sizzling and screaming from behind her, she glanced over her shoulder but nothing to worry about — looked like Hermione had decided to slow down that bloke's bleeding with a fire charm, which was probably a bad idea — George had healed Ron's arm and he joined them again, sending piercing hexes at the bugs which had managed to bounce over here through the windstorm, Hedwig caught another one, snatching it right out of the air before it could wheel around and fly back at them, leaving the bugs to Ron and George (and Hedwig) Beth moved to fill in the hole in—

She was still a few steps away when one of the slender scarred aliens leapt through the hole, boots clacking against the tile, she reared back and fell hard on her arse. "Distona!" Aiming from below, the curse hit low between his legs and dissolved up and out, incinerating most of his hips, legs remaining attached to the rest of him just with thin strips at the outside, immediately collapsing under his weight. A couple more were jumping through, climbing over their dying friend, a bullet pinged off one's armour, rearing him back a step, a second shot tearing a messy hole through his face, a cutting curse from George nearly severing the second one's head, both falling limp on top of the one Beth had hit — which was somehow still conscious, shouting and flailing, trying to free itself, and—

Beth twitched, barely managed to snatch her leg out of the way — that was definitely one of those weapons, the ones that had uncoiled from around the aliens' wrists, a brownish-greenish colour with an almost metallic sheen. From close up, it was clear its surface was made of scales, and was also definitely, definitely a fucking snake. Or something similar to one, at least, odd little red flaps around the neck — almost like a cobra's hood had been slit into several separate pieces — and somewhat flattened, with a long sharp-looking edge on either side. Seriously, what the fuck? How did you even use a snake as a melee weapon? What the hell was with these aliens' technology, fucking weird...

Thankfully, a quick "distona" disintegrated the snake's head no problem, the rest of the body instantly going limp. "Their weapons are alive, blow their heads!" George shot a lightning curse of some kind at the clump of bodies, probably hoping to catch their weird snake-sword-whip things, there was a snarling and spitting from behind the barricade, at least four more aliens coming this way, Beth ducked, a greenish bug whizzing over her head — a second later she hard a crunch that probably meant Hedwig had gotten that one too — raising her wand, "Calore vin—"

The breath was stolen from Beth's lungs by a massive explosion, the shockwave rippling through the ticket hall, her head spinning, the walls seeming to shake around her. She and the aliens all staggered a couple steps, Major Tim and Ron (both still injured) tipping down to a knee. What the hell was that? From not so far away, Beth hard a sharp rattattatt-ing, her ears ringing, it took her a couple seconds to recognise it as gunfire — close gunfire — quickly followed by a spang-crackle of some kind of powerful curse going off. Her lips twisting into a grin — that had to be help coming, they'd made it — Beth spat, "Cumigne lacera!" the spellglow lancing across the few metres in a blink to explode in the middle of a trio of aliens. Two were just thrown to the ground and scorched a bit, but one was definitely dead, "Calore vindico!" The hall in front of her was filled with bright white-blue flames, she pushed, the aliens shouting and snarling, she thought they were retreating...

When the flames cleared, a quick wind charm from George clearing out the smoke, Beth saw the ticket hall was a mess — stone scorched and pitted from stray curses, broken alien bodies laying here and there, the puddle of lava-ammo still fitfully glowing a deep red. Some papers behind the ticket counter must have caught at some point, that whole office back there was burning, the smoke turning the sunlight filtered through from above ground thin and weak. But besides the fires, nothing was moving — the aliens were gone.

Letting out a sigh, Beth sank down to her knees, and then plopped back onto her bum. They'd made it. Good, she'd been...kind of worried for a second, there.

The gun- and spellfire trailed off pretty quickly — it was still noisy with the burning of who knew how many fires around, the occasional booming or rattling of muggle weaponry in the distance, the floor under her shivering with more bombs hitting the city, but the nearby fighting was over already. Major Tim was crouched against a surviving part of their barricade, keeping an eye on the ticket hall with Beth, everyone else crouched around the injured soldier. Beth was a little surprised he hadn't died yet...though, how long did it take to bleed out from a gut wound like that? She guessed she didn't know...

It was a couple minutes before someone poked his head out into the ticket hall — not from the staircase, which was still filled with lava stuff, but from the hallways toward the entrances across the street — Beth waved at him. A small pack of armed muggles then flooded into the ticket hall, though they didn't look...quiet how she'd expected. In more modern pictures from combat zones their uniforms had a camouflage-like pattern on them, which Beth assumed must be mostly decorative, for whatever reason, since it wasn't like they'd actually do a very good job of hiding anyone. But these lads were in the same khaki uniform you saw on people wandering about now and then, like Sam under the sheet back there — Beth thought that was just for when, you know, they were on duty, but not really expected to be fighting.

But then, the attack had been unexpected, maybe they hadn't had time to change? They did have bulky armoured vests on, and helmets, and all their weapons and shite, maybe they'd just pulled all that stuff on, but didn't slow down long enough to change into the right uniforms. Or maybe these were the right uniforms, and she just had no idea what she was talking about, who the fuck knows.

It was slightly intimidating, seven or eight people swarming her way carrying big damn rifles — they were the good guys, though, and the guns weren't pointed anywhere near her, so she tried to ignore it.

Coming a little bit behind the muggle soldiers were three Hit Wizards — plain dark trousers and tunic mostly covered with a layer of shining black dragon-leather armour, accented here and there with runes stitched in silver, heavy cloaks a deep blue hanging from their shoulders. The mages and the muggles were both marked up a little, streaked with blood and ash, some with gashes or holes through their uniforms — the Hit Wizards rather less than the muggles, since enchanted dragon-leather was pretty tough shite, though their cloaks were rather worse for wear, one slashed into ragged strips. They were all moving pretty smooth and easy though, obviously nobody had been too badly injured...or the Hit Wizards knew enough healing to patch them up, she guessed.

Beth twitched, her back stiffening and her breath catching in her throat. Coming in behind the Hit Wizards, along with another few soldiers and some people in plain clothes (impossible to tell if they were mages or muggles), was Sirius. His clothes had been nicked in a few places, he'd lost his leather jacket at some point, his hair was a complete mess, scorched to one side. He was completely filthy with ash and who knew what else, coloured with sprays of dried blood (red and dark green and black), but none of it looked like it was his. He was fine.

Beth felt tension dribble out of her shoulders she hadn't even noticed was there, letting out a little sigh — good, that was...good.

(She was self-aware enough to know that she would not take it well if Sirius got himself killed.)

Pushing herself up to her feet, somewhat shakily, she stepped to the side a little bit, so she wasn't blocking the hole blasted through the barricade. She watched the men coming her way — their eyes were mostly on the alien bodies, their rifles loosely aimed that way, just in case something sprung up at them. Remembering nearly being bitten by that snake thing, Beth guessed they were worried about one of the aliens' weapons jumping out and attacking them on its own. They also seemed a little surprised, Beth thought, glancing at each other and pointing and muttering, but Beth guessed it was a bit of a mess in here.

The smell was pretty fucking terrible, really, Beth was trying not to breathe through her nose.

Sirius rushed forward, slipping around the Hit Wizards, waited for the soldiers ahead of him to file through the hole, bouncing impatiently on his toes. Major Tim waved down the first soldiers through, and they were chattering away, Tim telling them about what had happened down here and the soldiers answering his questions about what was going on above ground. It didn't sound great, to put it mildly — the landing parties were surprisingly small, there'd maybe only been a dozen like the one here spread all across London, but the bombing continued, and they'd send down aircraft which were a huge pain. Given it really hadn't been very long, shockingly large parts of the city were destroyed or on fire, nobody had even started trying to get a bodycount yet.

People had had some warning, most everyone had probably had time to get to some kind of shelter. But Beth guessed the death count was still going to be pretty fucking high anyway.

Sirius finally managed to squeeze his way through, and before Beth could hardly blink his arms were vise-tight around her, squeezing her against his chest. "Sirius," she gasped, "air!"

"Right, right, sorry." The death grip immediately loosened, Sirius retreated a step — he was still holding on to her, one hand on each shoulder, painfully tight, but at least she could breathe. "I'm sorry, I know the hugging isn't— I'm just— We heard there was a landing at King's Cross, and I came as quickly as I could — I was worried, you'd, well. I'm so relieved you're okay, that's all."

"Yeah, um." She felt like she should say something about being happy he was okay too — and she was, she'd been rather worried (she hadn't even said goodbye) — but she didn't really know how, so. "Um, it was kind of shaky for a minute there, but we did okay."

"I should say so!" Sirius said, turning a wide-eyed look around the hall. While Beth had been distracted with Sirius, two of the Hit Wizards had detoured to the injured muggle — hopefully one of them knew better healing than Hermione did, if he was lucky he might actually make it. "You did a hell of a good job holding them off, by the look of it. Was it just the...seven of you? Where's little Gin?"

"They're on their way back," George said, sauntering over with rather less of a bounce to his step than usual. "Hermione sent Fred and Gin and some of the muggles to block another entrance, they're all fine"

"Did they get attacked at all?"

George shook his head. "We thought it was better to leave them there, though. Just in case. Gin's a little annoyed she didn't get to help, but." He shrugged.

...Gin was pretty good with combat spells, for someone who hadn't even started fourth year yet, but Beth would just as soon keep her out of the fighting if at all possible. But she also didn't want to have to tell Gin to stay out of it, so, better Fred than her, she guessed.

"What's this, you're hurt..."

Beth blinked, confused, before realising Sirius was fingering her tattered shirt sleeve — right, almost forgot about that. "It's fine, just a scratch." She rolled up the remains of her sleeve, showing the fresh, half-healed reddish gash across her upper arm, one end rather jagged and painful-looking. It did sting a little, but not too bad, she'd barely noticed. "One of those bug things, you know, the purple ones."

Even as his wand fell into his hand, moving to heal the cut the rest of the way, Sirius grimaced. "Yeah, nasty buggers. Saw one of those tear out some poor sap's throat, not pretty."

"That's how Sam went," Beth said, pointing at the blood-stained sheet covering the dead soldier.

Sirius grimaced. "Sorry you had to, well..." He let out a sigh, focussed on the healing for a moment — it felt funny, kind of itchy, an occasional hot prickle as he fixed something. "I hoped we'd be able to fix this Voldemort shite before you were old enough to fight properly. We should have cleaned them all up back in the Eighties, it isn't... This shouldn't be your generation's problem, you know, it's my generation's mess, you shouldn't have to... Well, it didn't seem likely we'd get it straightened out before you were old enough anyway — Dumbledore's having enough trouble trying to keep you out of it already, if you haven't noticed — and now we're getting invaded by goddamn space aliens, so there goes that. Sorry, kid."

"...It's all right." It wasn't, obviously, but it wasn't his fault, which was the point. "So, what's next? We getting the muggles down on the platforms out of here?"

He gave her a shaky, humourless smile. "I don't suppose if I tell you to go back to Rock-on-Clyde and stay there with the rest of the kids you'll actually do it."

"Probably not." Maybe if she could convince Sirius to come back with her, she'd think about it. But she couldn't just sit at the absurdly oversized Potter family manor while everyone else was fighting, and just wait — especially since literally the whole planet was being attacked. Kind of seemed like an all-hands-on-deck situation, right? She might be only fifteen, but she could fight, she'd feel like such a fucking coward if she just sat at home and waited...

(And she'd spend the whole time terrified Sirius might already be dead. She'd rather stick with him, honestly.)

"...Fine. But you're sticking close to me, where I can see you — if you run off by yourself without a very good reason, I'm apparating you straight to Rock-on-Clyde and telling one of the elves to sit on you until the fighting's over."

"Agreed." She'd want to keep an eye on Sirius anyway, so that suited her just fine.

"Right. I don't know if you heard from Molly, but Old Town and Charing have both been hit a couple times, they're working on evacuating the residents — the floo's out, one of the bombs must have hit something important, so they're using portkeys, it's slow going. We might get called in to help convince the more stubborn folks in Knockturn to move it. The muggles are also evacuating as much of the city as they can, through the Underground. I'm told some of the tunnels move far enough out of the city, they can just take those the whole way — the power's out, so they don't have to worry about being hit by trains.

"Once I'm done here, I'm supposed to go back and help Moody evacuate the muggle government. They were going to move out on helicopters, but once the bombs started coming in, they decided that was a bad idea, don't want to get caught in the air, you know — when I left, they were trying to get together enough armoured trucks and the like to move everyone. I guess you'll be flying cover with me. Unless I can convince you to go home?" Sirius didn't sound like he had any hope of that happening, but like he had to try, just in case.

So she just didn't respond to it at all. "Flying cover? Should I get my broom?"

Sirius sighed. "Yes, right away. I'm going to help the twins apparate your friends to Rock-on-Clyde, and then we're moving."

Ron had left Remus's suitcase leaning against the wall by the staircases down to the platforms, and luckily it hadn't been hit in the fighting — Beth had no idea what would have happened if the expansion enchantments broke, but probably nothing pretty. While she was pulling out her trunk, Major Tim stopped by quick. Apparently, he'd volunteered to help the soldiers escort the muggles here out of the city. (They planned to use the tunnels for the Northern line all the way up to Barnet, just to get people out of the built-up areas of the city, someone in charge would figure out what to do from there.) He didn't seem happy that Beth was staying in the fight here — though much less sceptical than he'd been before, now that he'd seen her kick alien arse — wished her luck before moving on.

Good bloke, Major Tim. She hoped he didn't get killed.

Apparently, the muggle who'd been stabbed in the gut would make it. Hermione — her hands absolutely covered in blood now, shivering and pale — had slowed down the bleeding enough that he'd actually survive long enough to get treatment. As aggressive as the fire spell had been, a desperation move, one of the Hit Wizards had told her she'd probably saved the man's life — they'd apparated him off to a magical town in Ireland, where he'd get treatment from proper magical healers. They'd probably have to regrow organs and shite, but he'd make it.

(Some random muggle wouldn't normally be apparated off to get magical healing, but Secrecy was done for anyway...and supposedly one of the Hit Wizards said the healers would appreciate that he'd been injured fighting alongside the Girl Who Lived. Beth normally hated it when people made a big deal about that stupid shite, but if it saved that bloke's life, fine, whatever.)

Hermione was not happy that Beth didn't plan on going to safety with the rest of them, smothering Beth with a painfully tight hug...which meant she was probably getting blood all over Beth's back, but whatever. Accidentally slipping into French, she'd be fine, Maïa, Sirius would be watching her back. Besides, she'd be on her Firebolt, flying cover for the muggle government — she'd like to see any of these bastards try to catch her with their bugs and fireballs in mid-air, she bet she'd fly circles around them. Ron backed her up on it, but she could tell he was pretending to be more confident than he really was, not wanting to make Hermione even more worried.

Ron kind of wanted to stay to help, but he didn't trust his ability to fly and shoot at the same time, and his arm was still weak from the break. Also, his mother would murder him if she found out.

The twins, though, would be coming straight back to London once the younger kids were safe — they were of age, so Sirius couldn't stop them. They'd be going to Knockturn Alley to help there, though. Beth was not at all surprised to learn that the Weasley Twins had made friends down the bad side of town at some point, though all of them agreed to keep it a secret from Mrs. Weasley.

Gin also wanted to stay and help, but Sirius grabbed her and apparated out without even slowing to argue about it. (After all, Mrs. Weasley would murder him if something happened to Gin because he'd let her do something stupid.) Beth quick swapped out her trainers for her magic-made boots — for quidditch and duelling, better traction, and they had a few protective spells too — before shutting her trunk up, cramming it back into the briefcase. Hedwig she told to fly to Rock-on-Clyde on her own — Beth would be on her Firebolt, so Hedwig wouldn't be able to keep up, no matter how stubborn she was about it. (The cage was left on the floor, because fuck that thing.) A minute later, Hedwig, Hermione, and the Weasleys were all gone, leaving Beth alone in the Underground.

Well, not alone — pretty soon after the mages all left, there was a stream of harried-looking people coming through the ticket hall, past Beth and down toward the Northern line platforms. Apparently there were more soldiers directing people on the surface out of wherever they were hiding and into the Underground. Beth moved back into the ticket hall, near the bathrooms, out of the way of the worst of the crowd. Some people gave her funny looks on the way by — Beth was used to it by now, but she was aware that racing brooms looked very strange to uninformed muggle eyes — but nobody paused to talk to her, determined to get themselves and their families out of danger.

Oh, speaking of bathrooms, she should take care of that quick...

Before too long, Sirius was back. The ticket hall was pretty dense with muggles going through now, so he apparated her up to the street level instead. Woah, they had made a mess of the place — the three oddly-shaped landing craft she'd seen before were all reduced to twisted wrecks, the material shredded and blackened by fire, at least a dozen alien bodies scattered around. And the bombing had clearly continued, craters blasted out of the street, several buildings around smashed and burning, smoke even thicker overhead than the last time she'd checked. There were a bunch of muggle soldiers around — checking the buildings on the streets, waving people toward the Underground, a lot of shouting and running around — the big armoured trucks that'd carried them set here and there on the streets, some of them with big damn guns on the roofs, and that was a literal fucking tank, Jesus, she hadn't realised how huge the things were...

"Alright, kid." Unshrinking a broom he'd taken from somewhere, Sirius slung his leg over it, shot her a black sort of grin. "Keep your eyes peeled for fireballs, and stick close to me. Ready?"

"Yeah." Forcing a very fake-feeling smirk back at him, she drawled, "Let's go be heroes."

Sirius barked out a laugh, shaking his head. "Stop imitating me, Beth, it's creepy." Before she could figure out how the hell to respond to that, he took off like a shot, Beth darting up after him, arcing up toward the south.

Spreading beneath her out toward the horizon, London burned.

Chapter Text

Much has been made of the seemingly miraculous survival of Dimitra against invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong. Among some of the more fanciful commentators, the events are given an explicit spiritual significance — since the world has been acknowledged as one of the few Cradles of Life in all the galaxy, some claim Dimitra is somehow special, protected from obliteration by some unidentified supernatural force. A closer examination of the record, however, clearly demonstrates that there was nothing supernatural about Dimitra's success. In fact, the diverse peoples of the world came perilously close to catastrophe, saved from annihilation by only the most fortuitous of circumstances.

To start, one must keep the timing in mind. The Invasion of Dimitra began on 63:5:16, the opening engagements continuing until at least 5:19 — this four-day period is (somewhat idiosyncratically) referred to as "Zero Day" by the locals, which has since been made an official public holiday in Dimitran space. Observant readers may note that this situates the invasion well after General Wedge Antilles's stunning four-month-long stand at Borleias — ultimately 'losing' the battle, but delivering humiliating losses to Yuuzhan Vong forces in the process — and only a month before the Battle of Ebaq, where the Yuuzhan Vong lost a full quarter of their fleet alongside their highest military officer.

The depth of our ignorance of the Yuuzhan Vong's internal affairs throughout most of the war is something that is sometimes overlooked in retrospective scholarship, thanks to the testimony of heretics and prisoners of war made available in the aftermath. It hadn't seemed so at the time — the Yuuzhan Vong had conquered Coruscant and destroyed the New Republic in less than two years after the greater galaxy had even learned of their existence, their domination of all the galaxy all but inevitable — but the Yuuzhan Vong were in a terribly precarious position after General Antilles's 'defeat' at Borleias. The Yuuzhan Vong had left their home galaxy in incalculable numbers, surely representing the greatest fleet ever assembled in known history — but, as is well known, their propulsion systems are no more effective than our own. The journey through the empty, cold blackness of interstellar space endured generations upon generations. For hundreds of years they travelled, spent their lives from birth to death crowded into their great worldships, with terribly few resources not brought with them by previous generations. And they were, of course, a warlike people — even as their living spacecraft aged and deteriorated and died around them, they fought among each other, over old feuds or their dwindling resources or seemingly out of boredom and isolation. Invading the first galaxy they came across had been a necessity, for they wouldn't have survived long enough to reach the next.

And their difficulties did not end upon their arrival. Early attempts to establish a light foothold in the less 'developed' regions of space had been unanticipated failures, due to the combined efforts of the Chiss Ascendency and the Empire of the Hand, delaying the invasion considerably and forcing the Yuuzhan Vong to directly confront the New Republic. For all that the indecisive, feuding government had been unable to prevent the invaders from swallowing up large portions of the galaxy in a terrifyingly short span of time, the casualties suffered by the Yuuzhan Vong in the process had been crippling. According to their own estimates, the they had lost roughly a third of all adult members of the warrior caste and nearly a half of all military vessels and equipment between their early engagements on the Rim and Supreme Overlord Shimrra Jamaane's arrival on Coruscant.

That estimate was made before the conclusion of the Battle of Borleias. And so, by the time of their attack on Dimitra, the Yuuzhan Vong were already greatly diminished.

2nd September 1995 (63:5:16)
— Contact plus 00.00.00:02.15

Beth banked around, threw an overpowered banishing charm at the descending fireball, the air seeming to scream from the heat — the force sent her skidding, but the fireball was nudged out of its course. A couple seconds later, it plunged into the river in a fifty-foot-tall burst of steam, the crackling of boiling water audible from here.

She glanced down to the street below, and grimaced. It made sense to huddle down during the bombing run, but if they could get moving down there, that'd be great...

The evacuation of the muggle government in Westminster was going rather more slowly than Beth would like. The armoured trucks and shite they'd need to move everyone had been being kept on military bases outside the city — once they'd abandoned their original plan to lift everyone important out by helicopter, they'd needed to wait at least another hour for the trucks to start coming in. And then they had to wait longer for more trucks, and more, and, just...

This was maybe shitty, but did they have to bring this many people? They were bringing the Prime Minister, obviously, along with several Department Secretaries and a bunch of military leadership types (Beth didn't know who all was here, she hadn't asked), and of course the Queen's family — Prince Kenneth and the kids had already been moved from wherever they'd been when the attack hit, were waiting down there in a basement somewhere with the PM and whoever else. But on top of them, they were also bringing a whole bunch of Undersecretaries and ministers and all kinds of officials, Beth didn't even know who.

Like, of course all the lower-level people shouldn't just be left to die, but couldn't they evacuate most of them through the Underground like everyone else? If they were necessary for whatever government reason, it wasn't like they wouldn't know where they were going, they could all meet up later, right? Seemed like it was more important to get the PM and the Prince and Princess out of here — the Queen was in Egypt, and they had no idea whether she was even still alive, so it was double important to get the kids out, since one of them might be getting a promotion soon — and the Underground should be mostly safe for everyone else. Really, they could have left already.

And apparently part of the delay was because they were moving a bunch of documents and stuff too. They had mages helping that go faster, summoning everything and stuffing it all into expanded cases, but still, just... This just seemed really silly, that was all.

They did realise this was kind of an emergency, right? Beth would like to get moving now, thank you...

The last of the fireballs crashed down to the ground, further pummelling the already half-ruined city, but then there was a lull, the ship they were coming from having moved on once again. Beth had been told a little bit since coming here (not that anyone knew much), and it seemed the big fireballs were all being dropped by a single ship far overhead — a fucking huge ship, their best guess was it was a third of a kilometre long. As far as they could tell, this single stupidly massive space ship was covering all of Europe and maybe the Mediterranean. It was on a kind of clockwise loop, firing indiscriminately down at cities as it went...although London actually got hit twice in quick succession every time around the loop. It would come up from the south (probably after bombing Paris), fire a couple volleys on London as it continued north, hitting Birmingham on the way to Manchester, then looping by Leeds and Sheffield, and then take another run at London (just a couple minutes after the first) before turning east toward Rotterdam. They didn't know where all it hit, their communications with other countries were still pretty spotty (someone was already working on that), but since its whole loop through Britain only took maybe five minutes and there was about an hour between bombing runs, that thing could well be flying over all the big cities in Europe.

The RAF had tried to fly up there to blow the fucker up, before realising it was actually in space, if only barely — their planes couldn't fly that high. The pass before this last one had just finished around when she and Sirius had first arrived, and Beth had overheard one of the military people suggesting they might be able to hit it with a fucking ballistic missile — apparently those technically shot up into space for a little bit at the peak of their flight, before arcing back down to the ground — but aiming that would be a crapshoot, especially with how fast the ship was moving...and if they missed they might hit something important halfway around the world, could easily kill thousands of people on accident. They were gonna call that Plan B.

Unfortunately for them, Plan A was just hunkering down and waiting for the ship to move on. They hoped that, if they abandoned the cities and spread their people out enough, eventually they'd get to a point that constantly shooting at them wasn't worth spending the ammo anymore, and the bastards up there would give up.

In the meanwhile, they'd found that shooting the fireballs with guns or destructive spells, or even conjuring something for them to run into in mid air, could blow them up, popping like a balloon...specifically, like a water balloon — if you popped one, it didn't explode when it hit the ground, but the lava would still get down there eventually. Colder, from all the wind along the way, but it could still melt things, and still killed people who got hit with it just fine. Better than not doing it, but still not great. During the pass north just a few minutes ago, Beth had realised you could redirect them a little bit with banishing and summoning spells, without popping them — which didn't stop them from hitting the ground, of course, but there was a convenient river right there. The few fighter jets they had left and various anti-aircraft guns or whatever else kept shooting down the ones aimed for other areas of the city, but the handful of mages covering this part of Westminster with her and Sirius had quickly copied the trick.

So, at least they'd stop fucking lava from falling on the head of anyone important.

(Honestly, Beth thought it was fucking stupid that they were putting so much into protecting comparatively few people. She guessed she understood it was important, for like organisational reasons or whatever, but she still kind of hated it. Hopefully she and Sirius would go help normal people after they were done here...)

Of course, there were a bunch of little fighter ships that were following along behind the big ship, sweeping in to shoot at the city some more with smaller but equally deadly fireballs, more precisely. The RAF's fighter jets were mostly quick enough to dodge around the big fireballs, but Sirius had mentioned they'd still lost a bunch of the ones flying over London, mostly shot down by these little ships. Beth hadn't seen any of them yet — they hadn't come by last time around, for whatever reason, maybe preoccupied with something going on at another city in the loop. (If they were very lucky, some other country had managed to take them all out, but Beth wouldn't bet on it.) Sirius had already given her advice for dealing with them, apparently they were a bitch, could fly really fast and at funny angles and change directions in a blink (rather like a broom, actually), spat out fireballs from multiple spots, and, somehow, could pluck missiles and bullets and sometimes even spells out of the air, got through most clashes without getting a scratch. It was actually easier to kill them with spells than muggle weapons, you just had to do big, area-effect stuff...which Beth hardly even had the power to do yet anyway, so, yeah, not looking forward to those bastards showing up.

Beth was scanning the southern sky when Sirius flew up close to her. She heard him before she saw him, the overlong reddish flag tied to his waist flapping in the breeze — Beth had one too, all the mages with them did, they didn't want the muggles on the ground accidentally shooting them. "They're finishing loading up down there. We're gonna move fast, hopefully we'll be out of the city before the bombing comes around again."

...She would say that didn't sound likely, but she guessed they didn't really have to worry about traffic at the moment.

One of the other mages — in unfamiliar black and red uniforms, supposedly they were actually with the muggle government (Beth hadn't even realised you could do that) — suggested they get low. Let the anti-aircraft guns and whatever fighter jets were left deal with any aliens that buzzed through, they didn't want to attract attention of they could help it. Looking for a landing spot, Beth's eye was caught by a shallow glass dome, she touched down on a narrow roof between the dome and the street — it wasn't a high building, she was only a few metres up, barely any taller than the statue of some bloke on a horse in the middle of the street. (A WWI memorial, she was pretty sure.) The street in front of her was filled with dozens of vehicles, mostly big armoured trucks and shite, soldiers and harried-looking people in suits running around. Though, now that she was closer, she could see the activity had settled down some, fewer people on the street, doors slamming closed one after another after another. Beth could see the north end of the convoy from here, but not the south end, too many vehicles and buildings and bloody statues in the way.

If she leaned over the railing — there was a staircase leading to the roof from a courtyard behind her, apparently people were supposed to be able to get up here — she could see, just barely, a streak of red and yellow that she knew was the Queen's flag (or whatever the proper name was, Beth didn't pay attention to that stuff). Someone had tracked one down and attached it to one of the trucks somehow — Prince Kenneth, the kids, and the Prime Minister would all be in that one. So the people in the air and whoever else would be able tell at a glance which one they really wanted to make sure didn't get hit, she guessed.

As much as Beth didn't really give a damn about the royal family, personally, Princess Mary and Prince William were just kids — Mary was maybe two years younger than Beth, and William was, like, seven or eight? She didn't know exactly. So, she'd keep an eye on that one, she guessed.

(Beth realised it was kind of silly to think of them as just kids, since the Princess wasn't really that much younger than her, but Beth was willing to bet she could handle herself better in a fight.)

For all that it looked like they were getting close to ready, Beth still ended up waiting on the roof for what had to be a few more minutes. Jesus, this was ridiculous, didn't they get they were kind of in a rush? She was just wondering if it would be worth it to fish her water bottle out of her bag — when she'd shown up, one of the blokes in the unfamiliar uniforms had handed her a bag with water, some packages she assumed were, like, military ration bars or something, plus a few emergency healing potions — when she noticed movement in her peripheral vision. It hadn't gotten back here yet, but it definitely looked like the trucks were moving.

Finally, fuck's sake. Beth hopped up onto the railing, got a leg over her broom before leaning over the street, lazily drifted along a couple metres over the tops of the trucks. With all their engines going, they were seriously fucking loud — and she was a fair distance away from any of the literal tanks trundling around, she'd had no idea how much noise those bloody things made. She kind of wished she could fly higher, away from the noise and the exhaust, but if aliens flew by she didn't want to accidentally lead them here, so, she just got to deal with it. The other mages flying cover lifted off at more or less the same time she did, drifting along the street and hugging close to the convoy. Sirius was the only one she recognised, sidling over to fly only a couple metres away, just to her left. Moody was still with them — he'd gotten multiple patrōnī from multiple different Order people asking him to come help with one thing or another, but he'd told them all to call someone else — but he wasn't in the air, he'd be down in one of the trucks. Beth didn't know which one, but it hardly mattered, he could take care of himself.

Beth slipped more forward, Sirius pacing her, closer to the truck with the flag — there were too many fliers over there to actually fly over it, but she didn't need to be that close, just wanted to keep an eye on it. It was pretty slow going at first, vehicles picking out of the knot they'd made of themselves to drive double-file down the road — the single-file trucks back here splitting up into two rows as they went, so at least the convoy wouldn't be so stupid long — not helped by the slow-moving bloody tanks and whatever else, some of them seeming to have a little trouble getting around a corner. Beth was pretty sure that was Parliament up there, she'd seen it coming in, she drifted toward the right-hand side of the street so she could see around the buildings to the left, and...

Well, it had been Parliament, but it was only barely recognisable. Big holes smashed into it in multiple spots, the sprawling building sagging here and there, some of the towers were missing. It'd taken a couple hits before Beth had gotten here, but it looked much worse now — it must have gotten hit badly in the last bombing run, she'd been so focussed on covering the government people that she hadn't noticed.

...The building had been mostly empty, right? Hermione had said Parliament wasn't sitting today... Oh well, if there were, like, clerks and shite there, they'd probably evacuated ages ago by now...

They didn't actually go past Parliament, hanging a right, starting to pick up speed as they got everything straightened out — not fast by any means, but she assumed they'd speed up as they hit more open streets. The street did end up narrowing down to two lanes pretty soon, a wider street splitting off to the left but they continued straight on. As damn big as these trucks were, they didn't fit on the road, barely fit between the long stone buildings toward either side...and it looked like the fliers further ahead were cutting down trees and barrier posts as they went, levitating or vanishing them out of the way, Beth saw one truck bump into a lamppost and just keep going, the metal bending and then finally tipping over, glass shattering against the pavement. Maybe unnecessary, but the city was being bombed by aliens, Beth guessed a little extra damage probably didn't make a difference.

Before too long the buildings pulled away, and there were lines of trees on either side of the street instead. The road was narrow enough, trees leaning over far enough, that Beth was forced to hug even closer over the roofs of the truck, could reach out and tap them with a foot, weaving back and forth around stray branches. Beth wasn't sure which park this was — wasn't Buckingham Palace this way somewhere? — but the columns of smoke she saw through the trees, she was pretty sure big parts of it were on fire, a few stray lava-bomb-things must have landed back there somewhere. Nowhere near the street, though, the convoy kept moving without a hitch.

After a few minutes coasting along, there was another slowdown — Beth didn't notice, almost kneed a bloke on top of one of the trucks, waiting at a big damn gun sticking out of the roof, in the back of the head before she jerked aside. The trees on the left side had thinned out, showing a big open yard over there, on the other side a plain white building Beth thought was vaguely familiar (probably caught a glimpse of it on television at some point). But they were taking a right, the convoy speeding up a little as they got through the corner, the road opening up some, she darted ahead and—

Oh. Hello, Buckingham Palace. She'd thought it was over here somewhere...

They crossed over a low, wide bridge, before coming to a wide roundabout around a big damn statue. (Multiple statues on and around a big damn column, really.) The open space in front of the Palace completely deserted, the convoy was able to pick up a bit of speed, spilling around both sides of the monument in the middle, an occasional clanging and crunching as they rolled right over little movable barriers in the way. Lazily circling the shining gold-coloured bronze statue at the top of the absurdly oversized monument — a female figure wearing a Roman-looking robe with feathery wings spread wide, a laurel around her head (if she had her silly pseudo-Classical symbolism straight, maybe Victory?) — Beth took a look around the big open area.

There was absolutely nobody around, everyone presumably having fled toward the edges of the city or underground, probably the emptiest this place had ever been. (Beth had never been to Buckingham Palace before, but she assumed there'd always be tourists and security and shite around.) She was pretty sure that was the Mall stretching out to the right, she vaguely recognised that from shite on television, the big white stone facade of the Palace with its imitation Classical columns and the familiar balcony over the entrance and all on her left. From this angle, Beth could see there was a courtyard inside the Palace, on the other side of the front-facing wing (the only part she recognised), the stone of the back and side -wings way more beige, with more columns and stuff, one part of the roof obviously imitating an old Roman/Greek-style temple, she didn't think she'd seen any of that before.

There was some damage around, but not really that much — it seemed like the aliens were aiming to kill people, this area very open without a bunch of dense buildings around not an obvious target, assuming they were completely ignorant of the significance of the Palace. (They seemed to be shooting randomly, so Beth thought that wasn't a bad guess.) There had been a few hits in the area, though. Parts of the gardens around were in fire, the air thick with smoke — Beth barely noticed, she'd had a bubblehead charm going for a while now — and the Palace had been hit at least once, in one of the side wings, stone as easily smashed to pieces as anything else, the top floor along half of that wing collapsed, a thick cloud of smoke pouring out of the hole mostly hiding the flickering of fire within. Looked like that was going to be a pain to fix — Beth guessed it was only fair that some of the Queen's shite got wrecked, since the city was practically half-ruined at this point.

They didn't follow the Mall — if they did, they'd practically be going right back where they'd started — instead taking a street across the roundabout from where they'd come in, going past the right side of the Palace. The passengers would get a pretty good look at the damage, then...or at least she thought so, before she noticed there was a wall and a bunch of trees over there that'd be in the way. This street was pretty narrow too, though still wide enough for the convoy to move two-by-two, trees stretching over from either side, there'd barely be enough room to fly again. The first trucks were just reaching the trees when, over the noise of the engines and countless fires throughout the city, Beth heard a deep, sharp whistling roar, coming from behind her. She turned in place, drifting lazily to a halt, looked back for the source.

Approaching from the south were at least eight objects, at this distance still too small to be much more than dark pricks low in the sky, barely visible through the smoke. They swiftly grew, resolving into rounded oblong shapes, thickest in the middle and tapering toward the edges, almost like a seed. As they got closer, Beth noticed the edges were oddly knobby, none of the hard smooth lines she'd expect from an aircraft — though the vaguely teardrop profile was aerodynamic enough, she guessed — looking kind of random and almost organic. Still south of the river, she thought they swooped down closer to the ground as they neared, she could barely see little flashes of orange light spitting out of the fronts, springing down out of sight...probably punching into buildings, roasting alive anyone unlucky enough to be caught out.

An amplified voice wormed its way into Beth's ears — a rich tenor with an overly precise posh accent (putting Beth in mind of period dramas or something), recognisable as a bloke called Langley, the leader of the government mages. "Contact to the south. Under the trees, quickly." The trucks toward the front of the convoy jolted forward as the drivers stepped on it, those further behind accelerating in a wave as space opened up in front of them, gradually slipping under the cover of the leaves. They definitely weren't going to get into hiding quickly enough — and that was assuming the things up there hadn't already seen them — but she guessed getting under cover wasn't a terrible idea...

She didn't hear it at first, covered by the fires, her attention on the south, was startled by a screaming of engines coming from the north, seconds afterward a trio of fighter jets streaking by overhead — not close, far enough she couldn't make out any details, but still shockingly loud. Despite being outnumbered nearly three to one, the fighters curled in a slow turn, diving closer to the ground, Beth's seeker-trained instincts instantly recognising they'd meet the weird seed-shaped alien craft somewhere to the east. From what she'd heard, the RAF had already lost a tonne of planes and helicopters and whatever else to these things, and they were still flying right at them as soon as they showed up. Brave bastards.

Pacing the convoy as it rushed on, Beth kept glancing over her shoulder, watching the three fighters and eight alien ships approach each other. The aliens seemingly weren't reacting, still firing randomly down at the city, the fighters coming in from the side — and started shooting once they got close enough, the sharp ringing of machinegun fire once again on the air. It didn't look like they were hitting anything, though, the alien ships hardly even twitching, the fighters breaking off as they neared, wheeling around...and then the aliens reacted, the little ships swirling in different directions — gracefully and at impossible angles, as though unaffected by gravity or even momentum — zeroing in on the planes, specks of orange light shooting out of the front tips. Curling back in around on them, the British pilots actually managed to avoid the shots for a little bit, slashing through the tangled knot of manoeuvring ships — they even got one, an alien ship wobbling as it was hit from two sides at once, before tilting and dropping out of sight — but then one burst into flames, scattered debris raining down on the streets below, and then a second one. The second pilot managed to bail, a little dark shape streaking out of the fighter before it blew up. The third fighter, realising he was fucked, made a break for it, diving out of Beth's sight — she guessed hugging close to the ground and weaving between buildings and under bridges, trying to evade the three aliens ships that turned to follow him.

The second pilot was falling toward the ground, a white smear of a parachute appearing to slow his descent. One of the alien ships twirled around, and shot him out of the air, the tiny speck of a person just completely vanishing, incinerated from the heat.

Of the five ships not chasing the last remaining fighter, three turned to the east, presumably following the lead of the big ship floating over Europe. But the other two curled in a lazy little circle, firing again and again into the city below them, seemingly just for the hell of it.

And then, rapidly growing bigger by the second, they started moving straight this way.

Langley barely had time to warn anyone — most of the trucks with the bug guns on them halting and turning around to aim up at the sky, mages wheeling around to meet them — before they were already here. (Sirius hadn't been kidding when he'd said they could move fast, they must have been a kilometre or two away but then they were here, in seconds.) The things were surprisingly big, easily longer than two of the trucks end-to-end, made out of what almost looked like rock, but not polished down, craggy and mottled, an orange-ish creamy colour with patches of a darker reddish orange and deep violet, a transparent part in the thick, rounded middle that was definitely a cockpit. Beth wasn't flying straight at them, sticking low and to the sides with the rest of the mages — so the gunners could easily shoot past them, she assumed — they still weren't in spell range when the pair of odd-looking things started spitting out fireballs with a sort of wet gulping noise. About as wide across as the length of her forearm, hissing as they zipped through the air, they were aimed at the trucks, easily burning through the metal, Beth heard yelling for a second but it was quickly covered by the booming of the big damn guns, some deeper and slower and others higher and quicker, overlapping each other into an indecipherable mess, Beth's head ringing from the noise.

Turning to climb with the pack of mages she'd ended up with, hard enough she smacked herself in the chest with her broom handle, they arced up at the ships from below, "Cumigne lacera!" a spread of curses leaping up at them more or less at the same time. The ships jumped and jittered, managed to dodge most of the curses, others seeming to get sucked away and disappear, barely a foot from the surface — the spellglows smearing and curling around a single point, the mottled pattern of the ship behind distorted, as though bending the light as well. A couple curses got through, but at shallow angles, little chips of whatever the hell these things were made of blasted off to clatter down through the trees below. Swerving to fly past the things, Beth heard some thunking and plinking, bullets getting through, but only for a couple seconds before the ships went eerily quiet again (there wasn't any engine noise or anything, how the hell did these things fly?), the continuing gunfire not actually hitting anything.

Twitching with a flash of clarity, her breath caught in her throat for a second. "Vocem vecta, their shields are directional, box them in." However they were plucking bullets and spells out of the air, it was like a directional shield charm: they had to consciously put it up, and they could only block so many angles at once. They might not be able to shoot through their shields, but Beth was betting they could shoot around them.

Now above them, Beth wheeled around to throw down another curse, but the things weren't where she expected them to be, had zipped over to the trucks, dropping more fireballs on the muggle soldiers. Hissing through her teeth, Beth scrambled to catch up, the wind tearing at her hair and the flag tied to her waist flapping in the breeze. "Distona!" Skipping a few metres to the side (different angles, keep moving), "Sectumsempra!" dragging her arm through the air as she moved to broaden the band of the curse, "Fixam iaculor, distona, mutila!"

As fast as he was moving, she was coming up on the ships already, she kicked her broom around and pushed hard the opposite direction, the foot pegs kicking against her boots, her hand squeaked on the handle, she scrambled to hold on, the wood of her wand and the broom clacking against each other. Bullets whizzing through the air around her, she was over one of the ships now, Sirius and a few of the government mages in a tight pack around her, the ship shielding them from the guns. Beth had cast mutila without thinking — it only worked on living things — but to her surprise the piercing white spellglow managed to slip past the ship's shield and burst against the side, little flecks of stuff blown off to tumble away.

...Huh. Were these things alive? Their weird bug-grenades and snake-sword-whip things seemed to be, but their bloody fighter planes too?

But Beth didn't have time to mull over that, throwing a Lance of Modestus down at the ship, lost among the streaks of spellglows cast from the other mages around her. The ship saw it coming, jumping to the side shockingly quickly, avoiding the spells...and also putting the mages and muggles in each other's line of fire. Her entire body thrumming, Beth kicked her broom around, "Aigída!" the shield charm angled below her, and darted after the ship, bullets whistling around her or pinging off her shield while the spells slammed against the ground (and probably hitting a couple trucks, damn it). There were shouts of pain from behind her, she thought at least one of the mages had been hit, but she could feel magic thick on the air, most of them were flying with her, a rain of spells leaping out at the ship, one and another and another, Beth not really thinking about what she was casting, whatever she could—

The ship wheeled around, bringing its guns to bear on them — at least Beth assumed that's what those tubes clustered toward the front were — the mages broke, swirling around like a school of fish avoiding a rock. (Beth nearly ran into another flyer, barely jinked out of the way.) A fireball streaked through where they'd been a second ago, angled down toward the muggles, one of the mages ahead of her got too close to the ship, must have ran into the shield and—

He disappeared — the light bending around him, his body twisting and curling, the broom snapping with the force, a blast of numbing heat prickling at Beth's skin, sparks dancing in her eyes. (Radiation, she'd learn, later.) And he was, just, gone.

Fuck, just...fuck.

The ships had split up, she saw at a glance — the other moving to follow the rest of the convoy, mages on broomsticks and muggles in armoured trucks chasing after it — but Beth wheeled around to stay on this one. The ship jittering around and weaving to avoid spells and bullets, Beth had to adjust course multiple times, firing piercing curses as she went, flinging down another sectumsempra as she darted over it. One of the mages she was flying with was suddenly wrenched downward, as though snatched with a summoning charm, yanked down toward the ship — he didn't hit it, the ship skipping around to dodge more hits, the out of control mage tumbling toward the ground, Beth didn't stick around to see what happened to him, wheeling around again.

Another run on the ship, she saw the guns were steadily blowing off chips of the stuff, one of her spells got through again, taking off another chunk — they were definitely doing damage, but the fucking thing wouldn't just go down. Wheeling around again, Beth found herself suddenly being yanked forward, hard, was nearly pulled right off her broom. "Depelle!" The banishing charm slowed her down, but she was still being pulled toward the ship, she turned her broom around, leaned into the flight spells and the banishing charm as hard as she could, her arm burning from the magic and her legs aching from the pressure. Occasionally wrenched around as the ship kept dodging hits, bobbing this way and that (forcibly reminding her of that time Quirrell nearly threw her off her own broom), she was still, slowly, being drawn in, inch by inch.

Yanked around again, her hands painfully tight on her broom and her wand, she grit her teeth, glaring over her shoulder at the alien ship — fuck, just let go, already!

"Beth!" Sirius said, swooping around behind her. "What's wrong?"

"Bastard's grabbed onto me, trying to pull me in." She could feel something holding on to her, almost felt like a spell of some kind. (Did their shite work on magic somehow?) Even while being shot at by other people, it was still stubbornly holding onto her, but she had managed to hit it a couple times, she must have cheesed it off...

"Hold on, I'll try to—" Sirius cut himself off, probably noticing the same thing she had: the ship spinning on its axis, the guns at the front swinging around to point toward them.

...This was a terrible idea.

Her heart throbbing through her head to toe, Beth cut off the flight spell and kicked her broom around, turning back toward the ship, dragged faster forward. Leaning over her broom, yanking her arm back, "Accio!" and she flew, the sudden acceleration jolting her against the foot pegs, straight at the thing, the tubes at the front glowing orange—

—and she dove, straight down. Whatever was holding onto her kept pulling, yanking her dive into a curve, picking up a dangerous amount of speed, her eyes stinging and the flag behind her rattling, the ground coming up quickly, she twitched to the side to slip between a pair of trucks, the grass a blur beneath her—

With an uncomfortable tearing feeling, like ripping off a plaster, she was released. Her broom jolting under her, she nearly slammed straight into the ground, she pulled up, the Firebolt shivering in her hands, the enchantments burning off so much magic she could almost see it pouring through the wood. Beth arced up, up, until the broom was perpendicular to the ground, and then angled back and upside down, pushing against the speed she'd picked up in the dive. As she finally slowed — the wind softening against her face, her hair starting to droop — she rolled back right-side-up.

Right, that was close. Let's not do that again.

Beth was higher than she'd expected, easily fifty metres off the ground, and further away, the little battle spread out below her — the annoyingly tough alien ship dancing over the line of trucks, dodging fire from mages and muggles alike, the other harrying the convoy further ahead. As she got her bearings, she saw their ship somehow pluck one of the trucks off the ground, sending it spinning through the air, a muggle caught in it tumbling out, the truck clipping a mage and snapping his broom, both of them plummeting.

And Beth was getting a second crazy idea. Leaning forward, firming her grip on her broom, forcing magic hot and crackling down her arm, Beth hissed, "Hostīs damnātōs millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." The spell built through the overlong incantation, dense and sharp until she thought her hand might explode, finally releasing as it resolved — not as a single burst, but as a constant flow, burning through her, gritting her teeth against the pain.

And she dove.

Of all the different kinds of combat spells out there, they generally fell in one of three basic categories. Most of the ones you saw in ordinary duels were point spells — the curse was crammed into a spell envelope, which carried it through the air, once the envelope broke against something the curse released to do its thing at whatever it just hit. There were also big area-effect spells, that spread out in like a cloud or a cone or whatever, the effect of the curse applied to anything and everything caught by it. Since those curses generally had the same effect a point spell might, but were spread over a much, much larger area, they took far more power to cast, often hundreds of times an equivalent point spell, the advantage being you could get multiple people at once and didn't really have to aim. (Though friendly fire was a problem, Beth assumed that was why nobody here was using any.) Sirius and Dora could both cast plenty of these, but Beth couldn't really, not powerful enough yet.

There was a class of spells that were sort of halfway between the two, instead of a single point spread over an arc. There were multiple advantages to these kinds of spells — especially for someone like Beth, who had the skill to learn advanced battlemagic but not the power. For one thing, you could get out way more powerful spells this way: mages were limited by how much magic they could cast at a time (your magic didn't run out as you used it, but you could try to draw too much at once), so if you spread out the casting of a spell you could pump far more energy into it than you could into a point spell. You could get the maximum strength you can manage in a point spell into every hand-span or so of an arc, meaning you could easily get a total power of ten times as much as your strongest point spell, if you know what you're doing. Also, these spells could be way more versatile: the shape and the length of the arc was defined by your last wand movement, and you could make that pretty much whatever you liked. You could aim it to get a very exact cut in something (cutting charms were arc spells), or ice someone's feet to the floor (one of Dora's favourite tricks); you could slow down the movement, dragging out the spell, squeezing more power out of it; you could have a wide enough band to get around a shield, or make it impossible to dodge so someone has to shield, pinning them down; you could twirl your wand in a sort of curlicue, sending the spell out in a dense spiral that could overwhelm all but the strongest shield charm; and basically whatever else you could think of, the only limit was your own creativity.

The arc of the spell would follow your wand movement, but only one movement. If your wand stopped moving, or reversed directions, or whatever, the spell would be cut off — so, in most situations, there was a limit to how much space you had to work with. Since, you know, your arm could only reach so far.

Even just in the normal arc she could manage in normal situations, this was one of the most powerful spells Beth could cast, each second hungrily drawing out very close to the maximum amount of magic she could channel at once. Enough that it hurt — kind of a lot, actually. Which, Dora had been impressed Beth could cast it at all, apparently not the sort of thing you saw from not-quite-fifteen-year-olds. In a slicing curse, once any part of the band hit something, breaking its envelope, the spell released as a single cutting plane over that area. This one was more like a thousand piercing curses strung together side-by-side, as soon as it hit anything stabbing into it all along the arc at once. But, in addition to that, like the Lance of Modestus there was a second part: the piercing curse acted as a second envelope, once it was a expending releasing a dense burst of fire.

So, basically, this curse was a fire-elemental blasting curse, wrapped up inside of a piercing curse, which was then multiplied like a hundred times and wrapped up inside a single envelope, stretching out like a cutting curse. No fucking wonder it was one of the most powerful spells Beth could cast, because that was absurdly complicated. Like any arc spell, you could get more out of it by extending the arc — the longer you stretched out the casting, the more fire-blasting-piercing curses you could get. Normally, like any arc spell, you were limited by the length of your arm, and how far you could get your wand to move without changing directions.

Beth was a good forty metres above the alien ship.

At the moment, she could get her wand to move pretty damn far.

The curse spitting out of her wand in a constant stream, a dense, vivid red ribbon extending out and trailing behind her, the magic so thick she felt like her arm was fucking on fire. Diving, diving, she nudged her course a little this way or that as the ship skipped around. Her jaw aching, clenching her teeth hard against the pain keying up hotter and hotter, tears prickling at her eyes — from the wind or the pain, or maybe both. Coming in quick, she aimed to pass as close by the side of the ship as she dared, zipping past in a blink, letting go of the spell (gasping as the magic dissipated, her wand arm tingling and shivering), she pulled up, whipping over the heads of the muggles, nearly running right into a truck before buzzing on over the yard.

Behind her, she heard a dense series of explosions — bang-bang-bang-bang, one barely even finished before the next began, nearly as quick as the soldier's machineguns but even louder — but she didn't hang around to watch the fireworks, kept zooming along toward the remaining ship. The front of the convoy was well into the trees by now, the park to both sides of the road burning, mages dancing around the ship to the near constant retort of muggle guns. Beth wasn't entirely surprised to find a several mages pull up alongside her, she must have killed the first one. Soaring ahead at full tilt, it only took a couple seconds for them to approach spell range. "Vocem vecta. Clear the east side." The flyers ahead scattered, but didn't abandon their attack on the ship, just swirling around to sides where they'd be out of the way.

A dozen curses leapt out of their group, streaking in at the ship all within a second of each other. At more or less the same time, several trails of fire shot up out from under the trees, aimed right up at the ship — Beth didn't know what those were, had the muggles brought rocket launchers, maybe? Attacks coming in from multiple directions at once, the ship managed to dodge some of the curses, some of the rockets continuing on past it...but plenty of them hit, curses bursting and cracking into its sides, the bottom pummelled and crumbling.

The ship listed, fluttering like a fallen leaf, damaged but obviously still alive. One of the mages flew terribly close, practically standing on the thing's nose. A sharp jab of his wand, and a two-foot-wide hole was punched straight through the transparent window — and, presumably, the pilot. The ship immediately lost control, jolting this way and that on its slow drift to the ground, hitching against a tree, rolling over and finally ploughing nose-first into the grass.

Beth glanced over her shoulder back to the first ship, just to make sure — craggy boulders of fire-blackened rock scattered among the half-melted trucks were all that were left. Maybe she'd overdone it with that curse, a little bit...

It took a couple minutes to get the convoy going again, with the damage to their vehicles and all the wounded. Soldiers scrambled around, in places helped by uniformed mages, checking the bodies sitting here and there. Some of them were clearly still alive, the mages hitting them with a few quick healing spells so the soldiers could load them up in the trucks, but some were dead, their bodies left where they were. (Maybe shitty, but they just didn't have the room to carry them all — Beth assumed there'd be a memorial or something for the fallen later.) It seemed like they'd lost more trucks than they had people, soldiers sitting on the roofs or clinging on the outsides of doors, which seemed unstable, but they got going again before too long.

Beth's healing was shitty, so she didn't bother trying to help. Drifting low over the road, she did search for a certain truck — there it was, toward the front of the convoy, the Queen's flag still flying from a post stuck at the back, seemingly undamaged. Good, then.

At some point, Beth wasn't really paying attention, Sirius drifted up next to her. "You alright?"

"I'm fine." She wasn't hurt, anyway — considering all the shite flying around, spells and bullets and fucking lava balls, she was honestly a little surprised she'd managed to avoid getting hit with anything.

"You sure? That was a hell of a spell back there."

"...My wand arm's a little numb and tingly, I guess. It's not that bad."

Sirius's eyebrows dipped in a concerned frown. "There should be a pinkish-purple potion in your bag — it'll heal the nerve damage from overchannelling."

It took a bit for Beth to find it, her numb, clumsy fingers not making it any easier. "This one?" she asked, holding up the most purple-looking of the potions. Sirius just nodded, so she popped the cap off the little bottle and downed it in one go. It tasted a bit sour, a flash of cold running through her — the potion doing its thing itched, crawling over her like a hundred baby blast-ended skrewts, she rolled her shoulders, tried to ignore it. Tossing the empty bottle aside, she washed her mouth out with a gulp of water, before closing her bag back up again. "Yeah, that's better already. I know I was kind of pushing it with that big spell, but I saw a shot, so I took it."

"And a damn good shot it was, too — you snapped that bloody thing into four pieces with one hit."

Beth blinked. "Oh. Well. I guess it worked, then."

His voice low and dark, Sirius chuckled. "That it did, kid." He drifted over closer, reached over to take a light hold of her arm. "We can go home at any time. If you're tired."

"I'm fine," she insisted, shaking her head. "Where we going next?"

Sirius sighed, but didn't try to argue the point.

Chapter Text

It was observed, at the time, that significant attacks against the major galactic powers declined soon after the capture of Coruscant — there were a few border skirmishes and the occasional infiltrator, but the Yuuzhan Vong didn't execute a concerted invasion of remaining New Republic (and later Alliance) territory until shortly before the Battle of Dac itself, approximately two years after the Battle of Borleias. Given how easily they had snatched the advantage in the war, contemporary strategists had no explanation for the abrupt delay. We know now, due to testimony from defectors, that the losses suffered in the initial invasion and the enormous territory they'd stretched themselves across had terribly overburdened their forces — the Yuuzhan Vong needed time, to grow replacements for their lost equipment, to finish training up the next generation of warriors. In the end, they would not get that time, continuing assaults from every galactic power gradually forcing them to retreat, and finally surrender, less than three years after their apparent triumph.

Between the conquest of Coruscant and the Battle of Dac, the Yuuzhan Vong concentrated their efforts on terraforming various worlds within captured territory to their liking, twisted to support their massive biological factories. The process had largely gone unnoticed by the major galactic powers at the time — the invaders' virulent hatred of inorganic machinery had resulted in the destruction of all pre-existing long-distance communications networks — though the lingering effects are well known in the present day. The natural biospheres of hundreds of worlds were devastated by the program, resulting in the extinctions of unknown numbers of plant and animal species, yes, but also an unknown number of sapients. The Yuuzhan Vong preferred to target inhabited worlds, with native populations which could be used as slave labor or as sacrifices to their gods — fertile worlds home to pre-hyperspace civilizations were considered ideal, as they were less likely to be despoiled by industrial pollution or to put up any significant resistance. The military forces sent to pacify these worlds were normally quite meager, in proportion to the opposition expected.

Along with a handful of other 'primitive' worlds invaded by the Yuuzhan Vong, Dimitra was entirely unknown to galactic society. Located deep in the Unknown Regions, far from any major hyperroutes, the region was at the edge of the Hand's influence, the neighborhood occasionally patrolled but never settled. The locals had begun broadcasting in radio bands over the last century or so — but even if anyone had thought to monitor the correct frequencies, one hundred years was not long enough for the signals to reach any major population centers. A few short years before the broader invasion, the nearest communications station operated by the Hand, approximately sixty light-years away from Dimitra, had detected faint signals which might indicate an industrial, pre-hyperspace civilization in the area, but these signals were only identified with Dimitra in retrospect. How the Yuuzhan Vong discovered the planet is unknown, but it is likely that their observations were from enough of a distance to suggest a pre-industrial civilization, ideal for easy conquest and exploitation.

The Yuuzhan Vong were, as we all know, terribly unprepared for what they found. The task force which arrived in the Dimitran system on Zero Day was composed primarily of civilian craft — a single worldship with associated support vessels, belonging to the Shaper caste, intended to direct the transformation and cultivation of the world. The military escort consisted of a single miid-ro'ik-class cruiser, accompanied by a handful of escorts, including the expected complement of yorik-et starfighters — the infamous "coralskippers" — yorik-trema and yorik-vec assault ships, as well as the tsik-seru, an atmospheric fighter frequently seen on occupied planets. Groups of so-called "fire breathers" were deployed in a handful of engagements. Curiously, no rakamat-class ground transport was ever seen during the Invasion of Dimitra — it is assumed that this cruiser's rakamat complement had been left on another occupied world, or had perhaps been lost in a previous battle.

Between the worldship, the cruiser, and their escorts, the task force numbered perhaps as many as seven million souls. However, the majority of that number were civilians, concentrated on the worldship — primarily workers and Shapers, including children. Estimates put the warrior population of the task force, including Yuuzhan Vong and Chazrach thralls, at no more than a million.

At the time, the total population of Dimitra was not quite six billion.

2nd September 1995 (63:5:16)
— Contact plus 00.00.00:08.30

Spreading beneath her out toward the horizon, Manchester burned.

Beth had never been to Manchester, really all she knew about it from, like, history class back in primary school — since most of that had been reading, she hadn't really retained very much. Supposedly it'd been a big deal during the Industrial Revolution? She didn't know. Oh, and obviously she knew a little about the big-name football clubs (they had two), but that didn't really count.

It was a big damn city, clearly, obvious from the air, a huge area along a river all built up, stretching off toward hills in the distance. (It was the second biggest in the UK, so.) There were less bloody huge skyscrapers and shite than London, the city hugged closer to the ground, dense with blocks of terraces one after another after another, on and on. Her vague impression at first glance was also that there were fewer parks and green spaces and shite, especially close to the city centre — more squares and courtyards or whatever, paved or tiled, not a lot of grass. There were patches of green, trees sticking out here and there, but her general impression was pretty...brown. And red, from all the bricks.

Of course, some areas of London looked rather a lot like this, London just also had a lot of really nice places toward the middle of the city, since it was where all the important people had lived for centuries. Not the point.

Not that she could see a lot of it very well at the moment — the city had been hit about as bad as London, smoke pouring out toward the sky from hundreds and hundreds of bomb craters, fires burning in patches all over the place. And Manchester didn't have an Underground, and the military had been slower to get here (all the important people were in London, but Birmingham and multiple northern cities were also being hit), so Beth was sure a lot of people were dead.

"There," Sirius said, pointing. "They're in that park right there, see it?"

After flying cover for that convoy out of London as far as Norholt, Sirius had put out a few calls, asking around if anyone seriously needed help. First they'd jumped across the Channel — literally the first time Beth had ever left Britain — and up to a Dutch city (Rotterdam, she thought?), where she and Sirius had helped the locals chase off some more aircraft, giving the military some cover while they took out a landing party that'd managed to dig themselves in somewhere near a bloody huge dockyard. They'd then hopped back to London to help evacuate Knockturn Alley — unsurprisingly, a lot of the poor people and werewolves and shite down there didn't exactly trust the Ministry much, so weren't willing to go anywhere just because they were told to...and also it was sort of difficult for the vampires to move about during the day. A lot of them were more willing to trust Sirius, though, he'd ended up sending a bunch of the more stubborn ones (along with like a couple dozen vampire children, which were apparently a thing?) to Ancient House, the Black family manor, which Beth hadn't even been to before. Sirius didn't like it there, so he'd never bothered bringing her, but there was plenty of space, and some far enough from the sun to be safe for vampires, and elves around to keep an eye on people, it was fine.

(So, the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black was basically hosting a refugee camp for desperately poor mages and nonhumans — Beth was sure Sirius's ancestors were rolling in their graves.)

The evacuation of Knockturn Alley was still going on, she thought, but Sirius had found enough trustworthy locals who could teleport (not apparation, Beth thought, felt different) that they could handle the rest of it without Sirius there — he'd given orders to an elf to let everyone through the wards as guests, before continuing on again. After once again asking Beth if she wouldn't rather call it quits and stay somewhere safe, which really seemed quite silly, by this point.

Though she was getting filthy, sweat and ash and blood and who knew what else, she wouldn't say no to a quick shower...

They'd then moved on to Manchester, where the evacuation wasn't exactly going very smoothly. The city was a bloody maze, and apparently there were a bunch of tunnels and basements and stuff, some expanded into bomb shelters over the last few decades, which had been the natural places for people to go hide in...so, when buildings were smashed to bits over their heads, they found themselves trapped. And there'd been a few landing parties here too, a bunch of the lizard-people and a handful of the much more dangerous scarred aliens, which had obviously made everything a whole lot more complicated.

There were still packs of aliens roving around the city, they were told, but muggle soldiers with automatic rifles were just as effective against them as mages — the thing Beth and Sirius could do the most good with was clearing the rubble so they could free trapped people and get them out of the city. They had a pack of mages and emergency workers and local volunteers going down a block of old textile factories long ago converted into flats, that had been more or less completely levelled in the bombing, the mages smothering the fires and getting rid of the wreckage (and whatever seemed unsafe to poke around in), leaving the muggles to search for the entrances belowground, pull people out and swarm around tending the injured, while the mages moved on to the next pile of rubble. It was surprisingly hard work, and a little nerve-wracking — move or vanish stuff in the wrong order, and you could cause a bloody rockslide, which might accidentally crush the people below or the workers scrambling around. It was generally safest to vanish stuff as much as possible, so it didn't get in the way or fall on anyone's head, but vanishing big blocks of brick and plaster and whatever else was pretty damn power-intensive, Beth had to take a quick breather now and then, her wand arm stinging.

Also, they kept finding bodies in the rubble, Beth had nearly sicked up the first time. Not a fun job, to put it mildly.

(But she had to keep going — who knew how many people there were under there, and the machinery muggles would need to move all this shite wouldn't get here until it was too late.)

After who knew how long, the news had been passed along that someone had spotted another landing, somewhere to the southeast. A relatively big one, by the sound of it, including a pretty sizeable, boxy ship they hadn't seen yet. There weren't any military people in the area, mostly handling evacuations in Trafford to the west and hunting down the survivors of an earlier landing somewhere north of here. Beth volunteered to fly up and take a look, and Sirius didn't want her to go anywhere alone, so here they were.

Squinting through the smoke, it took Beth another second to spot what he had — a boxy orangeish shape was wedged into a narrow street, nearly hiding it, but she also saw a couple greenish curves of those odd misshapen fish-like landing craft she'd seen back at King's Cross. One on a bridge over a narrow canal was the most obvious, probably what Sirius had spotted first. There was a lot of movement in the park, but Beth couldn't make out what it was from here. "Yeah, I see them." She frowned, leaning over her broom, as though that'd make any difference at all. "Those are people, in the park. Are they taking captives?"

Sirius bit out a low curse. "Not if we have anything to say about it. I'm counting at least two of the green ones, will be a hell of a fight. Unless you want to wait for the army to come around."

"...If they are taking captives, we don't know how long that'll take, they might be gone by the time the army gets here."

"True." Sirius didn't sound at all happy about it, not looking forward to trying to take that many aliens by themselves. To be fair, she wasn't either.

"We can see if a few of the local mages will come help. And look, the canal goes all the way down to the river, we can get right to them without being spotted, come up from under their feet."

Sirius nodded. "Good thinking. Come on."

They returned to the rubble-clearing group, explained the situation to the local mages. Some of the people in earshot made faces when they figured out where exactly the landing was — Beth got the feeling it was the bad part of town or something — but they got a few volunteers. After some questions back and forth, Sirius narrowed it down to two — a tall blond man who was maybe about Sirius's age, and a dainty, ash-streaked woman who was just starting to get old enough for her dark hair to frost at the edges. The woman, Rosemary, might actually be the best fighter after Sirius, or maybe even better than him. She claimed she'd been an Auror before retiring to help raise her grandchildren — Sirius admitted her name was familiar, but that would have been before his time. (She didn't look that old, but mages aged weird.) Which was when Beth learned she was Rosemary Fortescue, like the ice cream bloke? Apparently so, the ice cream Fortescue was her husband's, like, second cousin or something...

(The magical world was so absurdly small sometimes.)

Anyway, they split up, the bloke riding with Sirius and Rosemary riding with Beth — it was possible to fit two people on a broomstick, but it wasn't really comfortable. Sitting awkwardly far forward on the handle, Beth grimaced at the arms around her waist, forced her shoulders to relax, tried to ignore it. Staying low, they flew a few blocks to the south and east, meeting the river, picking up some speed as they followed the water. There were buildings tight to either side, blocking out their view of the city, after a little bit they came past what Beth was pretty sure had been a train station — like most transportation infrastructure identifiable from above, this one had been pummelled, smashed to bits and gushing smoke from roaring fires — a big parking lot spreading out on one side, the buildings to the other side retreating a little bit in favour of a strip of greenery. They dipped under the low arch of a red brick bridge, Rosemary's arms tightening on her a little, nervous, the river widening on the other side, a patch of trees to the left, hanging low over the water—

Beth hadn't realised the trees were on a tiny little island, Sirius turned off along the narrow strip of water just before the trees and out of sight. Banking hard, she turned after him, but she'd gotten too far ahead to take the same path without slowing down — instead she looped a little further down, slipping between two treetops (one snagging at her leg a little), and then immediately jerking down to avoid the brick supports of the bridge, Rosemary letting out a little gasp behind her. Her surroundings whipping by so fast they were a blur, Beth kept turning, jinking around some bit of metal equipment (went by too fast to tell what), past the narrow strip of land the bridge was on was water, squeezed in a narrow gap between a pair of parallel bridge, she leaned even harder into the turn, coming out low over the water and shooting off ahead, nearly one-eighty from the direction she'd been going in two seconds ago. Sirius appeared out from under the first bridge a few metres ahead of her — he'd slowed down coming through more than she had. The pair of bridges overhead were angling closer together, their waterway narrowing, it looked like this strip of water might vanish underground soon, a turn off to the right streaked by before Beth had hardly seen it — besides, she thought the gap between the water and the concrete slab the right-hand bridge was on had been too narrow, and for some reason a barrier blocked off the path through the bridge supports — but Sirius had had the same thought she had. There was another bridge ahead, a road, their pair of bridges rising to allow it under, Sirius turned and pulled up at a hard angle, easily slipping through a narrow gap between the end of the barrier between the right-hand bridges posts, the concrete barrier marking the edge of the road, and the bridge overhead, Beth taking the same turn just as easily, then another sharp turn the opposite direction, angling down again, crossing over the bridge, jinking out of the way of a lamppost and barely clearing a fence, and then they were rocketing down a river, buildings and trees whipping by to either side.

Her grip on Beth finally loosening a little, Rosemary said, "You're bloody mad, Potter."

Beth smirked.

Their waterway came around a curve, little notches for docks to either side — there were boats around, but they didn't look like those big commercial barges, she assumed these dockyards weren't used anymore — dipping under another bridge, right on the other side the river splitting. Beth initially followed the wider path, curving to the south, but then she saw another smooth curve a little bit ahead — too smooth, they were supposed to be following a narrow canal, this was the wrong way. Yanking back on the handle, she took another sharp upward turn, Rosemary let out another little gasp, gripping tighter again, as they angled toward a building, but Beth kept turning, narrowly slipping in the gap between the wall and a tree, sailing over what looked like the outdoor seating area of a restaurant, and they dropped right into a narrow, deep, brick-walled canal. She actually ended up a few metres ahead of Sirius this time — he must have slowed down taking the turn off.

"Thought I lost you for a second there!"

Beth focussed on weaving through the supports of a bridge crossing overhead before answering. "Just try to keep up, old man!"

"Kids today, no respect..."

It was quiet and dark in the canal, the sun low enough in the sky they flew in a kind of false twilight...or maybe actual twilight, she'd lost track of the time ages ago. Several bridges criss-crossed overhead, Beth and Sirius gracefully weaving between the posts — not bothering to slow down at all, Rosemary's arms now and then twitching with nerves — the brick walls to either side gradually lowering toward the water level. As they took a sharp little corner, the walls fell away entirely, the buildings right to either side (a mix of old brick and more modern plaster and glass) practically on the water, only a thin strip of pavement between them and the canal. They passed through a tunnel under a bridge, the air echoing deep around them, and the walls started to rise to either side again, another shallow corner, a series of lock and dams forcing them to lift a bit higher over the water, staying as deep in the shadow of the buildings as they could—

They were going over a dam when Beth glanced up, her heart jumping into her throat when she spotted one of the fishy transport ships up on a bridge, maybe only fifty metres straight ahead. Diving down to the water again, they zipped ahead as fast as they could safely go, darting through gaps under a pedestrian walkway with only inches to spare. Beth held her breath, she saw one of the tall aliens on the bridge — but his back was to them, they managed to get under the bridge unnoticed, Beth and Sirius wrenching themselves to an abrupt halt, Rosemary clinging on tightly to stop herself from being flung off. In a low concrete tunnel under the bridge, there was a narrow walkway to one side, they drifted over in that direction, Beth careful edging over the railing, barely enough room.

Just before they landed, a swirl of Sirius's wand had a wave of magic ringing through the cramped space — a paling of some kind, probably keeping any sound they made from reaching the aliens overhead. "Come on, let's take a look." Broom resting in the crook of his arm, he walked toward the edge of the bridge, started casting charms. Sections of the air ahead seemed to shimmer, quickly resolving into panels, reflections from overhead dizzyingly tilting as he adjusted the spell.

A bit of tweaking the spell, and Sirius eventually managed to bring the situation overhead into focus. There was a little square of green above them to the... Beth was pretty sure the spell was reflecting the light funny — it looked like it was ahead of her to the right, but she was pretty sure it was actually behind her to the left. Anyway, a tiny little park, just the size of one of these tight, inner-city blocks, a tiny patch of grass and some trees. She thought there might be some walkpaths stitching through the place, benches here and there, but it was hard to tell through all the people packed in there. Dozens and dozens of people, and surprisingly mixed, rather more non-white people than Beth would expect — but then, she guessed they were in a not-so-nice part of a major city, that tended to happen — obviously terrified, sometimes even halfway trampling each other. They were being herded together by these big reddish insectile things, long spindly limbs knotting together around clumps of people, closing around to press them close. The aliens were definitely taking captives.

Sirius panned the aperture of the spell around, getting a better idea of what they were looking at. There were two of the fishy green landing ships — from the muggles in Rotterdam, they knew each of those held maybe forty soldiers, thirty to thirty-five of the lizard things and five or six of the scarred ones, for a total of sixty to seventy of the former and ten to twelve of the latter. Those might seem like bad odds, but they had pretty shite defences against magic, so, with Sirius and another Auror-tier mage here, Beth wasn't really worried...though, the bigger transport wedged into an intersection way to the right (left) could have fit a bunch more soldiers. Beth was willing to bet, though, that it'd been mostly empty — they had to have somewhere to put their captives, after all.

It looked like the lizard-things were mostly in the park, helping to hem in the prisoners. (Beth spotted a few bodies laying here and there, but not very many, the aliens clearly trying to take as many as possible alive.) There were a few of the scarred ones in the park, but most were waiting near the transports, or standing on bridges or intersections. As they watched, a few appeared from inside one of the buildings ringing the park — mostly rather old-looking, red brick, the base structure plain without obvious decoration, but people had made additions, since, and...

Beth was belatedly noticing rainbow flags in multiple places around the square, and even in the park itself, and more on the other side of the canal. Well, if this was where the gay people lived, she guessed that might also explain the faces some of the locals had made when they'd figured out where the landing was. There were plenty of children in with the captives, but she guessed it wasn't against the rules for straight people to live here too, and she was aware they sometimes had kids from previous marriages...

As the aliens Beth had spotted a moment ago dragged and prodded several people toward the park, adding them to the pool of captives, Sirius said, "Alright, could be worse. I was thinking Rosemary and I would stay on the ground, being very loud and distracting, while Beth and Eugene fly cover. Try to take out the ones on the roofs over here early, if you can," pointing at a few figures on a roof across the park Beth hadn't even noticed, "don't want them shooting you out of the air. Prioritise the tall scarred ones — those can be dangerous devious fuckers, but the scaley ones aren't much of a threat. Rosemary and I can sweep up all of those no problem.

"Also, we'll need to take out the transports first — we don't want them escaping with hostages, and the guns on those things are a bitch. Rosemary, if you want to take the one over our heads, I'll apparate over to take out the big one, and close toward the middle from that side?"

Rosemary nodded. "Agreed. What about the other little one?"

"Beth will take that one. What do you say, think you can open with that little trick of yours you came up with back in London?"

When Beth had exploited a dive to extend an arc curse, she hadn't realised that would become her signature move or something, but it quickly seemed like that was starting to be a thing. She'd used it a few times since, whenever it seemed convenient. "Sure, that shouldn't be a problem. It'll take me a little bit to drop, Eugene'll be on his own for a few seconds."

"'Course. Eugene, then you'll hit the ones on the roof here first. They can fire back at you, so come in at an angle — destructive curses, biggest shite you got. Take the building down around them if you have to. Good?"

The man looked rather nervous, pale and twitchy, but he nodded easily enough. "Good."

"All right. Try to keep them off the prisoners as well as you can," Sirius said, handing his broom over to Eugene. "There's no point to this if all the people we're trying to rescue get blown up in the crossfire. Everyone ready?" Rosemary just nodded, squaring her stance to land solid out of her apparation, Eugene mounting Sirius's broom. Beth sidled over closer to the opening of their tunnel, and hopped up to crouch on the railing, balancing on the balls of her feet, cheating a little bit with her broom's levitation spells. "We'll apparate on three. One. Two."

Pop-pop!

Beth jumped off the railing, swinging a leg over her broom as she fell and then immediately shooting straight up into the air, the wind tearing at her eyes and her hair flapping behind her.

There was a second pair of apparation pops, one louder than the other, closer, quickly followed by a harsh boom-crackle of some kind of lightning-based curse, then a hissing of the lava-ammo being splattered over damp concrete. That was Rosemary, somewhere underneath her, but she hardly heard Sirius's curse at all, just a rattling and cracking of debris settling. Sirius knew an arc curse that fucking vanished anything it hit — multiple layers thick, just kept vanishing its way through everything in its path until the energy was expended, Beth simply didn't have the power to cast it — she assumed he'd used that one again. Beth was coming up to the top of her arc when she heard more curses, an intense roar of flame and crackling of lightning, booming and snapping of explosions, concrete cracking from the force — sounded like Sirius and Rosemary were putting on a hell of a show, trying to keep the aliens' attention.

A brief moment of weightlessness as Beth reached the top of her ascent and started back on her way down, "Hostīs damnātōs millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." Gritting her teeth through the intense flood of magic burning its way down her arm, she wondered whether she should work at shortening that incantation, if she was going to keep using it all the time. You could do that, it just took practice and familiarity, gradually chopping off training wheels until you could do it silently — she'd already practised several curses to not needing the incantations anymore (though mostly just nonlethal ones), and dropped a third of the Lance of Modestus — but she hadn't realised she'd be using this one this much. After the battle, she should try to find some time to practise her lethal curses more...

The ribbon of the curse extending out behind her, Beth aimed herself toward the fishy green transport, sitting at an intersection directly across the square from the transport on the bridge. She'd release the curse at the last second, jink to the side to avoid the transport and continue into the street behind it, before curving back around to the park — to the left, to make sure she didn't accidentally hit a trailing end of her own curse. Looking over the path ahead, she could loop around this way, and come right at the roof those aliens were on, finish up any Eugene had missed on his first pass, and then angle back toward the bridge, shooting down at the aliens below as she went, loop back around the way Sirius had gone, and then pause a second to see how things were going and decide where she was most needed from there. Right, good plan.

Let's see how long it took for it to go to shite.

Turned out, not very long — she was only seconds away from the transport, ignoring the swirling of activity in the park below her, when there was a low gulping noise from the transport, orange light blooming in one of the tubes at the nose. Beth angled to the side to make sure she wasn't in the line of fire — grimacing as the quick movement drew magic out of her even more quickly to properly fill out the arc over that distance — and a fireball launched out of the transport...

...aimed nowhere near her, closer to the ground. Huh.

Beth released the spell, letting out a sigh of relief as the burning in her wand arm reduced to the familiar hot-cold tingling, pulled out of her dive to zip at stupid-fast speed inches from the pavement, pulling up into her loop even as the curse began to land, a long series of fiery explosions added to the noise of whatever the hell Sirius and Rosemary were doing. Bleeding off some of her reckless speed around the curve, Beth slipped in an alley between two buildings, angling back toward the park. She spotted the rooftop aliens ahead — one of them was definitely dead, a charred crater blasted into the roof, but a few were still standing, chucking their weird bug-grenades after Eugene. Beth was coming up behind them, they wouldn't even see her coming. Aiming at two standing closer together, "Cumigne lacera!" and then a "distona" at the third.

One of them must have heard her, reacting surprisingly fast, whipping around to look over his shoulder — but he'd wasted the second he had before the curse hit, didn't have time to dodge before it struck him full in the chest. The explosion definitely caught the one next to him, but Beth wasn't sure if it was lethal. Seriously injured, at least. The distona had hit the lone alien in the centre of his chest, punching a hole straight through his body, that one wasn't going anywhere.

Beth was past them before the bodies even hit the floor, twitching to the side to avoid one of the trees. "Steðjinn detti!" The blast of wind shook her around a little, tightened her grip to stop herself from rolling — but it also opened up some space between the lizard-things and the captives. She rained blasting and slicing curses down on the sprawling figures, once using her motion to extend a sectumsempra long enough to probably kill a half-dozen of them at once, but she didn't stop, standing still was a good way to get yourself dead.

Rosemary was on the street near the bridge ahead, the air around her shimmering with ephemeral blue-orange flames, an occasional crackle of static sparking off to nearby lampposts or manhole covers — flaring your aura, Sirius called that, channelling so much magic through your body that the bleed-off was visible to the naked eye. It was pretty wasteful to do in a fight, since you weren't really doing anything with that magic, but it was extremely intimidating, since most mages couldn't channel enough magic all at once to be visible like this (and especially not holding it for as long as Rosemary was). With especially powerful mages, you might see an accidental flash of soulfire in the instant before they cast a big spell, that just happened sometimes, but flaring your aura and holding it like this was one hundred per cent just to terrify the shite out of people.

The aliens probably didn't know that — at least, it sure seemed to Beth sometimes like magic had taken them by surprise — but they didn't have to know the mechanics of what was going on to know that someone so powerful the air around them burned was probably super fucking scary. There were a few of the tall aliens nearby, along with a bunch of lizard-people, holding back and not attacking. Beth wouldn't say they looked scared, exactly, but at the very least definitely wary, watching Rosemary casually walk toward them, narrow-eyed and fingering their weapons. A harsh jab of Rosemary's wand, her aura clenching and crackling, and she shot off an absurdly powerful lightning curse (angled down, so she didn't accidentally hit the captives), bright enough that Beth blinked spots out of her eyes — the aliens tried to scatter, but many didn't get out of the way in time, when the light cleared several new char-striped and twisted corpses left behind. The aliens threw off a hail of bug-grenades, seemingly hoping Rosemary would be distracted, but a big bronze shield appeared to absorb the hits with a storm of clinking and banging — seriously dented in places, but it held — which then reformed itself into a half-dozen big sickle-shaped blades, a banishing charm sending them tearing into the mob of aliens, easily cutting deep into the lizard-people, bouncing off the armour of the scarred ones but the force still knocking the wind out of them, chucking them bodily to the ground.

And then Beth had reached the corner, "Cumigne lacera!" aimed down at a clump of aliens, sprawled on the pavement from dodging the sickles, the group exploding into fire. Starting her loop back toward Sirius, she used the curve to extend a "Sectumsempra!" then quick tossed another "Cumigne lacera!" down to the left before zipping on toward Sirius. She spotted aliens through the trees in the park as she flew by, tossed an occasional piercing, blasting, or cutting curse that way as she went. Aimed low, to avoid hitting the captives — which meant she was probably getting few lethal shots, but it would slow them down and distract them, at least.

Sirius's fighting style was obviously different from Rosemary's, but just as flashy. After reducing the blocky transport to a mangled wreck, he'd also decided to set it on fire, with a dark curse of some kind — the flames were black, flickers of green here and there with wet little pops from the ship's innards, definitely not natural. He didn't stand in one place, but was continually apparating around the intersection, blasting apart one alien and slashing at his friends before popping away again, to appear among another clump of aliens, killing or injuring a few of them before popping away again, pausing to cackle for a second — too loud, his voice magically amplified, just to taunt them — aiming a blasting curse at one of the tall aliens trying to rush him so powerful that the alien just disappeared, the street underfoot shattered into fragments. He apparated away again, a piercing curse from point-blank blowing a hole through a scarred alien's armoured chest so large its body flopped to the ground in two pieces, a seemingly careless flick of his wand in the opposite direction lashing a trio of lizard-people, greenish blood splattering, a storm of bug-grenades were buzzing into the air, Sirius reappeared on top of the part of the street he'd torn apart with that blasting curse, a swirl of his wand transforming dozens of pieces of rubble into hawks all at once, the constructs immediately flying off to hunt down the bugs (or just take the hits for him), one of the scarred aliens was rushing out of a broken window in the building behind him, only a couple steps away, Beth aimed a curse (too far away, wouldn't stop him in time) but apparently Sirius heard him coming, a spellglow extended from the tip of his wand and stayed there, almost like a sword, Sirius easily batted the heavy overhand swing aimed for his head aside, twirling around the alien's back with a flourish of his wand, as graceful as dancing, sank the 'blade' through the back of his neck, tearing it out to the side, black blood spraying, turning the motion into a wide swing, the 'blade' separating from his wand and zipping away in a flash, spearing through the chest of a charging alien...

Beth had always known Sirius was an incredibly dangerous battlemage — actually seeing it was something else. She guessed she was lucky Sirius hadn't actually been trying to kill her back in third year, because there was absolutely no way she would have lived to see summer.

It didn't really look like Sirius needed her help, but she tossed down a few curses as she took the corner anyway, aliens blasted apart or thrown from their feet by the explosions. Sirius paused to toss her a jaunty salute before getting right back into it. Still drifting at a pretty good speed, just in case (holding still was a good way to get dead), she took a quick glance around the park, and—

She figured out where that fireball had been aimed — a streak had been carved into the park, grass and trees on that side burning. The centre of the blast, where the fireball had hit, was right where one of the clumps of people had been, streamers of lava flung over the lizard-things nearby...

Seeing they were under attack, the aliens had fired on the prisoners. Why the fuck would they do that?! Didn't they want these people taken alive?! What the fuck was the point?!

Hanging in the air, horrified, it took her a second to realise the aliens were still attacking the prisoners — compressed into tight clumps by the reddish insectile creatures, they could hardly do a thing to resist, the swords slashing into them, bug-grenades rising into the air and—

Beth arrived over one of the clumps in a blink, fired a stormhammer charm down on their heads. The prisoners were shoved roughly down by the force, but the wind also pushed the aliens stumbling away, giving them a second's reprieve — and opening up enough distance that Beth could lay into them with curses. Firing them off one after another, flying in a tight little circle over the prisoners' heads to get every angle, lizard-people were sliced apart or got holes punched through them or were blasted to pieces, but she couldn't just stay here, she'd bought enough time to move on to the next group. Another stormhammer charm cleared the area around them, slipping over to the side a little, "Calore vindico," thick blue-white flames bursting out of her wand, she directed them to crash over the scattered aliens, flying in a little loop around the prisoners she coated the entire ring, alien voices screeching from all directions as their flesh popped and sizzled, like bacon on the pan. (The smell was even relatively similar.) Dipping down closer to the ground, Beth's arm was shaking badly enough from channelling so much magic so quickly, it took her a second longer than it should to aim — a slicing curse tore apart the ring holding the prisoners in place. The flames were already dissipating, the prisoners streamed out of the hole, the insectile things quickly collapsed, the bubble bursting.

Some of them, she noticed, were pausing to pick up the lizard-things' discarded swords, charged swinging at the nearest aliens. Beth would have to be more careful with her aim, but she couldn't be everywhere at once, so, she'd take the help.

Moving on to another group, there was a heavy drone on the air, Beth took a hard corner, a brace of bug-grenades zipping past her. They started wheeling around to follow her again, she dove, moving toward the survivors from the first prisoner group she'd stopped at — the aliens regrouping, moving to attack the prisoners again, despite the fact that they were actively being slaughtered, what the fuck — arcing in straight toward the densest pack of them, she waited until the buzzing stopped before taking another hard corner.

Wheeling around, she saw Eugene get hit in the back, once, twice, banging into a tree and spinning out of control down to the street, out of sight behind the barrier wall. She grit her teeth — he hadn't known the bugs could take more than one shot at you, had he? With heavy thuds and a single burst of fire, the bugs that'd been aimed at her tore into the aliens below, to a chorus of surprised shouting and screeching. Sidling over, another stormhammer charm pushed the aliens away from the prisoners a second time, and she repeated what she'd done a moment ago, covering the whole ring with intense blue-white fire, then paused to free the prisoners.

The fight didn't take very long from there, most of the aliens already dead and over half the surviving prisoners freed. Plenty of the muggles plucked up swords and tore into the remaining aliens from behind, Beth circling the fight overhead, laying in curses wherever it seemed like they could most use the help, exploiting stormhammer and banishing charms to stop the muggles from behind surrounded. Barely a minute passed before Rosemary and Sirius were done clearing the streets — after both Aurors had entered the park, the aliens were cut down in batches, basically pulverised by the attacks from all sides, and soon it was over.

That didn't mean the park calmed down, though — there was still a lot of noise, yelling and crying, people running back and forth. Sirius and Rosemary rushed to start helping the injured, Sirius shooting off a patrōnus on the way — surely whoever he'd called must be terribly overburdened, Beth had no idea whether anyone would even come — several muggles who apparently knew at least some basic first-aid trying to help, shouting for people to go look for supplies in nearby buildings, some running off to do that. Not entirely surprising, it didn't seem like very many people intended to leave the park — she'd half expected people to scatter as soon as they were freed, but most looked to be sticking around. Probably wanted to stay close to the people with absurd magic powers who'd just swept in to save their lives, Beth would guess.

While all that was going on, Beth popped over the barrier wall to the street behind, looking for Eugene. He was definitely dead, by the mess the bugs had made out of his back — one hole near his hip, and especially the second one just at the base of his neck — he might have been dead before he'd hit the ground. It looked like he'd hit his head on the wall, so, at least he probably hadn't suffered very long. (Which seemed like a really cold thing to think, Beth had just been talking to this bloke a couple minutes ago and now he was dead, but she couldn't help it.) Beth touched down, grabbed one of the foot-posts of Sirius's broom — she'd levitate Eugene back to Rosemary, presumably she'd know who to send him to. But she came up with only maybe a third of the broom handle, ending in a splintered mess a handspan above the posts.

Beth let out a sigh — looked like Sirius wasn't going to be able to fly with her anymore. That was going to make the next fights rather more complicated. And he might not even let her help anymore, if he couldn't keep an eye on her...

That was definitely a cold thing to think, but she couldn't help it — besides, it wasn't like there was anything she could do about Eugene anymore. Except get him back home to his family, anyway. Gently flying back across the park with his body levitating a foot away — she didn't want to accidentally drop him — it took her a moment to find Rosemary. When she landed, Rosemary was working on a nasty-looking stab wound in a man's chest. She glanced up at Beth, and then glanced down at Eugene — her jaw clenching, her eyes squeezed closed for just a second. And she went right back to her healing work. She did know Eugene's family, she'd bring him to his grandparents' once they were finished here, thank you, Potter.

Not really worth thanking her for — she hadn't been paying attention to him and he'd gotten killed. But whatever.

Somewhat to her surprise, some mages did turn up. Not Order people, and they weren't in the white and green robes Saint Mungos' healers wore — mostly not robes at all, trousers and long-hemmed tunics, leather boots and gloves. Beth had no idea who these people were. But it seemed like they knew what they were doing, jumped straight toward the most seriously injured, dropping shoulder bags filled with potions and shite, so she guessed it didn't really matter who they were.

Beth didn't really know much healing, not enough to be useful, she settled up on a tree branch where at least she'd be out of the way. There were a lot of dead bodies around. Plenty of aliens, yes, the greenish-black blood of the lizard things splashed all over the place, some of their bodies rather badly mangled — which was gross, yes, but... Well, it was hard to think of them as people, honestly. She'd fought plenty of them by now, and they seemed pretty mindless, would follow basic orders from the scarred aliens but mostly just settled with charging at people and swinging their swords or tossing bug-grenades, nothing clever to hint they had thoughts in there at all. She'd fallen into thinking of them more as, like, trained attack animals or something — it'd probably be better not to kill them, since blowing the shite out of animals for no reason wasn't on, but they were trying to kill people, so she did have a good reason. She didn't really feel bad about it, but the results were pretty gross.

(Of course, the scarred ones were definitely people, but she didn't really feel bad about killing those either. If they didn't want to get blown up, they shouldn't have come here.)

But there were also a bunch of human bodies, too. Some scorched, half-melted, unrecognisable, over where that transport had gotten off a shot before she'd gotten to it, others holed from sword or bug-grenade wounds. Very messy, not pretty.

Near her tree, a woman was crying, clutching to herself the body of a boy probably about Beth's age, or a little younger. He'd been caught in the gut with a bug-grenade — one of the purple, cutting ones. He was long dead by now, his middle a slashed-up bloody mess, deep enough his insides weren't all on the inside anymore, pale pinkish tubes and whatever else leaking out. The woman (his mother?) was also streaked with blood, but Beth was pretty sure it was his, hugging the boy's body to herself, a second woman crouched next to her, arms hugged tight around her shoulders (her girlfriend, maybe, rainbow flags), a couple other teary-eyed adults standing around them. There were a dozen scenes like that, all around the park.

Her breath sharp in her throat, her skin crawling, Beth was glad she hadn't eaten anything in a while.

The healers had been here for at least a few minutes before Sirius called her down — he was standing with an older man who was apparently in charge of the healers, and a couple representatives from the muggles, trying to figure out what they wanted to do with everyone. Apparently, the seriously injured (along with their families) were being evacuated to a magical hospital in Ireland — Beth wasn't familiar with it, but she guessed magical Britain was too big to only have the one (now that her attention had been drawn to it, the healers were talking to each other in Gaelic) — but who knew how long it'd be until another bombing run came around, they should get everyone else out of here too. The muggles thought the quickest way out of the built-up areas of the city would be to go east, but there was a problem with that — Leeds and Sheffield were also being hit, and who knew how many bombs the thing dropped along the way, they might not be out of danger there. There were green areas along the river, to the northwest, that was the direction the Army was evacuating through...but they'd have to go through the whole city centre to get there, they wouldn't be out before another bombing hit.

Or, they could move everyone to a magical safehouse, at least until the bombing was over and they could safely go home. (Assuming their homes were still standing, that is.) Sirius already had half of Knockturn at Ancient House — there was still room, because that place was huge, but he didn't know if the muggles would be comfortable with all the vampires and wilderfolk and whoever around. The Keep was still empty, but too small to house this many people; Ravenhome and Castle White were also options, though Ravenhome was somewhat dilapidated and the residential wings of Castle White had been closed up for centuries, so not ideal. (The muggles were amusingly surprised that Sirius owned two literal castles.) Beth reminded Sirius that Rock-on-Clyde was still mostly empty, just serving as a safehouse for Order people at the moment, they could fit plenty of people there.

After a few minutes of discussion (the time they had until the next bombing slipping away), they decided that a magical safehouse was probably best — not only was it safest, but they'd be able to get there most quickly. They'd split the group up roughly in half, one sent to Rock-on-Clyde and the other to the Keep, that should be doable. (It might be kind of tight at Rock-on-Clyde, with some rooms already taken up by Order people, but they'd figure it out.) A couple of the muggles ran off to spread the news, work on getting the group split up, while Beth and Sirius figured out how exactly they were going to do that.

Thankfully, Cediny said the elves could just pop their guests straight over, it wasn't a problem. They'd need to do it in batches, taking breaks in between to make sure they didn't overexert themselves, and it'd go faster if she hopped over to the farmhouses and shite to recruit some more elves to help, but it shouldn't be a problem. The Black elves could also help, if they needed it — Cherri, the Blacks' head elf, had offered on her own, glancing at Sirius and then Beth as though asking for permission after the fact. (Beth had noticed that the Black elves were a lot more forceful and impulsive than the Hogwarts elves, didn't know what was up with that.) It was actually Cediny who had control of the boundary wards — Beth did too, of course, but she wouldn't be the one in charge of this whole evacuation mess — so Beth left that one up to her.

Sirius also said that, if they were going to be sheltering so many evacuees, maybe they should think about opening up Ravenhome and Castle White. Cediny actually spoke up to offer help with that, Beth thought as a kind of trade for the Blacks' help with the evacuation, so that was that.

(So, the refugee camp hosted by the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black would now also be taking in muggles — if Sirius's ancestors hadn't been rolling in their graves before, they certainly were now.)

When they had that all figured out, Sirius amplified his voice to make an announcement to the whole crowd. The news that they'd be being moved to a magic house with magic protections got a pretty bemused sort of reaction, but most of them seemed willing to go along with it — Beth bet the "magic protection" part probably helped. They'd figure out where they'd be going after that once the battle was over, and their government started getting all this shite sorted. They'd be teleported over by house elves, who were kind of funny-looking folk, but they were super friendly, they'll take care of you. At a shouted question from someone in the crowd, Sirius quickly leaned down to whisper with Cherri, before answering, yes, they could bring the bodies of family or friends with them — the elves would store them away somewhere under preservation spells, they'd keep until a funeral could be arranged. How long? Indefinitely — even if it took years they'd still be waiting, the elves would keep track of who was who and make sure all the survivors knew how to contact him when it was time.

Anyone else? Of course they'd all be fed, and they could get toiletries and clothes and shite too, within reason, just ask the elves. That it, then? Brill, let's get going.

As elves popped in to start evacuating the survivors, teleporting them out as few as two and as many as five at a time, Sirius shuffled closer to Beth. "I didn't have a chance to ask, you doing okay?"

"Yeah, not a scratch this time. My wand arm's a little tingly again, but it's not that bad, I think I'm fine for now." Beth did feel a little...off, eyes kept being drawn to the bodies around, but how she was doing physically was the much easier question to answer.

"We can take a break, if you want."

"No, I'm good to keep going." Sirius looked pretty sceptical, Beth cut him off before he could argue. "We have no idea how long this is going to keep going on, Sirius. We could be at this for days, for all we know. When we do take a break, I want to be able to get some sleep while we're at it — I just don't think I'll be able to do that right now."

Sirius was quiet for a moment, giving Beth a... Well, she wasn't certain what to call that look. She didn't doubt there was something unsaid there, his eyes dark and intense on her, but his face was blank enough she couldn't really guess what. Finally, he said, voice low and thick, "That's not a bad idea." ...Okay. "Oh, did you see Eugene? I didn't get my broom back."

Beth winced. "He didn't make it — bugs looped around and hit him from behind. Your broom snapped when he crashed. Rosemary's bringing him to his grandparents'."

"Ah fuck, poor kid." Beth didn't know how old Eugene was, exactly, but she was pretty sure he was older than Sirius had been during the war — kind of funny calling him kid, but whatever. "The Order has a stash of brooms tucked away, we'll have to go grab one quick. The safehouse is in Hogsmeade, think you can apparate there?"

...To Hogwarts's front gate, maybe, but not into the village itself, didn't know it well enough. "Um, no, you'd better side-along me again."

"Alright." Sirius glanced around, checking to make sure the evacuation around them was going along well enough, before holding out a hand. "Let's go."

Chapter Text

Of course, it's not unheard of for an occupying force to dominate a population they are outnumbered by five-thousand-to-one — there are numerous accounts of inhabited worlds of hundreds of millions of poorly-equipped residents being pacified by a single Imperial-class Star Destroyer, carrying only 40,000 crew members and 10,000 soldiers. However, there are just as many accounts of such an occupation failing, catastrophically. Millennia of military history have proven time and again that, while it may difficult to overcome a disadvantage in raw firepower, it is hardly impossible.

And the peoples of Dimitra had a number of unexpected advantages on their side. Their technology was relatively primitive, only at the tail end of primary industrialization, but the populace was surprisingly well-armed. Due to the split between the Liberal and Communist spheres previously discussed, and the enduring tensions between the two camps, the planet had seen a build-up of military equipment unusual on most modern planets. And, luckily for Dimitra, Yuuzhan Vong weaponry and armour were designed to counter their own technology, with some more recent adaptations made to accommodate the energy-based weaponry and shielding used by all major galactic powers — they were not optimized to fight a military using relatively primitive slugthrowers and combustion missiles. Advanced automatic slugthrowers, spewing out hundreds of projectiles a minute at supersonic speeds, were shockingly effective at cutting down masses of Chazrach, the energy-ablating properties of voduun armor useless against such a thick storm of simple bullets. A coralskipper might be able to pluck a single rocket out of the air, but fire a dozen all at once, while peppering it with hundreds of bullets from multiple directions, and the craft will be overwhelmed just as easily as it might with modern military-grade lasers and proton torpedoes.

And, naturally, there are very few defences against atmospheric fireballs fueled by nuclear fission.

3rd September 1995 (63:5:17)
— Contact plus 00.00.00:21.00

Beth was completely exhausted.

The feeling wasn't entirely unfamiliar to her. She'd had occasional trouble with nightmares as a kid — which, of course, the Dursleys hadn't been at all understanding about — and after she was woken up it could be very difficult to get back to sleep, so there were days she'd only get maybe three hours or so. And she'd still be expected to keep up with all the usual chores, because obviously. The Christmas season could be particularly bad, because not only was Petunia even more particular than usual that the house look at its best, but they'd also be baking and making various other sweets, all kinds of shite, fucking constantly, there was no day in those couple weeks when the house didn't smell of something they'd whipped up. (No fucking wonder Dudley had ballooned the way he had, honestly.) During the school break, Beth was working pretty much constantly, between the cleaning and helping with the decorations and sometimes a little yardwork and the baking and the cooking, Jesus, she hardly got a minute when she wasn't expected to be doing something. Beth didn't actually get Christmas dinner, of course, shut up in her cupboard, but by that point she was exhausted enough that getting a few hours to rest was a relief.

(No matter how hungry she was, only egged on by the smell of dinner wafting into the cupboard, but she got pretty good at ignoring hunger over the years.)

As much as Ron might complain about all their homework and stuff at school, Beth was actually less busy at school than she was at home on the breaks — enough that first year had almost been like how she imagined other people felt about going on holiday. Quidditch could be rough, especially when Oliver got particularly obsessive, but it wasn't that bad. (Oliver had said, in private, that he appreciated that Beth was the only member of the team who'd never once complained to him about their practice schedule, and she hadn't had the heart to tell him that was because her chores at home were worse.) When exam season came around, it could sometimes get a little bit much, but Beth was pretty sure that was just because Hermione got about as obsessive over exams as Oliver did over quidditch, she probably wouldn't bother nearly as much left to her own devices. And it'd only really been bad the first year, Hermione had left off once they understood that revising out of books and notes wouldn't do any good for her — instead, Hermione resorted to the three of them explaining things and quizzing each other verbally, which still took a fair bit of time, Beth guessed, but was much easier on her eyes than trying to read for hours and hours straight.

People trying to kill her could be very exhausting. Often not the incidents themselves, those tended to go by pretty quickly, but she'd definitely be tired in the aftermath. And nearly dying, no matter how relatively calm (or at least focussed) she was during the thing itself, had a nasty habit of triggering the nightmares again — so, despite being fucking exhausted, it could be a few days before she could get a proper night's sleep. She'd often still feel it dragging at her weeks afterward...not helped at all by the big incident often falling at the end of the school year, so she'd soon be back at the Dursleys' and expected to pick up her chores again.

(Even if the nightmares hadn't been back before, going back to the Dursleys normally triggered them anyway.)

The Dursleys part, at least, wasn't a problem anymore, but this last year had been especially exhausting anyway. Last August, Sirius hadn't had Grimmauld Place fully cleaned up by the time she got there, so she'd needed to help with that a bit — which, he'd expected rather less out of her than Petunia did, so that wasn't that bad, really. They'd also taken time to teach Beth spells and stuff, both from him and Dora (who made a point of visiting now and then), which could make her brain-tired, quickly copying a bunch of information from someone, but it was fun, and would also make it less likely she'd get killed in the next dangerous incident, so she didn't mind. And once the Triwizard Tournament started, Beth had been getting as many lessons as she could. Trying to learn shite out of books never did her any good whatsoever — especially magic, for whatever reason — but it was relatively easy to just sneak out of the Castle and meet up with Sirius somewhere in the Valley. And their play duels tended to involve a lot of running around and dodging and shite — the most powerful spell in the world didn't do any fucking good if it didn't hit the target — so she'd get body-tired as well as brain-tired. And, of course, all the dangerous shite going on meant she'd been getting a lot of nightmares, so she hadn't been sleeping great either.

The graveyard hadn't helped the nightmares issue, obviously, and the lessons had continued once she got home — they'd only stepped up, since she didn't have to worry about not getting caught sneaking out. Which Beth wasn't complaining about, since the more Sirius taught her the less likely some random Death Eater would manage to kill her, but it was still a lot of work.

But this was worse. Beth didn't know if she'd ever been this tired in her life.

The fighting had just gone on, and on, and on. Beth had no idea how many different cities in how many different countries they'd been to — Sirius had kept apparating them around, a call for help from a friend here, or word passed along through third parties that they were in trouble there, one after another skipping all over the place. She'd never left Britain before, not until tonight, though she didn't know exactly how far from the islands they'd gotten. She was positive she'd stepped foot inside the Soviet Union at least once, and she'd seen the Mediterranean a few times, but she didn't know how far they'd gone in miles, exactly.

It seemed like the aliens had hit all the big metropolitan areas, and some countries' militaries hadn't reacted as quickly, or had too many cities to defend all at once, especially with the bombings from space knocking out communications and transportation making everything a whole hell of a lot more complicated. And the longer the aliens had to attack a city unopposed, the harder it was to dig them out, and the more people they killed. Beth and Sirius had actually helped stop aliens from taking prisoners on three occasions, Manchester the first but not the last — they thought a couple transports might have gotten away with people, in poorer countries who couldn't respond as quickly (or didn't have many mages helping, who were much better at taking out the ships), but Beth hadn't heard for sure yet. Not to mention they had no idea what the aliens wanted with captives, they'd sure seemed ready to just kill them all when they saw they weren't going to get away...

The night had dragged on, Beth and Sirius popping over to one fight after another, between the actual fighting parts helping with evacuations, clearing rubble to free people trapped in collapsed buildings. Beth had stopped noticing the dust and ash clinging at her skin, the blood soaked into her clothes, human red and alien green and black, the smell of burning bodies coating her throat. The mangled alien bodies had been disgusting at first, Beth vaguely remembered a pall of horror at all the dead people all around, but at some point she'd just kind of...stopped. Feeling any of it, she meant. Which sounded kind of shitty, she knew, but she couldn't sit back and freak out over it all — people were dying out there, so many people. She could help, but if she slowed down, if she gave herself even a second to, she didn't know, cry or panic or whatever, more people would die, she had to keep going, and going, and going...

Sirius had seemingly been volunteered for the night shift of their hastily thrown together magical defence — Beth was aware Sirius was something of an insomniac, so he was a natural choice. She suspected that whoever had volunteered him for the job hadn't realised that Beth was with him, but she wasn't complaining, she doubted she would have slept much anyway. The Ministry knew Sirius was working with them too, they'd come across Aurors or Hit Wizards several times. They were under orders to leave him alone, something about the UK giving him amnesty (which they had, technically, when he'd shown up to help the government evacuate), but there'd been a few tense moments. Anyway, as the night had gone on, and the landing parties had all been dealt with, they'd been increasingly shuffled to evacuation teams, occasionally called over to fly cover when bombing runs came around. The bombing from bloody space hadn't slowed, and there were still occasional attacks from their weird rocky fighter planes, but things had calmed down a bit — whether they were focussed somewhere else, or simply starting to run out of ships, nobody had any idea.

After a long night that seemed to go on forever, Beth noticed the sun rise over the sea (they'd been in Barcelona at the time), and not long after that Sirius finally got a message telling him to go ahead and take a break — they'd try to give him at least eight hours, to eat and sleep, but if there was an emergency they might have to call him earlier than that, you know the drill. Sirius had been shuffling evacuees over to Black and Potter properties, but there was still room at Rock-on-Clyde, so that was where they went. Beth didn't really feel like eating at the moment, maybe in the morning (or afternoon, she guessed). She was sure Hermione and the Weasleys were worried, but she, just, didn't have the energy to talk to anyone right now, all she wanted was a shower and to just go to bed.

So one of the elves brought her straight to the Lord's apartments — warm, rosey wood everywhere, the floors carpeted and the walls littered with paintings and shite, upholstery on the furniture finely detailed, gold glittering here and there — Beth peeled off her filthy boots, trying not to touch anything with her equally filthy fingers. She felt kind of bad about leaving her boots on the carpet, that was definitely going to need to be washed out, but whatever. She stumbled her way toward the bathroom, stiff and unsteady — fucking everything hurt, she could barely keep her eyes open, but she didn't want to go to bed without washing up first, as fucking miserable as she was she could make it that long...

The private bathroom was bigger than you might expect, if you weren't used to silly magical nobles. It was split into two parts, the area with the toilet and stuff and the bathing area separated by an interlaced divider made out of polished ceramic, decorated around the edges with carvings of flowering vines and prancing hippogriffs. (The Potters had a thing for hippogriffs.) Beth stumbled her way to the bathing side, shelves set into the walls with towels and empty spaces for clothes, a long bench along the barrier for whatever reason — like in the quidditch changing room, though Beth wasn't a hundred per cent sure what that was for in the first place. It belatedly occurred to her that she hadn't brought a change of clothes with her, but that was fine, the elves had put her trunk in the bedroom and nobody was supposed to come in here. Everything was done in red and white ceramic, Potter colours, clean and gleaming, this bathroom probably hadn't been used since...

Er, a couple years before Beth was even born, maybe? Her grandparents had lived here until they died, in '77, but James had never moved into the Lord's apartments, staying in his childhood bedroom on the other side of the family rooms from here. Lily had been from a super poor family, and according to Sirius hadn't been comfortable with all the ridiculous opulence everywhere — not to mention how huge and maze-like the place was, too easy to get lost — so they'd moved into the cottage in Godric's Hollow instead, a muggle-built house they'd had converted for their use. It was very likely that the last people to use this bathroom were her grandparents.

The bathtub was also bigger than you might expect, if you weren't used to mages — magical neighbourhoods (especially in poorer areas) had big public baths, like swimming pool -size shite, and even private baths were oversized, more like a jacuzzi or something. One of the weirder thing about the magical world was that they didn't think anything of single-sex groups bathing together, part of why the bath tubs were so big was so multiple people could fit in them. Including the ones in the dorms at Hogwarts, but most people didn't really use those, Beth thought it was going out of style...though, her impression was that was more of an upper-class thing, poorer mages still did it. Beth didn't like baths, much — she'd always had showers, and she wasn't entirely comfortable just sitting around naked, honestly — and doing it with other people was especially, just, no. A couple times total, she'd showered in the quidditch team changing room (which didn't have any barriers or anything between the stalls, just out in the open), but only when she was super filthy and didn't want to track mud into the castle, and it was always very uncomfortable. Katie and Angie and Alicia being super pretty didn't exactly make it any easier.

Of course, there wasn't a shower in here, just a bath, so she'd have to settle for that, she guessed. And ugh, as filthy as she was she'd probably have to change the water multiple times, bloody pain...

Beth staggered over to the tub — it was set into the floor, but not all the way, the rim level with a platform to put your shampoo and shite like a foot off the floor — and crouched down to look over the controls, grimacing a little as something in her back protested. (Not an unfamiliar ache, something in there often got strained from long quidditch practices, bending over her broom.) Tired eyes refusing to focus properly, it took her a moment, squinting down at the panel...

She didn't know how any of this worked. There were a few different switches, and buttons, and dials — not like a normal faucet, but like a gear or something set into it, drawings on the faces, and... She didn't know what to do, none of this made any sense.

Frustration burning in her throat, her chest tight and hot, she'd have to go all the way back out and find someone to explain it, and she didn't want to talk to anyone, she, just— Why couldn't this place have a normal fucking shower? She was just so tired, moving hurt, she wanted this to be done so she could go to bed...

As stubborn as her eyes were being about focussing properly, she didn't notice she was crying until she felt the wet heat at the top of her cheeks. She idly wiped at her face, the ash and blood speckled over the back of her hand smearing.

Well, now she definitely couldn't go out and ask for help. Even if she could get over how embarrassing needing help using a bathtub was, that she was crying over something so bloody stupid would just make it worse. Not as bad as it used to be, at least — Vernon used to punish her for crying, she'd had a whole thing about that, but Hermione had helped her get over it back in third year (hormones were a bitch, Beth hadn't been able to help it) — but she still didn't want to, she was too tired to deal with that right now. The thought of having to leave here, the tears smearing the junk sticking to her all over the place, and people would be all concerned, and, just, she didn't want to deal with all that. She was too bloody tired already, sounded exhausting.

But she didn't know what to do, and the frustration just kept mounting thicker, her chest burning, her vision swimming. She plonked down on her bum, tried to control her breathing, to fucking stop, but it wasn't working, her chest clenching tight and her throat aching, her eyes burning. Stupid fucking thing, sitting here crying over a bloody bathtub, what was wrong with her...

There was a sharp pop! of house-elf apparation — Beth scrambled to wipe her eyes and cheeks dry, but she was probably just smearing stuff around and making it even more obvious, cleared her throat, vainly trying to shake it loose. "Hello, Beth. Are you needing help?"

She glanced that way, her vision a bit distorted and watery, the elf little more than a colourful smear. The Potter elves dressed differently than elves she'd seen before, their clothes a patchwork of different colours and fabrics, as though pieced together from spare bits of cloth, the borders between them sometimes with tatty fringes left in places, the threads plaited together and sometimes decorated with colourful glass beads. Except, it looked like it was made from spare bits of cloth, but Beth was pretty sure it wasn't — she'd asked Sirius, and he'd said this was how elves tended to dress themselves if they were left to do as they liked (and were allowed the materials to do so). Beth's grandparents, and great-grandparents and so on, hadn't actually supported rights for nonhuman beings, but they had been especially good to the elves for a noble family, and no, Sirius had no explanation for the contradiction.

(Of course, Sirius did support rights for nonhuman beings, but had been a huge arsehole to Kreacher until Beth had nagged him out of it...but that might just be personal history, because he was perfectly fine with the other Black elves. Beth didn't know...)

She couldn't see very well, but she did make out big, bright orange eyes. "Tisme?" They'd met, a couple times — her job had been to take care of James when he was little, and also do her best to keep him out of trouble, which predictably hadn't gone very well. She'd stuck with him after he'd grown up too, but had stayed at Rock-on-Clyde after Beth's parents had moved to Godric's Hollow, because Lily hadn't been comfortable with being waited on by elves either (and preferred doing all the cooking herself anyway). So she hadn't been there the night Voldemort showed up, but even if she had gone with them she would have been on a break anyway — Tisme had a daughter, right around Beth's age, so she would have been busy with her instead.

Beth had met Nilanse too, shy little thing, but also really excitable sometimes...

Tisme gave her a floppy-eared little nod, and might have been about to say something, but Beth got there first. "I'm sorry," she muttered, pointlessly wiping at her face again. "I don't know why I'm... I don't know how to..." She trailed off, waving vaguely at the bathtub.

"It's okay, Beth. I can be drawing the bath, while you're getting ready."

Slumping in her seat a little, Beth let out a shaky sigh. It was still pathetic, but she was tired enough, too overwhelmed from the frustration and whatever else burning in her chest and swirling in her head, that she didn't really have the energy leftover to be too embarrassed. So she just nodded. "Okay. Thanks."

Beth peeled off her socks — relatively clean, thanks to her boots, but stiff and stinky from sweat — before clumsily pushing herself to her feet, taking way more effort than it really should, stiff and achy. Water was already pounding into the basin out of somewhere just under the controls, and apparently it was perfumed — something sweet, maybe orange, with edges of spice and...something vaguely earthy, not sure what that was. Beth picked at the button of her denims for a second, glancing at Tisme, before deciding, just, fuck it. She normally was not comfortable taking her clothes off with other people around (or even when she was alone, honestly), but she was just too tired to care at the moment.

Getting her trousers off wasn't really a problem (though she did nearly lose her balance and fall over like a clumsy idiot), and her shirt kind of hurt, muscles in her back and shoulders twinging in protest. What was a problem was her bra. She didn't really need the damn thing in the first place, most of the time — she didn't exactly have much there, especially standing right next to Hermione — mostly only bothered when she was wearing tee shirts and stuff, so nothing poked through or anything, and when they were doing duelling practice. (The whiplash from moving too quickly was uncomfortable, and distracting.) As stiff as she was, aches flaring harder as she reached, she couldn't fucking get the thing, more tears of frustration burning in her eyes, fuck...

There was a sharp finger-snap, a tickle of magic, and the clasp undid itself. Muttering a rather strained thanks, throat not quite cooperating properly, Beth flung the stupid thing away. She shot Tisme a glance, but she wasn't even looking at Beth, idly poking at a loofa-looking thing and some glass bottles of stuff she'd retrieved from somewhere — didn't look like she was actually doing something, probably trying to avoid making Beth too uncomfortable. Beth must be seriously out of it, because she managed to peel her knickers off. Though she did rush into the bath pretty quick...

...and ended up slipping and plunging into the water quicker than she'd meant to, coming up spluttering and pulling her hair out of her face. Because of course.

The water was hotter than she'd expected, probably hotter than she'd go with if she'd been running it herself — but it felt really good, some of the stiffness immediately disappearing. Though, she didn't know why, loosening up a little immediately had her almost shivering — didn't make any bloody sense, starting to shiver because she got into hot water — and she'd barely been in here for a few seconds before there was a startling wrench through her chest, a thick sob grinding through her throat. She'd been taken by surprise, hadn't felt it coming, her hand jumping up over her mouth, and then there was a second one, her eyes burning, fuck, why was this happening...

Beth managed to stammer out an apology — she always felt like she had to apologise for crying, which Hermione insisted was very silly — but Tisme just brushed it off, voice soft and...something, Beth didn't know.

Using the loofa-looking thing and some of the stuff out of one of the bottles (definitely a liquid soap of some kind), Beth scrubbed all the ash and blood and shite off her skin — Tisme needed to help a little with bits of her back she couldn't reach, because apparently there was a greenish blood smear back there (didn't remember that happening), which was embarrassing, especially since Beth was still crying, her throat burning and her nose leaking. But she was so tired, head light and fuzzy, she kind of noted it was embarrassing, a distant thought, but didn't really feel it that much.

Tisme had to drain and refill the bath multiple times before the water stopped being absolutely disgusting from all the shite stuck to her. Beth mumbled something about being sorry for wasting the water, Tisme giving her a funny look — apparently the water was purified and recycled somehow, magic, it was fine.

After she was mostly clean, feeling very raw and exhausted — her skin scratched up from scrubbing the blood off, the heat seeming to lull her even closer to sleep, could barely keep her eyes open, and also emotionally raw, harsh and jagged (though she couldn't put a word to what the feeling was exactly) — Tisme decided she was going to take care of Beth's hair. The stuff was a fucking mess, after flying around for hours and all the smoke and dust and splatters of blood — she'd been considering just chopping it all off, honestly. But if Tisme thought she could handle it, sure, they could do that, she guessed. (In large part, Beth went along with the suggestion just because she didn't have the energy to argue.) Tisme grabbed something on the side of the tub Beth hadn't noticed, and pulled — there were a couple clunks, and a section of the tub was pulled out, a sink-sized basin sort of thing extending out from the rest of the tub. Poking at it, Beth noticed the rim on this side, visible under the water, even had a cushion for your neck to rest on, which, that was wild, how the hell had they gotten this in there?

Beth turned around and laid back, limp, her weight mostly supported by the cushion thing against the back of her neck. Well, mostly by the water, she guessed, though she wasn't really floating — she was a skinny bitch. But she floated enough that the pressure on her neck wasn't really bad, the surface of the water lapping against her skin in some places, kind of tickled. Tisme gently worked out the tangles, an occasional tingle as she used magic to cheat. She said something about tying it up next time, so it wouldn't be as bad, and yeah, she knew, Beth normally did that before quidditch practices. By which she meant Hermione normally did it for her, because it wasn't as though Petunia had ever bothered teaching her frivolous stuff like that — she could plait hair now, but just because Hermione had taught her — and doing it herself was a huge bloody pain, since her hair was all big and long and curly and impossible. She hadn't bothered just for the trip to school, and there hadn't been time to stop and take care of it.

...Getting ready to leave for Hogwarts felt like it'd been bloody forever ago. Less than twenty-four hours still, she was pretty sure, if not by very much, but it seemed like way longer than that.

For some reason, laying here with Tisme's fingers running through her hair had her crying again. Worse than before, even. She had no idea why, she didn't know what she was feeling, her head a numb fuzzy mess, she was so tired, but the sobs kept shaking their way out of her, the water lapping, she covered her face with her hands, she didn't know what the hell was wrong with her. She managed to stammer out something about being sorry for being a mess, which she realised was stupid — that impulse to apologise for crying, she was well aware it was just because Vernon and Petunia were abusive bastards, Hermione hadn't spelled it out that explicitly for her but Beth wasn't a complete idiot — but she couldn't help it, she didn't know what was going on, ugh...

Tisme was mostly quiet for a time, just letting out little soft shushing noises, focussing on Beth's hair. Beth calmed down, eventually, or at least mostly — she was still sniffling a bit, her chest and throat fucking hurt, but at least she wasn't actively sobbing for no fucking reason anymore. (She hated crying, it always hurt, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.) Silence dragged for a bit, Tisme still gently working at her hair, the edge of spice from the water and the smooth sweetness in the shampoo tickling at Beth's nose.

Finally, Tisme said, "It's okay, to not be all well. Warriors have a hard job."

...That wasn't the word Beth would use, but she was aware of how it was used on the magical side, sometimes. She guessed it wasn't completely inaccurate. Especially with what she'd spent the whole last day doing — that was pretty characteristic warrior stuff, the way mages meant it...

"Jamie and Lily were not... They wanted things to be better, for you. The Dark Lord, and his people, and all of it, Jamie and Lily wanted the war to end with them. They didn't want you to have to fight. It's a hard job, it takes a lot. It hurts, body and soul. A good job, we are needing someone to do it, always, but hard. If they are seeing this now, I'm thinking, they are being very sad." A short pause, Tisme's hands coming up to cup her cheeks — light and gentle, fingers warm and smooth and delicate. "And, they are very proud. I know this."

...

And Beth was crying again, because of course.

Tired and sore and warm, weirdly comfortable despite all the aches everywhere, Beth didn't remember a whole lot about the rest of the bath. She knew Tisme, still working at her hair, filled the silence with soft babble, stories about James as a kid, or James and Lily, some stuff from the latter end of the pregnancy and shortly after Beth's birth. Beth was vaguely aware that she'd actually been born at Rock-on-Clyde, she'd heard that somewhere — her parents had decided it was the safest place, with the wards and the family magic and the elves and stuff. (Supposedly it was preferred that children likely to inherit the title always be born at the family manor, for family magic reasons she didn't know the first thing about.) Tisme hadn't, like, personally delivered Beth or anything, but she had been there, and had helped take care of the baby, so she had stories. Which was a slightly surreal realisation, that the hands just now running through her hair had held her within a couple hours of her birth, didn't know how she felt about that.

(Annoyed, maybe. She hadn't known there were Potter elves until Sirius had brought her here last summer, or even that she owned multiple houses, including a huge fucking manor, with greenhouses and extensive grounds and everything. She didn't know why Dumbledore hadn't just stuck her here, and had the elves take care of her — they definitely could have. Honestly, as weird and overbearing as house-elves could be sometimes, if she'd been able to pick her family, she definitely would have picked the elves here at Rock-on-Clyde above the Dursleys.)

(Beth barely knew her at this point, but Tisme obviously would have been a much better aunt than Petunia.)

An indeterminate time later, Beth was woken up by a messenger charm, from Sirius — saying to come get some breakfast if she was moving, he'd need to leave in an hour or so. Which, he could have just not woken her up and left without her, so despite how groggy she felt she pushed herself up to sitting anyway. She was in an oversized bed, sheets deep red and black, smooth and soft and warm, matching the room around her, which she only vaguely recognised as the Lord's bedroom. She'd looked in here before, but just in passing, had never had any intention of staying here.

She didn't remember getting here. She belatedly realised she was naked, she must have fallen asleep in the bath, Tisme just floating her into bed instead of waking her up. (Slightly embarrassing, but she had needed the sleep, so — she made a mental note to thank Tisme for last night later. Or this morning, whatever.) Her wand, still in its holster, was sitting on the bedside table, her boots standing nearby, leather shiny clean. A fresh set of clothes were sat folded on an armchair, waiting — not her clothes, the black cloth faintly glimmering, magic-made, but she had the feeling they would fit perfectly.

For a moment, Beth sat in bed, rubbing at her face. Memories from yesterday flicking by in her head, helped along by the stiffness in her limbs, low pain from bruises — blood and fire, eyes glassy in death, too many to count...

She forced out a sigh, shivering a little as she ran out of air. People were dying out there, she knew, more and more every minute she sat here. There was a part of her that didn't want to go back out, just stay here, under the wards, with Hermione and the Weasleys, where it was safe. She was just one fifteen-year-old girl, it wasn't like she could stop a bloody alien invasion herself or anything. Nobody would judge her for it.

Nobody except herself.

Her hand steady, unwavering, Beth reached for her wand, summoned the clothes to herself with a silent flick — she had a job to do.

Chapter Text

Most famously, Dimitra had the advantage of literal magic (again, to use the local terminology). Much has been made of the unusual proportion of Force-sensitives on the rediscovered human homeworld, the extent of their abilities seemingly outstripping those seen by Jedi throughout history. At the time of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, the "magical" population of Dimitra was estimated to be between point-five and one percent of the total. For comparison, before the war the Jedi numbered around one hundred twenty, out of an estimated galactic population in excess of one hundred twenty-five quadrillion — roughly one in one hundred fifty Dimitrans were mages, whereas the Jedi were only one in one quadrillion.

Dimitran experts insist the occurrence of mages on their world is unremarkable — perhaps slightly elevated relative to average, but not to such a margin suggested by the statistics. Local scholars believe the "magical" population of the galaxy is vastly underrepresented by the Jedi and various less well-known orders, due in large part to a selection bias. The Dimitrans have designed various devices by which a less powerful "mage" may have a much greater effect — by Dimitran standards, the Jedi are walking everywhere on their own two feet, while it would be much more efficient to simply get in a speeder and fly there. Grandmaster Skywalker has long admitted there may be thousands of Force-sensitives left undiscovered — due to organizational bottlenecks and insufficient infrastructure, their ability to detect potential Jedi is extremely limited — and recent experiments by Jedi recruiters with Dimitran techniques have validated some of the magical scholars' claims.

So what is the cause of the seemingly disproportionate magicalness of Dimitra, then? After some analysis, scholars have proposed two possible contributing factors: longevity, and diversity. The use of those words may seem absurd, speaking of such a young society limited to a single world, but the mages of Dimitra have advantages in these areas which the Jedi, for all their long, complex history, do not.

Dimitra's entire written history may only be five to six thousand years long, but mages have existed for the whole duration. This may not seem a great accomplishment, given that the Jedi Order is believed to have been founded eleven thousand, twenty-five thousand, or thirty-five-thousand years ago — which date is used varies depending on how one defines "Jedi Order" — but their Order has not existed uninterrupted through all that time. Limited to only the six-thousand-year period of Dimitran history, the Jedi Order has been reduced to a single member on at least two occasions — once shortly after the Mandalorian Wars approximately four thousand years ago, the Order preserved from extinction by one Meetra Surik, and a second time with the Great Purge of the recent past. Modern scholars know precious little of the Jedi as they existed before their revival under Master Surik — only scattered legends of wartime heroics remain — and Grandmaster Skywalker himself will admit that the Jedi of today have very little in common with the Jedi before the Purge. His training under the previous Grandmaster Yoda was very short, and focused solely on the mission at hand, most of his development since then entirely self-taught — and it is those largely self-taught abilities that he passed on to his students. For all practical purposes, the Jedi Order as it exists today represents a continuous tradition going back only so far as the opening of the (now defunct) Jedi Academy on Yavin IV, barely thirty years ago.

The history of magic on Dimitra, on the other hand, features no comparable discontinuity. At different times, knowledge of their arts has been passed down student to apprentice, in a manner similar to Jedi of various periods, but at other times was taught to entire classrooms of students at once, to an organized curriculum culminating in official certifications. In recent centuries, "magic" has become formalized as thoroughly as any science, with dozens upon dozens of educational institutions all across the world — most localities even provided a basic magical education to all residents within their borders — and formal academia including researchers and journals and vast libraries, everything that might be expected of modern research universities. And there, perhaps, is another poorly-ackowledged but perfectly mundane advantage held by Dimitra: Jedi training has almost universally been considered a journey of personal spiritual development, emerging as the Order had out of an ancient priesthood, but the practice of magic on Dimitra had a much more practical, secular character going back millennia.

The mages of Dimitra have been refining their arts for generations upon generations, successive developments made over six thousand years without interruption, as clearly demonstrated by the complexity and variety of of the "magic" they can bring to bear. If the Jedi had a similarly strong history, who knows what they might have been capable of by the time the Yuuzhan Vong arrived?

And here we already see a hint of the relevance of Dimitran diversity — the "magic" available to them came in many broad and varied classes, and could be freely adapted to any number of practical applications. There is the advanced academic approach to the subject to consider, of course, but in other avenues, Dimitra may have been advantaged by their own underdevelopment. The locals have only perfected planetary communications and transportation technologies in the last one hundred fifty years — until very recently, the various scattered communities throughout the planet developed independently in various degrees of isolation. Not only have the Dimitrans regularized, formalized, and academicized their arts to a degree the Jedi have never managed (in known history), but this development has come out of multiple different cultures and traditions, resulting in several superficially similar but substantially distinct schools of magic, all with their own specialities and deficiencies. If a Western mage encounters a problem he cannot solve, he may consult with an Eastern or American mage — there is no such parallel tradition today's Jedi may collaborate with.

These factors made mages a far more versatile resource to the Dimitrans than were the Jedi in their fight against the Yuuzhan Vong, and far more effective. A Jedi with a decade of intensive training, lightsaber in hand, may have serious difficulty bringing down a Yuuzhan Vong warrior one-on-one; on the other hand, a teenage student of Dimitran magic may do the same in seconds, with a single "curse". (Famously, Elizabeth Potter defeated no less than eight warriors single-handedly during Zero Day alone, less than a month after her fifteenth birthday.) Mages were effective in combat, yes, but their medicine was also far more advanced than Jedi healing, they could manufacture devices to effect uncrackable communications or uninterruptible transportation, build defenses strong enough to withstand repeated volleys from the cruiser orbiting their world, even personal shields to protect individuals from fire-breathers. As the invasion progressed, there were rapid developments in adapting their magics to work hand-in-glove with available technology, resulting in advances unique to Dimitra that compare favorably with modern equivalents available to the rest of the galaxy — as their infant fleet's performance in the recent insurrection demonstrates.

Jedi and Dimitran mages both insist their abilities arise out of the same fundamental potential — a Jedi may learn Dimitran magic, just as a mage may learn Jedi arts. But it is clear that, whatever their similarity, their difference in approach has led to results so distinct as to be unrecognizable.

5th September 1995 (63:5:19)
— Contact plus 00.00.03:6.30

Spreading beneath her out toward the horizon, Paris burned.

The aliens had initially sent out landing parties to all the big cities, or at least bombed them from orbit, over the course of the first day people scrambling to deal with them. There'd been a little bit of a lull in the middle there, all the aliens who'd landed killed — even the bombing had stopped, for a time. Beth had heard a rumour that the big ship bombing them had flown off to the moon, for some reason. She had no idea if that was actually true, she wasn't sure how they'd found out — maybe there were people with telescopes somewhere keeping an eye on them? — but if it had happened, the ship had come back with a vengeance, if anything the bombing even heavier.

And there'd been another round of landings, more aliens concentrated in fewer places than last time. Mostly, aiming for the biggest cities, where the resistance was stiffest — London had gotten out of a second attack, having mostly been evacuated by this point (which was apparently obvious from space?), but some other huge cities weren't so lucky. Beth and Sirius had been in Istanbul at the time — the local mages still insisted on calling it Constantinople, of course — helping clear rubble and repair bridges and stuff to keep the evacuation going. (Things were somewhat complicated there, due to the Turkish government not quite having the resources of rich European countries to respond as well, and also being surrounded by water and having the Greek border so close. The Greek military had actually opened the border, even running over barriers across roads with tanks to get people and vehicles through faster, which helped.) They'd been surprised to look up and see more of the green fishy-looking things dropping out of the sky, Beth and Sirius had flown up to meet them, along with a bunch of other mages — over the last couple days, they'd learned magic was better at killing their ships than guns. With the local mages, plus numerous helpers come in from neighbouring countries, they'd managed to knock out most of them before they made it to the ground, the couple that slipped through immediately shelled by the Turkish military, soldiers sweeping in to gun down the survivors.

Sirius got a message from a friend, so he'd quick apparated her to Moscow. The city was a bit of a mess, but honestly not as bad as she'd come to expect by now — though she guessed she shouldn't really be surprised, the Americans' capital was probably in relatively good shape too. (There had to be advantages to being a global superpower, after all.) There was an even bigger landing going on here, she and Sirius arrived just at the tail end of it, sweeping in to help blow up the last couple transports before zig-zagging through the city to spot the ones that'd landed. For the most part, the Reds were already on it — like how mages were better at taking down their ships, a few soldiers with automatic rifles could mow down a couple dozen lizard-people without too much trouble. (Mages could kill them just fine too, but only ones who knew any decent battlemagic, which wasn't even close to everyone, and even then muggles were more efficient at it.) The tall, scarred ones were more of a problem, since their armour could survive getting shot a few times, but bring in heavier weapons, or grenades and shite, yeah, the muggles could mostly handle them just fine. Beth and Sirius went right past the ones close enough to army people, they'd take care of those, after a little looking found one without any soldiers around.

They announced their arrival by Beth once again blowing up their transport with an over-long Thousand-Lances — because apparently she had a signature move now — and had probably killed over half of the aliens before several cracks of apparation rung through the square, and then a flood of automatic weapons fire. Looked like some of the local mages had popped over some muggle soldiers, which was clever — as long as they were working together anyway, why the hell not, right.

About then, Sirius got another patrōnus from Dumbledore — Paris was in trouble. Sirius paused to ask the bloke who seemed to be in charge of the soldiers who'd just popped in if they were good here — he wanted to radio their names up to a superior, so they'd know Beth and Sirius had helped out (though the Soviets already knew about them, they did Leningrad just yesterday) — before grabbing Beth and apparating out.

This wasn't the first time Beth had seen Paris since the aliens attacked, so the blasted-out, fire-scorched mess wasn't a surprise. The steady booming of big guns and rattle of machineguns told Beth the army was still here in force — unlike every other government in Europe Beth had heard anything about, the President and various important ministers had refused to evacuate, the French stubbornly digging in to defend their capital city.

Beth hadn't heard it herself, but she had it second-hand that the President had given a big, dramatic, inspirational speech over the radio and everything. All about how France had already surrendered Paris to an enemy once this century, and God save him, he would not let it happen again. If the aliens wanted him out of Paris, they'd have to come down here and drag him out themselves — and he didn't plan on being taken alive, he would rather die than surrender. (Supposedly, there'd been the sound of a handgun being loaded in the background while he said that, just to make it clear he was being completely serious.) He continued to give radio addresses, every hour on the hour, with updates on the progress of the invasion and the evacuation of the civilians — but not the high-ranking political leadership, who'd also all refused to leave Paris — so everyone would know he was still alive and that France was still fighting.

She didn't know shite about this bloke, didn't really follow politics (she didn't even know if he was a liberal or a socialist or what), but he sounded like kind of a badass.

When they arrived back in Paris, they immediately took off into the air, to get a look around — another bombing run had come by not long ago, the air thick with smoke and dust, so it took a little bit to make out anything useful. By the noise, Beth would guess there were landing parties somewhere, but Paris was fucking huge, they should find someone to ask if there was anyone they—

And then several of their rocky fighter planes zipped by, dumping a torrent of fireballs down on the city below as they went — passing close enough Beth was sent reeling by the wind, wand clicking against her broom handle as she grabbed it with both hands — closely pursued by a cloud of mages on brooms. Right, that was where the people in charge wanted them, got it. Beth and Sirius immediately zipped after them, leaning low over her broom and consciously shoving magic into the enchantments to get as much speed as she could. She started opening up distance ahead of Sirius pretty quickly — his first broom had been a Firebolt, but this one was only a Nimbus 2000, side-by-side the difference was obvious.

The ships were curving around, and then they flipped at improbable right angles — seeming to stop in mid air and then zoom off equally fast, completely ignoring momentum — sending a few fireballs at the mages following them before continuing over the city, a constant rain dropped below them. Beth turned to intercept them, and then adjusted to a sharper angle, fuck, these things were fast, come on...

She was barely in spell-range before the things blew right past her — the eerily silent ships moving quick enough the roar of wind following them was almost deafening, again sending Beth wavering before she got her broom under control again. By then, the main pack of mages were catching up, racing by a bit to her left, she started off again parallel to them, again chasing after the bloody things.

It seemed the aliens were paying attention and developing better strategies, just as the defenders were. Before, the ships Beth had seen had normally hovered over ground forces and just pounded everything into oblivion, trusting their shields to absorb the return fire — skipping around a bit to prevent too much from concentrating on them at once, but relatively stationary. This group — eight of them, Beth counted — seemed to have learned their lesson. The things were, just, absurdly fast (which she guessed made sense, since they were spaceships, and space was really fucking big), could accelerate from nothing to much faster than even her broom could keep up with in a blink. And they could do the opposite, too, from so fast they were a streaking blur to perfectly still in an instant, just, ignoring momentum somehow — the big things could turn on a sixpence, no matter how fast they were going, and at odd angles, just, twitching and jittering around, it was very weird. They had to have some way to zero out the effects of momentum inside the ship somehow, because otherwise Beth was pretty sure the pilots would have been battered into paste by now, some of the turns they were pulling...

The point was, Beth couldn't keep up with them — and the rest of the mages, mostly on even slower brooms, couldn't touch them either. They were stuck in a frustrating little dance, the mages chasing the ships back and forth and back and forth, sometimes getting close enough to risk tossing a few spells at them, but the speed the ships were moving at made it terribly difficult to aim, few hit anything. And sometimes taking shots in return, the ships swivelling in place — while still moving forward at the same ridiculous speed, how did these things fly, exactly? — the ships' speed added on top of the fire balls', too-fast streaks of light, one mage reduced to a burning torch plummeting toward the ground, another, another. Beth was almost hit once, intense heat slapping over her in a wave, practically before she'd seen it coming, too fast — she wouldn't be surprised if she ended up with a sunburn from that, but she was lucky, one of the mages behind her was killed by the same shot.

It was very frustrating, after a couple attempts that didn't get them anything some of the mages started apparating around, moving in front of the ships. Ooh, that was clever, how did they... It took a little bit of poking around for Beth to figure out that, by standing up on the foot-pegs, she could get enough leverage to dig into an apparation — thankfully, she didn't splinch anything, and took her broom with her, that could have gotten messy. (Sirius would later lecture her about experimenting with something as dangerous as mid-air apparation in the middle of a battle, but it'd worked, so whatever.) By the time she got with the programme, a couple of the ships had been nicked, but none seriously damaged. Watching the battle swirling around through the air, Beth waited until just after the ships had turned around again, tried to guess which direction they were going, apparated ahead of them and an extra couple dozen metres up. A quick glance, she'd gotten the angle wrong, a second apparation got her in the right place. Dragging the incantation out a little, "Hostīs damnātōs millanceīs," they were coming faster than she'd thought, she raced through the rest of the incantation even as she started to dive, "flagrantibus ulcīscere!"

The eight rocky, colourful alien ships racing right at her, she released the spell at the last second, tried to dip under them — tried, because they were moving so bloody fast, she was spun off course by the turbulence around them, sucked in along their wake. Thankfully, she didn't hit anything, and none of the ships vanished her like that one poor bloke back in London the first day...though she was spun badly enough she nearly lost her grip on her broom, both feet slipping off the pegs, both arms and one knee hugged around the handle. Scrambling to climb back on, the curse hit with a quick series of explosions, she turned around quickly enough to see she'd only managed to clip one of the ships with one of the ends, most of the curse streaking by down toward the city below.

She winced — she hoped that didn't hit anyone...

A dozen little flashes of fire, chips were blown off the ship she'd hit, carving a knobbly asymmetrical gash across the surface. She hadn't properly killed it, but it did quickly drop behind its buddies, wavering unsteadily in the air — damaged, at least. Still getting her broom back under her, the other mages leapt at the opportunity, and soon the ship was struck by a withering assault of spells from all sides, leaving only charred fragments behind, spinning and flipping down below.

Over the next couple minutes, they managed to bring down a second, apparating ahead and crippling it with wildly-cast area-effect and arc spells — Beth had nothing to do with that one, her second attempt at hitting one with a Thousand-Lances missed completely. The ships were already adjusting their strategy, starting to shoot fireballs ahead of them in anticipation, one mage was hit with a fireball, a second splattered on the front of a ship, instantly shredded into pieces by the force—

All around, there were dozens of flashes of fire — some bright gold and white, others deep violet and black — with a chorus of furious avian screeching. It wasn't just the sound, magic carried thick on the air, with an intense feeling of righteous rage, bubbling up Beth's chest, her hands reflexively clenching, skin squeaking against the polished wood. For a wild second, she thought a bunch of phoenixes had joined the fight, but no, the colour of the fire was wrong — and as figures resolved out of the flames, Beth saw the birds were far too big. They looked sort of like hawks, with the rounded heads with big eyes and sharp curved beaks, large clawed feet, and huge angled wings, but were somewhat out of proportion, their bodies too narrow and too long, the legs looking off in a way Beth couldn't quite put words to. Some were mostly bright yellow, with white patches on their bellies and more orangeish on their backs and the edges of their wings, some with wider, flatter faces (looking almost more owl-like) mostly a solid black edged here and there with purple and a deep silvery colour. Also, they were far too big to be normal birds — the closest was near enough for Beth to tell their bodies were roughly human-size, wings broad enough to shade the sun.

It seemed the veela and lilin had decided to help defend Paris.

Beth didn't really know what to think of veela and lilin, generally. She knew the legal situation for them could be sort of complicated — like, in Britain, veela were considered beings, who got fewer rights than humans but were still considered people, but lilin were dark creatures, getting even fewer rights, despite the fact that veela and lilin considered themselves to be the same race. (Beth's understanding was that it was kind of like how human mages could have magic that naturally leaned light or dark, just more extreme.) There was some weird stuff about how they reproduced that Beth didn't really get, not helped along by veela/lilin being super private about it. Like, humans married into their clans all the time, but they couldn't actually have kids with humans — Fleur called her dad her dad, because he was married to her mum and had raised her and everything, but he wasn't her biological father...and she didn't even know who was, and no, she'd refused to explain how that happened. (Beth got the impression it was a secret, to make it harder for racist humans to fuck with it and exterminate them.) They could turn into big damn birds, yeah, and had some kind of wandless fire magic, but they also had a kind of mind magic, pushing feelings out at people.

People were really scared of them for that reason which, yeah, Beth kind of got — people messing with your head was always creepy as fuck. She was pretty sure it wasn't malicious, though. Like, from what she'd seen, they were mostly just pushing out whatever they happened to be feeling at the time, and she thought it was just part of how they talked to each other? She'd watched veela with the Beauxbatons students at Hogwarts talking to each other, and yeah, that's what it'd seemed like...and, Beth's omniglot-ness picking up on it and unconsciously starting to copy it after talking to Fleur a few times was a pretty damn big hint. Beth couldn't actually do the mind magic part, but Fleur had still noticed, seemed to noticeably soften toward Beth a bit, for whatever reason. (According to Sirius, if she changed the shape of her own mind to push her emotions out the feeling would colour her aura, which was something empaths like veela would be able to pick up on — she wasn't doing that consciously, of course, she was shite at occlumency, but being an omniglot can be like that sometimes.) The aura of sexiness veela (and lilin) seemed to have, Beth was pretty sure, was just because they were kind of horny all the time, for weird magic reasons. And also they just tended to be super pretty, so some of that was on other people, but whatever.

The way Sirius explained it, they kind of needed to borrow energy from other people, for complicated magic reasons, which they preferred to do through sex — they could do it other ways, but sex was the most fun. So, they were magic sex vampires, basically. They could hurt people doing that but, since they basically had to feel everything the other person was feeling in the process, they really really didn't like to. Sirius was pretty sure it was against their own law, in fact. (Apparently, feeling someone die while they're a part of you was super unpleasant, who'd have thought.) Of course, people could be super squeamish and paranoid about magic sex vampires, which shouldn't really be a surprise to anybody, but Beth didn't...think that was deserved? They were a little creepy, sure, but they were mostly benevolent, or at least not actively malevolent, she didn't think they were worth being scared of.

Unless we were talking about their fighters — those, Beth was learning just now, were pretty fucking intimidating.

The huge bloody birds showing up easily doubled their fighting force, which probably would have made it easier anyway. They could pop around the battlefield like the mages, disappearing and reappearing in bursts of fire, and, unlike animagi, could still cast magic in their bird forms — and a surprising amount of magic too, filling the air around them with flames just by a hard flap of their wings. The light-coloured birds (veela) cast fire all gold and orange, intensely hot, giving off light magic warm and pleasant, like sunlight on a summer day; the dark-coloured birds (lilin), though, their fire was black and purple, and seemed to draw in heat, chilling the air around them, the magic they put out dark, but not vile and sickly in the way of some curses, instead reminding Beth of a cool spring breeze, thick with thunder on the horizon. (If Beth's magic leaned one way or the other, she imagined she'd find one of the two uncomfortable, but her magic was weird.) The clouds or fucking tornados of fire didn't seem to do anything — which did make sense when Beth thought about it, these were spaceships — but having way more people in the air was a good distraction, able to head them off easier and get attacks coming from more directions. Pretty quickly after the veela and lilin turned up, they'd already picked off a third ship.

Then the newcomers changed strategies — and they got really scary.

Some kept at what they'd been doing before...more or less. They'd still hop around, flooding the air ahead of the ships with clouds of fire — but the fire didn't stay clouds. A seconds after being cast, it would clench, seeming to pause in place, and then swiftly condense into a swarm of glistening needles, almost looking like gold and violet gemstones. The ships would fly right through the needles, some bouncing off and some sticking into the surface, seemingly to no effect...but then the veela/lilin would put up another cloud of flame — flying through the fire, the needles stuck in their skin would explode, scoring dozens of little holes, jagged chips flung away, like hitting a tree with a blasting curse. They didn't do a lot of damage, the needles small enough it was just superficial, but it wasn't nothing.

Watching the second go around, Beth thought she'd figured it out: gold needles would explode in the dark fire, and the purple needles would explode in the light fire. She didn't know why veela fire and lilin fire interacted like that, but it was obvious it did. As small as the bits they were chipping off the ships seemed to be, the second run through they must have hit something important, one of the ships slowing and wobbling. Beth actually got to this one first, appearing right in front of the cockpit — she could faintly see the scarred alien inside through the crystalline surface, some weird bag over his head. (Air supply for when they're in space, maybe?) She tossed off a Lance of Modestus, the two-stage piercing curse splashing against the windshield, soaking into it, the material thin enough that the second stage went right through, Beth saw a flash of blood. And then it was by her, too quickly for Beth to make out whether that had been a lethal hit — but the ship was obviously listing now, the hail of additional spells tearing it apart probably hadn't been necessary.

The rest of the newcomers took a different tack: they switched into human form, in mid-air. They couldn't fly like this, falling unaided, but after passing the elevation of the ships they'd teleport up again, streaking past the ships only to appear overhead in another flash of fire, again and again. They'd also make the weird frozen fire-blades, sometimes bands whipping out at the ships, almost like an arc spell, others making long spears, rearing back and chucking them overhand at the ships, the spears flying unnaturally quickly, as though propelled by an overpowered banishing charm. Some spears missed, or bounced off, or only stuck in a little bit, the ship's manoeuvring snapping off the rest to spin away — the bit stuck in the surface would then explode the next time it was touched by the opposite fire-colour, the explosions bigger than from the needles, so not completely useless. One lucky spear buried itself deep in a ship, just rear of the cockpit, missing the pilot but obviously hitting something important, the ship shivering and wiggling in the air, mages quickly leaping on it to finish it off.

One lilin, the mad badass made a kind of sword, and fell right at one of the ships, a heavy two-handed overhand slash shattering his conjured weapon into pieces and sending the man into an uncontrolled tumble — but the force, and whatever magic was imparted by the blade, managed to sheer off the last metre of the tip, at least. Apparently there was something important in there, because the ship immediately started flipping head over tail, streams of lava-ammo spilling out from the hole. After nearly falling all the way to the ground it finally managed to right itself, coasting along slow and unsteady, still leaking liquid fire from its shortened nose. It didn't last long, though, once a couple mages had noticed it'd survived they'd popped over (including Beth), the crippled ship pulverised under a hail of spells.

With the help of the veela and lilin, the ships were quickly killed off, one by one. The last survivor tried to escape, pointing its nose up at the sky and streaking up, but then a veela landed on the cockpit. Drawing a sword — an actual sword, Beth belatedly noticed the newcomers were all in matching uniforms, must be from a veela military of some kind — dropped to his knees against the window and buried his sword in it up to the hilt. The ship's acceleration had him sliding off, but he held onto his sword, his weight cutting a curving streak through the cockpit — probably not hurting the pilot, but definitely breaking the seal, he couldn't go back up into space anymore. The ship spun around, and started to dive, chasing after the falling veela, but then Sirius was there, the cockpit shattering in a million pieces from an overpowered blasting curse. Beth didn't see the shot that killed the pilot, but the ship stopped manoeuvring, kept diving nose first, down and down and down, until it finally smashed itself against the city below.

Beth looked around, spinning in place — yep, that was all of them. Well, that hadn't been so bad.

The air again ringing with avian screeches from the veela and lilin — this time a bubbly, gleeful thrill, an edge to it almost smug — joined with cheers from the mages, too loud, some of them must be amplifying their voices. The whole group started diving back down toward the ground, a few who'd ended up further away apparating over to join them, the big bloody birds lazily spiralling down after them. They were singing, now, their voices clean and clear — almost human-sounding, despite being bird-shaped at the moment — magic carried along on the sound, reminding Beth very much of Fawkes. (It wasn't a proper language, since Beth didn't immediately copy it, but she assumed the magic it worked by was similar.) Not explicit meaning, but feeling, an echo of it drawn out of Beth — mournful for all the people who'd been killed, yes, but despite the enemy's best efforts they were still here, resolute in the will to keep fighting so long as there was a single person left to protect, and they'd just kicked arse too, if the aliens thought they'd just roll over and take it they had another fucking thing coming.

(Her chest tight with the tangled storm of emotion, it almost brought tears to her eyes, she took a few slow, deep breaths to get control of herself.)

Early in the descent, she recognised Le Palais de l'Élysée ahead — the residence of the French President, they'd built a fallout shelter or something underneath, all the high-ranking government people were down there somewhere. They'd also put magical defences in place, pre-existing, they'd just switched the wards on when the bombing started, which Beth was pretty sure was a violation of Secrecy, but nobody cared anymore. There was a big pearlescent dome over the gardens, shimmering in rainbow streaks like a soap bubble, the area under the dome packed with a bunch of military equipment and soldiers, clumps of locals who'd decided to stay with the army rather than risk fleeing through the city. (Paris was huge, it'd take well longer than an hour to get to the edge of the built-up area, meaning another bombing would come around before they got out.) Beth knew from her previous visit that they had a pretty busy camp going on here, people gathered out on the grounds, a big outdoor kitchen put together from supplies commandeered from the surrounding blocks, to keep the refugees and the soldiers fed, both the ones guarding the Palace and the ones coming in from assignments elsewhere in the city. They'd even looted alcohol from somewhere, bottles of wine being passed around, because of course — this was France, after all.

Beth and Sirius could get through the wards, they'd been keyed in during their last visit, but she expected they'd need to send up someone to let the veela and lilin through...but then with a flood of gold and black flames, they just teleported straight to the other side of the wardline. Oh, well, never mind, then...

The mages touched down in a paved courtyard between the gardens and the Palace itself — the stone a creamy off-white, rows of big windows, twisty detailed decorations carved around the frames and along the edges. The military had put up a little command station here, a big tarp pitched over tables strewn with papers and marked-up maps, a couple bits of alien equipment salvaged from one corpse or ship or another (sealed with protective spells to prevent possible contamination), big metal boxes she assumed were some kind of communications stuff, she didn't know, a couple army people constantly listening at or talking into radios. Beth knew Britain had a rather more permanent-looking and professional set-up in Oxford, though she'd never gotten this close to it — after Beth and Sirius had moved on, the convoy they'd escorted out of Westminster had continued on to Oxford, setting up a base of operations in the University. (The town had basically become a big refugee camp, and also a place for volunteers to gather, Beth could see people all around from the sky, but thankfully the aliens hadn't tried to bomb the place yet.) This here was a similar idea, she thought, but temporary and more haphazard-looking.

(She assumed the French military must have a bunker in the city somewhere they could use instead, but they'd decided to do this outside. For morale reasons, maybe?)

Beth and Sirius didn't approach, though, hung back with a bunch of other mages while a couple people Beth assumed were leaders of some kind went to update whoever was in charge around here. They were joined by... Beth hadn't caught whether that one was a veela or lilin — there wasn't an obvious difference in human form. Whatever, a woman in the odd veela uniform was going with them. The base was leather, but very old-fashioned looking, a chest piece and those skirts made out of strips like pictures Beth had seen of Roman soldiers — not covering a whole lot, their legs below the knee and arms bare (they weren't even wearing shoes), Beth assumed the armour projected protective spells to cover the rest — with long sashes draped over their shoulders, crossing their chests, wrapped around their waists, twisting red and purple stitched with glittering gold. All of them were armed, not just with wands — Beth assumed the bracers on their lower arms were also wand holsters — but also with blades, a sword hanging from one hip and a knife at the small of their backs — which weren't just for show, the enchantments you could put in a sword were fucking ridiculous. (Obviously, when she thought about it, since goblins could fight mages on even ground despite not being able to use wands at all.) She was aware it even used to be common for battlemages (or sometimes just nobles in general) to wear a sword or a dagger, in addition to their wand, but it'd gone out of style at some point after Secrecy. She assumed these veela and lilin were from some rather old-fashioned military group she didn't know anything about, would explain the uniform and the weapons.

It looked like the veela/lilin person was being introduced to whoever was in charge over there — she had no idea whether muggle leadership would even know of the existence of veela, so that would probably take some explaining. Whatever, not really Beth's business. Some of the mages conjured benches, Beth and Sirius went ahead and sat with them. Not like she really needed to sit down or anything, the active flying she'd been doing did use her legs but not as much as actually running around, but why not. Some of the locals showed up with bottled water and, like, buns and stuff — Beth wasn't really hungry, but she took some water — the helpers giving the mages some funny looks when they didn't think they were being watched. Apparently the random people who'd ended up here weren't quite used to magic being real yet, but there were kind of more important things to worry about, so. Some healing potions were passed around (Beth took one for nerve damage, the hot-cold numb tingles in her wand arm dying down), the conversation quickly turning to the state of the invasion.

Most of these mages were locals, so they didn't know much about the situation beyond France, just rumours they'd picked up here and there. Beth and Sirius had been popping all around Europe, though, Sirius kind of monopolised the conversation filling them in. She did follow the whole thing — French was one of the first languages she'd picked up after learning about the omniglot thing — but Beth didn't talk much, just sitting quietly and sipping at her water.

Apparently, someone was keeping any eye on the ships in orbit — they were keeping a catalogue, some of the French mages had heard about it from somewhere. The biggest one was huge, at least fifty kilometres across, which was fucking insane. It seemed to be made out of the same stuff as the fighter ships they'd seen (they thought, maybe), shaped sort of like a big starfish, a blob in the middle and big arms curving out. It wasn't part of the attack, though, hanging back in orbit around the moon. Their assumption was that it was a civilian transport of some kind, holding back in wait for the defenders to be dealt with before moving closer. They didn't need to bother, since it wasn't like anyone would be able to hit them up in space anyway, but whatever.

The biggest military ship almost looked like an oblong spiralling seashell of some kind, with twirling bands around its length and coming up to a point...but, naturally, was fucking huge — their estimates put it just over a kilometre and a half, which was, just, ridiculous. It'd mostly stayed out of the fighting, occasionally sending down fireballs from orbit — in particular, it'd picked off several countries' naval bases — but this second wave of landing craft and fighter ships had come from that one. The first wave had come from smaller ships — of course, "smaller" was still improbably big, maybe around a fifth the size of the big one, so around three hundred metres long, the size of an especially large skyscraper. There were at least three of them, though they weren't sure if that was all of them, since long-range communications were out and the curve of the earth got in the way. They were pretty sure there was a fourth, and maybe a fifth, but they knew of three for certain, the spotters even noting distinctive markings to keep track of them. It was one of these that was flying over Europe and bombing the shite out of them...though apparently, when they'd run off to the moon for a little bit, they'd ended up with a different one, the ship on its bombing loop overhead now with different markings from the one that'd done it the first day. Not that it really mattered, she guessed, since the lava-balls would kill people the same no matter which ship it was coming from.

Apparently, people were trying to make guesses about how much space there was in these ships and how many aliens they could be expected to carry, but there were too many open questions to get a solid answer — they had no idea how the aliens' technology worked, so they didn't know how much space all the equipment would take, or what they considered acceptable as a minimum for living space, or how many crew the ships needed to operate, anything like that. Also, the attacks on all the big cities seemed to be mostly a distraction, the spotters had seen really big landing parties heading somewhere further south. They knew at least one was in Africa, probably in the really jungly part south of the Sahara, and they thought there were two in Asia — one in India, and one in Indochina, or maybe Indonesia? (They hadn't gotten a good angle on it, not sure where it'd ended up.) Word had been passed along through the mages that there was another big landing in America, in the Amazon somewhere, but they didn't really know much about it.

They didn't know much about any of them, really, what was going on down there. They assumed that, once they'd dealt with the attacks on European cities, they'd have to pack up and go help dig out these big landings — India might do okay, she guessed, depending on what exactly the aliens had brought with them and how many of them there were (nobody knew shite), but it sounded like most of the countries they'd (probably) landed in didn't have the resources to take care of it themselves. So, even when the fighting here was over, it wouldn't really be over.

(Convincing Sirius to let her help with the attack on Europe had been bad enough, but she assumed he wouldn't be happy with her volunteering to go fight aliens halfway around the world. She'd figure it out when the time came.)

And they did think the fighting in Europe was mostly done already. With the fighter ships they'd blown up just a minute ago, they'd already killed most of the ones the spotters had counted — reports from other countries could be spotty, so it was possible they were all dead, and they just hadn't heard about it yet. There was the big landing that'd just happened, presumably they'd get word if anyone needed help dealing with that. (From what Beth and Sirius had seen, hopping from Istanbul to Moscow to Paris, they probably had it handled.) Unless something big happened, most of the French mages were hesitantly confident that the aliens had run out of little ships and soldiers to throw at them. They'd hang out waiting for word to come in they were needed somewhere, of course, but they thought it was done.

Which meant the complicated politics bit was about to start — there was the end of Secrecy to deal with, and all the muggles and mages cooperating to put together a response to the big landings was going to be a huge fucking headache — but that wasn't Beth's problem. In fact, she pretty much stopped listening when they got to the politics part, rolling off the bench to lay on her back on the stone of the courtyard (muscles in her back, strained from leaning over her broom, twinging a little at being forced straight), and stared blankly up at the sky.

Supposedly, the climate in Paris was pretty similar to London — a little warmer and sunnier, but not really by very much. Which was kind of funny, because you never heard people talk about Paris being a rainy dreary shithole, but whatever. Like in London the same time of year, it was pretty cloudy, but not overcast, alternating patches of clouds and blue sky. Enough that it'd probably be at least partially sunny today, if it weren't for all the smoke rising from the city, blurring out the blue with bleak brownish-grey. The sun would peek through sometimes, bits of the smoke noticeably backlit, throwing crazy shadows overhead. Like you could get sometimes when it was partly cloudy, but much more busy, the roiling of the smoke being sheared in different directions by the wind making even more varied shapes in different colours, a complicated mess.

...And there were a lot of cities that'd been hit as bad as Paris, right? It occurred to her that all that smoke in the air, washing out the sun, probably wasn't good. She wasn't sure how much of an effect it would have on temperatures and, like, crops and stuff, but...probably an effect, right? Having to deal with a famine on top of aliens trying to kill them could get very bad very quickly. That was an unnerving thought, she was kind of freaking herself out a little...

(Saving people from the aliens wouldn't do any fucking good if they all just starved to death anyway.)

Since she happened to be looking up at the sky, she was one of the first people to see it. There was a disturbance in the clouds and smoke overhead, swirling and bowing out, as though being pushed aside by something — Beth felt herself stiffen, tension thrumming through her, before the something even showed itself. It was an oblong shape, several times longer than it was wide, vaguely cylindrical, a yellowish-whitish colour that only grew paler as it got out from behind layers and layers of smoke, streaked here and there with darker oranges and browns. Beth heard shouting from the command station, and then a wailing siren pierced the air, muggles scrambling for weapons and mages for their brooms. She'd seen it early, so she ended up near the front of the pack, zipping up through the wards so fast the wind roared deafeningly in her ears, almost covering up the fires of the veela and lilin teleporting. The shape was still dropping, and dropping, the size of Beth's finger, and then her hand, and then her arm, and then bigger...

It swooped down over the river, its dive halting over the big islands in the water over there, maybe a mile to the east of the Palace. And then its guns opened up, one whole side of the ship flaring with bright orange light, and the whole island was consumed in fire, the shockwave so powerful Beth felt it tear at her hair from here, dust stinging at her eyes.

Like the fighter ships she was more used to, the surface of this one was mottled and uneven, seemingly made out of partially eroded stone, craggy and blobby. A sort of rounded tube, reminding her almost of a discoloured cucumber, even seeming to kink and curve a little as a long cucumber might, dotted with little nodules sticking out all over the place. As irregular as the shape was, it didn't really seem like it'd be aerodynamic to her...but then, it was a bloody spaceship, so they probably didn't need to worry about that. She flew straight at it, in a crowd of mages on broomsticks and big bloody bird-people, and the ship just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, fucking up her sense of scale, it was further off the ground than she'd thought, maybe as much as a kilometre, the thing was just so fucking big, a few hundred metres from one end to the other, it was hard to say exactly...

The guns were more powerful than the fighter ships, that one broadside had pretty much melted half of that entire island, previously dense with buildings but now a mass of glowing sludge, belching a thick column of black smoke, more buildings collapsing as their foundations were eaten away. The lava-bombs that'd been dropping from orbit, the largest as wide as she was tall, but brighter and hotter, the wind on the way not having cooled them down, hitting with less impact but the heat sheering through buildings in a blink, liquid rock or metal or whatever the fuck it was sloshing down alleys. Anyone left on that island was either dead already or about to be baked to death, and there was probably nothing they could do about it.

The ship tilted on its axis, and then a volley of lava-bombs were spit out from the opposite side — another city block just vanished, disappearing in an explosion of fire and smoke.

Some of the mages launched spells at the thing, but they fizzled out before even reaching the surface, the size of the ship throwing off their sense of distance. But the ship reacted anyway, a dense rain of fire-balls sent in their direction — smaller ones, similar to the fighter ships' guns. There were enough fire-balls that she couldn't really go around, and dodging them would be risky, so she apparated instead, forward and up. She'd meant to come out straight above the big ship, but it was still a short distance ahead of her, fuck. Close enough. The incantation for the Thousand-Lances spilling over her lips — automatic by this point, cast it so many times the last few days — Beth started in a shallow dive toward the big ship, the long arc of her curse extending out ahead and above her. Partway down, her flightpath brought her among a group of mages, they sidled to the side out of her overlong spell, a dozen shouted incantations melded together—

She was still a couple seconds away from the ship when a distortion appeared in front of her, the lines of the ship bending, refracted — Beth abandoned the spell, wand hand snapping to her broom to wrench it to the side. One of the mages around her didn't react quickly enough, vanishing into the distortion, his body twisting unnaturally for an instant before he was just gone, Beth blasted with a flash of hot prickles. Her broom shuddered in her grip, Beth being yanked back, as though someone grabbing onto the back of her shirt and pulling, but she leaned harder into the flight spells and managed to wrench away from the pull, turning down, zipping by the width of the ship in a blink, diving toward the city below, her heart pounding loud and painful in her ears.

That was the weird shielding the fighters had, but bigger — and it'd appeared far further away from the ship than they normally did, Beth almost hadn't reacted in time. That had been too close.

Once she'd caught her breath, she levelled off and began pulling up again. The ship was still moving, drifting ponderously over the city, and at a pretty good clip too, Beth had to adjust the angle of her climb to meet it. Another city block vanished in a burst of liquid fire, dozens of fireballs flung from the other side at the flying mages, she saw one get hit, clothing and broomstick caught alight, yet another burning projectile plummeting to the city below. From here, she could tell the defenders were noticeably fewer than they'd been before, several must have been caught by surprise by the dense fireballs or the too-deep shields. They were still fighting, though, spellglows lancing at the ship from this way or that, clouds or darts of veela/lilin fire.

Beth suddenly flew through a cloud of dust, chunks of surprisingly light, porous stone pummelling her, she ducked her head, jerked to the side. Debris from the ship, they must be making hits. As huge as the fucking thing was, she expected the skin was proportionately thick — at this rate, this was going to take a while...

Coming up from below, distona distona cumigne lacera, even as the first spellglow neared the ship she dug in and apparated away — didn't want to attract attention and get sucked into one of those shields. She wavered a little coming out, her foot slipping, took her a second to get control of her broom again. She'd apparated over a garden to the south (first thing she'd thought of), a few hundred metres away from and mostly level with the ship. She picked a spot low on the right side — there was a darker patch here, almost purple-ish, distinctive enough she'd remember it, aim right at the seam with the lighter stuff just there. Casting the Thousand-Lances again, she flew straight for the ship, gritting her teeth against the magic burning its way down her arm. As she approached, there was another huge burst of veela fire, tiny little explosions popping off scattered across the top of the ship, it lurched to the side a little, Beth reflexively adjusted her approach angle a little, and almost ran right into her own arc spell, dipping a little down before she accidentally killed herself (that would have been embarrassing). She released the spell earlier than she normally would, took a hard corner, paralleling the side of the ship a couple dozen metres away — hanging off her broom sideways, hugging the handle tight with one arm and one leg, so she could toss curse after curse 'down' at the thing as she sped by. Shields caught some of them, but she saw a few burst against the craggy surface, dissolving from a distona or flinging out chips from a sectumsempra. She saw an orangish glow growing out of notches here and there, rolled back right side up so she could apparate off again the instant before the guns fired.

The ship was wheeling around, turning to cross the river to the northern side of the city, no, Beth wanted to keep hitting that same spot. Once it'd evened off, she apparated again, putting her on the right side again. That'd seemed to work okay, so she'd just do it over again, started a Thousand-Lances aimed for the same spot on the lower-right. She was still some seconds off when she wanted to turn — dozens of metres away, the ship still big enough it all but completely filled her vision — when mages on broomsticks plummeted past her to either side, what—

Orange glows appeared along the face of the ship, shite! She dropped the spell, turning away, the fireballs already flying — her breath catching in her throat, the world seeming to slow around her, like that moment before she caught the snitch, she harshly yanked her broom up and to the left, and then the fireballs were streaking past her. Beth was blasted with heat from all sides, leaving a lingering ache like a bad sunburn and stealing the breath from her lungs, but she'd gotten through. Her arc spell was past her now, a deep red ribbon twisting across the last few metres to the ship — some of the arc was bent away by a shield, but some was slipping past — Beth tossed off a few more curses before dipping into a dive, dropping below the guns' line of sight.

Except then there were more fireballs coming at her from above, fuck, this thing had guns on the bottom face too. Only a few shots at first, and relatively slow, since they were travelling the same direction — glancing back over her shoulder, she sidled around the only one that was coming anywhere near her, before squaring herself and apparating away again.

Another city block was annihilated, and then another, the ship constantly spitting out fireballs, but the mages and veela and lilin stayed on it, many spells disappearing into shields but many slipping past to burst against the ship, the material darkened with scorched streaks or blasted off in chips and chunks. Beth made a few more runs with her Thousand-Lances, aimed at more or less the same spot; Sirius caught up with her after the second one, and realised what she was trying to do, flying alongside her and hitting the same spot with his scary vanishing curses. They were definitely doing some damage, a gash slowly being carved into the side of the ship, and not just the two of them, each time Beth apparated out more scorch- and pock-marks appeared in the ship, making it look even more mottled and uneven than it'd started. And they made another pass, and another, and another, Beth wincing as the ship lit up one patch of the city after another, broomsticks and bird-people shot out of the sky...

Until after what felt like an hour of making one run after another after another, dodging fireballs along the way, her hair knotted from the wind and skin wet with sweat and gritty with ash, Beth saw it. As fast as she was moving, it was in view for like a second, she was already diving downward again before her brain quite registered what she'd seen: there was a gash torn into the ship, showing a narrow glimpse of a hallway on the other side.

"Vocem vecta. We opened a hole, lower-right. Make a distraction up top, please." Beth was only mostly certain she'd remembered to speak in French, hopefully somebody was listening. Beth apparated again, putting herself more in line with the hole, and darted off, the acceleration hard enough to push her feet hard against the posts, her hands squeaking against the handle. She ducked low over her broom, eyes fixed on the little hole in the side of the ship, growing larger and larger by the second, certain now it was wide enough to fly through. The ship filling her vision, there was a sudden explosion of fire, deep enough of a boom Beth felt it in her chest, on the opposite side, from this angle the ship edged with golden-white flames, almost looking like an eclipse — thanks for the help, lads. The ship started manoeuvring in response to whatever was going on up there, nose tipping up a little and turning, Beth wrenched her broom back into line, the craggy hull of the ship stretching in all directions and the gap yawning open—

Beth passed into shadows, the wind and much of the noise of the battle abruptly cutting off, her stomach twisting and head spinning as the world seemed to tilt around her, her sense of down swinging some degrees sideways. She slammed down hard on the braking spells, her momentum carrying her forward, but she let it, lurching over the front of her broom and tucking into a roll, bleeding off her speed — getting her feet back under her, as she stood up she lept to the side, clearing the hole for the next people through. Not looking where she was going, she slammed shoulder-first into a wall, nearly knocked down on her arse again.

Glancing around, it looked like there was a long hallway running along the lower-right corner of the ship — which was convenient, hopefully the pilots and commanders and shite would be somewhere up at the front. Beth was in a cross-hallway which, luckily enough, happened to be placed more or less directly across from the hole in the ship. As Beth looked around, more broom-flyers appeared through the gap, the cross-hallway giving them room to slow down. (Most of them rather more gracefully than Beth, though she was forced to duck under someone's foot nearly hitting her head.) The hallways looked...really weird. It wasn't like she'd expected futuristic-looking polished metals or whatever, like in some science fiction film, she had seen what the rest of their technology looked like, but it was still...

The walls were smooth, but textured, mottled pinks and reds and yellows. The joins between walls and ceiling and floor weren't angular, but more gradual curved lines, the hallways like long tubes. They looked organic, like how she imagined the inside of someone's throat or blood vessels or something would be, it looked like they should even be slimy, but Beth was leaning with one hand on a wall, so she could feel they weren't — a soft, almost leathery texture, warm to the touch, but dry. There was a faint smell of raw meat on the air, cutting over it something more like cooking bacon, thick on the steam wafting from the charred streaks slashed into the hallways from curses that had managed to slip through the gap.

That was...odd. Beth had noticed that their weapons and armour almost seemed to be living things — were their whole bloody ships alive too?

Beth shook the thought off, shoved away from the wall — they weren't alone in here, there were several aliens at the intersection, diving out of the way of the mages flying in and shouting. (There were panels and rolls of some kind of material sitting here and there, a repair team?) They did look different, though. They were the same species as the tall ones, definitely, but most of them were without all the weird mutilations and scars and shite on all the ones Beth had seen so far, their faces mostly intact. (Which actually made it more obvious that they definitely weren't human, their features noticeably wrong.) Most were rather plain, dressed in undecorated loincloths or toga-looking things, but one was in a more complicated robe, Beth immediately marking her as the person in charge. There was some weird thing attached to her head, in place of hair, a tangled mat of writhing tentacles — very gross — and, Beth initially took it for a glove of some kind, but on second glance her hand had actually been replaced with some kind of...armoured crustacean, like, a crab or something, her eight fingers with blades and pincers and tiny little tools she couldn't make out from here...

Okay. That was fucking weird.

Beth didn't pause to think about it too long, flung a blasting curse right at the one in charge — she jumped into motion, trying to dodge the curse, but reacted too late, the spellglow striking her in the upper-right, her chest torn apart with a splash of thick black blood. Some of the plain ones were pulling out the same short sword things the lizard-people used, others running off, probably to go warn someone. She belatedly noticed the larger hallway was an odd sort of L shape, some of the aliens were walking along the wall, standing upright at a 90-degree angle to the floor, which, that was quickly giving her a headache just looking at it. Trying not to think about how the hell that worked, Beth punched through the chest of one of the ones with a sword; another one was charging at her, she slipped to the side, severing his sword-arm with a sectumsempra, as the alien staggered a follow-up blasting curse splattered his head all over the wall. (Ugh, gross.) Other mages had started attacking the aliens at more or less the same time, wiping them out in seconds, curses chasing after the ones trying to flee.

...Were those civilians? They didn't seem to be carrying weapons. They were on a ship that was blowing the shite out of Paris right now, so they were at least assisting with the attack, and they'd probably been running to warn soldiers, so. Beth assumed nobody would really give a damn about just killing the aliens and not bothering to take even any of the unarmed ones prisoner instead, but it did make her feel kind of uncomfortable for a second.

They were just finishing off the last of the aliens when the hallway suddenly erupted into gold-white and purple-black flames — one nearly right on top of Beth, a blast of frigid air slamming into her — a dozen veela and lilin appearing. Jesus, could have given them some warning, about gave her a heart attack. Beth quick tracked down her broom, shrunk it away, and they didn't hang around talking about where to go next, they all started moving all at once. Most of them had clearly had the same idea as Beth, charging down the main hallway toward the front of the ship (some hopping up to run on the wall, which continued to look fucking weird), but some split off in the other directions, probably as a distraction, or to hunt down important equipment to smash. Not that Beth expected they'd be able to recognise that stuff even looking directly at it, but why not. Glancing around, she saw Sirius was going this way too, near the front of the mages running along the wall.

They ran without any opposition for a time, it was impossible to say how far without any things around to use for scale, the gentle up and down curling of the floor under her feet and the subtle curve to the walls throwing off her sense of distance. A few aliens came out of cross-hallways or doors — looking like valves, flaps irising open — immediately set upon by curses from multiple sources, mages peeling off in those directions in case more were coming. And destroying everything they found while they were at it, Beth guessed, explosions and snapping of curses resolving, sizzling and popping of cooking meat, steam wafting out of doorways in their wake.

A deep buzzing, some of the grenade-bugs came zipping out of a cross-hallway, one veela/lilin slashed across her chest before she could react, Beth dove, rolling under the cloud of fire from one of the red ones, skidding to the opposite side of the hall. Still laying on the ground where she'd fallen, she peeked around the corner, there were three soldiers over there, just starting to charge out toward them. "Cumigne lacera!" a couple other curses and one of the lilin-fire-spears flying out at more or less the same time — the trio vanished behind a burst of fire and a rain of colourful sparks (didn't know what that curse was), by the time the air cleared they were all dead on the floor. The veela who'd gotten cut with a bug was bleeding pretty badly, but was well enough to evacuate herself in a burst of golden fire; the mage who'd gotten hit with the fire bug was burned badly enough that he probably wasn't going to make it, but one of his friends quick apparated him out, reappearing behind them some seconds later, their group already having picked themselves up and moved on again.

"This way, here!" Beth glanced to the right, saw someone waving them to an opening in the wall up there — assuming he must have seen something important, Beth turned that way. Bracing herself, she just kept running, around the corner with the wall, leaning back and stepping up, her stomach lurching and her head spinning as gravity shifted 90 degrees. (No idea how they were doing that, but it was pretty neat.) The opening led to a short tunnel, the lights on the ceiling — patches of this yellowish glowing moss-looking stuff, which continued to be fucking weird — curving down along the wall until finally reaching the floor on the opposite end of the tunnel. The people ahead of her mirrored the lights, running up the wall as they went before ending up upside-down on the ceiling — Beth belatedly realised the lights told you which way was up, because they couldn't just have gravity pointing the same way all the time, for some fucking reason. Gritting her teeth, trying to ignore the way her stomach protested, she followed after them, stumbling a little as her brain struggled to make sense of the tunnel twisting around her, the floor and walls of the room ahead tilting.

They came into a low-ceilinged but wide and long hall of some kind, depressions in the floor every few metres lined with some kind of equipment — Beth thought they were workstations of some kind, what almost looked like control panels and lumps of living something-or-other that clearly did something, shells gleaming and creepy fucking tentacles wavering, very busy, Beth's eyes glazed over most of it without taking in the fine details. Over each of the workstations was a window, the colours and shapes somewhat distorted, but showing the view outside, the horizon straight up, the city on Beth's right and the smoke-choked sky to the left...which meant the floor inside was perpendicular to the ground outside, but Beth wasn't thinking about that right now. There were people at all the workstations, odd fleshy bags over their heads, more walking between the rows, but they were already scrambling into movement by the time Beth caught up, some moving to rush against the mages, others turning to flee, soldiers in their weird shell-armour reaching for grenade-bugs.

Golden and purple fires appearing scattered through the hall, veela and lilin jumping ahead, curses lanced out toward the armoured soldiers first — Beth's distona took one full in the chest, dissolving to dust, falling to the floor in multiple pieces — taking out all of them on this side of the hall before they could barely react, a buzzing in the air as ones toward the opposite end managed to get bug-grenades out. But the veela/lilin cast their weird crystallised fire, needles seeking out the bugs, the things exploding to send bits of frozen flames and shattered bug parts everywhere. The rest of the aliens fell under a rain of piercing and slicing and blasting curses, stray spells striking the windows — actually displays of some kind, the curses tearing out chunks to reveal the ceiling beneath — as they ran out of aliens the curses instead turned on the equipment packed into the room. They spread out a little as they went, so they could get to everything, blasting curses tearing apart the controls and shite to send bits of shell and splashes of black and greenish-yellowish blood everywhere, severed tentacles flopping limp on the floor, the curses a constant booming and crunching and clattering of noise, Beth could barely hear anything else.

From the displays and shite, Beth suspected these were the controls for the guns — hopefully they'd slowed down the bombing of the city, at least.

As they got toward the opposite end of the hall, the horizon through the displays tilted, the city shifting around more behind her. The ship was taking off, pointing its nose to the sky. But even as it moved, there was some kind of explosion somewhere far behind them, the floor shuddering under her feet, hard enough some of their group stumbled, the city through the displays lurching to the side. Beth suspected some of the mages who'd split off before had just blown up something important.

They streamed through another twisting tunnel, like the one before, coming out back into the same L-shaped hall... Actually, Beth suspected they were on the top-right side of the ship now, but whatever, there was another identical L up here, so. Before long they ran into some more crew members — not soldiers, must have some other job — quickly cut down before they could do practically anything. There was another shudder in the floor, and then gravity abruptly shifted, pulling them at an angle back the way they'd come, what'd been a hallway a second ago now mostly vertical. For a couple seconds they slid down the shaft, Beth scrambling for something to grab onto, and then ran into a hard ramp, some kind of ceramic, rolled to a hard stop against another body, drawing a hard oof — someone had conjured a floor for them, looked like, good thinking. People started reaching for their brooms, but before they could get very far the gravity righted itself again, pulling them toward what was supposed to be the floor. Beth skidded back down the ramp, sliding until she reached the leathery organic surface—

A clonk on the back of her head as someone ran into her, another heavy impact on her back slammed her against the floor chest-first, she coughed, stars dancing in her head, let out a strangled groan as the weight suddenly increased, someone falling on top of whoever had fallen on top of her. Her face pressed into the floor (the little air she could get smelling strongly of flesh, ugh), the weight on top of her shifted, a knee or elbow or something painfully digging into her lower back, fuck fuck fuck...

Finally everyone had gotten the fuck off her, a lilin reaching a hand down to help her up. All a little dizzy and bruised, they immediately started running again, a little more slowly than before, a few of them noticeably limping.

She wondered if the aliens had fucked with the gravity on purpose, but if they had they probably would have kept it on the wrong way to squish them against the 'floor' who knew how far down, or at least stop them from getting further up the ship. Someone elsewhere must have hit something else important, throwing off whatever made their gravity work for a second there.

There was movement in the hall ahead, Beth leaned around to try to get a glimpse between the people in front of her — there was a sizeable pack of lizard-people up there, maybe as many as a dozen soldiers with them. The lizard-people started charging toward them, an amplified voice yelled, "Break!" There was a cross-hallway here, both left and right, some of their group split off to either side, probably hoping to go around the aliens, but some of them kept going straight ahead. The defenders couldn't be everywhere, after all, hopefully someone would get through. Fewer people in the way, she spotted Sirius near the front of the people staying in this hallway, so she stayed with them too.

Curses started flying, but Beth couldn't fucking see anything with everyone in the way, she turned toward the wall, jumped as she neared it, gravity switching 90 degrees on her in mid-air, staggered a couple steps. The first couple ranks of lizard-people had been chewed up by the first volley of spells, but the rest kept coming, climbing heedlessly over their dead or dying buddies. "Sectumsempra," dragging a squiggle through the air, the invisible arc passing over the other mages' heads to slash into the pack of lizard-people, cutting several down to the bone. She'd had to aim high, to make sure she didn't hit any of their people, so a few got past — Sirius just punched the first one to reach him in the face, hard enough the dinosaur-looking motherfucker spun down to the floor, so Sirius could cast his vanishing arc spell into the ranks behind it, the line of charging aliens folding into themselves, killing a good third of the lizard-people single-handedly. Because he was just a complete fucking badass like that.

(Sometimes, Beth was reminded that Sirius was actually an extremely dangerous man, he was just so silly most of the time that he rarely seemed like it.)

There were more bursts of fire as veela and lilin teleported head, toward the scarred aliens, but Beth saw three running up onto the wall toward her, reaching for grenade-bugs. "Cumigne lacera!" The alien in front was killed by the fiery explosion, the one behind him staggered, but the last reared back, throwing the bug — Beth dove down to the floor, skidding awkwardly, but there was a heavy thrum as the bug zipped overhead, missed for now. Climbing back to her feet, one of the veela/lilin got the bug-thrower from behind, but the last was still coming for her. He'd dropped his bug, instead reaching for their weird snake-spear-whip things. Beth shot off a distona, but he gracefully dove over a shoulder, immediately popping to his feet again to her left, the spell going wide, dipped around the arc of a cutting curse, and then he was far too close, snake-thing hardening into a long spear, his arm rearing back to stab.

Beth jumped, a quick banishing charm giving her an extra boost, throwing her at the other 'floor'. She landed awkwardly, tripping, and then falling right into a lizard-person corpse, splashing into hot, wet blood, all along her side and back — ugh, gross. Sick clawing at her throat, she pushed herself up, the alien had switched his snake-thing to whip form, turning around his head, "Aigída!" the head bounced off the silvery shield charm before it could reach her, the alien turning on his heel to—

Sirius jumped up next to the alien, a vanishing curse severing the head of the snake-thing, a follow-up curse incinerating the alien's head, the body falling limp. He turned over to Beth — looking up at a funny angle, standing on the wall relative to her — probably about to ask if she was okay, "Fixam iaculor!" the two-stage piercing curse penetrating the armour of the alien coming up behind Sirius before punching through the body beneath from shoulder to hip, the force making him flip nearly head over heels.

Sirius glanced over his shoulder, startled, before turning back to throw her a grin. "Thanks, missed that one!"

Beth turned back to the battle, but it was pretty much done by this point. One of the veela/lilin was trading blows with a scarred alien — taller and thicker than most of the rest, spikes growing out of arms and hips, a fleshy-looking cape draped from hooks fixed to his shoulders — even as the others finished off the last few survivors. It looked like someone had challenged someone to a duel, the veela/lilin fighting with her sword, turning aside spear thrusts and ducking or spinning out of the way of the swinging snake head, the enchanted blade cutting gouges into the alien armour. The alien was snarling and spitting, visibly surprised that the woman was actually keeping up — until the spear changed to whip form in mid swing, twirling around the sword, but the woman just ducked under the head whipping around toward her face, falling to one knee, a blast of purple fire leaping from her free hand to burn at the alien's hip. He screeched and stumbled back, the injury making him fall to his knees, his head vanishing in a second blast of fire, body immediately going limp. The fire cleared to show the head discoloured in mottled patches and streaked with frost, definitely dead. And that looked like all of them, good.

Beth belatedly noticed that the hallway ended maybe another twenty metres ahead — there were already explosions coming from that direction, some of the people who'd turned off must have gotten there first. There were a couple minor injuries in their group, but nothing serious, they were all soon running toward the corner ahead.

They were about halfway there when the floor under Beth's feet shuddered. She didn't mean, like, the whole ship being rattled by something — though it felt like maybe that was happening too — but she saw the shivering in the walls and ceiling too, like the big damn monstrosity of a living ship was having a muscle spasm or something. A few of them were pitched to the ground by the shivering, Beth stumbled—

And then, with an odd twist that felt almost like a friction burn, the internal gravity went out — instantly turning the hallway into an elevator shaft. Taken by surprise, Beth fell backward, after falling a couple feet her back scraping against the floor, the friction pulling her into a tumble, and then the floor was gone and Beth was spinning through the open air — the ship must still be tilting — she passed through a spot where the gravity was still working, for whatever reason, saw the 'wall' coming in time to put her wand away and tuck her shoulder, rolling against the 'floor'. (Thankfully, the strangely organic materials of the ship's insides made it a relatively soft landing.) But then her roll took her past the working gravity, her head spinning as her sense of down rotated 90 degrees twice in the space of a couple seconds, and she was falling again—

Someone had conjured a plug over most of the hallway, once again putting a ramp along the edge to slow them down a little. Beth still banged her wrist really hard on something, but she actually landed on someone this time, cushioning part of the impact — landing face up, she saw someone falling straight toward her, rolled out of the way just in time for the person under her to get squashed by a second person, both of them letting out pained shouts. Beth scrambled to get her feet underself, and—

Hot, sharp pain stabbing up her arm, wrenching some kind of noise out of her throat, Beth flopped over onto her side, cradling her wrist. For fuck's sake, ow! The pain diminished into a background burning, pounding with her pulse, white sparks of agony following every twitch of her fingers. Right, she'd definitely broken something. Kind of surprised, mages were pretty resistant to physical hits like that, must have fallen at a funny angle...

The conjured floor tilted underneath her, mages and veela/lilin and corpses — whoever'd done the conjuring had done it low enough that they'd caught some of the aliens they'd just fought in it — sliding toward one side, Beth's stomach lurching and her head spinning. Partially from the pain, yeah, sweat already breaking out, but it also felt like the room was spinning, her weight decreasing, nearly enough to lift her into the air.

They were falling.

"We got the brain!" came a magically-amplified voice, somewhat strained — if Beth had to guess, having their own trouble dealing with the ship's tumble. "It's going down, everyone get out!"

Beth was a little startled that the ship apparently had a brain, but why not, she guessed. There were flares of fire as veela and lilin teleported out, pops of apparation, Beth shakily pushed herself up to her feet, still cradling her wrist. Taking a deep breath, trying to focus through the pain, she dug in her feet and—

The floor suddenly titled beneath her, nearly forty-five degrees, Beth tumbled to the side, reflexively threw out her hands to stop herself from slamming into the 'wall' (actually the floor?) — an overwhelming piercing pain stabbed all the way up to her elbow, her vision going white and her head spinning, loosing her balance. Gritting her teeth against a scream, she hugged her wrist against her chest — reflexively, that probably wasn't actually helping — blinking the spots out of her vision. There was a harsh hissing noise, she glanced around, one of the snake-spear-things was nearby, rearing up to—

«Stop!» Beth could feel the parselmagic didn't quite take properly, but the living weapon seemed confused, hesitating for a couple seconds — long enough for Beth to get her wand out and take its head off with a distona.

The room was still spinning, tilting, Beth sliding against the conjured floor the opposite direction now. Keeping her injured wrist close against her chest, she tucked her wand away again, turning against the direction she was sliding she managed to get her knees under herself. She started pushing herself up to her feet, but then there was a shiver in the room around her, heard as a thrum in the air, and the ship sharply tilted, flinging her off her feet and straight into what was supposed to be the ceiling — the landing was fine, the glowing mossy stuff soft and fuzzy to the touch, but then something heavy slammed into her, a hard edge digging into her hip. She wiggled herself out from underneath, belatedly seeing the heavy thing was an alien corpse, helped along a little by the continued spinning of the falling ship taking some of the weight off of her, her back bruised and that spot on her hip twinging — must have gotten caught on an edge of its armour, ow — she tried to get up to her feet but the floor tilted under her again, she fell against the conjured floor, dammit!

She'd gotten back up to her knees, the pain in her wrist and the spinning of the room making her terribly nauseous, the dizziness making it even harder to stand — and she jumped at something wrapping around her shoulders. Beth recognised Sirius the instant before they disapparated.

A twisting, uncomfortable trip through apparation space later — really not helping with the nausea — and reality came crashing back into existence, the daylight almost hurting her eyes, the smoke on the wind almost pleasant after the ever-present raw meat smell of the ship. And then the wind grew faster as Beth dropped out of the sky, immediately wrenched into an uncontrolled tumble as Sirius let go — obviously he would have apparated into mid-air, momentum was preserved through apparation. Beth reached for her broom, she needed to carefully tuck it into her elbow so she could get her wand out, cancelled the shrinking spells. The broom pushed itself out of her grip, immediately carried up away from her by the wind, "Accio!" Beth managed to catch the broom under her arm, so she could tuck her wand away again.

Grabbing at it with her good hand, a bit of shuffling around, not helped by the wind clawing at her, crawled around until she thought she had more or less a decent grip. She started the flight spells up gently, worried too quick of a stop would just have her torn away and start falling again — and good thing she did, too, she was still tumbling, her momentum enough she ended up hanging on to the broom by her good hand and one knee. Slowly increasing the power to the flight spells, she was gradually pulled out of her tumble, finally came to a stop upright, one shaking hand tightly gripping the handle and breathing heavily, practically vibrating with nerves.

Looking down, by how small the buildings were she was still at leat a kilometre above the ground. Good thinking on Sirius's part, bringing them out that high, that could have gotten messy...

Sirius swooped up next to her just as she spotted the alien ship, several kilometres away, above and to her right. Falling mostly tail-first, wobbling and spinning, the thing looked a mess, blackened by fire in patches and with countless holes punched into it. It was leaking, thin orange filaments of lava-ammo-stuff trailing out of one spot, the spin drawing an uneven spiral in the air. It was hard to tell how far away it was for sure, but Beth was pretty sure the impact would still be in the city somewhere, if not in the city proper at least the built-up area around it — hopefully people saw it coming in time to get away...

"You okay, kid?"

"More or less. Thanks for coming back for me, I couldn't get good enough of a grip to apparate out." Apparating into that hallway while the ship was falling couldn't have been easy, Beth definitely would have splinched herself trying it.

Sirius gave her a funny look — probably thinking of course he would come back for her, that was a silly thing to thank him for. "If we have a minute one day, we'll work on unrooted apparation. It's not something most people learn, but it can come in handy sometimes."

'Unrooted' because there was no way to 'root' yourself, she guessed. Some of the language used to describe magic stuff could be very silly sometimes. "Like when bringing down an alien spaceship, I guess."

"I guess," he drawled, smirking a little. "But seriously, are you okay? That was probably the sloppiest flying I've ever seen you do."

Beth grimaced. "I think my wrist is broken, banged it tumbling around in there."

Mirroring her expression, Sirius nodded. "Yeah, that can happen — if you're too shaken around and disoriented, the instinctive magic people do to resist injuries doesn't work right sometimes." Beth was slightly confused why he was bothering to explain it right this second, but then remembered how most everyone had mocked Neville for hurting himself at their first flying lesson way back in first year. The point was probably to reassure her that she wasn't a weak mage or something. Which was ridiculous, she was well aware that she was almost unreasonably powerful for age — her personal theory was that it was a side-effect of the ritual Lily had done to protect her from Voldemort — but whatever, purebloods were just silly like that. "Andi's off somewhere helping the injured, I think. Let's land somewhere quick, and pop over to the Refuge to find a healer to take a look at it."

The big magical settlement in Ireland, he meant — Beth had never actually been there before, but apparently there was a hospital, a fair number of the injured had been sent that way. Ireland hadn't been hit by the aliens at all, for some reason, so. "Okay."

"And, I think we're going home after that. I suspect bringing their big ship down here was a last fuck you — I'm pretty sure the invasion in Europe is mostly done for now. We'll be able to take it easy for a few days, at least."

Beth blinked at him for a moment, confused. They couldn't go home, London was a fucking mess, who even knew if Grimmauld Place was still standing. It took her a few seconds to realise he meant Rock-on-Clyde. "Oh. Sure." This wasn't the time to argue about her volunteering to help with the big landings in Africa and Asia, and he hadn't brought it up himself, no point in starting an argument now.

"Also, don't be angry with me — I know how the ladies can be about getting grooming tips from men — but you could use a shower."

She rolled her eyes. "I know, ugh, I was trying not to think about that."

"You realise 'bathing in the blood of your enemies' is supposed to be metaphorical, right?"

"Shut up, Sirius. Can we just go already?"

With a last toothy grin at her, amused with himself, Sirius started on the way down. In a somewhat lazy dive, at a shallower angle and much more slowly than they'd normally fly — probably out of respect for her only being able to use one hand. And she had to be careful, too, keeping her arm close to her stomach and ducking against the wind, so it didn't get jerked around too much, so she wasn't complaining. As they descended, Beth watched the big spaceship fall, and fall, and fall, gracelessly spinning and wobbling, only moments left before it crashed.

She didn't want to think of how many people that thing had killed — there were patches of the city below that were still glowing from the lava-bombs, the jagged tapestry of buildings noticeably flattened in places. And it had been doing a big circuit around Europe before showing up to finish them off, all those bombs dropping over the last few days, thousands of people, all around the world maybe millions...

Her chest clenched tight and cold, jaw clenched hard enough her teeth squeaked, Beth turned back forward, glaring down at the ground ahead. They'd lost a lot of people, she was sure, but they'd managed to fight the aliens off — they'd won this battle...or at least hadn't lost it. But the war wasn't over yet.

She was certain Sirius would not be happy with her volunteering to go help with the big landings, but she honestly didn't give a damn, she was going no matter what he said. Beth would make sure these bastards fucking regretted ever coming here.

(Her vision wavering, she twisted to wipe her eyes on the sleeve of her injured arm, kept silently following behind Sirius.)

Chapter Text

But even then, for all their unexpected advantages against the Yuuzhan Vong, the damage suffered by Dimitra during the invasion was still immense. Local scholarship divides the conflict into four phases: Zero Day, the Battle for the Earth, the Battle for the Sky, and the Cold War. Zero Day refers to the opening attack, from the initial detection of the approaching fleet in the outer system until the Yuuzhan Vong retreat to a handful of positions hugging the equator four days later.

It is impossible to know precisely what the objectives of the Yuuzhan Vong forces were — there exist no survivors from the task force — but from observations of their deployment it is possible to make reasonable assumptions. A limited orbital bombardment targeted major urban areas worldwide, immediately followed up by small detachments of warriors with associated air support. Given the population of Dimitra at the time, and how widely they were distributed, Yuuzhan Vong soldiers were spread quite thin, in most cases only a few hundred warriors expected to subdue a city of millions. Simultaneously, at least four separate large-scale landings of equipment and raw materials were made in sparsely-populated areas of the equatorial belt, to begin the process of terraforming the planet.

Due to a quirk of Dimitran history, the more advanced industrial societies tended to be concentrated in the northern hemisphere, at temperate latitudes — most such societies were well away from the main landing sites. The best guess of contemporary scholars is that the Yuuzhan Vong underestimated the threat of these industrial societies, trusting the warriors sent to the cities to be enough to subdue the locals, or at the very least to kill their leadership and throw them into disarray. While communication and transportation networks were successfully crippled, the political leadership of a handful of small nations devastated, the initial attacks were successfully beaten back, allowing these more powerful temperate nations to reinforce the embattled tropics.

These initial attacks on urban centers were a failure, but the casualties sustained by the Dimitrans were still significant. Large volumes of material and equipment were lost in the early exchanges — in particular, air forces were reduced to perhaps a fifth of their previous strength in the first twelve hours alone. Ground forces fared better, but vehicles and soldiers were lost in large numbers before the Dimitrans could adapt their tactics to their unfamiliar opponents. Between indiscriminate slaughter committed by Chazrach and warriors, strafing runs by atmospheric craft and coralskippers, and the intermittent bombardment from orbit, casualties among the populace were devastating, if not crippling.

5th September 1995 (63:5:19)
— Contact plus 00.00.03:12.00

Hermione couldn't sleep.

Rock-on-Clyde was a bit ridiculous, but she wouldn't expect anything else of the outrageously extravagant magical nobility. She'd been brought in through the guest wing — the room visitors would come in by floo, though they'd actually apparated in, the wards were simply thinnest in that particular room. The hall was big and empty, pure white marble sparkling with imbedded quartz, the floor a mosaic of polished tile including a large, lovingly-detailed reproduction of the Potter coat of arms. The rest of the guest wing was equally fine, the marble broken up with carpets and tapestries in bright vibrant (Potter) red, gold glittering here and there. Somewhere in there was a formal ballroom, which Hermione hadn't seen, a couple hallways lined with single bedrooms, so party guests could stay overnight rather than risk the floo while intoxicated.

All those bedrooms had quickly filled up with evacuees (mostly from Knockturn Alley), as that first day went on people split into groups and moved over into the terraces. That was what the elves called that area of the complex, anyway — the core of the manor had been built on the top of a hill, the terraces descended the slope in tiers. There were full-size flats over there, with bedrooms and salons and bathrooms and kitchens and everything. Hermione wasn't sure how many there were, exactly, but it was certainly possible to house hundreds of people in an emergency.

Which was, she'd been told, precisely the point: every magical noble family had a residence large enough for them all to retreat to if need be. In times of war, or when they were threatened by a feud with another family, or whatever else. The Potters had been a decently large family once upon a time, centuries ago, so they had beds for a correspondingly large number of people — especially if they used sofas and the like to squeeze out even more sleeping space than intended. Rock-on-Clyde was hosting hundreds of people now, she didn't know exactly how many, most of them evacuees from Knockturn Alley and even some muggles, every single flat in the terraces occupied, often multiple families sharing one. The impoverished Knockturn locals were accustomed to sharing living space, nobody had complained about the accommodations — even the muggles were seemingly more concerned about magic being real, and worrying about the literal alien invasion going on outside.

(They had the space, but Hermione was concerned about food. Cediny said they didn't need to worry about it for a while, but how long was "a while", exactly? Surely they couldn't feed this many refugees indefinitely, and the invasion was going to cause market disruption on a literally unprecedented scale...)

As the terraces had filled up, Hermione and the Weasleys had been moved to the main family's rooms, at the top of the hill, which were also ridiculous. There were a few common rooms, a sprawling living room, a game room — mostly centred on a card table, but there was also an unfamiliar version of table skittles and a variety of board games, some of them even familiar, muggle-made (if dated, from the 60s and 70s) — and even a cosy little library. (Relatively little, that is, comparable to theirs back home.) There were a surprising number of bedrooms attached, enough for Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, the twins, Ron, Ginny, and Hermione to each have their own, and still have a few leftover — supposedly, this area was for the Lord and Lady, their children, and sometimes even their grandchildren to live, so the size of the place did make sense.

It'd been Mrs. Weasley, in discussion with Cediny, the chief Potter elf, who'd decided who would sleep where, and they'd left the Lord and Lady's rooms entirely empty. Apparently, there was another, smaller salon in there, and multiple bedrooms — it was typical in the nobility, and even among wealthy commoner families, for the lord's wife to have her own living space, Hermione wasn't sure why. She'd initially expected Mr. and Mrs. Weasley to at least take the Lady's rooms, but Mrs. Weasley had insisted it wouldn't be appropriate. The "Lord"'s rooms, of course, were reserved for Beth, though Hermione had no idea how much time she'd actually spent in there. Hermione knew Beth had been to Rock-on-Clyde before, but she'd lived in London with Sirius — she'd likely never spent more than a couple hours here total. Supposedly, she'd come back to sleep here at least once since the attack started, though Hermione hadn't even known she'd been in the house until after she'd already left again.

Hermione had been in the main library at the time, and as much as she was worried about Beth, she hadn't been able to summon much regret for missing her — the library was incredible. It was set up in a squat, circular tower, bookshelves wrapped all the way around the inside wall, a shallow ramp slowly spiralling up all the way to the ceiling maybe fifteen, twenty metres overhead. Hermione couldn't go all the way to the top — the more potentially dangerous a book was, the closer it was to the top, protected with successive layers of wards to keep guests or children from getting into anything questionable — but that still left thousands and thousands of books to look over. And that wasn't getting into the various artefacts on shelves or stands sealed under glass, like in an actual museum, weapons and jewellery and enchanted devices she couldn't identify, some of them looked absolutely ancient, and a rune-littered bowl she recognised as a pensieve, dozens of bottled memories on racks in expanded space fit into its plinth. Not the most impressive library Hermione had ever stepped foot in, of course, but still very nice.

(To be honest, Hermione was slightly jealous — Beth didn't even like books.)

Poking around the library was a nice distraction from worrying, or from thinking about anything more consequential than the books right in front of her. She hadn't slept very well the last few days. The room she'd been given was perfectly comfortable, of course, it was, just... She'd been anxious — by that point, they hadn't known much about the extent of the attack, and she hadn't gotten news from her parents yet — which had made getting to sleep that first night difficult. And then there were the nightmares, the inhuman howling of the reptilian aliens, the earth shaking with bombs, inexplicable bug-shaped projectiles tearing into people, and...

She'd startled awake after only a few hours, shadows jumping in the darkness, it'd taken her a moment to remember where she was — more to the point, that she wasn't back in that tube station. The feeling of blood wet and sticky on her hands, she'd needed to go to the bathroom and wash them, despite the fact that she could see they were clean just fine, it was the only thing that'd calmed her down.

Hermione didn't know how Beth did it. That one little fight in the tube station, and Hermione was... And Beth had volunteered to keep going, had all but refused to go to safety — she'd been out there for days now, doing who knew what. She was aware Beth just didn't react emotionally to some things the same way as most people — due to lingering trauma from being abused as a child, Hermione was certain — but knowing that, intellectually, and understanding it were two completely different things. It'd been days now and, just, she didn't understand how Beth could do it, that was all.

(It almost certainly wouldn't be good for her mental health in the long run, but Hermione was aware trying to talk her out of it wouldn't accomplish anything — as long as she thought she could do some good out there, that she could help, Hermione knew Beth would keep fighting. The wonderful stubborn noble idiot.)

They had gotten some news from outside, by now, if rather less than Hermione would like. Apparently, in the short span of time they'd had before the aliens reached earth, representatives to the ICW and the other big international organisations had agreed to suspend Secrecy for the duration of the crisis — since Secrecy was defined by international treaties, the leadership couldn't just declare it ended on their own — which was largely irrelevant but still interesting to know. (It seemed the leadership of the muggle and magical worlds were in close enough contact to be able to react that quickly, which Hermione hadn't been aware of.) The Ministry had declared a general state of emergency, power temporarily handed from Fudge to the Director of Law Enforcement, Susan's aunt Amelia — Hermione wasn't as informed about magical politics as she would like, but she was pretty sure this was a good thing. According to Beth's cousin Tonks, Director Bones was far more reasonable about almost everything, and even believed them about Voldemort being back, so she guessed that was something. There'd be a big important Wizengamot meeting in a couple days, where the magical government would decide on the direction they'd take going forward, so they had to wait until then for anything further.

She knew a little more about what was going on with the muggle government. The civilian and military leadership had mostly all survived, those in London safely evacuated. There'd been some concern about the Queen, currently in Cairo as part of a diplomatic tour of certain Arab countries, their primary methods of communication knocked out in the initial attack — but at some point over the last couple days, they'd passed along word through the military's back-up radio systems that the Queen was fine, they would get her back to Britain as soon as they were confident it was safe to move. (By land, or maybe sea, the risk of an aeroplane being shot down in transit too great.) The government was taking certain emergency measures that had been prepared starting back in the 50s, when people had begun to have concerns about the effects of a war fought with nuclear weapons, but never actually implemented. The civilian government did still exist, the Prime Minister still in charge, along with the rest of the Cabinet, but many other functions and services had been suspended indefinitely, even basic ones.

Including, as it happens, Parliament — with the continued landings and invasions, they had no idea when or where it would be safe for Parliament to meet again. They hadn't been officially dismissed, since the Queen wasn't in the country at the moment, but Hermione had heard that they'd been informed to consider themselves dismissed in the meantime, until the Queen could get here and formalise it. They'd organise elections again as soon as it was safe to do so, however long that was going to be.

(Hermione was pretty sure they couldn't just do that...and wouldn't that mean the PM and the Cabinet were out of a job too, since they only held those offices by virtue of also being MPs? At least, she thought the PM went out with Parliament when they were dismissed, but she didn't know for sure, it'd been ages since anything like that had actually happened. She was certain the established rules had been seriously broken at some point over the last few days, but they did kind of have more important things to worry about — Hermione wouldn't be surprised if, so long as there was a credible façade of civilian governance to prevent them from slipping into outright military dictatorship, nobody was going to make too much of a fuss.)

All kinds of other things had closed down as well. Schools, rail stations and airports, nonessential businesses and government services, even utilities completely shut down or rationed in anticipation of damage or sudden changes in supply or use — even down to individual petrol stations, pumps left inactive for all but emergency vehicles. They'd even tried to drain the fuel from petrol stations inside the targeted areas, to prevent possible secondary explosions, but with how little warning they had they hadn't gotten to very many. (Apparently there were areas around London and in Manchester and Sheffield that had been all but burned to the ground, enormous fires still ongoing.) Most government offices had closed for the first day or two, but then they'd opened up again (outside of the affected areas), the emergency radio messages calling all public employees in to work — to help with the increased workloads a lot of services would be facing due to people fleeing the major cities, but also for possible reassignment, it was a whole complicated process that was only just beginning. Though, remarkably quickly given how little notice they'd had, but Hermione guessed they had had plans set up.

According to Dad, nobody was certain when or whether they'd be getting paid — all the central offices in London had been abandoned, and the government's computer systems were down — but the vast majority of public sector employees had still turned up as requested anyway. Pitching in, and all that.

Hopefully they'd be able to get everything back into working order in a relatively short time-frame. The government had relocated to Oxford, commandeering parts of the University buildings to set up a semi-permanent headquarters — considering the Palace of Westminster and significant parts of Downing Street had been destroyed in the bombing, 'semi-permanent' was probably going to be a pretty long time. (When Hermione had been told the Houses of Parliament were gone she'd had a dizzying moment of surreality, it was, just, the entire world was slipping away, it seemed like, it was hard to believe this was really happening sometimes.) They'd been a little worried openly setting up operations would draw the aliens to them, but, however they were picking targets, they weren't going after the leadership specifically. Given their weird, biological technology, the common assumption was that they weren't listening in on radio broadcasts at all, maybe didn't even have the capacity, so it was very possible they had no idea the government had moved to Oxford in the first place. They'd been a little cautious, at first, but as their presence hadn't drawn any attention they hadn't bothered, the town practically turning into a military/refugee camp overnight.

Hermione had been back to Oxford, just yesterday, Remus apparating her over after they were sure it was safe so she could check in with her parents. The town was halfway unrecognisable, especially around the University — the buildings were the same, the contours changed only slightly by bits of communications equipment tacked on here and there, the streets empty of cars but filled with all variety of military vehicles. There were people all around, camped out under haphazard tents or just out in the open in green spaces or right on the pavement, gathered in big clumps listening to radios set up here and there or one of the places they were handing out supplies, in a queue for one thing or another (mostly to volunteer or to get information). Getting all the evacuees situated was a pretty big problem, especially since the announcement that the government had fled to Oxford had drawn a flood of volunteers from nearby counties — they'd filled up practically every available building in town, but even then hadn't had enough, the excess left to crowd the parks and streets, it was a mess.

Her parents had even taken in refugees — when Hermione had shown up, she'd been a little surprised to find a dozen-plus unfamiliar people in the house. Their house was pretty large — Hermione remembered, when they'd moved into the place when she'd been five or six, wondering what they were going to use it all for — so they had plenty of space to take people in. There being strangers in the house wasn't even an entirely new phenomenon, the guest bedrooms made available for local Party members (or associates) who needed a place to stay for a couple weeks, for whatever reason. The Party was working to organise the refugee camps as much as was possible, help to make sure everyone was getting everything they needed, so Dad had been in a position to offer their house for people with disabilities or serious medical conditions, especially children, who might want to have a doctor around, just in case. There were several families crammed into their house, Hermione had noticed at least one kid in a wheelchair (palsy, maybe), a couple blind people, one person she thought had Down's.

When they'd talked, Dad had admitted he'd stolen insulin from the hospital — he would have tried to buy it off someone, but they'd been busy enough there hadn't been anyone to talk to (and who knew how long pounds were going to be worth anything anyway) — so there must be a couple diabetics in the house, and also a kid with leukaemia. Dad wasn't an oncology expert, but he was pretty pessimistic about the boy's chances, especially given the interruption in proper care and the risk of secondary infections from the move and the somewhat crowded living conditions. He'd keep an eye on it as best he could, the parents also already informed of what to look out for, but he was worried that, by the time they noticed anything was seriously wrong, the kid would have already deteriorated enough they'd lose him. His chances were probably better in a house with a medical doctor on hand than in one of the camps around, but Dad had been careful not to make his parents any promises.

Dad had been called in to help at the local hospital — they'd already had his name on file because Mum and Dad both had admitting privileges there, in case there was an emergency they couldn't handle at the practice — in addition to his shifts there and checking in with the refugees in their house also helping the Party put together a clinic for the refugees, to take care of minor things so people with non-critical issues didn't crowd the hospital too much. He actually hadn't been at home when Hermione had shown up, the strangers in her house had pointed her toward the clinic — in the early process of being assembled at that point, tents raised from poles and curtains and bedsheets, or whatever they had on hand, washing stations jury-rigged with garden hoses. When Hermione had found him, Dad had been split between treating a teenage girl with a jagged scrape on one arm (from falling debris) and some pretty nasty smoke inhalation, and answering questions from volunteers how they wanted the clinic set up.

Seeing her father doing normal doctor stuff like looking over an injury like that wasn't that unusual. Her parents were primarily dentists, but they were proper medical doctors, and had kept their certifications in other areas up over the years — they volunteered at a local free clinic when they had the time, Hermione had been brought along now and then back when she'd been too young for them to feel comfortable leaving her home alone. (She'd spend the whole time reading quietly in a corner, but still.) Seeing him in the middle of a messy refugee camp yelling instructions to people setting up a very haphazard-looking clinic had still been somewhat surreal.

(Dad admitting to outright stealing medical supplies had also been rather surreal, but on reflection she couldn't say she was that surprised. Better they get used than sit in storage somewhere.)

Dad had been rather taken aback when she turned up — her parents hadn't known exactly when the attack had hit London, they'd hoped Hermione had already been on the way to Hogwarts. He'd been swamped with people at the time, couldn't get away to talk, so Hermione had helped out for an hour or two to get through the queue of patients. Hermione had picked up some basic first aid over the years — she even had a certificate back in her room from a class she took last summer, though she didn't know what that was worth exactly — but since Secrecy had lapsed anyway, she went ahead and just used magic for most of it. Her healing magic was pretty limited, and she didn't have potions on hand, but for the little things they were dealing with here it was better and quicker than what she'd be able to do otherwise. Most of the refugees were remarkably matter-of-fact about magic existing, but she guessed they'd had a couple days to get used to the idea by then...and magic being used to fight aliens and heal the injured was probably about as good of a reintroduction as they could have hoped for, really.

A couple of the volunteers were rather shocked by her doing magic, though — she vaguely recognised them, they must be local Communists she'd met at one point or another. (She was brought to events sometimes, but she could be pretty bad at remembering people.) Apparently, Dad hadn't mentioned his daughter was magical yet, so that'd made a little fuss.

They'd managed to get away after a little while, caught up. Hermione had managed not to cry, talking about Sam, if only barely — Dad being extremely sympathetic about it and hugging her and everything hadn't made it easier to keep her composure. Mum wasn't around, for a surprising reason: it turned out even former reservists were being called back, particularly ones who had special skills, like medical training. (Hermione's parents were very fit, but they'd had her late and were getting up in years — Mum was probably too old for them to consider calling her in in ordinary circumstances, but these weren't ordinary circumstances.) Part of the reason it was so surprising was because Hermione had...kind of forgotten Mum had been in the Army? She'd left well before Hermione had been born, and it just wasn't something that came up very often. That Mum was from a big military family, had been raised relatively conservative — only relatively conservative, since she'd joined the Army rather than get married straight out of school like a 'proper' young woman — her personal politics not swinging to the left until after she'd met Dad, was the sort of thing Hermione was vaguely aware of, but just didn't think about very often.

It helped that she didn't see much of Mum's side of the family, had barely even met her grandparents. She'd been told, just a couple years ago, that they didn't approve of Dad, for exceedingly offensive reasons — Dad had a single Algerian grandfather, and apparently that was too much colour for them.

(Which was completely absurd, not only because racism was stupid, but Hermione's great-grandfather had been an actual war hero who'd been killed in the literal French Resistance, but she guessed that was beside the point.)

Mum was off somewhere with a bunch of lapsed reservists and volunteers, getting run through some basic combat training — review for Mum, but Dad suspected it was all new for a lot of them. (Also, they were probably all half her age, but Hermione didn't doubt she was keeping up just fine. Her parents dragged her out hiking sometimes on holiday, and Hermione just about killed herself trying to keep up with them, every time.) Last Dad had heard, she'd been told to prepare herself to be sent off to one of the big alien landings in the tropics, probably Africa or India, they didn't have any detailed plans at this point. Which was a seriously scary thought, her Mum being sent off to a warzone on another bloody continent, but there was nothing Hermione could do about it. Just had to...wait, and hope everything turned out alright.

She'd gotten the impression Dad was nervous about it too, was distracting himself with work. (She suspected he wasn't sleeping much either.) Hermione's aunt Tienne had provided another excellent distraction from his worries by apparating over to update Dad on how their family were doing — Orléans hadn't been hit, so Grandmother, Tienne, and her aunt Anne were all fine; her cousin Mailys had been in Paris at the time, but she'd gotten out, had already joined them at Grandmother's house; her uncle Rémy and his family, near Nantes, were also fine; Tunis had been hit, and Tienne hadn't found her uncle Eugène and his family, she was sure they were alive but not where they were. (Tunis had been hit, their house intact but empty, Tienne assumed they'd been caught up in the evacuation.) Which was all good news, of course, but Hermione was taken aback by the detail that Tienne had apparated straight to their house in Britain from Orléans, because apparently her aunt was a mage? Since when?!

Dad said Tienne had been equally surprised that she hadn't needed to tell him about magic, because she hadn't known about Hermione, either. She'd known that, for Statute of Secrecy reasons, they hadn't been able to tell Dad's (or Mum's) family about magic — the families of muggleborns were allowed to know, but only those in their household, living with them — and it turned out it'd gone both ways, so Hermione hadn't been told that her aunt and her cousins Aimée and Théo were also all muggleborns. Not a huge surprise, she guessed, since magic tended to run in families there were pretty good odds she'd have close relatives with magic, but still, it was ridiculous. Despite being his (half-)sister, Tienne was only a few years older than Hermione, Dad had long moved out and across the Channel before she'd even been born, so he hadn't counted as a member of the household — Grandmother had wanted to tell him about it, but she hadn't wanted to risk Tienne being removed from her custody if she broke the rules too flagrantly. It was all, just, ugh, Hermione was very annoyed.

From what Tienne had told Dad, Grandmother was actually a squib, born in one of the magical noble families that had been wiped out in the Communalist Revolution in the 30s and 40s — Tienne had told him their grandparents' names, which was actually news, they'd thought their mother had been abandoned at an orphanage as an infant. (Which, she had been abandoned at an orphanage, just at a later age than she'd implied.) Dad had forgotten their given names (tired), but apparently Hermione's grandmother had been born Athénaïs d'Angeus, which was a name she recognised from History class, one of the more important French noble families on the magical side. Which was a little surreal, she still didn't know how to feel yet about having an actual connection to the magical world (if in the wrong country).

Anyway, after getting lunch and talking for a bit, Hermione had floated the possibility of staying in Oxford with him — somewhat to her surprise, he'd said it might be better for her to stay at Rock-on-Clyde. It was still possible the town would become a target, with the government and the military here, she'd be safer under the Potters' wards. Also, he'd thought she was safely away at Hogwarts, so he hadn't bothered saving her bedroom for her, they'd have to kick out the family living there for her to move back in. And he was going to be extremely busy for the foreseeable future anyway. The primary floo hub in London was down, but they didn't need to go through London to get from Wales to Oxford — if Hermione wanted to visit now and then, check in and maybe help with the refugees some, of course that'd be great, but he'd be more comfortable with her staying where she was.

So that was what she was doing. She'd sent a messenger charm to Remus, telling him she'd be taking the floo back to Rock-on-Clyde, just to test whether it worked — and she'd been here since. She hadn't gone back to Oxford today, Dad really was very busy, she didn't want to distract him too much. Instead she'd, just, poked around the library, read whatever seemed interesting.

And she...waited. For news, for the fighting to end, for some inkling of what she was supposed to be doing with herself. Just waited, and worried.

She felt like she should be doing something, she just...didn't know what. She wasn't much of a fighter — proper magical duelling required being able to whip out the right spell at a second's notice, and Hermione was too methodical, just couldn't get the hang of it — so going to help with that would be a good way to get herself killed, and she didn't know enough healing magic to be much use as a medic either. (Also, front-line medics needed to be able to fight too, she'd just get in the way.) Despite all the refugees packed into Rock-on-Clyde, there wasn't really any work to do there either — Cediny had called in elves from other Potter properties, they had it handled. Hermione did feel rather guilty about that, but most of what the elves were doing seemed to be on Cediny's initiative — Beth and Sirius had brought the evacuees here, but accommodating them was left entirely up to the elves — and she had delegated the lion's share of the cooking to refugees who knew what they were doing, their guests mostly cleaning up after themselves, so it could be worse?

(Naturally, Beth was also uncomfortable with the magically-enforced servitude house-elves were bound by — Hermione had noticed before that, when talking to Potter elves, she seemingly consciously avoided phrasing anything in a way that could be interpreted as an order, so they wouldn't be magically compelled to do as she said. Which was still not great, but... Also, Beth had hardly ever been here before, so in a way it was more like they were all guests in Cediny's house, and Beth hadn't ordered them to look after the refugees, so they weren't required to be as friendly and accommodating as they had been so far, and... It was complicated, Hermione guessed.)

She could go back to Oxford to help out, but she wasn't certain how much help she would be, exactly. Things were still a huge mess there, and she didn't have any particular skills or knowledge that would be special help, she couldn't help the feeling she'd end up just getting in the way. Maybe after things had calmed down a little bit, and... Oh, she could make some potions to stock the clinic with — muggle medical supplies were going to be relatively difficult to come by, especially a couple months down the line, but there was no reason she couldn't fill in the gaps with magical ones instead. Not just for the refugee camps at Oxford, she guessed adding to the stash the Order was keeping probably wasn't a bad idea either. And the Potters had a lot of greenhouses and stuff for potions ingredients, so she'd probably be able to get most of what she needed relatively easily. She would need to write down instructions, of course, as well as the few interactions and allergies to look out for — potions were generally less sensitive to those sorts of things and less prone to side-effects, but there were still potential problems — but they were usually rather straightforward, there was no reason muggle doctors or nurses or even volunteers should be too confused.

She quick made up a list of issues she thought the clinic Dad was setting up might need to deal with, and which kinds of potions would be useful for that; she added a note to herself to look into things she didn't know of a potion for off the top of her head, and to drop by Oxford tomorrow and ask Dad if she was missing anything. It was too late to do that now, though, so that was all she could do at the moment. And so, after such a short period of productivity, she found herself at a loss again.

It was late — though she wasn't sure how late, exactly. Ron and Ginny and Mrs. Weasley had all already gone to bed, Ron rather reluctantly. He'd stubbornly tried to stay out here with her, but he'd run out of steam only in the last half hour or so, yawningly suggesting she try to get some sleep herself. That didn't seem particularly likely — she hadn't slept well last night, and had made up for it by sneaking a nap in the early afternoon — but Ron might not realise that. (She hadn't told him about the nightmares.) It was pretty quiet here in general, the main family's rooms far enough away from the terraces and the guest hall that the activity there didn't reach them here. But it was even quieter than normal, the air still and heavy. Hermione was curled up in one of the chairs in the big salon with her Armithmancy textbook — she had the feeling Hogwarts might not be returning to normal business for a little while, so she might as well go over what she was supposed to be learning. That might be more difficult in Runes — Babbling didn't teach from a textbook, the required books for the class just references — but Hermione didn't want to bother her with questions about what they'd have been studying...maybe the Potter library would have something useful, she didn't know much at all about warding...

She'd been reading the same paragraph over and over for at least a couple minutes, not properly taking it in. Her eyes weren't quite cooperating, tired, but also she just kept getting distracted, losing her train of thought in mid-sentence. Worrying about the literal alien invasion going on, worrying about her parents, worrying about Beth. Worrying about the end of Secrecy, and the response to the invasion, international politics were about to get extremely complicated. Not to mention, worrying about Voldemort — everyone was distracted with the literal aliens, but he was still out there, and who the hell knew how he'd deal with this situation? She couldn't imagine the Death Eaters would be happy about Secrecy ending, that could get very bad, very quickly...

(Everything was a mess, and Hermione didn't know what to do about any of it.)

"Oh, Hermione."

She twitched at the unexpected nose, glanced up toward— "Beth!" Jumping out of her chair, the book toppling down to the floor (oops), she started crossing the room toward Beth, weaving impatiently through the furniture. Beth's hair was a wild tangled mess, an asymmetrical red halo around her head, the skin of her face and her arms noticeably pinkish, as though sunburned, where it wasn't darkened with ash, thin trails of a dried greenish-black fluid Hermione knew was alien blood peeking out at her collar. She looked tired, face long and blank and eyes deep and puffy, shoulders visibly slumped — but Hermione didn't see any obvious signs of any injury, just exhausted. Hermione met her with a hug, Beth twitching just a little, startled. She felt tense, but warm, and very much alive, the relief hitting hard enough Hermione felt tears prickle at her eyes.

(If Beth had gotten herself killed somewhere out there, Hermione didn't know what she would have done.)

Slowly, as though uncertain, Beth's arms found their way around her — gripping far more loosely than Hermione was, but Beth could be overly cautious about these things. Aware of how Beth could be about touching, not wanting to make her too uncomfortable, Hermione quickly let go, took a half-step back. "I was so worried, I haven't seen you since— Well. Are you okay?"

"Fine. Tired. It's late, I thought everyone would be in bed by the time I got here."

"Everyone else is. Except the twins, they're somewhere helping out." They'd spent most of the last few days helping people get out of the magical enclaves in London, sorting through half-burned-out magical districts for cursed objects and potions reagents that shouldn't be left just sitting around. Hermione hadn't seen much of them since moving to Rock-on-Clyde, but a bedroom was set aside for them anyway. "And, this isn't a I'm completely miserable but don't want to make a fuss 'fine', is it? You know I hate it when you use that word."

Beth rolled her eyes — there was less energy to the expression than usual, but it was still reassuring that she was seemingly well enough to be exasperated with Hermione's nagging. "I'm tired, and sore, but other than that. I had a broken wrist, but the healers took care of that, and gave me a potion for the burns, and..." Beth reached into a pocket, drawing Hermione's attention to how oddly she was dressed. Mage-made clothing, definitely, baggy trousers and a wrap-around short-sleeved tunic of an unfamiliar style, both in plain, undyed linen. From the spots of alien blood Hermione had noticed, she guessed Beth's clothes had been a total loss. She'd pulled a fist-sized ceramic container out of her pocket, said, "I'm supposed to rub in some of this before bed, for burns and bruises and stuff. But seriously, Hermione, I'm okay."

"Good, that's good." Hermione was tempted to ask about the broken wrist — she needed to take a mental step back and remind herself that broken bones weren't nearly as big a deal to mages — but she didn't want to bother Beth too much when she was already so exhausted.

"Mm. I was going to get something to eat and have a shower first, or a bath I guess, but I...can't remember where the kitchen is." Beth was giving the living room around them a vaguely distressed sort of look, eyes wide, lost.

That was almost a little funny, but Hermione had to agree Rock-on-Clyde was a bit much. "It's over here, come on..."

Beth was quiet on the way to the kitchen, listening to Hermione fill the air with ramble — nervous habit, couldn't help it. About her parents, what was going on in Oxford, what she knew of what the Order and the government were doing, whatever came to mind. She seemed mildly amused by the revelation that Hermione had had an aunt and cousins at Beauxbatons for years without knowing about it, which was somewhat irritating, but she guessed it was kind of ironic from a distance. Yes, everyone who'd been moved here was fine, so far as Hermione knew, she hadn't heard anything...

Normally, Beth was a very energetic person, just in general. Hermione had noticed that she often seemed to have trouble sitting still for very long at a stretch — barely a couple minutes into class and Beth's fingers would start tapping at her desk or her foot would start bouncing, uncomfortably shifting in her seat. It was noticeable in the way she walked too, though exactly what it looked like depended on her mood. If she was preoccupied with something, or angry, she tended to hunch in a little, motions quick and sharp, feet hitting the floor hard enough for her shoes to get a good clunk against the stone floors at Hogwarts. If she was in a lighter mood, there'd be a bit of a bounce to her step, her arms swinging, almost like she were skipping down the halls. Walking alongside her, Hermione sometimes felt exhausted just watching — she didn't know where Beth got the energy, honestly.

There was none of that now. There was a gingerness to Beth's pace, cautious. That wasn't entirely new, at least, almost like she'd just been to a hard quidditch practice — she had said she had bruises, so that explained that. But even then, normally her characteristic energy would still be there, barely contained, making Beth seem stiff, strangely on-edge. (People who didn't know her as well sometimes misinterpreted it as concealed upset or anger.) This time, she just seemed...slow. Limp and distracted and just...tired, Hermione guessed. She'd seen Beth sleepy before, when she had nightmare episodes, but this was...more than that. She didn't think she'd ever seen Beth this absolutely exhausted before — she even completely missed Hermione asking a question once, only half paying attention...

Hermione didn't realise she was biting her lip until she noticed the twinge of pain, forced herself to stop.

The kitchen was relatively large, but compact, cabinets and multiple work surfaces densely packed into the space. The ceiling was somewhat low, which might ordinarily make it seem a bit claustrophobic, but the greyish stone of this area of the building only made up the floor and three walls, the ceiling and fourth wall glass — above looking up at the sky, the curve of the library tower visible to one side, ahead opening into a sizeable greenhouse, filled with berries and herbs and the like. The sky was fully dark by now, clouds mostly covering the speckle of stars, lights from the kitchen slashing through the greenhouse, most of the contents hidden by multiple layers of knobby shadows.

Hermione started to lead the way to the pantry when she was startled by a little pop of house-elf apparation. "Hello Beth, Miss Hermione. Are either of you wanting something?" One of the reasons Hermione didn't know how to feel about the elves here was that they certainly looked better than elves she'd seen elsewhere — their clothes were nicer, clearly hand-made with care, and... Well, she assumed the rich greenish skin tone was healthy for house-elves, without the hint of a greyish tint she'd seen on some of the Hogwarts elves. (Of course, that they were healthy and happy didn't necessarily mean anything, but it was easier to convince herself that they didn't need or want her help.) This was, um, Tisme, Hermione thought, one of the younger women, Cediny's...niece, maybe? Hermione mostly tried to pay attention to eye colour to identify them — Tisme's was a fiery orange — since they had way more variety than in humans, but that wasn't always reliable.

"No, that's fine, I was just going to...I don't know, make a sandwich or something." She gave the stovetop a somewhat sceptical look — it was magical, the buttons and switches completely unfamiliar. "I don't know, is there bacon in here somewhere?"

Getting a sandwich together was maybe a little more complicated than Beth had assumed — loaves of bread sold pre-sliced were very much a muggle thing, and the bacon didn't come in a package all sliced up nice either — so Beth, looking slightly exasperated, ended up accepting Tisme's help making her dinner. Hermione had eaten... That had to be over five hours ago by now, she hadn't realised it was so late. Anyway, she didn't need a whole thing, but she did ask Tisme if she could go pick herself a handful of berries — Tisme summoned a little bowl out of one of the cabinets, lights in the greenhouse turning on with a snap of her fingers, go right ahead. Apparently their growth was magically accelerated, she didn't need to worry about using up berries they wanted to use for something else, which was interesting. She guessed they'd have to use some kind of fertiliser, they'd quickly exhaust the soil otherwise, there must be potions for that...

By the time Hermione returned, Beth and Tisme were at the stove, standing side-by-side muttering to each other. The stove was at a height that didn't seem convenient for either of them, Beth needing to lean over somewhat, Tisme on a little step-stool. It took several minutes, the two of them bouncing to this thing or that, Tisme occasionally explaining where something was or how one thing or another worked, but eventually Beth had her sandwich, plus a scoop of beans and mushrooms in gravy — Hermione suspected Tisme had pushed the beans on her, because elves could be naggy like that. (Like Mrs. Weasley, but much less abrasive.) It was a somewhat odd sandwich, buttered bread and bacon and strips of what Hermione thought was leftover baked chicken (or maybe duck) and slices of cucumber and several herb leaves from the greenhouse and a layer of crisps. (Made out of carrots and turnips or whatever was on hand instead of potatoes, they did have a bit of extra vegetable flavour to them but not so strong it was distracting.) Tisme had mentioned cheeses, but Beth had turned them down, said something about her stomach not being up to it at the moment. Which sounded slightly absurd to Hermione, she meant, maybe the rest of that sandwich would be fine, if it weren't for the bloody cucumbers — she had no idea what the hell those were doing there. Beth's taste could be a bit odd sometimes, so it wasn't the first time Hermione found herself looking askance at something she was eating, but still, cucumbers? on a bacon sandwich? Bloody weirdo...

Tisme gave Beth a funny look when she asked if she could just have a glass of water, Hermione suggested she try some of the cider instead. The Potters — by which Hermione meant an orchard Beth owned — actually made the stuff for sale, but they kept some too, and it was pretty good. Beth muttered something about falling asleep in the bath again, but she accepted the cider, and they sat down at a little table in a corner of the kitchen.

Between bites of her odd sandwich, Beth filled Hermione in on what she'd been up to since the tube station, what was going on out there in general. Beth had been to half the Continent, it seemed like — Rotterdam, Paris, Moscow, Istanbul, Barcelona. She didn't even remember where all she'd been, Sirius would just apparate her somewhere and they'd help with evacuations, clearing rubble, hunting down alien landing parties or flying against their fighter planes. (Not "planes", Hermione guessed, since they'd come down from orbit they must be some kind of spacecraft.) She'd actually been part of the escort getting the PM and the royal family out of London, and by the sound of it had played a significant part in them getting through it alive — Hermione joked that that was the sort of thing that people ended up with knighthoods for, Beth had just rolled her eyes...and then said she technically already had two of those, which was true, Hermione had forgotten about that. Beth's description of the aliens, just, firing on a crowd of defenceless captives in Manchester was horrifying, but Beth hardly seemed to notice, voice flat and eyes blank, focussed more on her sandwich than the story she was telling.

Beth was lucky she'd gotten out of the big alien ship with only a broken wrist — if Sirius hadn't done an insanely reckless apparation to come back and get her, she probably wouldn't have made it out in time. She was remarkably matter-of-fact about that too, of course, Hermione didn't really expect anything else.

(Beth could have died, easily, and Hermione wouldn't even have known about it until someone thought to tell her.)

Hermione was rather relieved to hear that the fighting seemed to be mostly done now. Or, Europe was through the worst of it, at least — they'd managed to fight off the initial attacks in the north, but the aliens had made much larger landings in a few places around the equator, they still had to deal with those. Beth didn't have any better idea than Hermione what was going on down there. Long-range communications were still down — they were slowly putting together a network using magical means, but it would take time to get detailed updates from outside of Europe — so they had very little idea what exactly the landings were composed of, nor why the aliens seemed so focussed on the equatorial region. If they intended primarily to wipe out those most prepared to resist and take over the planet, one would think they'd focus on temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere — Brazil and India were significant regional powers, of course, but nobody would try to argue they had the same capacity to fight back as, say, the United States or Russia. That power difference didn't exist in the same way on the magical side, true, but still, Hermione wondered if they knew anything about Earth at all. Beth admitted that they'd seemed blindsided by magic, and didn't do so great against muggle weapons either, so...

Beth floated the possibility that they'd mostly gone around the equator because there was something they wanted there. Maybe natural resources — nobody was certain, but it did seem likely that their landings had been aimed at tropical rainforests — or maybe the climate there was simply their preference. It made sense that, assuming they hadn't started out taking the humans seriously as a threat (which seemed like a pretty good bet to Beth), that they would send most of their stuff at the thing they wanted most. All their technology seemed to be alive, so, maybe they needed a tropical environment to grow them? They might be building factories down there, or whatever the proper term should be — that was Beth's theory, but they'd find out when they got there and saw for themselves.

Which was actually a good thought, Hermione had to try not to show her surprise. People tended to underestimate Beth's intelligence — not least of all Beth herself — she didn't want to give the wrong impression.

"You plan on going. To help root them out." It wasn't really a question.

Beth nodded. "If they'll let me, I guess. Sirius won't try to stop me, he gets it, but... Well, I'm technically of age in magical law, but that's just because magical Britain is fucked up, you know."

Hermione was very much aware of that — technically, the closest equivalent to legal majority in magical Britain was the age of contract, which was thirteen. There were thresholds above that, but they were based on educational qualifications, not a person's actual age. For example, the restrictions on underage use of magic defined "underage" as people who hadn't yet gotten their OWLs (or equivalent)...and also only in muggle areas, but Hermione had already worked herself up enough over that. (The Ministry could track where magic was cast, but not necessarily by whom, and were primarily concerned with the maintenance of Secrecy — so magic-raised students, living in magical enclaves with magical guardians, could practise magic over the summers, but muggleborns couldn't without risking expulsion, so ended up falling behind their magic-raised peers.) Theoretically, if one finished their OWLs at thirteen, they were no longer covered by underage restrictions, and could get an apparation licence and everything. And now that Secrecy had been well and truly shattered, Hermione guessed that restriction didn't matter anymore anyway.

It was called the "age of contract" because it was the age at which magical law recognised people as competent enough to consent to a contract. And that meant any contract — employment, debts, marriage, anything...including something in magical law called "corporal indenture", which was was basically slavery.

Yes, thirteen-year-olds selling themselves into slavery was perfectly legal in magical Britain — there were legal brothels in London that made contracts with people that young, legally. It was extremely messed up.

(Magical Britain needed a proper revolution, badly.)

So, technically, Beth was a legal adult on the magical side, despite being barely fifteen. So, theoretically, she could join whatever group they'd be putting together to fight the aliens in the tropics. Or at least there would be no legal reason she couldn't — Hermione wouldn't be surprised if they wanted volunteers to have their OWLs, at least. And this group would probably be working with muggle governments, who had their own laws on the matter, and might object to their allies using literal child soldiers.

But then, they were being invaded by aliens — maybe people would be willing to overlook it, under the circumstances. Especially since Beth was exceptionally talented for her age, and would be able to catch up quickly, thanks to being an omniglot. Maybe not so early in the crisis, but if things got worse before they got better...

She didn't want to think about... Mum was already going to be sent off to another continent to fight actual aliens, and that was bad enough. And Beth was only barely fifteen, she shouldn't have to do this, there was no reason she...

Hermione didn't want to lose either of them, but she definitely didn't want to lose them both.

"I really wish you wouldn't."

Poking idly at the remains of her beans, Beth glanced at her, the barest hint of a smile. "Yeah, I'd guess not. I know you don't like it when I get in trouble."

"This is so much worse than that. This isn't... I'm serious, you could die."

"Believe it or not, I am aware of that." For some inexplicable reason, she almost sounded amused.

"It's not funny, Beth! I don't know—" Hermione cut herself off, realising going down that tangent wouldn't do any good. She knew why Beth didn't take her safety seriously — the Dursleys, to put it briefly — and forcing Beth into an uncomfortable conversation about that just now was only going to make her even more stubborn about it. "I'm scared you're going to get killed out there, thousands of miles away, and there'll be nothing I can do about it! Why is that so hard to understand?"

Frowning down at her beans, Beth muttered, "I do understand. It just doesn't change anything. I'm not... I can't just sit here, and do nothing. I would hate myself for the rest of my life, I can't."

"There are other things that need to be done! I went to Oxford yesterday, and there's plenty of work to go around, getting all the refugees situated and— We don't have to worry about Secrecy anymore, so there are all kinds of potions and enchantments and wards people could use, I was just starting to look into all that. And with the damage to big cities, and all the people made homeless, there's a tonne of reconstruction we're going to have to do, that'll be going on for years, and having magic will make that all a lot easier. International trade is going to, just, collapse, I'm sure, so we'll have to worry about food and medicine and who knows what else, and magic can help with all that too, and—"

"Maybe there are a lot of other things, but I'm not good at other things, Hermione!" Beth dropped her spoon — rattling against the plate, getting gravy all over the handle — both hands coming up to rub at her face. Her breath thick and shaky, god, she looked so tired, Hermione's heart clenching, she had to resist the urge to reach out to her. (Beth didn't tend to react well to unexpected touching.) After a moment, she said, "People are dying out there."

"I know that."

"I don't think you do. I mean, obviously you do, like, factually, a thing you know, but..." Letting out a heavy sigh, Beth dropped her hands, showing the red in her eyes. Staring right at Hermione, strained and intense, she asked, "Do you have any idea how many dead bodies I've seen these last few days?"

"...No." She'd said she and Sirius, between attacks, had helped with evacuations and freeing people from ruined buildings — Hermione would guess it was a lot. Maybe literally hundreds. "I'm sorry you had to see..."

"It's not about— That's not what I'm saying. Not really. Maybe you can... I can copy information out of people's heads, but that doesn't mean I'm any better at using it than they are. Half the time I don't even realise I know something until someone reminds me, I'm not— Sure, I'm an omniglot, but I'm still me, you know. I can learn stuff quickly, but knowing a bunch of things doesn't stop me from being a big dumb idiot."

"You're not stupid, Beth," Hermione insisted, for what felt like the millionth time — she really hated it when she talked about herself like that.

"Maybe not, but... Maybe you can help with all that other stuff, but, did you forget how shite I am with potions and enchanting? Like, I can know exactly what I'm supposed to do, but I still fuck it up, I don't know why I'm—" Beth cut herself off, leaning over the table, her hands again rubbing at her face. At least in part, Hermione suspected, to hide tears.

Hermione guessed she wasn't...entirely wrong about that. Beth was a natural with charms, but potions and enchanting were both a different kind of magic. It took prior planning, and a meticulous attention to detail, and patience, that just didn't seem to come easily to Beth — her seeming inability to sit still for more than a couple minutes at a stretch didn't exactly suit her to a long brewing process, or delicately carving rune after rune. Hermione couldn't count the times Beth had gotten visibly, terribly frustrated in Potions class. Professor Snape's condescending, abrasive tone didn't help — that man had an uncanny ability to strike right at Beth's sensitive areas with laser precision with only a single flatly-delivered sentence — but Beth had complained that she could have the formula bloody memorised, know the theory of how it was supposed to work — sometimes better than Hermione, thanks to the encyclopaedic memory of attributes and interactions omniglottalism allowed — but still not be able to get the potion to come out right. She just didn't have the temperament for it, she always got impatient and rushed, or her attention would lapse, ruining potion after potion, time after time. And her few attempts at enchanting weren't much more successful.

So, she was right about that part, maybe — but that didn't mean she had to— There were other options, there had to be other options. "Reconstruction, then, that takes a lot of charmwork. Hell, you could swing a hammer if it comes down to it."

Beth's lips twitched. "Yeah, it takes charmwork — and also enchanting, not to mention training I don't have. And, it's kind of a finicky thing, I don't know if... At least with a potion, the worst I have to worry about is the thing blowing up in my face — I'd rather not be responsible for someone's house falling down around their ears."

"I'm not saying you'd be designing things yourself, someone would be there to tell you what to do."

"Still, it's not..." She sighed, her eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a second. Picking at a couple bits that'd fallen out of her sandwich, moodily glaring down at her plate, she said, "I'm not good at anything else. Maybe I could help with reconstruction, sure, just another hand holding a wand. But battlemagic is something I'm good at. Like, really, not just for my age — I fought with a lot of grown-up mages all around Europe today, so I know that for a fact. Not, like, the best or anything, but, definitely better than average. I took down that first flying thing, clearing out those landings in Manchester and Rotterdam, I barely got hit the whole time, people around me dropping one by one. The big one over Paris, it was my idea — I had help, but I was first in line, blowing the hole open and getting inside, who knows how long it would have kept firing on the city if I hadn't been there. Someone would have come up with it eventually, but... I'm good in a fight, Hermione, I don't know why I'm... It's just what I'm good at.

"Sure, maybe I could stay here in Britain, and help with...whatever. But... Today, if I hadn't helped, how many more people might have died? Dozens? hundreds? Maybe thousands, with Paris. If I stayed— If I was working on reconstruction or whatever, sure, it's helping, but every day, I would wake up and think... Maybe, there's someone out there who's not quite as good as me, maybe they're short one more person than they would be. And so maybe they can't do as well, or as much. And I would wonder, how many people are dying somewhere out there, right now, that wouldn't be if I were there, instead of here? I'm not saying I could, like, fight off all the aliens all by myself, or whatever, but... This is something I can do, I'm good at this — and if I don't do it, if I stay here, people will die, people who didn't have to.

"I know you, and Ron and the Weasleys, and Sirius, I know you'll all be worried. I know I could die, and you'll all be hurt by it. But how many lives is that worth, Hermione? Hundreds? thousands? Can you tell me, honestly, that it'd be worth it? Because, I'm sorry, but I don't think it is."

...No. No, Hermione couldn't tell her that. She didn't even really believe that Beth not going wouldn't mean more people dying — she might have said that kind of talk was completely absurd before, she was only one fifteen-year-old girl, but, well, she didn't think Beth was lying about these last couple days. So. She couldn't guess how much of a difference it would make, but, some, surely. Part of her kind of wanted to say that, yes, the lives of hundreds of strangers she'd never meet thousands of miles away were worth less than Beth being here and safe, but she seriously doubted Beth would believe she meant it — and if she did, she'd probably just think less of Hermione for it.

That was just...not fair. That wasn't fair at all.

Hermione wasn't consciously aware of when her hand had found Beth's. She hadn't pulled away, as she often did when people grabbed at her without warning — gripping back, not painfully tight, but noticeable. Blinking down at the table, Hermione struggled to control her breath, her own chest trying to strangle it out of her, cleared her throat. "Dammit, Beth, why do you– why do you have to have a good point?"

Her lips twitched. "Lucky for you, it doesn't happen very often."

"Oh shut up, you." With her free hand, Hermione quick wiped at her eyes, cleared her throat again. She wasn't going to break down over this, nothing had even happened yet, Beth was going to be fine. She'd made it through these last few days, hadn't she? "I'm going to miss you." Because she'd likely be gone for months at a time, Hermione meant — she refused to consider the odds of Beth never coming back at all.

"I'm not going anywhere yet. We don't even know what this is going to look like yet, it'll be a couple weeks at least."

"And what if whoever's in charge does decide you're too young to take along?"

Beth shrugged. "Then I'll fly there myself — I might have to wander around for a little bit, but Firebolts are fast, I'll find the warzone eventually. I'm not just going to sit here, no matter what happens. I couldn't live with myself."

Despite how miserable this all was, the possibility of losing Beth hanging over her like a dark cloud, could barely breathe, Hermione still felt an amused scoff force itself up her chest. "You're bloody impossible, Beth."

Smirking over at her, the expression losing some of its depth from exhaustion, Beth drawled, "Believe it or not, I am aware of that."

Even local authorities have managed little more than rough estimates, given the chaos of the time — conditions on the ground would not improve to a state to permit a thorough accounting for another three years. The best scholarship available suggests that, during Zero Day alone, between the slaughter around the primary landing zones and the strikes at urban centres, perhaps a hundred twenty million people were killed, representing as much as two percent of the total population. In the first week.

And those casualties were only going to mount as the weeks dragged on — Zero Day might have ended in victory, but the Battle for the Earth had just begun.

— Garm Kelchis Dance, Homeworld Found: An Introduction to Dimitra and Its People
excerpt from Chapter III.6, "The Yuuzhan Vong Invasion"

Chapter Text

8th September 1995 (63:5:22)
— Contact plus 00.00.06:00.30

Beth had seen pictures of the Wizengamot Chamber, though she'd never actually been here before. It was sort of like a full circular amphitheatre, but instead of a bunch of benches in rose there were three tiers of desks, all facing the open floor at the middle. There was technically a fourth tier, on the other side of a barrier behind the third tier, filled with rows of armchairs all the way around the Chamber, but those were for first- and second-class members of the Order of Merlin, more like an observation balcony than a proper part of the Hall.

(Apparently one of the privileges of being in the Order of Merlin was getting to observe the Wizengamot, and sometimes even comment, which didn't sound like much of a reward to Beth.)

The whole structure was made out of intensely white marble, tiny glinting lines of gold framing the tiles, more gold leaf in complicated curly patterns covering a lectern at one side — the Chief Warlock's podium, elevated above a single overlong table all the Department Directors sat at. All the white and gold was hard on the eyes, glaring under the sun let in by an enchanted ceiling, a lot like the one at Hogwarts. There was less warping of the image of the sky around the edges, the view clearer, but this one was only, like, three hundred years old or so, less than that even, they must have made improvements. It was a somewhat cloudy day, but still enough that the glare was uncomfortable. Thankfully, there was other stuff to break it up somewhat — all the Noble Houses got a desk on the tiers, and they got to design their own, so they came in a wide variety of materials, colours, and styles.

The Potter seat was on the third tier, maybe forty-five degrees around from the Chief Warlock's podium. (Meaning she was in the Government seats, which was a little annoying, because she was pretty sure she didn't like the people in charge much.) The desk was made out of a rich, rosey wood, like all the wood parts in the family rooms at Rock-on-Clyde, on the corners facing the floor ceramic figurines of rearing hippogriffs in red and white — Beth had noticed Potters must have a thing for hippogriffs, since she'd started paying attention she saw them everywhere on Potter stuff. Not saying that was a problem, she did like hippogriffs, just, didn't know what that was about.

Actually, thinking about it for a second, she did know what that was about. Godric Gryffindor had become famous for, in big mediaeval battles, flying on the back of a hippogriff over an attacking army to hit them from behind, on his own like a complete badass — it was even where the name "Gryffindor" came from, a French translation of a nickname he was given at the time — so hippogriffs were very commonly used as a symbol of Gryffindor, both the original bloke and the (now extinct) Noble House he'd started. The Potters were one of the families who claimed descent from Gryffindor...though, Beth was pretty sure she (and like half the nobility, according to Hermione) was descended from all the Founders, Gryffindor was just the one they liked best. So, that was probably why all the hippogriffs.

There were three chairs behind the desk, made out of the same wood with padded white upholstery. There must be cushioning charms or something, the chair was far more comfortable than the thin padding made it look — which made sense, since old people would have needed to sit in them for extended periods of time. One chair in the middle had a somewhat taller back, with glinting gold tracery around the edges, the other two still nice chairs but rather less fancy looking. The big chair was meant for the head of the family, the other two for, like, heirs and assistants and things.

Right now, Beth was sitting in the big chair, feeling kind of silly, and Dumbledore was in one of the normal ones, just to her left. They'd arrived somewhat early, not wanting to be hung up by people too much, drawn into who knew how many uncomfortable conversations along the way — and, despite the importance of the day, and all the crazy shite going on all over the world, Beth was still getting very bored.

The room was very noisy, hundreds of people chattering away, shouting over each other just to be heard. The desks were mostly all filled now, people finding their way to their seats — one each for the fifty-nine Noble Houses, their Wizengamot representative plus one or two relatives and/or assistants, and then the Minister and the twelve Department Directors, plus their assistants swarming around the over-long table, so that was a couple hundred people right there. And the seats for Order of Merlin members were packed. According to Dumbledore, that wasn't normal, on an average day you'd just see a few people, maybe a couple dozen when there was important business, it only got nearly this full when something really, really big was happening — Beth would guess an alien invasion was big enough. And then on top of all that, there were also people crowded into the floor at the middle of the Hall, completely hiding the triskelion mosaic under their feet. Well, not completely, there were only like a dozen people and the floor was bigger than that, but that was still way more than normal.

Sirius was down there — he'd need to petition to be allowed back to his seat, at the beginning of the meeting — alongside unfamiliar people in a mix of muggle and magical dress. A few people were definitely muggles, in muggle-style suits and everything, flanked by a couple bodyguards in the same black uniforms Beth remembered from the mages flying cover for the government convoy leaving London — she was a little surprised they were still armed, handguns visible at their hips and one with an actual bloody sword, but she guessed it wasn't like those were any more dangerous than wands, and practically everybody had one of those. Talking with the muggles were a rather odd-looking couple, a blonde woman in a plain knee-length dress, maybe thirty at the oldest, a taller East Asian man looming over her shoulder, old enough his hair had started to frost at the edges, dressed up in colourful robes in an unfamiliar style. (Old-fashioned magical Chinese formal dress, Beth assumed, but she wasn't an expert.) The impression she got, watching, was that the blonde woman was definitely in charge, which seemed a bit incongruous, given the contrast in their clothing and age. Whatever.

The oddest in their group was a black-haired young woman, looking perfectly unremarkable in plain black trousers and tunic. Beth wouldn't have given her a second glance if there wasn't a faint tingle in her scar every time Beth looked at her — pretty subtle, numb, almost like the pins and needles of a limb fallen asleep. She had no idea what it meant, at all.

Her scar had been quiet for the last week or so, ever since hurting really bad once during the alien attack. Somehow different from the pain she'd gotten there before, almost... Most of the time, it almost felt like she was being stabbed in the forehead with a hot poker, but this time it'd been cold — still sharp, but not like stabbing, more like a knife made out of liquid nitrogen or some shite slicing along her scar, and cutting out... She didn't know, she had no idea what it meant. The pain had been bad enough that she'd practically passed out — not literally, but she'd collapsed useless for a couple minutes — but luckily she and Sirius had been helping with evacuations at the time, so the distraction hadn't gotten her killed. And after a couple minutes, it'd stopped, and she'd been...fine — a little numb and tingly, sort of like now, but the pain had, just, stopped, without much of a lingering ache at all. Which, not complaining, but still bloody weird. In fact, her scar had been so quiet since then that she'd kind of completely forgotten about it. There was sort of a lot going on, so.

Until seeing this woman in the Wizengamot, and getting that odd uncomfortable tingle.

Since Dumbledore was right here anyway, she'd told him about it — she thought he might be a little annoyed about not being informed earlier that her scar had done something new and strange, but he didn't say anything about it (there was a lot going on, okay!) — but it didn't sound like he had any better idea what it was about than she did. No, she hadn't had any nightmares to do with Voldemort since, like she'd said, it was very quiet these days. (Again, not complaining, just weird.) Beth could tell Dumbledore thought that woman down there was suspicious, but he couldn't tell her anything about her. Besides that, if Beth's scar was tingling around her, she was probably worth keeping an eye on.

Gee, thanks Headmaster, never would figured that one out for herself...

There was even a goblin down there — standing ram-rod straight, out of the way to one side, the edges of polished bronze-ish plate armour not quite hidden by a bright red robe shining in the sunlight, a spear longer than he was tall held in one hand, point over his head and butt resting on the tile floor. Dumbledore said the people down there all had business of one kind or another with the Wizengamot, petitioners they'd hear in short order once the meeting began. Presumably the muggles were here to represent the UK, who the magical government would have to work closely with going forward, and the goblin was probably carrying a message from his government. Those (plus Sirius) made sense, but Dumbledore didn't know who the blonde and the Asian man were.

She guessed she'd found out soon. Just as she was wondering to herself how much fucking longer this was going to be, there was a low boom-boom-boom, the entire room seeming to ring like a gong. The people who weren't already sitting down (or standing on the floor to wait their turn) scrambled to their seats, as a pair of Hit Wizards made up in Wizengamot purple pushed the big, gold-encrusted marble doors ponderously closed. By the time they clunked into place, everyone had found their seats — an expectant quiet fell over the room, broken by a low sussuring of movement, people whispering to their neighbours.

They weren't left in suspense very long before a vaguely familiar woman got up to the Chief Warlock's podium. Dumbledore had been expelled from the position earlier in the summer, but they hadn't actually filled it yet — apparently a lot of politics went into it, it was a whole thing. In the meantime, the Director of Wizengamot Administration Services (something Tugwood, Beth forgot) had been filling in. But, when the invasion started, the magical government had declared a state of emergency, which put the Director of Law Enforcement in control of the Ministry and also the Wizengamot. Susan's aunt Amelia was somewhat short, as a lot of purebloods tended to be, but thick and sturdy, in the way of someone who was extremely physically fit, short straw-blonde hair over a square-jawed face. Not super pretty or anything, but she definitely gave an impression of another kind.

That impression being that this woman could definitely kick all their arses, which she guessed was probably the sort of thing you wanted from a wartime leader.

Beth twitched when Bones started speaking — her voice was sharp and booming, much...bigger than she'd expected from such a relatively small woman. She said something about the session being started, blah blah, after barely a sentence moved on to an invitation to address any procedural issues before the Council. Beth had the feeling there was supposed to be more ceremony to the beginning of a session, but she wasn't really surprised that Bones had just blown straight through it. Sirius took that as his cue, slipping out of the group on the floor and waving for her attention. Blah blah, Sirius Black, claiming my seat, blah.

Unsurprisingly, there was a bit of a reaction to that, but Bones silenced the Hall with a combination of sharp glares and snapping at rowdy Lords to shut up. The whole process from there was very quick. Bones explained what her own investigation into the matter since Sirius's escape had turned up — apparently, despite Fudge having his head up his arse about the whole thing, Bones had been quietly looking into it on her own time, because not everyone in the magical government was incompetent — and that Sirius had already been given amnesty by the UK. At a wave from Bones, one of the government people — Director Fox, of the Department of Mysteries (Beth didn't know what that was) — got to his feet, holding some...crystal pyramid device...thing. Bones would ask Sirius a question, Sirius would answer; the pyramid would glow from within, mostly blue or green, and Fox would just say truth every time. Some kind of lie-detecting thing, Liz guessed.

As the questions went on, there was an increase in muttering from the crowd — Sirius's story was being verified as true at every step, so, obviously someone being falsely imprisoned for a dozen years and then made public enemy number one despite being completely innocent was kind of a big deal. Once they got through the story, Bones waved Fox down again, and declared that, under her authority as the Director of Law Enforcement, she was summarily voiding his conviction in absentia for crimes committed in November of '81, as well as dismissing the charges filed after his escape from Azkaban in July of '93 — obviously, escaping from prison when you were innocent was perfectly reasonable, still holding him responsible for that would be silly. And that was that, Sirius was a free man.

Well. That was easy.

Sirius offered to reimburse Hogwarts for the property damage he'd caused trespassing there back in Beth's third year — and also the Weasleys', for accidentally injuring Ron — but Bones said that was a matter for him to discuss with the parties involved. Sirius was led through a few quick oaths, which all the members of the Wizengamot had to swear — Beth hadn't, but just because she'd made Dumbledore her representative here shortly after he'd been fired as Chief Warlock, and he was sitting right there. Once that was done, he sauntered over to a desk in the first tier, made out of shiny pure black stone, swished down to a seat. Aside from the government table, most of that first tier was empty, only a few of the desks occupied. The Most Ancient Houses, apparently — they kept the seats for the Seventeen Founders of the Wizengamot in place, despite most of them having died out centuries ago.

Once that was done, one of the mages in the black uniforms — the one with the sword, the sheath polished red and gold — stepped forward, coming to a sharp halt straight in front of the podium. "My name is William Langley. My uncle was Lord Edward, of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Langley — as the sole remaining heir, I claim my right to the seat."

Oh, well, speaking of the Seventeen Founders...

There was a bit of hubbub at that, people whispering to their neighbours or shouting out objections. Bones waved them down again, looked over at someone in the government seats. "Caradog."

"Yes, Director." A middle-aged blond man stood up, held out a hand behind him — an aide handed him an old leather-bound book, the man flipped it open. "According to our records, Lord Edward Langley took his own life in the winter of Sixteen Eighty-Seven, aggrieved by the murder of his family by followers of the Dark Lady Frances Cromwell some decades before. With his death, the House was declared vacant."

Langley nodded. "Yes, Director, I believe that is correct."

"That was three hundred years ago. If you truly are Lord Edward's nephew, how do you yet live?"

There was an odd ripple across Langley's features, and he was, abruptly, an entirely different man. He'd been pretty plain and unremarkable-looking before, and he still was now — just a different unremarkable-looking, nose a little longer and his hair gone darker. "My mother — Bellatrix Eudora Langley, née Black — was a metamorph, and I inherited the talent."

"Bellatrix Black?" called out someone in the Hall, Beth didn't see who.

Langley glanced in that direction, just for a second before turning back to the government seats. "Bellatrix is a common name in the House of Black. My mother was named for her grandmother, the Chief Warlock's daughter."

"That is, the Chief Warlock Henry Black," the man from before asked. "He was your great-grandfather?" That was kind of a big deal, Beth guessed — Henry Black was super famous, it was a whole thing.

"Yes, Director."

The man waved at one of the aides, leaned in to mutter something. There was a brief conversation going back and forth, before the Director nodded, turned back to Langley. "Do you have any documentation to verify your claim?"

"Yes, Director. May I?" he asked, reaching under his uniform jacket. The Director — Wizengamot Administration Services, Beth thought, this would be that Tugwood bloke — waved Langley forward, so he approached, fishing a tube the length of his forearm out of an extended pocket. For storing scrolls, Beth knew, she'd seen the like before. This one looked to be made out of...ceramic, maybe, but it looked old, the previously white material faded tannish, chipped in places. Of course, it might well be three-hundred-odd years old, so.

Tugwood leaned over the table to take the tube from Langley and, gently, screwed off the cap. Several pages of fragile-looking parchment were delicately removed from the tube, splayed over the table in front of Tugwood. He looked over them for a minute, fingers following his eyes from one sheet to the next. Finally, he nodded, started carefully packing the papers up again. "I'm satisfied, Director," he said to Bones. "My Department will not contest Lord William's accession."

There was another wave of muttering at that — mages could be ridiculous about their history, and one of the famous Founders of the Wizengamot had basically just come back from the dead — but Bones waved them down again. With hardly any ceremony at all, as though nothing out of the ordinary were happening, Bones led Langley through the same oaths she'd given Sirius just a couple minutes before. Once that was done, Langley stepped up to a relatively plain wooden desk in the bottom tier, a curly pattern carved into the edges Beth couldn't make out from here, and sat down. The muggles actually went with him, apparently he'd be speaking for them when the time came — there weren't enough chairs, he conjured a couple for the muggles, the other uniformed mages standing looming over their shoulders.

The Hall was still filled with chatter, people not done gossipping about that development yet, when the woman who made Beth's scar tingle stepped forward. "My name is Phoebe Ramsey. I claim the Noble and Most Ancient House of Gaunt, by right of my grandmother, Merope Riddle, née Gaunt."

And there was another storm of muttering in the crowd — Beth heard a rustling from close next to her, Dumbledore leaning forward on his elbows against the desk, long wrinkly fingers folded under his chin. The name Langley hadn't really meant anything to her, but she did know the Gaunts, from History class. (Well, Hermione talking to her about what they were supposed to learn in History class, technically.) The name had only come into use in the last five centuries or so, but modern scholars posthumously applied it to the family going back way before then. They were one of the Founders of the Wizengamot, yes, one of the few Gaelic families invited, the ruling family of a little petty kingdom somewhere in Leinster at the time. They were locally influential, one of the more powerful magical families in Ireland, but didn't have much national importance for most of history. The major exception was Ignatius Gaunt, one of the more successful Dark Lords in British history, back in the 12th and 13th Centuries — he managed to conquer, like, half of the Isles, ruling from Hogwarts itself. He'd been something of a crazy bastard, supposedly had multiple basilisks, it'd taken a big damn army of mages and muggles together to finally put him down.

(Some of the details she knew about Ignatius Gaunt, like the multiple basilisks, Beth had learned from Sirius instead — the person who'd led the big damn army was called Gwenffrewi of Aberdyfi, who happened to be a member of the House of Black, and one of only a few ancestors of his Sirius was actually proud of.)

But anyway, the Gaunts had gone on, finally losing a large fraction of their people and influence in the early to mid-17th Century. They'd been important in the fight against the Cromwells, they'd been a big help but had gotten their arses thoroughly kicked in the process. The Gaunts who remained had strongly opposed Secrecy, and had gotten their arses kicked again by the other noble families forcing them to fall in line. Even after that, they'd stubbornly refused to recognise the authority of the Ministry, which had led to a little mini-war between the Gaunts and the Department of Law Enforcement — by the end, the previously powerful family was reduced to a single household, most of their properties seized by the Wizengamot and handed off to parties injured in the conflict or sold for profit. The Gaunts never had recovered after that, pulling further and further away from the other magical families and increasingly sinking into poverty, until they stopped showing up for Wizengamot meetings entirely, back in the early 19th Century, and faded into obscurity. The family finally being declared extinct in the 1960s was barely even a footnote, they'd long ceased being important to anybody by then.

Pretty much the only time Beth heard anyone refer to the Gaunts these days was in the form of incest jokes — apparently, they hadn't just been isolating themselves from the nobility, but literally everyone...meaning they'd proceeded to fuck their own cousins, or even siblings. In at least one known case Beth had heard about, a Corvin Gaunt (the last Gaunt to attend Hogwarts) had had children with his own daughter, it was very gross. It might have been a respectable name once upon a time, but it definitely wasn't anymore.

Claiming those creepy fuckers as your family seemed like it'd be really embarrassing, but Beth guessed that wasn't her business.

From how Dumbledore was leaning forward over the desk, narrowed eyes attentively watching this Ramsey women, he definitely thought there was something important about this. Beth had already told him about her scar being weird, maybe that in combination with the name meant something to him? She was about to ask whether he knew who this woman was now, but Bones was shouting for quiet before she could get the question out.

"Thank you, Director," Tugwood said to Bones, before turning back to Ramsey. Beth belatedly noticed he had another book splayed open in his arms — maybe the same one, hard to say. "We do have a record of a Merope Gaunt, in the form of a single mention dating to the Nineteen Twenties, as a witness in criminal proceedings targeting Marvolo and Morfin Gaunt. Is this the same Merope Gaunt you claim is your grandmother?"

"Yes, Director."

"I don't suppose you could have your grandmother come into our offices after this assembly to verify your claim."

"No, she died in childbed, long before I was born — I'm uncertain whether my father even knew of her identity until later in life. I only know the name because my mother performed a heritage test when I was a child."

"I see. Is your father available to testify on your behalf, then?"

Ramsey seemed to hesitate, just for a second. "I'm afraid he's...unavailable. I've never met him, in any case — I'm uncertain whether he would come to vouch for me if I asked, and I doubt you would allow him to testify regardless."

"...I don't see why Wizengamot Administration Services should refuse to speak with him. Unless there are outstanding criminal charges against him."

"In a manner of speaking. My father is the individual now known as the Dark Lord Voldemort."

The Wizengamot Hall immediately went fucking insane.

While the shouting went on around her — Ramsey standing still and calm in the middle of the storm, seemingly unaffected — Beth flopped against the back of her chair, frowning to herself. That seemed...unlikely. Maybe this was just her, but she couldn't exactly imagine bloody Voldemort having children — that was just bloody weird, she didn't want to... Well, she guessed he hadn't looked like that forever? She meant, he did used to be human at some point, not always the weird snake-man he was now, and this woman was...probably in her twenties or thirties — Beth was some metres away, and it could be hard to tell sometimes, mages aged weird — so it was possible he'd had her before whatever rituals and shite he'd done to make himself look like that.

...He'd probably already been doing the Dark Lord thing by then, though. Supposedly that'd started in the 60s already, and... Beth guessed Ramsey might have been a little kid by then, but not any older than that. Meaning it was very possible her mother had been one of Voldemort's followers — supposedly a lot of cult leaders could get into some creepy sex stuff, who the hell knew what'd been going on back then. Or, when she thought about it, maybe a rape victim? She didn't know, Ramsey had said she'd never met him, could be anything...

Still, bloody weird, that was all. Beth did at least tentatively believe it — if she had some connection with him, that might explain Beth's scar being weird about her — but Voldemort having kids was still the weirdest fucking thought ever, that was all.

As the shouting continued on, Beth belatedly noticed that Dumbledore didn't seem surprised — he'd hardly even reacted, looked like. Still staring down at Ramsey just as he had before, hardly seeming to blink. "Is that true, you think?"

Dumbledore hesitated for a moment, but it didn't seem like Bones was getting control of the assembly any time soon. "I don't doubt that this woman is somehow connected to Voldemort. I have serious doubts as to the truth of her story, however."

"What part of it?"

Dumbledore's eyes flicked to her for a second. "I suppose I never did ask how much you were told, down in the Chamber of Secrets. The diary had the owner's name written on the inside cover — did you never notice?"

Beth shrugged. "We didn't talk much — also, it was fucking creepy, bastard riding around in Gin's body like she was a puppet or something, ugh." She realised she was mixing her metaphors, since people didn't exactly ride around in puppets, whatever. "And I didn't get a good look at the diary, just enough to stab it. Why?"

"I have done my own investigation into the matter, and I do believe that Merope Gaunt was Voldemort's mother. However — and this is not well known, Voldemort did a very thorough job of separating himself from his birth name — but Voldemort's name was once Tamsyn Riddle."

"Okay? I don't see what—" Beth cut herself off, blinking. "Tamsyn is a girl's name."

"Yes, it is."

"...You're saying the bloody Dark Lord was born a girl?" That wasn't...completely impossible, Beth guessed. She was aware it was possible to permanently switch sexes — it took a big involved ritual, which was technically illegal in Britain (it was blood alchemy), so it didn't happen very often, but it wasn't unheard of. Supposedly, it was considered a medical thing, a treatment for something about people feeling like they were the wrong sex for reasons Beth didn't really get? Whatever, not important. (Hermione claimed it happened to muggles too, though of course their treatments for it weren't nearly as good, but Beth had literally never heard of that before.) So, it was possible Voldemort had done that at some point, she guessed. Fucking weird, but... "Are you sure about that?" As fucking weird as the idea was, it seemed more likely to Beth that Dumbledore had just...gotten the wrong person...

"I cannot show you all the evidence tying the two, here and now, but suffice to say I am very certain." Oh, well, okay then, just seemed like a hell of a leap to her, but she guessed she'd take his word for it. "When I learned of it, I can't even say I was surprised — Tamsyn had precious little tolerance for weakness in those around her, and least of all in herself."

Okay, Beth was rather irritated at the suggestion that being a girl was inherently a weakness, but Dumbledore was saying what he thought Voldemort thought, so she just let it go. If she was following what Dumbledore was getting at here, he thought "Tamsyn" hadn't gone to proper doctors and shite, but had just fucked around with stuff himself...herself? Whatever. Anyway, she thought the point was that Voldemort probably couldn't have fathered a child, so Dumbledore doubted Ramsey's story. Which did make sense, when she thought about it — she couldn't imagine Voldemort just sitting down and letting a healer fuck with his body with blood alchemy, and it was kind of hard to perform surgery on yourself. "So...do you think Ramsey is Voldemort? Like, he switched back to a girl to fake us out or something?"

"...I don't know, Beth. I simply don't know."

Well, that cleared everything up, thanks for that, Headmaster...

Bones eventually managed to calm the Hall down, though she had to cheat — she whipped out her wand and cast a powerful spell of some kind, the magic crawling over Beth in a wave...and the room instantly went completely silent. After waiting for a few seconds for people to cool off, Bones cancelled the spell, said something about maybe shutting the fuck up for five seconds and they might get their questions answered (more politely than that, but not by very much). Ramsey insisted she had nothing to do with Voldemort, had never even met him — she'd grown up with the Ramseys, who were apparently a family of mages who'd defected to the UK, working for the muggle government and living on that side and everything. Beth hadn't even known that was a thing, but Dumbledore said it was. He'd heard the muggle government even sent letters to muggleborn students after they took the OWLs, explaining how shite career options could be for people who didn't have the right connections, but you could totally come work for us instead. It turned out mages on this side did not like those mages — thought they were basically traitors, judging from the tone of the reactions Ramsey was getting — and one claiming to be Voldemort's kid was not helping matters.

At a question from Tugwood, Langley stood up, to confirm that the UK was aware of Ramsey's background, and would officially back up her claim on the House of Gaunt if asked. They'd also vouch for her character, but nobody took that seriously — after all, suggesting that the UK was trying to get a second one of 'their' mages onto the Wizengamot didn't exactly make the purebloods happy, like the muggles were infiltrating them or something.

The shouting from some of the Lords was reminding Beth very much of how paranoid some Tories could be about the Reds. Maybe not bringing up Voldemort or the muggle government at all would have been better for her case...

After calming down people shouting whatever for a second time, Bones handed the floor back to Tugwood, who insisted that it didn't really matter who her father was or what her relationship with the muggle government was like. If she had a claim on the seat, she had a claim on the seat, and determining that was the only thing Tugwood cared about. (Very professional, Beth guessed, even if he was being so serious about a very silly thing.) Tugwood asked if Ramsey had any documents proving her connection to Merope Gaunt, but of course she didn't — Ramsey wasn't even certain whether Merope had been able to read, so. She didn't have a copy of that old heritage test, though she guessed they could do another one later, if Tugwood insisted.

"I do have one thing, however." Ramsey took a ring off a finger of her left hand, held it up. "May I approach?"

Tugwood waved her forward, even as one of his assistants turned to a stack of books tucked away over there, presumably looking for something they could use to identify the ring. But, when Ramsey reached up to drop the ring into his palm, Tugwood immediately perked up. "Ah! I recognise this piece! This is the Peverell Ring."

There was an immediate storm of whispering around the Hall, because British purebloods could be ridiculous about their history — Beth was aware that Peverell was another of the Seventeen Founders, died out bloody ages ago. Supposedly, the last Peverell had married the Longbottom who later became the first Potter, back like seven hundred years ago, a lot of the Potters' initial wealth made up of what was left of the Peverell fortune. A lot of gold and shite, sure, but apparently it was well known that the Potters had gotten the Peverell library, a lot of the really old books and scrolls in the library at Rock-on-Clyde were from the Peverells. (They'd been big into creepy soul magic and shite, so those books were concentrated toward the top of the tower, away from the prying eyes of children — according to Sirius, Lily had probably used the old Peverell books to design the ritual she'd used to save Beth's life that Hallowe'en. So, the Dark Arts did have some use, Beth guessed, probably better for her that previous Potters hadn't just destroyed them.) The Peverells had been kind of a big deal, in the first half of British history, there were all kinds of stories about them (some real, some myths), a lot of families claiming to be descended from them like it was something impressive. People would still brag about artefacts they had that'd once belonged to the Peverells, whether it was actually true or not, it was a whole big thing.

(According to Sirius, her invisibility cloak was a Peverell heirloom, but that was ridiculous — it'd have to be like a thousand years old, and invisibility cloaks simply didn't last that long. James had probably just been making up impressive shite to fuck with Sirius, seemed like something he'd do.)

Beth had never heard of a Peverell Ring, but she did know how people could be about Peverell shite, so it wasn't really a surprise that everybody was whispering about it. Curiously, Dumbledore had even twitched in surprise, leaning further forward over the desk, seemingly fascinated. Or something, anyway, Beth wasn't sure how to read that expression — all the wrinkles and the beard in the way didn't really help, and she didn't have a great angle, but. "What is it?"

Dumbledore didn't answer, just kept staring. Okay...

The assistant was trying to hand over a book, but Tugwood just waved her off, apparently not needing the book for this one. "One of the ancient heirlooms of the House of Peverell, it was passed down to the Gaunts as the House finally died out — it was traditionally worn by the Lord Gaunt, for centuries. If I recall correctly, it was last seen on the hand of Marvolo Gaunt, back in the Nineteen Twenties."

"That is correct," Ramsey agreed. "My understanding is that Morfin returned from Azkaban to find Marvolo already dead — he claimed the ring before burying him. My father took the ring from him during their one and only meeting. He later left it with my mother, who later gave it to me — he didn't explain his thinking, but I suspect he was concerned it would be lost in the fighting."

"I see, I see. Well, this is the Peverell Ring, I have no doubt about that." Tugwood gently — almost reverently, like it was a sacred artefact or something — handed the ring back to Ramsey, who immediately slipped it back on. "That you have this ring in your possession proves that you have some connection to the House of Gaunt, certainly — whether that connection is one of blood, well, that is more difficult to say." More whispers running through the hall, Tugwood hesitated for a second, his gaze seemingly flicking toward Langley. Turning up to Bones, he said, "Director, with her possession of the Peverell Ring and Lord Langley's testimony in mind, I'm inclined to allow it. I would prefer Lady Phoebe present further corroborating evidence to W.A.S. as soon as is feasible, but I'm uncertain whether that will be possible in our present circumstances. In the meantime, my Department will not contest her accession." Tugwood smoothly sank back into his seat, seemingly unaffected by the storm of muttering and the occasional shout of protest his decision had caused.

It took much longer for Bones to get through the oaths and stuff than it had for Langley, with constant interruptions from the Hall, Bones needing to resort to silencing them all for a second time. Eventually they managed it, Ramsey — or Gaunt now, Beth guessed — allowed to take the Gaunt desk on the bottom tier, all shining green and black ceramic. (Very Slytherin-y, which wasn't really a surprise.) The whole time, Dumbledore was intently watching her, his fingers slowly tapping at the desk.

So, seemed like Ramsey was a big damn question mark, but Beth was going to go ahead and take her scar tingling whenever she looked at her as a bad sign.

While the Hall was still filled with tense muttering, the unknown blonde woman stepped forward in front of the government seats, the Asian man still looming over her shoulder. Again, it took a little while for the Hall to calm down, the woman standing patiently, her hands folded behind her back. Bones finally got everyone to shut up, passing the floor back over to Tugwood, who hadn't even bothered sitting back down. "I suppose you would also like to claim a defunct House." Tugwood sounded almost amused about it — Beth would guess this was something that almost never happened, and here they had three in a row, making such a fuss it was taking them forever to get to the actual meeting part of the meeting. This session was going to take all fucking day at this rate...

"Even so. These days I'm called Sarah Selwyn, but you know me by another name." She had an accent, but Beth couldn't figure what kind — it sounded vaguely Celtic, but also vaguely German, could be anything. "Selwyn" was a familiar name — there were a couple Selwyns at Hogwarts right now, at least one Death Eater had been a Selwyn, and it was a noble family — but that didn't necessary mean she was one of those Selwyns. There were also, just, normal people named Selwyn, so.

Tugwood waited a moment for Selwyn to continue, but it didn't look like she was going to. "And what name is that?"

"I won't say — you wouldn't believe me anyway. Instead, I will simply demonstrate." Selwyn turned her back on the government seats and crossed the floor, ignoring the murmuring of the crowd around her, the Asian man following close on her heel. On the opposite side of the floor — not directly across from the Chief Warlock's podium, but at an angle that Beth could easily see — she stepped up onto the bottom tier, circling around behind one of the desks. This one was plain grey stone, a layer of black ceramic on top smooth and shiny but everything else rough and ancient-looking, the chair behind it roughly carved from the same stuff — Beth assumed there had to be cushioning charms and stuff on that, because it just looked uncomfortable. Hanging off the front was a banner, as wide as the desk, a lot of them had a thing like that, this one showing a snake wrapped around a rose on a plain yellowish background, the edges of the fabric fraying just a little. The design was vaguely familiar, though Beth couldn't place it — the desk and the flag both looked old, even older than the other abandoned seats, as though it hadn't been maintained in the meanwhile.

As Selwyn stood in front of the chair, the Hall abruptly went completely silent. Hardly anyone seemed to be breathing, the tension on the air electric — enough that the hairs on the back of Beth's neck stood up, despite the fact that she had no fucking clue what was going on. For a long moment, Selwyn simply stood there, her eyes slowly turning over the hall, seeming to look at every member of the Wizengamot one by one. Dumbledore visibly tensed a little as Selwyn's eyes dragged over them, didn't know why — if she was doing something, with mind magic or whatever else, Beth hadn't felt it.

And then she sat down. Everyone in the Hall seemed to hold their collective breath, just for a second, before erupting into a storm of chatter, so suddenly Beth jumped.

...Oookay, then? Something had definitely happened, but Beth didn't get it — and the noise of people talking was too mixed up for her to pick out anything any particular person was saying either, just, noise. Selwyn seemed unaffected by the outburst, reaching back for her companion's hand; there was a faint crackle of magic, Beth could barely feel it from here, no idea what that was, Selwyn then conjuring a chair, the man settling in next to her.

Right, it felt like people were going to continue being silly about this for a while, Beth wasn't going to miss anything. Leaning a little toward Dumbledore, she muttered, "Um, what's going on?"

"That's the Slytherin seat." There was a hard edge to Dumbledore's voice, sharp and tense. His eyes were fixed on Selwyn now, Ramsey temporarily forgotten, his brow deeply furrowed.

Oooh, right, Beth remembered the snake symbol now — she'd seen it a few times here and there at Hogwarts, must be a Slytherin thing. As in, the old noble family, not the house at Hogwarts, their symbol was different. Slytherin was one of the Founders of the Wizengamot, she knew, so she wasn't surprised they had a desk down there...and it was slightly ridiculous, Selwyn just sitting there, the Slytherins had died out centuries ago. (The 15th Century, Beth thought.) But it still felt like she was missing something. "Okay, but, what's the big deal about her just sitting there, though? Lots of people claim to be descended from Slytherin." Beth knew for a fact she was herself, but that wasn't special — Slytherin had, like, fifteen kids or some shite, over a thousand years ago, like half the country was descended from him somehow by now. Time was funny like that.

(Like, she was related to Slytherin the same way she was related to Gryffindor — according to Hermione's research, one of Slytherin's grandchildren had married one of Gryffindor's grandchildren, and their daughter married a Longbottom, and one of their descendants left the Longbottoms to start the House of Potter. That was the most direct one on her grandfather's side, but on her grandmother's side, Sirius said there was a pretty direct line up to the both of them again, and also Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, and you could get back up to Gryffindor and Slytherin again and again and again by different ways if you traced back up different parts of the tree. Because, again, a thousand fucking years, time was funny like that.)

"And so many do, but none can claim their seat on the Wizengamot. After the House died out in the Fifteenth Century, there was a brief contest between a handful of related families over who should have the right to use the name. During a debate on the floor over the matter, an unknown individual appeared in the Hall. They then set a curse on the seat — they declared that the House would belong to none of them, that only he who could sit there without consequence was worthy of the name. And then they left, without a trace."

"...Okay." Fucking weird, but the magical world could be that way sometimes. "And nobody has sat there since?"

"Oh, some have tried, convinced they alone were worthy of their famous ancestor's legacy. Every claimant has been rendered catatonic, the curse only releasing them after days of unending nightmares. A handful have even died from the ordeal. None have made the attempt since before even I was born. In all that time, the curse has not been broken, and the Slytherin seat has not been moved from its place — the curse is so stubborn that, after the original Wizengamot Hall was destroyed in the Seventeenth Century, the modern structure was built around it."

Woah. Alright, then. "So, who is she?"

"At a guess, the individual who placed the curse in the first place."

That was like five hundred years ago, but fine. "And...who is that, exactly?"

"I don't know, Beth." She probably wasn't imagining the hint of exasperation on his voice. She realised she was asking a lot of questions, but she couldn't help it, it wasn't like she knew most of this shite — and whose fault was that, again? (His, it was his fault, for sticking her with the Dursleys, where she wasn't told anything about anything. But, he was getting annoyed with her for not magically knowing this shite, fine, whatever.) "There are theories as to their identity, but they are only theories, with no hard evidence one way or the other. The surviving accounts do not even agree on the individual's gender, making any attempt to identify them in the modern day all the more complicated. It is one of the great mysteries in British history."

Huh. That was odd. Spitballing here, but if Beth had to guess, she'd say she was a metamorph, like Langley. They technically didn't age the way everyone else did (Dora sometimes joked about you mere mortals, it was a whole thing), and supposedly they could even change sex if they felt like it (according to the occasional sex joke from Dora, so Beth wasn't positive she was serious about that) — so that would explain Selwyn still being alive five hundred years later, and also people at the time not agreeing on whether she was a man or a woman, if it'd been really obvious she was a metamorph or she'd looked especially androgynous or something. It seemed reasonable that Selwyn was actually a Slytherin, and had just outlived the rest of the family, and got annoyed with everyone arguing over their stuff, but also didn't want to take the seat herself, because who the hell would choose to deal with the Wizengamot forever? Cursing the fuck out of it and pissing off without explanation was kind of an extreme option, but mages could be fucking weird, and Slytherins were kind of known for being melodramatic bastards, so. Seemed like a reasonable guess to Beth.

Not that it really mattered? They kind of had more important things to worry about than who the hell had just casually taken the Slytherins' spot on the Wizengamot. Like who the hell had just taken the Gaunts' seat — the Order hadn't heard anything from Voldemort since before the aliens attacked, maybe it was a scheme somehow...

(Or maybe Voldemort simply recognised that dealing with the alien invasion was more important than whatever the fuck his racist terrorism campaign was supposed to accomplish, but Beth didn't think he was that...sane? Yeah, let's go with that...)

After far too long, Bones finally got people to shut the fuck up — well, not completely, but enough for Bones to raise her voice over them and continue on with business. If that was all the procedural stuff, then they could actually get this meeting started. She should start with a quick summary of the situation as they understood it before—

"Excuse me, Director," called one of the people on the bottom tier, getting up to her feet. A woman in duelling armour, brown and green and white, Beth didn't know who that was — the rather plain desk had a flag with a yellow sunburst on a green background hanging from it, which was familiar, but she wasn't quite placing it. "There was one other matter."

"This better be serious, Bríd — we've wasted enough time already, we have pressing issues to attend to."

"I suppose it isn't a critical issue in the short term, but if it is not addressed soon it may cause greater difficulties in the future." The woman — "Bríd", which was a given name — had a noticeable Gaelic accent, putting a bit of a bounce on her speech, but it wasn't super distracting. "I understand that the state of emergency declared by the Ministry was necessary, under the circumstances. It was not, however, legal — I am concerned any effort to meet the crisis before us will be sabotaged by questions of legitimacy."

"Don't play innocent, Ingham," called a man from one of the desks near the government seats. "You say you are concerned about a hypothetical problem that may come in the future, while simultaneously causing the problem you claim to be concerned about." That was a bloody circle of a sentence, but Beth got what he was trying to get at.

"You misunderstand my intent, Your Grace — you do seem to have a bad habit of that, don't you?" Raising her voice over the irritated rejoinder, "I have no objection to Director Bones's leadership, in principle, but I wish to ensure we set out on the best legal footing possible, to prevent any challenge to said leadership in future."

The Chamber then immediately devolved into a tangled argument about the complicated legal situation they'd found themselves in. If Beth was following all this, the woman — Bríd Ingham, apparently — was correct that the Ministry couldn't just declare an emergency the way they had. It was good that they had, because Bones had been able to steamroll over any rules that might have slowed down the evacuation of the Ministry offices and the rest of the magical enclaves in London, probably saving a lot of people in the process. Apparently, the DLE had already made an informal alliance with the muggle government, which was also something they didn't have the authority to do — the muggles here with Langley were here to start formalising it, but the situation they were in now was definitely still illegal — not to mention Aurors and Hit Wizards teleporting all over the Continent to help out with attacks here and there and everywhere, completely ignoring any borders in the way and the fact that they technically didn't have authorisation from the Wizengamot to act. Nobody had refused to cooperate so far, the active alien attack more important than quibbles about the law, but if the government tried to draft some people to make healing potions for them, or tried to take food to supply the evacuees, or protective gear for newly-recruited battlemages, and they were refused, things could get very complicated very quickly.

Basically, Ingham was worried that, if the government didn't have all their ducks in a row, they might push further than people thought they were entitled to, and accidentally spark a civil war as people resisted them. And she wasn't the only one, either, once Ingham pointed it out there were a lot of other people saying similar stuff. Needless to say, the mages fighting each other like idiots while there was an alien invasion going on wouldn't do anybody any fucking good. But purebloods were hidebound self-centred idiots, so this debate was probably going to go on forever — they must have been here for hours already, and they hadn't even accomplished anything yet...

Dumbledore rose to his feet, the movement noticeably awkward and stiff (he was super old). He raised his voice a little to cut over the murmuring going on all over, but Beth thought he was actually cheating — there was a faint tingle on the air, he must be using some kind of (wandless) charm to project the sound through the Chamber. "If I may, Director?"

There was an immediate negative reaction from various people throughout the Hall — some people hadn't been happy about Beth agreeing to let Dumbledore use the Potter seat immediately after he was kicked out of the Chief Warlock post, which was exactly why she'd done it in the first place — but if Bones noticed she didn't care. "If you have a simple solution we've all overlooked, Mister Dumbledore, I would like to hear it."

"It is very simple, if perhaps unpalatable to some. It is true that the Ministry hasn't the right to grant an individual emergency power in order to manage an emergency — the Wizengamot, on the other hand, does. I propose we select a Lord Protector for the duration of the crisis."

Well, that was one way to solve this debate, Beth guessed. Though if the sudden noise from every part of the Wizengamot, and even the observers' seats, was any sign, it probably wasn't going to help much. Choosing a Lord Protector was a pretty big deal, as she understood it — such a big deal that they hadn't even done it in, what, five hundred years? Though, there were other reasons they hadn't done it for a while, it was complicated.

Beth sort of thought of the Wizengamot as magic Parliament, but it was actually a little more complicated than that. The comparison worked, more or less, as long as you were only looking at the present day — the mages hadn't really had their own government until the Statute of Secrecy. Before then, the mages of the Isles would be residents of different kingdoms all over the place — or they had been until pretty close to the end, anyway — with loyalties to different countries and speaking different languages and following different laws, the Wizengamot not so much its own government as a diplomatic thing. They would occasionally deal with particular magical issues, sure — the Wizengamot had taken it upon themselves to take out, like, Dark Lords, and people abusing magic, or whatever big magical problems their little kingdoms couldn't handle on their own — but for the most part it was just a place to work out trade deals, manage alliances and feuds between the different big important magical families, sometimes acting as envoys for their kings dealing with normal international politics stuff, that sort of thing. Less like magic Parliament, and more like a magic UN (though on a much smaller scale and in the Dark Ages).

The old Celtic clans that'd made the Wizengamot in the first place had this tradition where, if a big thing was threatening a whole bunch of clans at once, their little kings would all pick one war-leader to lead them to deal with it. When they'd made the rules of the Wizengamot, that tradition had carried over. The Lord Protector replaced the Chief Warlock — and also, in the revised post-Statute rules, the Minister, fusing them into one office — but had much broader powers to basically rule by decree, draft people into the military, seize equipment and supplies and even lands as they see fit. It was a temporary appointment, kind of like a dictātor from the Roman Republic, empowered to deal with a problem and then stepping down once it was over. Apparently, the Lord Protector got addressed, both domestically and internationally, like they were royalty...meaning magical Britain was technically a monarchy, but one that worked by selection and not inheritance, and where the throne was vacant the vast majority of the time. (Which was weird, but whatever.) It was a very powerful position, and the noble families could be irrationally protective about all their shite, so of course it wasn't something they'd ever actually done very often. Probably less often than they should — the way the rules worked, they actually needed to pick a Lord Protector to legally declare war, so they couldn't streamline things to deal with, for example, a maniac Dark Lord and his homicidal band of racist terrorists.

It didn't help that a few incidents had kind of tainted the office over the years. There'd been a couple examples of people stubbornly trying to hold on to the title after the emergency was over with...and then there was the time the Dark Lady Frances Cromwell murdered the Chief Warlock (the same Henry Black mentioned what felt like hours ago) and claimed the title over his dead body, without the approval of the Wizengamot. That had kind of put a stink on the whole thing, as you might imagine — there hadn't been a legitimate Lord Protector since before Cromwell.

So, the Wizengamot Hall getting a bit noisy at someone suggesting they pick a Lord Protector wasn't really a surprise. Dumbledore might be trying to stop the arguing so they could get to important shite, but Beth wasn't sure this idea was actually going to help at all.

After a few seconds of chattering and shouting back and forth, someone managed to snatch the floor long enough to shout across at Dumbledore. "If you think to nominate yourself, Dumbledore, you have horribly overestimated this body's tolerance for your presence. If you hadn't managed to slither your way into the Potter seat, you would not even be allowed in the building." There was some shouting at that, both agreeing with and yelling at the bloke, a whole big mess — Beth grit her teeth, resisting the urge to cover her ears with both hands.

"I have no— If I may!" Dumbledore yelled, raising both hands for attention. It didn't really help, the noise going on and on, after some seconds Bones yelling for quiet, finally resorting to her trick with the silencing charm again. Once the tingle of magic on the air abated, there was still some muttering, but it was quiet enough Dumbledore would be able to make himself understood, at least. "Thank you, Director. I have no intention of nominating myself to bear the burden of guiding our country through the dark times to come. I know that, as ill-trusted as I am today, that doing so would only cripple our efforts to repel the invaders who have so ruthlessly and mercilessly attacked us — placing myself into the office, even should this body decide to do so, would not equip us to save more lives than we might otherwise, but might only see more lost due to confusion and dissent. And, of course, I am simply too old to lead a country into war."

There was a little bit of muttering at that — it was widely-believed that Dumbledore claiming Voldemort was back was some sort of gambit to seize power for himself, which was completely fucking ridiculous, but whatever — and even some laughter. Mostly good-natured, Beth thought, at that last bit — there had been a bit of a drawl on Dumbledore's voice for the comment about his age, so that was probably more laughing with him than at him.

"No, nominating myself would not do, and I would never sabotage our response so as to suggest it. But even putting myself aside, we must take great care whom we choose. It is a heady responsibility, one that may wisely be entrusted to only the most honourable, the most incorruptible of persons. Those who it can be certain would never use such exemplary authority for personal gain, but only as necessary to safeguard the lands and the peoples we have sworn to serve. When I consider who may have the depth of skill and the purity of character to faithfully lead our country through this crisis, I find only one name comes to mind." Smoothly and dramatically, Dumbledore raised one arm, holding one open-palmed hand out toward the government seats, his voice dropping into a deep rumble. "May it please the Lords of the Wizengamot, I propose we invest Amelia Bones as our Lady Protector." Dumbledore held the gesture for a moment, as everyone in the Chamber around them seemed to all hold their breath, before carefully sinking back into his chair.

The quiet lingered for another moment — everyone considering the idea, Beth would guess. She knew Bones was really well-liked, was a literal war hero and everything (she'd been an active Auror in the war with Voldemort). And, it helped that she was a very...blunt Director of Law Enforcement. She meant, from what Beth had heard from Order people, Bones pretty much stayed completely out of politics, and just tried to do her job. There wasn't even a sniff of corruption around her, which, for someone so high up in the Ministry, was practically unheard of. Sometimes there was trouble with her trying to get around enforcing laws she thought were stupid — some of the racist shite against non-humans, for example, ended up being enforced mostly by Regulation and Control, in large part because Bones very intentionally half-arsed that kind of thing — some people did get annoyed with her for that, but nobody argued Bones was doing that sort of thing for, like, personal gain, or as favours to people, or whatever, she legitimately just thought those laws were stupid and refused to cooperate with stupid shite. She could be a bit too stubborn and blunt for a politician, supposedly, but someone who'd do what they thought was right or necessary no matter what was kind of exactly who you wanted in charge in a situation like this.

Beth wasn't an expert, there were a lot of people in the government she didn't know shite about, but if you were going to hand ultimate power over to someone, Bones was who she would pick. And as squabbling and obstructive as the magical government could be, they really should pick someone. Of course, who the hell knew if the Wizengamot would agree with her — she didn't generally expect these idiots to be reasonable. In fact, them being terrible at their jobs was kind of why picking a Lord Protector might be a good idea in the first place...?

Eventually, the quiet fell apart, people muttering to each other. The noise in the Chamber gradually increased, but not breaking out into shouting and arguing as Beth had expected — instead, starting somewhere to Beth's right and quickly spreading across the Hall, there was a deep boom, boom, boom, boom. As it came around, Beth realised people were doing that with some kind of noise-making charm, their wands tapping against desks in unison with each boom. Not everyone started doing it, there were definitely some people around the government seats who were sitting it out — some even visibly disapproving, arms crossed and glaring out at the Hall — but they did get most of them, obviously.

Huh. Colour Beth surprised, the Wizengamot was actually being reasonable for once — that almost never happened...

Bones hadn't moved since the Headmaster's nomination, visibly taken aback. But, as the noise spread through the Hall, she left the Chief Warlock's podium (Tugwood standing up to take her place), stepped down to the floor in the middle. Beth would guess presiding over your own nomination for an even higher office was probably inappropriate. Gradually, the noise died out, and Bones gave a brief speech, very little of which Beth would remember afterward. About being flattered by their faith in her, that it might be necessary to appropriate people's property to supply the war effort and to resettle those made homeless by the initial attack, but vowing that she would only do so as she felt necessary to carry on for another generation the legacy handed them by their ancestors, blah blah, political shite, blah. It was pretty short and blunt, considering Bones had literally just been nominated to be made queen (slash military dictator) of magical Britain, but Beth couldn't help it, once she'd recognised it as a political speech it went in one ear and straight out the other.

(Even after listening to Hermione talk about stuff sometimes, she still knew less about politics than she probably should, and maybe she would actually be able to pay attention if it wasn't always so boring.)

Once she was done with her little speech, Tugwood asked if anyone had any comments, questions, protests...and surprisingly didn't get any — the only person who stood up was a Lord Eirsley, who only spoke long enough to suggest they just get on with it already. (Beth was with that bloke, this shite was taking way too long.) So, without further ado, Tugwood started with the vote. Apparently they started with the first tier, because Sirius was the first to vote — he voted to make Bones Lady Protector, naturally — followed immediately by Susan, sitting at the Bones seat (plain white marble, matching the Hall itself, with very little decoration at all) alongside a woman in the black and blue of the Hit Wizards. Beth had heard Susan complain that she was often stuck with bodyguards any time she was leaving the house or school without her aunt around, Amelia worried about some bastard kidnapping Susan and trying to use her as a hostage. (Like all good Aurors, there were a lot of criminal types out there who really hated her.) Anyway, Susan abstained, which made sense — just like Amelia presiding over the vote wouldn't be appropriate, Susan voting at all also wouldn't look good — and the process continued on.

Dumbledore leaned over toward Beth, lowering his voice so they wouldn't be heard over the vote (finishing the first tier before proceeding alphabetically down the list now, seemed like), to suggest that Beth should be the one to vote for the Potters. That was Dumbledore's job, basically, but picking a Lord Protector was a big fucking deal, and it would look better if Beth participated herself — especially since Dumbledore was so controversial these days. That did make sense, so, why not. Dumbledore asked if she had any quick questions about what was going on, but she just waved him off. She realised she could be an idiot sometimes, but she actually got pretty good marks in History class (thanks to Hermione talking about shite aloud for her), and she did pay attention to Dora talking about the DLE and Order people talking about how the war was going. She didn't need any help figuring out that voting for Bones was definitely the right thing to do.

Besides, she was well aware that Bones was one of Sirius's favourite people in government — they'd fought together in the war, but she also had zero tolerance for the racist shite that was far too common in magical society, and he claimed she could be amusingly blunt about how stupid she thought it all was — and also that Fudge sucked. So, basically kicking him out and putting Bones in charge seemed like an obvious improvement to Beth — especially since Bones would have way more power to ignore the stupid racist laws. And also Voldemort was still out there somewhere, and she'd probably be in a better position to deal with that too? So. Yeah, not a hard decision, she didn't hesitate at all when her turn came up.

(No matter how fucking ridiculous it was that she was voting in wizard Parliament — she was barely fifteen years old, and she hardly understood any of this shite, honestly...)

Tugwood didn't say exactly what the vote total had ended up being, but he didn't really have to — Beth had only been half-listening, but she was still very certain it'd ended up being well above half. While Tugwood was saying some very fancy, poetic shite, Beth was distracted by the big double doors being pushed open. There was a tromping of boots, about a dozen Hit Wizards filed into the Hall — the special ones that guarded the Wizengamot, with their finely-detailed purple and gold armour, carrying brightly-polished swords and/or spears. (As silly as it looked to modern eyes, the things must be enchanted to hell and back, and could probably do some serious damage in the right situation.) As Tugwood wrapped up her speech, one of the Hit Wizards pounded his spear on the floor, near the edge of the triple-spiral design taking up the centre.

Apparently it wasn't just a design: some of the curved lines were actually seams, the floor irising open, the panels seeming to rotate as they were pulled away. A shallow circular hole was opened up in the middle of the floor, Beth couldn't see inside it very well from this angle. A couple of the purple Hit Wizards hopped inside then climbed back out, one with a cloth of some kind (probably a cloak or something) draped over one shoulder — very colourful, a swirling rainbow mess, if there was a particular pattern to it Beth couldn't make it out, trying to follow the lines almost making her dizzy. The other had pulled on gloves before, gently, lifting up with both hands a...length of wood. Slightly longer than an average person was tall, it almost looked like a branch someone had just hacked off a tree, most of its length straight and mostly smooth — though still with little knobs here and there, kinking and curving at subtle angles — but at one end divided into multiple twigs, spreading out a little but remaining tangled together in a confusing mess, almost like a root ball scaled up. The bloke was carrying the thing carefully, almost reverentially, Beth immediately got the impression that the thing was really important, whatever it was.

The first Hit Wizard had reached Bones, and it turned out the cloth was a weird rainbow cape...thing — it got draped over one shoulder, held closed by...something the Hit Wizard set over the other shoulder, Beth couldn't see it from here. (There was a metal glint where the corners of the cape were held in place, but she was too far away to tell what that was.) While they were doing that, Beth leaned a little closer to Dumbledore, whispered, "What's that thing? The big stick, I mean."

Dumbledore let out a little huff of laughter. "That is the Merlin Staff, Beth."

Beth twitched, gave the staff a double-take. "Wait, really? You mean, the Merlin Staff, literally? I didn't know that thing was real!"

"It has not been seen with living eyes in centuries, but yes, it is very real."

...Bloody hell, she'd assumed that was just a myth. Before wands had become common, a lot of people had used staves instead — more room to work with meant it was easier to pack in the enchanting necessary to prepare it as a focus. The things could be pretty hard to make, so they'd be passed down through families, or sometimes master to apprentice, or staying with a particular office. One had been passed down by an old Celtic priesthood on Anglesey, handed from high priest to high priest back longer than anyone knew, supposedly centuries before the Romans had ever reached the Isles. The first Wizengamot had met at a sanctuary managed by the priesthood — exactly where they were now, the land had been handed off to the government at some point — and the high priest at the time happened to be the Merlin. Instead of sticking with the priesthood (which, after a bunch of reforms over the centuries, eventually became the House of Bones), with Merlin's death the staff had been donated to the infant Wizengamot instead, to be held by the Chief Warlock.

A couple centuries later, though, they'd stopped using it. Supposedly, there were some weird ancient magics tied to the staff, and when the staff was taken up by a person the weird magics approved of the staff would bloom — it quickly became very embarrassing if the staff didn't bloom when a new Chief Warlock was picked. They decided the staff would belong to the Lord Protector instead. There were a couple cases over history when the staff didn't bloom for a Lord Protector, immediately leading to the selection of a new Lord Protector, and on one infamous case another and another, until they found one the staff liked. There was an old story about Ignatius Gaunt nearly stealing the thing, and a big dramatic thing about the person who managed to swipe it and escape from the old Wizengamot Hall while it was being attacked by Cormwell and her people, it was a whole thing.

And Beth had assumed it was all fictional. For one thing, two thousand years was a long bloody time for a wooden staff to survive, and also, mysterious mystical objects that only worked properly for people who were worthy just...seemed like the sort of thing that would be fictional? She meant, it was very silly, that was all.

Beth guessed that, after four years and change dealing with the magical world, she should be used to their silly shite turning out to be super serious by now. It was just surreal.

Did this mean that Merlin was an actual historical figure? She'd kind of assumed all that was myth too...

Anyway, the one with the Staff sank to one knee just to Bones's left, held the Staff up toward her with both hands. Bones began to reach for it, but then hesitated, her hand hovering a foot from the wood. The Hall had gone completely silent, everyone seeming to hold their breath — Beth had no idea what would happen if the Staff rejected her, she assumed it'd be much harder to find an alternative everyone would agree on. Thankfully, Bones didn't leave them in suspense for too long, her hand closing around the staff after only a couple seconds. There was a faint crackle of magic, something Beth only vaguely felt sweeping through the room, and the tangled twigs at the head of the staff abruptly burst with pure white flowers, gusty sighs and low chuckles running through the Chamber. Beth squinted, leaning forward a little — apple, maybe? Didn't the more traditional mages have a thing about apples?

While that had been going on, there'd been some reshuffling in the government seats. The middle of the long table, where the Minister sat, had melted down into the floor, Fudge standing awkwardly behind Bones's empty seat. The Chief Warlock's podium was also gone, the spot it'd been transfigured out a little into the government seats, dividing the table in half, stairs ascending the little platform leading up to a chair that hadn't been there a moment ago. It seemed to have grown out of the stone of the Hall, formed out of the same white marble, little bits of quartz glittering in the sun, blocky and plain and undecorated.

After a second spent staring at the flowers that'd taken over the end of the Staff, Bones started toward the...toward the throne, Beth guessed was the proper term, the special purple Hit Wizards dropping to their knees as she passed, a clattering of metal against stone as they laid their weapons down at her feet. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a shuffling and thunking as everyone in the Hall started getting to their feet all at once — Dumbledore reached for her elbow to draw her up, but Beth had figured that out for herself, thanks. When Bones got to the top of the stairs, she turned and sat without any additional ceremony, the rainbow cloak fluttering around her a little, the Staff held in one hand with the butt resting on the floor.

"Take your seats everyone. We have work to do."

(And that was how Beth's friend Susan became a literal magic princess.)

(Also, the Wizengamot didn't know it, but they'd just elected the final leader of magical Britain — Bones would ultimately dissolve the country as an independent entity, less than a decade from her nomination. If they'd realised that at the time, Beth guessed the election might not have gone so smoothly, but it was too late to do anything about it now.)

Chapter Text

11th September 1995 (63:5:25)
— Contact plus 00.00.09:02.45

The door clicked open, a middle-aged man poking his head out. "Miss Potter? The Commander will see you now."

Beth got up from her chair in the crowded, extremely slapdash 'waiting room'. Really it was just a hallway they'd put some furniture in — a large part of it feeling crowded was the people coming through the hall, not in the 'waiting room' so much as passing through it, weaving their way between chairs set against both walls. The government's move to Oxford had been on very short notice, obviously, and they were still in the process of getting things into anything like a working order. The office they'd set aside for the commander of the still-forming joint muggle–magical...thing had been some professor's office in one of the University buildings — from the signage, maybe a business department or something? Beth wasn't really sure what muggles studied at university...

The UK and magical Britain had only had an official alliance for literally less than twenty-four hours — Bones had met with the PM and his people here in Oxford just yesterday — but things were already moving quickly. Beth had heard that wardcrafters, both working for the Ministry's Department of Public Works and freelancers, were being organised to put up protections over important muggle sites, government and military and food and transportation and stuff. Some of them were still needed for mages' stuff, especially putting up new living spaces for people made homeless by the first week's bombings, but a lot of them were freed up by the Morrigan promising sanctuary on Ireland — because apparently the literal Morrigan was real? Beth had heard her mentioned, kind of like a boogeyman-type figure — people literally called her the Queen of Nightmares — but apparently she actually existed, just, an absurdly powerful immortal sorceress who'd been around for literally thousands of years. (A metamorph and a mind mage, supposedly, which was just cheating at life.) But even her power wasn't limitless — she could protect Ireland (and had protected Dublin, apparently, knocking fireballs out of the sky long before they reached the ground), but she couldn't extend the same protection to Britain. A lot of the homeless mages had already been relocated to Ireland, and Beth had overheard muggles talking about finding boats across to the North, it was a whole thing.

They'd already opened up their stores of resources for each other, which didn't make a big difference yet, but Beth expected it would pretty soon — magical Britain happened to be a major food producer, the magical population growing almost everything themselves and even exporting a big surplus to the Continent. Back at Rock-on-Clyde, Hermione had pointed out that, even if the aliens left today, probably millions of people would still die: the damage done by the initial attack would have disrupted international trade badly enough that there would still be terrible famines all over the world, and it was only going to get worse as the fighting continued. She claimed Britain wouldn't be as hard hit as a lot of places, but they would still have trouble, since a lot of the grain and stuff they did grow was meant to feed livestock, cows and sheep and stuff, and might not be easily retooled for human consumption. The mages had a surplus, yes, but they were a tiny fraction of the overall population, so Hermione had no idea how much of a difference it would actually make. Making potions and healers available to muggles had already been a big help, though, since magical healing cut down recovery times for almost everything by a lot — there were a bunch of volunteer healers helping the people injured in the bombings, which, that was probably going to end up being the first experience most people had with magic, which might be a good thing in the long run? Who knew.

Beth had heard there were other things going on too, like helping get reliable international communications and transportation going again — they already had communications back up, for the most part, but they were still working on transportation, too unsafe to just use air travel — and apparently they were putting together teams of muggle scientists and magical, like, artificers and shite, to figure out ways to make their stuff work better together. Like, wards and enchanted stuff were great to protect people from the continuing bombings from space, but a ward solid enough to block a fireball would completely stop radio signals too, and you needed to carefully shield wired signals to stop them from getting all scrambled. Apparently Élysée Palace had already set up stuff to deal with that, decades ago, they were working on doing something similar in Oxford, but it was a work in progress. Especially over the large area they wanted to protect, it was a pain. And there was other stuff, like, if mages and muggles were fighting together, the interference from the mages doing magic would screw up radio signals the soldiers and commanders and shite used to talk to each other, not to mention the soldiers' radios just exploding if they got too close to a big spell...

Not to mention, with international shipping practically dead, they were going to start running into power issues pretty quickly. The UK was rationing petrol and electricity, trying to stretch it out as long as they could, and they had pretty big reserves, but it wouldn't last forever — Beth wasn't an expert, but she'd heard six months to a year, at most. If they didn't get things running smoothly again by then (which, given how fucked everything everywhere was, didn't seem likely), they were going to be in serious trouble. So yeah, magical power plants or something sounded like a great idea, people were already on it.

None of that was Beth's problem though — some of those things Hermione could maybe help with, but Beth was really only good at the one thing. Luckily, there were plenty of aliens in Africa and south Asia and the Amazon to go blow up, so there was something she could do to help. Langley, the same one just admitted to the Wizengamot a few days ago, happened to be the head of the Queen's magical bodyguards, which Beth hadn't even realised was a thing. The Ministry and the UK had agreed to make a sort of experiment. The UK would be sending normal Army people out, and the mages their Hit Wizards and stuff, but they also thought it was a good idea to have mixed groups, you know, some mages and some muggles in one team fighting side-by-side. Mages and muggles were better at different things, so Beth thought that just made sense. They'd agreed to put Langley in charge of the thing, take a bunch of volunteers and send them out to the alien landings around the equator as soon as possible.

They'd probably start loosening the rules as things got worse, but for the moment at least, Beth was too young to join the Army, and you needed at least a few OWLs to join the Hit Wizards. But this mixed group said they were talking volunteers, and Beth hadn't heard anything about requirements — it'd be kind of hard for them to have one set of standards for everyone, since mages and muggles had different qualifications and different laws. She hadn't thought it was super likely she'd get in, she might end up needing to join one of the volunteer groups being put together by the weird pagan priests on the magical side, but she'd gone ahead and put her name in anyway.

She was honestly a little surprised when a letter telling her to come in to see the Commander had turned up the very next morning.

Shouldering her way through a stream of people passing through the hall, she noticed she was getting funny looks from the other people waiting their turn. Some of them were obviously mages (mostly in duelling clothes, one actual enchanted armour, expensive), and they'd clearly recognise the name — one man earlier had been nosey about it, asking if she knew what this was for, if Sirius and Dumbledore approved. Sirius wasn't happy about it, of course, but he understood where she was coming from and hadn't tried to stop her — in fact, they'd applied for it at the same time, though Sirius's return letter said he was in and that he should show up at their training camp immediately — and Dumbledore very much disapproved, but had ultimately said it was her decision, so. Also, it wasn't this random stranger's business, so piss off. The muggles in the hall were probably just thinking she was too young, which she guessed was fair — magical ageing being what it was, she wouldn't be surprised if she looked even younger to muggle eyes than she really was, probably seemed ridiculous to them.

Hopefully Langley himself wouldn't be unreasonable about it. He was a multiple-century-old metamorph, and supposedly they'd had a different concept of childhood back then...

The office had obviously been commandeered — there were still academic books on the shelves, personal knick-knacks and things. Beth even spotted framed pictures set aside on a shelf, maybe of family. At least, she assumed they weren't Langley's, they were just kind of packed into an available spot on a shelf, presumably waiting for the office's original owner to come claim them. The whole office was kind of a mess, papers and books haphazardly stacked in a corner to make room for Langley's things, a second desk crammed into the back half of the room for his assistant — some low-ranking Army officer or something, in the plain greenish uniform Beth saw on a lot of the people just walking around Oxford these days. Both desks were scattered with papers (and even some parchment), in stacks or folders or just strewn around. When she came in Langley, wearing the same black uniform from his Wizengamot appearance, was looking over what looked like a letter, on lined muggle notebook paper.

"Lady Elizabeth," he said, not bothering to look up from the letter. Gesturing at one of the chairs across the desk, "Have a seat."

Beth tried not to grimace, and probably failed. "You don't have to do all the formal my lady stuff. Sir." The sir was appropriate, she guessed, since he was a proper knight and everything...

He nodded, to show he heard, but he kept going over the letter, even after she'd (somewhat awkwardly) sat down. The Army bloke had gone back to his desk, to go over papers there — by the snippet Beth could make out from here, working on getting supplies and stuff for the group they were putting together. Langley finished with the letter he was looking over, made a note on what looked like a ledger or something, then picked up a file, flipping it open. Apparently that was a file on Beth herself, she saw the letter she'd sent right at the top. The Army bloke finished writing something, folded a few papers together and got up to slip out the door, just as Langley finally looked up at her.

"In ordinary circumstances," he started, voice low and smooth, "I would not consider this even for a single second. While you may have reached the age of contract in magical Britain—" He meant the closest thing magical law had to an age of majority — which was only thirteen, because magical Britain was a backward mess. "—you are still a minor on this side. You haven't even taken the OWLs yet, were Secrecy not abandoned you wouldn't be qualified to cast the meanest charm in public. You are too young."

Yes, well, Beth had sort of expected that. "You said, in ordinary circumstances."

Langley let out a heavy sigh. He leaned back in his chair, hands hanging limp off the ends of the armrests, giving her a hard, steady stare. It was making her a little uncomfortable, honesty — it didn't help that she knew Langley was stupidly powerful, she could feel his magic in the room around her, sharp and warm... "Unfortunately, Miss Potter, these are not ordinary circumstances. And neither are you an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl. The reports we have gotten so far from the landing sites are...concerning, to say the least. The major militaries of the world have already been significantly weakened in the initial wave of attacks, losing much in the way of men and material in doomed counter-attacks before we began to adjust our tactics. Air forces in particular are badly crippled. So this will be, largely, a ground war, in unfamiliar jungle, against unknown numbers utilising unknown equipment and tactics — it will be a miserable campaign, and we will need all the wands we can get.

"Furthermore, the affected areas are some of the most linguistically diverse regions on the planet, and, not coincidentally, also the most underdeveloped. We will need to coordinate with the locals, but there is an unfortunately high probability that, due to the low penetration of modern international culture in these regions, we will not share any language with them. Perhaps we will be able to communicate through local intermediaries who have learned English or French as a second language, but it will be difficult. For that reason alone, we are attempting to recruit omniglots, specifically. Were you not an omniglot, and had I not heard of your actions in London, Manchester, and Paris, you would not be sitting here right now."

...Fair enough. Honestly, as much as she was maybe under-qualified, not having taken her OWLs or anything, she had kind of kicked arse against the aliens, even compared to a lot of adult mages — she'd gotten pretty damn good at blowing up their ships solo, for example. Really, she thought that was enough to want her along despite her age, but if he just wanted her because she was an omniglot, that was also fine, she guessed. "So, why am I sitting here right now? Sir. I know Sirius was just told to go right to the training camp you're setting up."

Langley tilted his head, giving her an almost Snape-like look — not sure what that flat expression was supposed to say, but. Turning back down to her file, he said, "I understand you are able to apparate without assistance."

"Yes, sir."

"I checked with the Department of Transportation, and it doesn't seem you've applied for a licence."

"They wouldn't give me one — you have to at least have your OWLs before you can get an apparation licence. Sirius thought it was important I learn it early, for emergencies."

"Yes, Lord Black is a very practical sort, isn't he." Beth wasn't sure whether Langley meant that as a bad thing or not. "It was noted, by one of my subordinates in London, that your proficiency with battlemagic is far more advanced than one would expect of anyone at your age. Would I be correct in the assumption that you have learned to leverage omniglottalism to quickly acquire all manner of information beyond the linguistic?"

"Um, yes? Sorry, you're saying it like it's a big deal, but I thought that was just an omniglot thing? That all of us can do that."

"Theoretically, all omniglots possess the potential, yes — many never learn to fully utilise it." Oh, well. She hadn't known that, actually, she'd just thought it was normal. "I imagine you'll be able to do the same to absorb an accelerated course of basic training."

She hesitated for a second. She didn't know what that meant, exactly, so. "As long as I'm being taught by a person who knows what they're doing one-on-one, or in a small group of, like, four or five, yes."

"That shouldn't be a problem. How many languages are you proficient in?"

"Um...twenty-three? Fluently, it's twenty-two or twenty-three."

One of Langley's eyebrows twitched, but he didn't comment on what Beth realised seemed like a ridiculous claim to most people. "Any non-European languages?"

"...Not really, I mostly picked them up at school, during the Triwizard Tournament. There is ǹKhēmi, that's not European I guess, but I think that's only spoken by mages? Oh, and I know some Arabic and Marāṭhī, and a tiny bit of a Chinese language — um, Hak-kâ-va, specifically — but I'm not fluent in any of those." Hermione spoke a little bit of Arabic, picked up from her Tunisian relatives, the Patils' first language was Marāṭhī, and Cho's family spoke Hak-kâ-va at home — Beth had picked up enough Marāṭhī to get through a conversation, maybe, but she wouldn't count on her Arabic or Hak-kâ-va.

Langley just nodded. "I presume one of these twenty-three languages is French."

"Oh, yes, sir." There were a lot of former French colonies around the alien landing sites, Beth assumed that was an important one to know.

"How long would it take you to become comfortable with an entirely unfamiliar language?"

"...I guess it depends. If I'm working at it really hard, you know, hanging out with a native speaker and focussing on picking it up all day...less than a week, probably?"

Both of Langley's eyebrows arched up. "Less than a week?"

"Well, I wouldn't be fluent by then, but good enough to actually talk to people without getting confused, yeah, less than a week. Sir."

For a few seconds, he didn't say anything, just tapping at his papers with a pen, staring blankly at her. "Perhaps you don't realise this, Miss Potter, but that's unusually quick for an omniglot."

"...No, I didn't know that. I don't really know any other omniglots, so, I'll take your word for it, sir." She hesitated, just for a second. "So, I guess learning fourteen languages to fluency in the eight months the students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang were over for the Tournament is also really fast."

"It certainly is. For the average omniglot, one language a month is considered a reasonable estimate — it is often somewhat quicker for young people, but nearly two a month is still exceptional."

Okay. Good to know, she guessed. "Well, as long as we're talking about me learning stupid quickly, it rarely takes me more than a couple minutes to learn a new spell, and I picked up apparation in like two afternoons. It probably won't be any different for, um... Basic training, you mean I'm going to learn how to use, like, guns and shite? Um, sir." She tried not to look embarrassed that she'd just babbled, and slipped and cussed, oops.

There was definitely an expression on Langley's very bland and unremarkable face — which was still slightly odd, since he was a metamorph and could look like whatever he wanted, he must be doing that on purpose for some reason. She couldn't say what Langley was thinking, exactly, expression too mild and... Surprised, definitely, she thought — Beth realised learning a new spell in a couple minutes was slightly absurd, and most people thought learning apparation that quickly (especially at her age) was impossible — and maybe amused about something? She wasn't sure. Whatever he was thinking, he said only, "Everyone must know the basics, Miss Potter."

So, that was a yes on learning to use guns and shite. Seemed kind of pointless, since she knew curses that could do way more damage than any single firearm, but whatever.

"If we are to do something so foolish as bring you with us," he said, a note on his voice she didn't know how to read, "one of your duties will be as an interpreter. I hope to have at least one omniglot — or mind mage, if we must — with each detachment, to ease communication with the largely isolated locals we're likely to encounter. As soon as you arrive on site, you'll need to familiarise yourself with the local language as quickly as possible, so as to enable commanding officers to develop a more thorough understanding of the situation on the ground, and to coordinate with local forces. We may also need you to negotiate with the locals to secure permission to set up barracks and defences, and possibly to acquire food and the like — I expect supply lines will be quite shaky for some time. Whatever teams we put together will be far more mobile than the Army proper, so you may be moved around between problem areas on short notice, which may require starting all over again with additional local languages. Your team will be relying on you, on any number of matters. If that sounds too stressful for you, say so now — by the time you become overwhelmed out in the field, it may already be too late to prevent serious repercussions."

...Well, it did sound intimidating — she was never great at not making an arse of herself, trying to talk about serious shite — but it didn't sound any more 'stressful' than fighting for her life, so. "Um, will whoever I'm negotiating with take me seriously? I do just look like a random schoolgirl, so."

Langley's lips twitched. "You haven't the authority to come to an agreement on your team's behalf — your commanding officer will be with you for these discussions."

Lending whatever she said an air of officialness just from his very presence, Beth guessed. "Right. I should be able to do that, then. Sir. Um. It might be better if I can get at least a couple days talking to the locals before needing to do any serious talks, you know, just so I can understand the basics, at least. Like, if it would be possible to send me ahead a couple days before everyone's ready to move, so I can get a head start on the language? That would make it a lot easier, I think."

"The other omniglots I've already spoken to have all made the same request. We will attempt to send small advance teams ahead with the omniglots, but that might not always be possible. Though, most I spoke with suggested a week at the least, to establish a baseline."

Kind of baffled, because apparently she was weird even by omniglot standards, Beth shook her head. "If I'm doing literally nothing else but picking up the language, a few days is fine. I mean, I wouldn't be able to keep up a real conversation by then, but basic stuff, like asking where the aliens are and where they really need help, where we can set up camp, dealing with food and stuff, that shouldn't be a problem. I'll give myself an awful headache pushing it that fast, but."

"Very well," Langley said with a nod, making some kind of note somewhere. "Given your performance on a broom over that first week, we'll almost certainly want you in the air. Most air forces worldwide will remain inoperative for some time, we expect — and while the invaders have had no difficulty shooting helicopters out of the sky, mages on broomstick are far more manoeuvrable, especially when one considers the potential afforded by apparation. While you may on occasion need to fight on the ground, the most common scenario will likely see you flying cover for your team. Intercepting enemy aircraft, blocking or redirecting missile and mortar fire, engaging in air-to-ground attacks against enemy infantry. This will often put you out ahead of the rest of your team — and depending on the situation, how many other units are operating with yours, you may not have any backup at all. You will draw fire, I'm certain, and you will be alone. The role is necessary to protect our forces on the ground, given the state allied air forces have all been reduced to, but it will be extremely dangerous."

So, basically she'd be asked to do what she'd been doing that whole first week anyway, was what she was hearing. Feeling the smirk twitching at her lips, Beth said, "Sir, I'm a Gryffindor — crazy reckless shite is my speciality. Oh damn, I cursed again, sorry sir..."

That twitch at the corner of Langley's lips was definitely amusement, but it didn't last for very long, a more serious cast coming over his face almost immediately. He was quiet a moment, eyes turned down to his desk but not seeming to be focussed on anything, the fingers of one hand idly tapping. Not really sure what was going on, Beth, just, stayed quiet — if she opened her mouth she'd probably just put her foot straight in it again, so. Kind of silly that part of the reason why he was even considering bringing her on was to be an interpreter, considering how very, er, undiplomatic she was, had been even in this conversation. Not complaining, she did want to help, and given how fucked everything was she kind of doubted any of the people they were turning up to help would give a damn if she said something off-colour, just saying.

After what had to be a minute or two, Langley let out a thin sigh. He reached for a stack of papers on his desk, pulling out a couple sheets, and immediately started scribbling away at them. It was hard to see from Beth's angle, but she thought they were forms of some kind. "There is a temporary clinic set up in the courtyard outside, you might have seen it on the way in."

He paused, but that might just be because he was focussed on his writing. Just in case he was expecting her to respond, she said, "Yes, sir."

"You will present yourself to the staff there..." He flipped to another page, made a couple notes before scrawling what was definitely a signature. "...and you will give them these." Quick folding the papers into thirds, he held them across the table toward her.

Reflexively starting to reach for them, she asked, "So, I'm in?"

"Assuming the medical staff have no serious objections, yes." Oh, well. Beth kind of hated seeing doctors (or healers), but she guessed she could deal with one little exam. She tried to take the papers, but Langley didn't let go, steadily staring across the desk at her. "Don't make me regret this, Potter."

"...I'll try not to, sir." That was the best she could promise, really. The world was kind of fucked at the moment, and shite happens.

Beth was waved out with little fanfare, just as Langley's assistant was returning, another person waiting in the hall called in after her. Anyway, right, all the tents and shite she'd seen on the way here, she'd come in...this way, okay. Navigating through the rather crowded halls — it was busy here, the relocated government and the Army still in the process of pulling themselves together — Beth was tempted to take a look at the papers she was carrying, but managed to stop herself. She had no idea whether she was supposed to look at them or not, and Langley would probably like a good excuse to decide the little girl wasn't worth it, and that would be a stupid reason to get stuck here. Besides, it was probably super technical government paperwork shite, and she wouldn't get anything out of it anyway.

The medical exam ended up being way more involved than she'd expected, and kind of tedious. The clinic they had operating down here was apparently mostly for clearing volunteers to join up, so it was pretty low-tech, just tents set up, split up into individual exam rooms with flimsy cloth dividers, folding chairs and tables around. The...nurse, probably, that she handed her papers to gave them and Beth a very sceptical look, before having a quick muttered conversation with another of the workers and squirrelling Beth away in a corner.

At one point, people getting their shite together, she overheard something about "Sir William" ordering they do the full thing — maybe they were going a little easy on the requirements for most people, but Langley wanted to make very very certain she was healthy before letting her in? Silly, especially since she would bet she was in better shape than literally everyone else in the building (er, tent), but fine, whatever.

Some of it was pretty basic stuff, like what she'd get going to the paediatrician as a kid — Petunia probably wouldn't have bothered, but bringing her along for Dudley's appointments and never setting anything up for her would have been suspicious. (Beth still hadn't seen doctors growing up nearly as often as Dudley, but it wasn't like she'd needed it, so. Though, if she had gone more often, they might have caught the abuse early...) You know, height and weight, blah blah, basic medical history stuff, blah. The nurse was slightly concerned that she seemed to have very little fat on her — she wasn't, like, dangerously underweight or anything, but that was mostly muscle and stuff, which apparently also wasn't super healthy? — but Beth did work out a lot (if only incidentally doing other things, like quidditch and duelling practice, she wasn't making herself super skinny on purpose), and her appetite came and went sometimes, so that was probably it? It didn't seem like the nurse thought it was a big deal, at least. Or, not once Beth assured her she wasn't doing it on purpose, anyway, she was just like this...

The medical history was more of a problem, at least in parts, because she didn't know shite about what conditions her parents or grandparents might have had. She personally didn't have any of them (or at least not the ones that she knew what they were), so it was probably fine. Her own history, well, she didn't get ill kind of ever? Mages, you know, they were more resistant to those things, they normally only caught the really bad ones. (Mages got infections super rarely, but when they did it was almost always a serious medical emergency.) She'd gotten injured a lot, but those had all gotten magical healing, so she was pretty sure there'd be zero sign even on an x-ray or whatever, most hadn't even left a scar. The big blotch on her arm was from a basilisk — wicked, right? — the phoenix tears had taken care of everything internal, but it hadn't gotten the chemical burns from the venom on the upper layers of her skin, and basilisk venom resisted healing magic, so. Oh, and all the bones in this arm had been vanished, shoulder to fingertips, but they'd regrown overnight, and she didn't think she'd broken anything in that arm since? So they should all be fine.

The nurse seemed slightly horrified by the injuries Beth had gotten over the years — welcome to her life, wasn't being the Girl Who Lived grand.

Apparently, it was slightly disturbing that Beth had never gotten a vaccination once in her life, so she was going to be getting a whole bunch of those. (Petunia hadn't been one of those paranoid weird people who distrusted vaccines, she'd gotten Dudley all of them, just not Beth — she suspected Petunia had been half-hoping she'd catch something and get dead, or at least be extra miserable for a little while.) Not all of them right now — since she'd never had one before, they were going to look out for allergic reactions or whatever — they'd spread them out over like the next week. And then she'd probably need to get more after that, depending on where she was being sent — there were, like, tropical diseases and such, which you didn't develop a resistance to growing up on a cold, wet, miserable island in the North bloody Sea, and some of them could be pretty fucking miserable, so they gave everyone a few jabs as a precaution. Not that Beth thought it was likely she'd get measles or whatever the fuck either, but mages could still spread shite even if they didn't get ill from it themselves, so fine, whatever, guessed she was doing that.

They also wanted to do a bunch of blood tests, because sure, why not. They did that right at the beginning, actually, so they could run her blood off and hopefully get results back by the time they were done with the rest of the exam. Beth was asked if she was silly about needles, which she'd never been stuck with a needle once in her life, but she was hardly squeamish, so probably not? (Which led into a question about vaccinations, but a different nurse took her history later, so she actually ended up having that conversation twice.) They kind of needed a lot, like, multiple big vials, because apparently they were testing for everything all at once? Langley had asked them to be thorough, she guessed, whatever. Watching someone stab her was kind of weird, but it wasn't like it hurt at all — she did take enough blood that Beth started feeling kind of dizzy and tingly and nauseous (blood loss, she recognised the feeling), but after a few minutes and a couple biscuits (shortbread, very plain, but homemade and perfectly edible) she was feeling better again, so.

After drawing her blood and the height and weight stuff and talking about her medical history, an actual doctor came in. They were also supposed to check for, you know, skeletal and joint problems and stuff, and some of that they would normally do with x-rays. (But most of it with, like, stretches, and just watching the person walk, or whatever.) The machines at the hospitals were terribly backed up, still dealing with all the injured from the evacuation of London — so they would be doing it by hand instead. Which involved Beth stripping down to her underwear and being prodded at by a stranger, which was extremely awkward. It didn't help that she wasn't wearing a bra today (she usually didn't, didn't have enough up there that she needed to), but the doctor said she could keep the vest she had on under her jumper. How uncomfortable she was being about it led into a talk about the Dursleys somehow, which was super fucking awkward, but thankfully it didn't last very long — once the doctor had confirmed that she wasn't living with them anymore, and had been getting the support she felt she needed since to help her get over stuff, she just moved on.

It wasn't that bad, really. Most of it was just, like, stretches and stuff, you know, showing she had proper range of motion without hurting herself or anything, and proving her hips and knees and shite were working right by just walking normal. It was a little awkward that the doctor had to watch her at it in her underwear to confirm that, but whatever, Beth just tried not to think about it. The prodding was uncomfortable, but thankfully there wasn't too much of that. The doctor thoroughly checked her wrists and her ankles, like, pressing against the bones in there to make sure they were in the right places or whatever, those weren't so bad — but doing the same with her shoulders was more awkward, Beth just stared at the cloth divider and tried to ignore it. There was also prodding into her stomach, hard enough that it kind of hurt honestly, but that was actually checking for, like, liver inflammation and stuff, not bone-related. The doctor also wanted to check something to do with her spine, which involved Beth lying face-down on the table (trying not to think about the fact that her bum was covered with only a single thin layer of cotton) while the doctor's fingers pressed firm along her spine, and... That one felt kind of good, actually, but Beth was trying not to notice that, because that was also seriously fucking awkward.

The doctor being a woman probably didn't help, because Beth could be frustratingly gay sometimes. Not that she would have been less uncomfortable with a man doing all this, just saying.

She was doing a final few things with the doctor, like listening to her lungs and her heart and talking about random stuff — the doctor actually guessed that she had pretty rough periods sometimes, apparently that could happen to especially athletic girls, and double especially the first few years after starting, which was just unfair — when the blood test results came in. Which seemed fast to Beth, but she had needed to wait a bit between seeing the first and second nurse, and then again before the doctor turned up, so maybe it'd been a while, what did she know. The results turned out mostly normal...except it turned out she had a vitamin D deficiency, which was news to her. She got plenty of sun, or at least as much as anyone on this grey fucking island got — quidditch practice did tend to involve going outside a lot — but apparently some people were just worse at producing the stuff, for no identifiable reason. (Well, not really, it was heritable so it was presumably a fuck-up in her genes somewhere, but it was still stupid.) You still got vitamin D from food and stuff, but that wasn't always enough — especially since, with the inevitable famine looming on the horizon, vitamin D -rich foods were probably going to start being scarce pretty soon, it might be better to get in the habit of taking a supplement.

Beth was sure there was a potion she could make that would take care of it, she'd ask someone later. So, thanks for telling her, she guessed? Apparently one of the symptoms of low vitamin D can be a vague feeling of weakness and tiredness and something that kind of seemed like mild depression, which, that explained a lot...

So, yeah, that didn't turn out too bad, all told. The doctor lady signed off on her being healthy enough — she seemed super unhappy about it, since Beth was only barely fifteen, but..

Beth was given a card — pretty plain, her name and a string of numbers and letters scrawled on it — and was told to go wait by the trees over there. Okay, then. There were a handful of people already there, presumably more recruits for the mixed muggle–magical thing. Some of them were obviously already Army people, wearing the same khaki uniforms as a bunch of people walking around Oxford these days — these blokes were all packed and ready to go, with stuffed backpacks and duffles and shite, and they were even armed, pistols on hips and rifles strapped onto bags. One of them had a case that she assumed was a sniper rifle or a fucking grenade launcher or something, Jesus, she didn't know. Beth had hardly even seen a firearm in person before like a week ago, and it was still slightly weird, but as long as nobody was pointing the things at her she could mostly ignore it.

There were five Army blokes — Beth didn't know how to read the rank stuff on their shoulders and lapels, but they didn't all match, so she guessed they were a mix — one woman probably in her thirties, and two men who were definitely mages, in the trousers and tunics and cloaks she saw all the time off the main street in Charing, or in Hogsmeade. (She thought robes were a more, like, upper-class or super formal thing, somewhat more modern-looking clothes were more common with average mages.) She noticed the muggles and the mages kept shooting each other glances, the muggles probably not quite used to magic existing yet. As she got closer, she noticed that the muggle woman and the pair of mages also had bags with them, which... Beth hadn't realised she'd be going straight to...wherever they were putting the new people up, she probably should have brought things too.

Oh well, if she needed to she could always apparate to Rock-on-Clyde, grab some things, and come back in like five minutes. Not a big deal.

The adults, naturally, assumed she was lost, one of the Army blokes asking if she was trying to find someone — probably trying to be all helpful and friendly (proper Hufflepuff-like), but a big damn bastard walking up to her with a visible gun on his hip was still slightly unnerving. (She was wearing a wrist holster, so she could definitely get a hex off before he could even draw that thing, but still.) Also as expected, they were very sceptical about her coming with them. The mages were less sceptical once they realised who she was, immediately started babbling to the muggles about Girl Who Lived stuff, which was very embarrassing. Desperate to change the subject, Beth might have mentioned, that first day in London, single-handedly bringing down a pair of alien fighter ship things that'd been firing on the government convoy, and thereby personally saving the lives of Princess Mary, Prince William, and the Prime Minister — maybe exaggerating a little bit (not by that much, honestly), but it was much better than the mages filling the muggles' heads with nonsense about that Hallowe'en.

The looks she was getting after that were also rather uncomfortable, but over something she'd actually done, which she could live with. She guessed.

They only had to wait for what was probably ten minutes at most — which was long enough for another mage to show up (this one a woman, but at least twice Beth's age), sparking off another round of the oh my god the Girl Who Lived talk, ugh. There was a soft pop of apparation from nearby, made by a black-haired woman wearing what looked very much like the same trousers and jacket as the officers walking around, with the rank thingies and the weird cross belt thing and everything...except hers was in all black, the leather bits in white (instead of the normal brownish colour). That was...weird. Beth thought all the Army stuff was supposed to be that, like, off-greenish khaki colour, you know? She didn't know what the hell this was.

It wasn't until after the woman started walking toward her that Beth noticed the odd, numb tingling in her scar. Beth hadn't recognised her at first — she'd never had a chance to see her up close at the Wizengamot meeting — but this must be Phoebe Ramsey, the woman who'd claimed the Gaunt seat. And also claimed to be Voldemort's actual daughter.

It seemed like that should be bigger news than it'd ended up being, but between someone claiming the Slytherin seat and selecting a new Lord Protector and making a formal alliance with the goblins for literally the first time ever — negotiated personally by a prince, their queen's grandson, and the goblin royalty hardly ever set foot on the surface — and the literal Morrigan randomly appearing in the middle of the floor despite apparation to the Wizengamot Hall supposedly being impossible — because she'd heard them talking about her, from Ireland — there'd kind of been a lot to talk about coming out of that meeting, so.

Now, Beth still wasn't quite sure what to think about all that. She guessed it was plausible Voldemort could have had a kid at some point — the thought of that snakey bastard doing something so normal as having sex was, just, weird, but presumably he hadn't always looked like that. If he did have a kid, she wouldn't have expected them to end up with the muggle mages (mages loyal to the UK, she meant), but, her very existence was odd enough Beth would be surprised by her turning up pretty much anywhere, she guessed. Honestly, magical Britain was fucked up enough that she'd normally consider siding with the muggle government instead to be a point in her favour, she definitely saw where the mages who'd defected to the UK were coming from.

Of course, Dumbledore didn't really believe it, because apparently the Dark Lord Voldemort had been born a girl, named Tamsyn Riddle. Beth was...kind of sceptical on that point, honestly. He didn't have any proof, or at least not anything he'd told Beth about, basically just said to take his word for it — and since the reasoning he'd suggested for the transformation was super misogynist, Beth kind of instinctively distrusted it. Saying shite like that made her sceptical of Dumbledore, honestly, even though she knew he meant to say that that was what Voldemort (/Tamsyn?) had been thinking, it still made her uncomfortable. It seemed more likely to her that Dumbledore had just gotten the wrong person somehow...but since he hadn't told her why he thought Riddle was Voldemort, she really had no way to say for sure one way or the other.

Not that the Tamsyn Riddle story being true necessarily meant Ramsey couldn't be telling the truth — assuming Voldemort had done the whole proper sex change ritual, you could father kids like normal after that (or he could have given birth to a kid before that, obviously). Dumbledore had talked like Voldemort supposedly having been this Riddle girl contradicted Ramsey's story, but it just didn't? Like, Beth had found that whole (frustratingly uninformative) conversation to be very confusing.

If Ramsey was Voldemort's daughter, she guessed it was...possible that her scar would get this weird tingly thing around her. Curse scars did bloody weird shite just in general. She'd expect the thing to hurt like hell if Ramsey actually was Voldemort, and had done something to himself to make him just look like a normal woman somehow (for some inexplicable reason), but it'd gone super quiet all of a sudden like a week ago, still didn't know what was up with that. Point was, she didn't know what happened to it, so she had no idea whether it would hurt like usual if Voldemort was standing right in front of her nose. This weird numb tingling wasn't really anything she'd noticed from it before, and, she didn't know...

Ramsey was super suspicious, definitely, but at this point Beth had absolutely no idea what was going on with her. It was, just, subtly unnerving, couldn't they have sent someone else to pick them up?

"All right, everyone," she called as she approached, coming to a sharp halt a couple metres away from their group as the people sitting on the ground scrambled to their feet. "I'm Phoebe Ramsey, one of the mages among the inaugural officers of the newly-minted S.C.F. You can go ahead and call me a lieutenant for now — this is still a work in progress," she said, gesturing at her own chest, probably meant to indicate the rank thingies (Beth didn't know what the proper term was). "Are any of you here not applicants to the S.C.F.? nobody? Good.

"We're in the process of setting up a base of operations for the new division, where we'll catch the mages up on modern military organisation and familiarise the rest of you with living and working around magic. We will pack in whatever training we have time for, but it will be very quick and dirty — we hope to start shipping out teams in a week, maybe two, but no longer than that. The longer we let the invaders dig in unopposed, the more difficult it will become to get rid of them. We simply can't afford the time to do a thorough job of it.

"So there's no point in delaying here any longer. Who of you have apparated before?"

Beth raised her hand, and was a little surprised to see only one of the other mages was doing the same. While she blinked in confusion, one of the muggle blokes asked, "I'm sorry, Lieutenant, but what does that mean?"

"Apparation? Magical personal transportation — instantaneous, but can only be done to and from locations the user is familiar with. If you've seen mages disappearing from one place and appearing at another, that's what it's called."

"Ma'am? I think I was brought along through it a couple times, during the fighting in London. Does that count?"

"Did you vomit?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then we'll count it." That bloke raised his hand, and also the woman, since being side-alonged apparently counted. "Very well. I'll have to carry you there one at a time, for safety reasons — we'll start with those who've never been apparated, and move on to those who've been side-alonged before, and finishing with those who can apparate independently. Being side-alonged can be quite disorienting the first few times, so transporting you in this sequence ensures you'll be recovered by the time I've gotten you all there. Go ahead and get yourselves in order and we'll get started. Which of you lads wants to go first?"

While the Army blokes glanced at each other — being teleported around with magic was kind of an intimidating prospect before you got used to it — Beth raised her hand. "Er, Ma'am? Can I pop back home and grab some things quick? I didn't realise I'd be leaving right away, sorry..."

One of Ramsey's eyebrows arched up, she cast a time charm with a snap of her fingers. "Go if you must, Potter, but if you're not back in ten minutes we're starting without you."

"I only need five." Beth turned on her heel, apparating straight into her bedroom at Rock-on-Clyde. "Tisme, can you grab my shower things, please?" She ran over her to her trunk, kicked open the lid, snatched out her book bag, and just held it upside down over her bed, shaking it until everything had fallen out. She didn't think she'd really need much — presumably they'd be given uniforms and stuff — so she went ahead and stuffed handfuls of underwear and vests into the bag, a couple trousers and some shirts just in case. Oh, some socks, obviously, and the jumper she had on now would be fine if it got colder, could just keep rain off with a charm, and ooh, her invisibility cloak — she had no idea if it even worked against the aliens or not, mind-affecting spells didn't seem to, but she might as well try it out...

Tisme showed up with a mesh bag, all of her bathroom stuff crammed inside, she tucked that away too. And her emergency bag too, of course — a portkey, some protective amulets, and also healing potions and stuff, the leftovers of the stuff she'd been given by the government mages in London but refilled and added to since. She wavered a moment before deciding she would bring her Firebolt, carefully shrunk it and tucked it into her bag. She grabbed a notebook from her desk, the pages filled with scripts for enchantments — she wasn't quite as good at remembering enchantments as she was with charms, Sirius had given her a bunch of useful stuff and she'd written them all down so she didn't forget — and, ah, this one, a framed picture of Hermione, Ron, and herself, crammed into an armchair in the common room at the end of third year. (She was tempted to bring a picture of her parents passed out snuggled up on a sofa — taken by Sirius, at the Godric's Hollow house when she'd been maybe four months old — but it wasn't replaceable if it got lost.) And...that was it, she thought, she didn't think she'd want anything else. Oh shite, the potions she took for period cramps, almost forgot — that was it, okay.

Beth apparated straight back to where she'd left, the weight of the bag almost making her overbalance. While she'd been away, the group had been reduced to three — two, Ramsey popped away with one just a couple seconds after she arrived. Slightly out of breath — she might have rushed a little too much — Beth squatted down over her bag to sort through it, trying to put the contents in a somewhat better order than, just, randomly being thrown in there. Which was sort of hard to do without just emptying the thing and starting over, but she did what she could.

Ramsey came back, approached one of the remaining people, told him to hang on, and then disappeared again, leaving only Beth and the single other mage who'd apparated before behind. She was a little confused that, among the mages in their little group, only one of them could actually apparate — maybe that wasn't as common as she'd thought? There was the floo, and the Knight Bus and stuff, she guessed she hadn't really thought about it. A short moment later, Ramsey reappeared, Beth still elbow-deep in her bag, so she took the other mage first. Beth quick crammed everything down, buckled the bag closed, was standing up with it slung over her shoulder by the time Ramsey came back.

Beth didn't like being side-alonged, particularly, especially by strangers — especially since it required physical contact, and she tended to be a bit weird about touching. But if they didn't have portkeys or whatever available, there was really no better way to get where they were going, so, as Ramsey stepped up to her Beth reluctantly held out her hand, trying not to tense up. Resisting the spell, even unintentionally — and being side-alonged was having a spell cast on you — could drastically increase the chances of being splinched, did her best to relax. She'd only be holding her hand for a couple seconds, surely she knew what she was doing, and she could always apparate straight back out or go for her emergency portkey if something went wrong, it was fine...

Ramsey took her hand, skin warm and smooth...but her magic, the skin contact allowing it to flood over Beth without the natural resistance of the air around them, was cool and harsh, like a stiff autumn wind, Beth immediately chilled, tingles sprouting over her skin. Unthinkingly, she wrenched her hand away, took a couple staggering steps back, her breath freezing in her chest. Staring wide-eyed at Ramsey, her heart abruptly banging in her throat and her fingertips, she—

"I realise you're new, Potter," the unfamiliar voice drawled, low and unamused, "but generally one does not draw one's weapon on a superior officer."

...Beth hadn't even realised her wand had fallen into her hand. It was, just, instinct.

Ramsey might look different, speaking with a normal, rich, human voice — the accent was even wrong. But her magic was familiar. Beth knew who this really was, she knew.

"What is this, what— What do you want?"

One dark eyebrow arched up, head tilting to give Beth an impatient, unimpressed sort of look. "We don't have time for this, Potter. Are you coming or not?"

Her wand hand was shaking a little, she probably should have cast something already, but she was, just— "I'm not going anywhere with you. The last time you brought me somewhere it didn't end well for me, Voldemort."

Unbelievably, the unfamiliar woman whose magic just so happen to feel exactly like the Dark Lord's, just, rolled her eyes at her — rolled her eyes, like Beth was being a silly hysterical child, or— "Oh, honestly." She took a quick step forward, Beth's wand twitched, but before she could even try to do anything a wave of magic crashed over her, her head spinning. The tension abruptly draining away, her tangled up head smooth and cool and blank, the confusion and fear and anger, just, gone — a pacification charm, Beth knew, a powerful one — the sudden calm had her going partway limp, she might have collapsed to the ground if Ramsey didn't catch her, firm hands closing on Beth's arms. "Do keep the dramatics to a minimum, if you please. You might have noticed, but we've found ourselves in something of a worldwide existential crisis at the moment."

Beth could hear the words, but the meaning didn't quite click, meaningless sounds ringing in her ears — this was one hell of a pacification charm, Jesus. "That, um, I... What...?"

Ramsey let out a sigh. There was a flicker of magic, one of her hands letting go — Beth had recovered enough by now that she didn't immediately fall over. Ramsey turned her other hand, and...slipped Beth's wand back into its holster.

...Oh, she must have dropped her wand. Numb from the pacification charm, she hadn't even noticed. That was...bad. Dropping your wand with a Dark Lord standing right in front of you was generally bad. At least she'd given it back, Beth guessed...

She was so confused right now, her head spinning, she didn't know what...

"I understand if you may cling to a wish for vengeance — the sins of the father, and all that — but I would delay the pursuit of such personal vendettas until the common treat we all face has been neutralised. Once the invaders are all dead, if you then wish to exact retribution for what was done to your parents, you're certainly welcome to try."

...She, she— Ramsey was sticking to her story, that she was actually Voldemort's daughter — that's what she meant by that, sins of the father. But, she wasn't, though. Beth wasn't sure why she was so certain, and still all light-headed from the pacification charm it felt rather distant and surreal, but she knew, she— "I'll tell. I'll tell everyone, who you really are." That was probably not a great thing to say right to Voldemort's face, but she maybe wasn't thinking straight at the moment.

Amazingly, Ramsey rolled her eyes at her, again — Beth was so taken aback she just blankly gaped back at her, hardly even noticed the pacification continuing to dribble away. "Naturally. I could hardly expect anything else. Besides..." Her hand tightening around Beth's arm just a little, her posture squaring, preparing to apparate, Ramsey leaned closer, looming over Beth, she had to tip her head back. Her voice low, a cool smooth whisper, "No one will believe you."

Ramsey grinned at her, bright and cheerful, pale eyes dancing.

And then Beth was yanked into crushing blackness, apparated away in a maelstrom of nonsense colour, pulled inexorably along by the hand on her arm.

Chapter Text

25th September 1995 (63:6:4)
— Contact plus 00.00.23:01.15

A few speckles of warm water tapping against her head, Beth reflexively glanced up, the tops of the trees half-hidden in mist, back-lit by the sun into a soft white glow. She cast a quick rain-repelling charm, just in case, carefully tweaked over her cooling charm so they didn't interfere — and she would need both, the rain didn't stop it from being terribly hot down here. Beth had never been more grateful for environmental spells in her life.

Over the last few days, things had been moving very fast. Omniglots were a rare and valuable resource — Britain had more than most magical countries, for whatever reason, but even there they were at most one in five hundred — and the longer they delayed moving to help the people facing the brunt of the invasion the more time the aliens would have to dig in, so they wanted to get what few volunteers they had prepared and shipped out as quickly as humanly possible. Beth had spent maybe a week and a half at the SCF's slapdash little training camp, mostly focussed on Army stuff, a lot of the organisational and procedural whatever as well as some basic muggle combat training — though they didn't spend a lot of time on the latter, since her battlemagic had been given a stamp of approval after only a couple quick practice sessions with the senior mages there, and she was far more likely to use that anyway.

She was carrying an actual bloody pistol at the moment, tucked away in a holster strapped high up her thigh, which still seemed fucking absurd — even just that they'd give firearms to fifteen-year-old girls in the first place, though that probably shouldn't seem so weird, when she thought about it? After all, wands were way more dangerous than guns, and she'd gotten one of those on her eleventh birthday. Some of her muggle-raised sensibilities leaking through, she guessed. Not that she expected she'd ever use it — magic was far more versatile and potentially destructive, and also her aim was better with a wand — but she'd been told it was some kind of rule that everyone got one, so, fine, whatever.

She had been taught some magic, mostly things to help navigate, or communicate over distances, some stealth and environmental charms — which were kind of the same category, since controlling the traces you left in an environment was very similar to the functions needed to alter your immediate environment — and also a fair bit of healing. The team she'd been put with did have a proper medic, who'd gotten a much more thorough education in the subject, but he wasn't a mage, and even a little bit of amateur healing could make a huge difference in an emergency. (Her plan in medical emergencies was to just do whatever the hell Brad told her to.) Put together with all the muggle Army stuff, it turned out to be a lot of shite she'd needed to have crammed into her head on a very tight schedule. And apparently she did learn things even more quickly than most omniglots, for whatever reason, because after a couple days the instructors told her they were taking it up a notch, and the pace of shite they were throwing at her grew even more ridiculous.

It turned out, even with cheating mind magic shite, the brain could only tolerate having so much information crammed into it without consequence — migraines kind of sucked, she'd learned. At least when her head really started hurting they decided she was done for the day, but still, Jesus...

After a week and a half of probably the most intense study she'd ever done in her life, alternating between lessons and miserable headache episodes and sleep, a group of them were pulled away from whatever they'd been doing at the time and informed they'd be going to central Africa of all places — like, right now. There'd been twelve of them in that little meeting — all of their faces had been familiar, but she'd hardly spoken to half of them at the time — though another four had been added on the way to the airstrip, organised into four groups of four, which was apparently copying the way the SAS did things, for reasons. (Like Beth would know the difference anyway, it didn't really matter.) She'd had long enough to quick apparate back to Rock-on-Clyde to swap out a few of her supplies for things that might be more useful in the bloody tropics and tell people what was happening — she hadn't even been able to say goodbye to Sirius, he'd been busy elsewhere at the time — practically the second she got back they were being packed into trucks and ferried over to some RAF airstrip, where they were shepherded onto a plane with like a hundred other people, and they were gone.

The first couple hours of the plane flight she'd mostly spent talking to the fifteen other people in her troop (as it was called), since a lot of them hadn't gotten a lot of time to get to know each other, as crazy as things had been since the attack. Beth was one of four mages — one in each patrol, as the groups of four were called — two of the others also carrying brooms — one was a Hit Wizard, and the other was actually a professional quidditch player who also happened to be a duelling hobbyist. (His name was only vaguely familiar, she didn't know the local clubs very well.) The fourth mage, arriving with the last group of four just before the plane took off, to her surprise just so happened to be Bill, Ron's eldest brother — she'd had no idea he'd joined, apparently he'd been loaned to the SCF as part of the three-way cooperation they had going on between the mages, goblins, and muggles. He was primarily here as a cursebreaker, to do warding and enchanting and stuff, but of course he wasn't a bad battlemage either.

Beth had been warned that she and Sirius would be put in separate troops, due to some standing rules about putting close family members too near each other in the organisation, but those rules obviously didn't apply to Bill. Which was good, at least she knew someone here, even if it wasn't very well...

The muggles were all military people, volunteers for this combined muggle–magical experiment of theirs. They had a mix of specialties, but Beth had quickly noticed that they were mostly, like, scouts and snipers and fucking high explosives experts — she'd guess their job was mostly going to be to keep an eye on the aliens and occasionally blow shite up when the opportunity presented itself. They leaned older than she'd expected, mostly in their thirties, rather more experienced, qualified types than you'd get if you pulled people out of the Army at random. Which did make sense, when she thought about it, since they were expected to do a lot of weird crazy shite often without much in the way of backup, so.

It also meant she was younger than the rest of them by an even larger margin than she'd assumed she would be — the second-youngest was actually Bill, and he was a good decade older than her. Unsurprisingly, most of them were rather put off by that, Beth was trying to ignore it. They'd probably change their minds the first time they ended up in an actual fight, and Beth started blasting apart a dozen aliens with every spell. She had it on good authority from muggle fighters during the initial attack that that shite was kind of intimidating.

The plane ride was super long, going on what had to be ten or twelve hours. She wasn't sure exactly, she'd slept for part of it — they went ahead and gave everyone vaccines for various shite in the area while all gathered together on the plane, and those had made Beth kind of tired — but they'd left in the afternoon and the sun was already rising again when they landed. She'd overheard someone saying that just going straight down would have had them flying over where the main landing site was, so they'd looped around a bit, probably by a wider margin than they'd needed to just to be safe. (Getting shot down before they could even get there wouldn't do anybody any good, after all.) They'd landed in a city called Goma, sprawled out on the shore of a big damn lake (Kivu), looming overhead to the north a bloody active volcano (Nyiragongo). Seriously, an actual volcano, she could see smoke coming off of the thing from the city, it was unnerving. Beth and a couple other omniglots had immediately been gathered together and shuffled off with some locals, to spend just a couple days familiarising themselves with the local language.

Though, that was kind of a complicated question. They were in the Congo, the official language of which was French — a rather odd-sounding dialect of French, but still French, Beth didn't have any trouble understanding it. The problem was, maybe only half the country actually spoke French very well at all, if that many, the French-speakers concentrated in the major cities, especially the area around the capital. (Which was literally a thousand miles away from here, because it turned out the country was huge.) French had been the language of the colonial administration here — Belgian French, but still French — and it'd stuck around as the language the government and stuff used...but a lot of people lived basically in the middle of nowhere, the government and education systems and stuff not having much of a footprint at all. Especially in the northeast of the country, which just so happened to be where they were. So, like, the government and military people mostly spoke French okay, but random ordinary people didn't tend to.

Exactly what language people did speak was kind of hard to figure out — there were far too many tiny local languages to keep straight. The big lingua franca people tended to use in this area of the continent, learned as a second language so they could all talk to each other (when it wasn't just French), was Kiswahili, the proper name of Swahili in itself, which was basically an additional official language in the east of the country...but that didn't guarantee that everyone spoke that either. A really common one with the locals was a related-but-different language — sort of like the difference between English and Dutch — called Kinande, and there were a fair number of people in Goma, at least, who spoke another language more closely related to Kinande called Kinyarwanda (largely but not solely spoken by refugees from across the border just to the east of the city). But the people where they were being sent to probably spoke something called Balendru, which was completely unrelated to the other three (like the difference between English and Euskara or some shite), or maybe one of the dozens of tiny local languages they hardly even knew the names of, nobody could say for sure.

Beth and the other omniglots spent a couple days getting as much Swahili as they possibly could crammed into their heads — which wasn't much, but at least it was better than nothing — one day a Lendu man came by so Beth could get a tiny bit of Balendru. Nobody could tell her how useful any of this would be where they were going, which made the headaches she got from pushing herself seem kind of pointless, but whatever.

Even while focussed on picking up the language, it became obvious pretty quickly that they were hardly in a particularly stable area of the continent — the end of colonialism hadn't exactly gone smoothly down here, and they were still feeling the aftermath. These days there were a mix of communist (some allied with the Soviets and others the Chinese) and conservative governments, some countries rather stable in which international faction they allied with and others switching back and forth from administration to administration. At the moment, Congo was neutral, but kind of vaguely socialist-leaning, maybe? It was complicated. Things were equally complicated in some neighbouring countries — Angola was definitely communist these days, but had had a really nasty time breaking away from Europe (Liz forgot which country it used to be a colony of), and was pretty much constantly at war with local conservative militias and the white-supremacist governments in the south; Zambia, like the Congo, was neutral but kind-of-vaguely-not-really socialist, and like Angola preoccupied with the racist shitholes just to their south; Beth had only vaguely heard of shite going on in (conservative) Uganda and (communist) Tanzania, something about a war a decade ago and both countries being a mess ever since (resulting in a refugee crisis, a fair number of Ugandans fleeing into the Congo); and the Central African Republic sounded kind of fascist? and also a violent chaotic mess in general, who even knew what the fuck was going on up there.

Currently, there was another refugee crisis going on, due to what sounded like an ethnic conflict in Rwanda and Burundi — Beth hadn't followed the explanation exactly (it hadn't helped that it'd half been in Kiswahili), but it sounded like the same ethnic conflict was going on in both countries, but it also sometimes spilled into fighting between them...or maybe just different factions straddling the border ignoring it to snipe at each other, she wasn't sure exactly. Apparently there was a whole thing going on with that, to do with both the Congo and Tanzania threatening to intervene to put a stop to it — partially just because it was fucked up, but mostly because both countries were poor to begin with and really didn't need the added burden of looking after refugees, not to mention the risk of the conflict spilling across their borders — but if they did that Uganda would probably intervene on the other side, and with how shaky some of the governments and factions down here could be that could easily balloon into a large-scale international conflict, which wasn't a risk anybody wanted to play with. It was complicated, was the point.

(One of Beth's language instructors was in the Congolese army, who she'd gotten most of this stuff from. His personal opinion was that they should just invade already and have done with it, but Beth wasn't sure how common that opinion was. One of his cousins had been murdered by one of the militias spilling over from Rwanda, and also he happened to be a Communist, so naturally found the old tribal monarchies still holding disproportionate influence in Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda to be deeply offensive on principle. Not exactly an impartial observer, then. He also thought they should team up with Angola, Zambia, and Tanzania to help the rebels overthrow the remaining white-supremacist enclaves in the south, which wasn't really a surprise when she thought about it. So, yeah, kind of impossible to tell what the majority opinion in the country was just from that one bloke.)

Of course, that probably wasn't going to happen now, since the alien invasion gave them rather more pressing things to worry about. She'd heard that the ethnic tension especially hadn't, just, gone away overnight, there was still low-key fighting going on here and there — Beth had heard gunfire in the distance multiple times — but the large-scale war they'd been teetering on the edge of definitely wasn't going to happen now. Though, the feeling on the air she'd picked up while in Goma, she suspected the various international forces accumulating in the Congo would do something about it at some point, just to stop the tension from snapping again and making trouble while they were trying to deal with the aliens. She suspected someone would finally get sick of it before too long, and knock out the governments in Rwanda, Burundi, and maybe also Uganda, and do their best to disarm the various radical ethnic militias running around — or at least point them at the aliens, she guessed. There was little telling how long that would be, but if Beth got back to camp to hear news of fighting going on in the south had come in while they were out, she wouldn't be at all surprised.

Because, obviously fighting each other over pointless nonsense was exactly what they needed to spend their time doing right now. Not like there was a literal alien invasion they were dealing with or anything.

Goma had been kind of a chaotic place in general, even before the invasion. The refugees from the ethnic conflict just to the southeast had been numerous enough that aid had already been coming in for some time — after all, the Congo themselves hardly had the resources to handle that kind of thing, it could quickly get very messy without help. Beth hadn't known about this before, but apparently there'd been a deal between the West and the Communists that the assistance to provide for the refugees would be a cooperative effort, any necessary security forces needed to protect the supplies and aid workers provided by a neutral party at the invitation of the host countries. (The Congo and Tanzania had agreed to let in Egypt and Cuba, the latter of which Beth was pretty sure were Communists, but apparently weren't with the big international Communist alliance? Confusing, but whatever.) She was aware deals like that happened now and then — if they cooperated on projects like this, they didn't have to worry about the opposite party maybe doing something nefarious while they were at it — Beth just didn't pay that much attention to muggle news. They'd already been at it for a year or two, Goma the centre of the effort, so they'd already built up a lot of the necessary infrastructure to host the teams and supplies coming in and out, an extra runway at the airport, some patching up of roads, some rather utilitarian housing for international workers coming through, all kinds of stuff. Supposedly the Soviets had offered improvements to their water-purification system, a big plant and laying down pipe and everything, and the Cubans (with help from the Soviets and Egyptians) had built a literal hospital from scratch, it was slightly ridiculous.

Which made it a very convenient stopover point for militaries coming in to fight the aliens. Kisangani was a larger city, and closer to the heart of the landing area, so might have been more convenient...if it weren't already occupied — the people fleeing from the area said the city, of nearly half a million people, had been taken in the initial attack. They weren't entirely sure how much territory the aliens were spread over (the maps Beth had seen were very fuzzy, only estimates), but it was thought Kisangani was well behind their lines, so, Goma it was.

It was a pretty respectable city, few tall buildings but covering a large area, spread out on the shore of the big damn lake, many of the buildings painted in bright, pleasant colours, not bad-looking. The residential areas of the city were surprisingly low-density, modest little houses separated by sizeable gardens — she'd asked one of her language instructors about it, and apparently public housing included space for vegetable gardens, part of an effort to reduce food scarcity dating to one of their more left-leaning governments a couple decades ago, which was kind of neat. Set up in a few public greenspaces, or else spread out in blobby outgrowths off the city, were refugee camps hosting thousands of people, at minimum. They were relatively orderly affairs, at least, tents (and sometimes even simple wooden shacks) set up in neat little rows, gathered around temporary warehouses where supplies were kept, and even tiny little slapdash clinics and primary schools for the children and the like. Didn't seem exactly pleasant to live in, she was sure everyone would rather go home, but it could be a lot worse, she guessed.

And spreading out in more big blobs were the military camps. They had a fair number of people sending fighters in to help, so the whole thing was kind of a big mess. Apparently, it'd taken some negotiation to decide just who would be showing up where — the landings were all in former colonies, and they could be kind of sensitive about certain foreign militaries kicking around in their countries, for obvious reasons. The Congo, for example, would not react well to seeing Belgian soldiers walking around again, and some of their African allies who'd immediately agreed to send what help they could had equally intense animosity for the French — even more in some cases, since it turned out the French had intervened in their former colonies multiple times since 'independence' (which Beth had literally never heard of before her language lessons) — and the Indians had basically told Britain to fuck off, they'd rather fight with the Communists. One that had kind of surprised her, there was another major landing in, like, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, somewhere around there (she didn't know exactly), which was very near the Chinese border...but they didn't want to let the Chinese military in. They would accept help from their neighbours, the Soviets, any of the Arab and European states who were offering — but not France, since they were also a former French colony, and had fought a nasty war for independence in living memory — but she'd heard they'd basically told the Chinese to fuck off.

Apparently the Chinese had invaded the region only like a decade ago? There'd been a big bloody war and everything, which was completely new to her. How had she never heard about this? Also, weren't everyone involved Communists? What the hell...

Anyway, by the time Beth had arrived in Goma, foreign fighters had already been moving in for a week or so. The comparatively modest African militaries had gotten here in significant numbers first — she'd heard the Tanzanians were the first to arrive, followed by smaller teams from Zambia and Angola (apparently including Cuban volunteers who'd already been in Angola at the time). More fighters were gradually trickling in from their neighbours to the west further along the coast, but they were gathering somewhere in the west of the country, to come at the landing from the other side. The Soviets were the first from outside of Africa to show up, weeks ago now — though Beth had seen very few white people among them, supposedly mostly from Central Asia — an Egyptian force coming in by way of Tanzania not much later — though a rather modest one, beefing up their security forces already in Goma, most of their people with the Arab forces massing in Ethiopia to press the aliens from the north — soon followed by advance forces from the Americans and a smattering of European countries, including Britain. In the next week and continuing since Beth had arrived, more Americans and Europeans kept flying in, though they probably wouldn't see a lot of the former for at least a little while — they were focussed primarily on the big landing in the Amazon, and there were also rumours of aliens in the Pacific, but they had the capacity to spare to send a little backup their way. Supposedly the Chinese also had a pretty damn sizeable force on its way too, but it'd taken them some extra time to put it together, they weren't expected to arrive for another two to three weeks.

She was kind of looking forward to it, honestly — she'd heard they were bringing a bunch of fucking flamethrowers (because apparently the Chinese army just did shite like that), which sounded very useful for fighting in the bloody jungle.

Goma had been very loud and chaotic, with the refugees and foreign militaries all concentrated in one place — the active fucking volcano looming over the city some kilometres to the north only making everything seem more tense and dire. (Literally, an actual volcano, there was a stripe of smoke rising from the peak and everything, it was seriously unnerving trying to sleep so close to the thing.) The alien invasion going on, the volcano nearby, the low-key unrest in the refugee camps, all the foreign fighters all over, sometimes from countries that didn't like each other very much, all of it combining to make everyone very on-edge. And then, not long after Beth arrived, thousands of people started streaming in from the north — the landing had started weeks ago now, but most of the locals were fleeing on foot, so it'd taken them this long to get here — which didn't exactly help things settle down any.

Thankfully, none of that was Beth's problem anymore. After just a few days in the city, transportation had been arranged for her troop by the local mages, and they were relocated to a forward camp in the bloody rainforest a couple hundred kilometres north. From here, they were within a few kilometres of the territory held by the aliens — if she got on her broom and flew straight up, high enough to look out over the trees, she'd be able to see signs of their presence, unsettlingly nearby. Of course, Beth hadn't actually done that, since that'd be a good way to get spotted and blown out of the sky...

Beth didn't really know much about the magical governments in Africa — the situation was seriously fucking complicated, she understood that much. For the first century or so after Secrecy, most of sub-Saharan Africa had been being overseen by Egypt and the Arab and Indian countries, how much 'oversight' was actually necessary varying quite a lot depending on where you looked. It'd been handed off back to the locals in bits and pieces, the last "protectorate" dissolved over a century ago now, but there were so many different countries with completely unfamiliar names, it was impossible to keep straight. The region of the continent they were in now was relatively sparsely populated, but shockingly diverse, so many different ethnic groups and languages packed into a relatively small area she honestly didn't know how they managed it. Well, mostly they didn't? She was pretty sure the magical countries in the area cooperated to keep an eye on the area, mostly just to make sure Secrecy remained in place — there weren't really enough mages here for a full proper government to be worth it.

It turned out it was kind of hard to build cities in the middle of the fucking rainforest, who'd have guessed.

They'd come here through...well, kind of a portkey, she guessed? It was Chinese magic, supposedly, something the locals had adopted over a century ago now, since all the rainforests and mountains and rivers and volcanos and shite made floo travel pretty much impossible. They'd sketched some kind of big spell circle on the ground, just drawn in the dirt by hand, the few dozen people being moved standing inside of the circle, the mages performed some cooperatively-cast spell of some kind — and then zip, they were standing inside an identical circle a couple hundred kilometres away, instantly. It'd made Beth rather dizzy, their whole group had needed a few minutes to sit down and recover, but it hadn't been that bad. It required a fair bit of coordination — the circles on either side had to be drawn exactly the same, simultaneously — so it wasn't something that could be done without a lot of preparation, but still, much better than portkeys or the floo.

Rainforests, Beth had learned already, were kind of miserable places to hang around in for more than a couple hours at a time. Despite being so much nearer the equator, Goma hadn't actually seemed any warmer than summer at home — she suspected the elevation and cooling from the big damn lake had something to do with that. Where they were now was...somewhat warmer, she thought? It was hard to tell for sure, because it was so fucking humid all the time. Now, London was a wet miserable city, but when it was being wet and miserable it was also usually cooler. Somehow, there was so much water in the air here that there was occasional fog and mist condensating onto leaves and shite even in the summer heat, while the sun was still out, which was fucking ridiculous. Seriously, it was miserable, she was basically sweating constantly all the time, but that wasn't even the worst part — the air felt thick just breathing it, especially when she was walking around or doing something, it didn't take very long before she started feeling a little out of breath. Like there was so much bloody water in the air that it made it hard to breathe.

And the bugs! Beth wasn't squeamish about this shite like some girls could be, something buzzing around her head or occasionally finding one crawling on her or whatever didn't really bother her, that wasn't the problem — the problem was they were fucking loud! The first night after they'd gotten here, Beth had had serious trouble sleeping. Partially because she knew the nearest alien camp was only a few kilometres away, but partially because the buzzing and chirping and chittering was constant. And not a subtle noise either, she could tolerate it if it were just a low buzzing or something, but it was high and piercing and, just, fucking loud, enough it was giving her a headache, she didn't know how anyone could stand it. She'd eventually given up and put up a sound paling, anchoring it with a few runes carved into a random chunk of wood (a basic trick Sirius had insisted she learn) — maybe not a great idea, since she might not hear it if they were attacked in the middle of the night, but she wouldn't be much help in a fight anyway if she couldn't fucking sleep.

That shite was all miserable, yes, but it wasn't all bad. It rained pretty much every day, yes — normally not very much at a time, little showers sweeping through again and again and again, which still added up to a hell of a lot of rain all together — but the clouds and the fog and the mist all cut down on the sun that actually reached her kind of a lot. The sun did come out often enough, of course, but getting plenty of breaks helped. Beth was stupidly pale, she couldn't count the times she'd gotten terribly sunburned at quidditch practice, if she were stuck out in the sun all the time she'd probably literally die.

Though, the forest itself also helped with that. Some of the trees here were, just, fucking huge — trunks well wider than her armspan, with thick tentacles of roots sprawling out and out and out, eventually tangling up with their neighbours enough it was impossible to tell which roots belonged to which tree, and, just, absurdly tall. Beth had used a quick measuring charm on a particularly tall one and, after doing the conversation in her head, it was over fifty metres tall, Jesus. The trunks were pretty bare of branches for the first couple dozen metres or so (fuck), but they spread out once they were up there, enough layers of leaf-heavy branches overlapping to cast the ground far below in thick shade.

There were parts of the forest where the huge trees didn't blot out the sky, for whatever reason, those sections bright and sunny, and dense with all kinds of shite, ferns or whatever, and crawlers, and younger trees and bushes and, just, whatever, most of it unfamiliar. The locals had cut walk paths through the underbrush — one had supposedly been in use until just a year ago, and it was already half-overgrown, the forest reclaiming it shocking quickly — but where they hadn't, these sunny patches were practically impassable, the greenery so dense it might as well be a solid leafy flowery wall. The further you got from these open patches, it got darker and darker, the deepest areas almost seeming to be in permanent twilight, lit by the distant glow of the nearest open patch, the occasional beam of sunlight slashing down through the darkness.

Beth didn't like hanging around in the really dark areas, honestly. It was easier to get around, the pseudo-twilight thick enough to prevent any dense groundcover from forming, but she couldn't bloody see anything. Some of the shite around here was dangerous, venomous snakes and whatever, as dark as it was in here she could easily step on something without realising it...

Thankfully, they didn't spend much time in the especially dark areas. They didn't want to go out in the open either, concerned the aliens would spot them, so instead they traced along the edges of the open patches, still out of the direct sunlight but bright enough to see what the hell they were doing. Enough sun that there were still a lot of bushes and shite they had to make their way through, and of course there were bugs flying around all over — Beth had been stung a couple times already, but thankfully nothing she'd had a bad reaction to, just painful — and of course just breathing here was a fucking pain, but it wasn't that bad. Or, could be worse, at least the sun wasn't frying her to death...

There were people who actually lived in this place, which she personally couldn't imagine. Some of them were farmers, would cut or burn down a patch of the forest, grow shite there for a few years, and then pick up all their shite and move a few kilometres and start over again, letting the forest reclaim it — the topsoil was surprisingly thin and sandy, she could find rocky shite pretty easily just scraping at it with her boot, they probably had to move around so they didn't just exhaust the soil. There were also smaller groups of, like, hunter-gatherer types, living deep in the middle of nowhere and just living off of whatever they could find. Their guide was one of these people, who were apparently mostly pygmies — the locals who hadn't been killed or captured had all fled, with the exception of a small handful of hunters, who'd stuck around to keep an eye on the invaders. Ballsy little bastards, honestly.

(Beth had a suspicion Hermione would say "pygmy" was a slur, but she honestly wasn't sure what else she was supposed to call them. Kepfisa himself was Efe, but Beth was pretty sure that was a particular clan group...or something, she wasn't sure exactly — it didn't help that they didn't share a language, so she couldn't exactly ask. And there were multiple different groups in here, so Efe didn't work as a general term. Oh well.)

When the African mages had been scouting the place out, looking for a place they could teleport people in, they'd stumbled across Kepfisa who, after a bit of explaining, had offered the tiny little village his people had been staying in until just a couple weeks ago as a place for them to camp. Most of their first day up here had been spent just expanding the small partially-cleared space into something they could actually use — they were bringing rather more people than had been living here before, and they had equipment and stuff, they'd needed to clear some space. Luckily, that was relatively easy to do, since they had magic. Their little ramshackle shelters had been shrunk down in Goma, and then just unshrunk once they had a spot for them, very efficient. After her troop was done mapping out the immediate area, and getting a sense of what the aliens were up to, there would be more people coming in — probably hundreds — so most of them were back at the camp at the moment clearing out more space, Bill constantly tweaking the wards to keep them hidden and protected, they'd be at that for a while.

They'd needed to practically destroy the village, but Kepfisa had just brushed it off — his people were used to moving around on short notice, when they fled they'd been carrying everything of value they had on them.

Beth had done a little bit of exploring around the camp, getting the lay of the land, serving as a translator while they were told about things in the immediate area, what bugs and snakes and things they had to look out for, which plants were edible, that kind of thing. (They had plenty of food for now, but things might get spotty down the road, and there was nothing wrong with snacking on fruits and nuts around if they felt like it...except some of them were poisonous, was the thing.) This was the first time she'd gotten very far away from the camp at all — part of their job was to, yes, get the camp going so they could move more people in, but also to map out where the aliens were, and try to figure out what they were up to. The aliens seemingly hadn't noticed their arrival at all — they'd seen aircraft going by not very far away, but Kepfisa had learned they had trouble seeing very far through the trees, as long as they weren't flying right overhead they were probably fine — so they had an opportunity to observe their nearest outpost undetected. Kepfisa had been observing them for a couple weeks now, so he had some intelligence to share too.

The walk had been pretty miserable, a couple kilometres through the densely-forested terrain, the plants thick enough and the ground uneven enough that they couldn't move in anything like a straight line, weaving and twisting around. (Beth would worry about getting lost, but Kepfisa knew where he was going, and she could always resort to locator charms to get back.) The path Kepfisa led them on mostly kept to the edge of those sunny patches — because the brush was thin enough and well-lit enough to find their way relatively easily, but also so they were still partially hidden, the aliens less likely to spot them — though that wasn't always possible. They had to cut through a darker area a couple times, and once they had to force through the dense underbrush of a sunny patch, consciously avoiding any of the pre-existing paths. Those would leave them far too exposed, but even without the cover of the bloody enormous trees, the thick vegetation should keep them mostly obscured. Beth had ended up scratched to hell, the branches clawing at her — the only reason she didn't have twigs and leaves caught in her hair was because she'd resorted to just cutting it all off every morning (it grew back as she slept every time, bloody annoying) — and David had been stung by a bee or something, but they'd made it okay.

As difficult as the terrain was, as indirect as their path, it took them probably an hour to reach where they were going — the spot Kepfisa led them to had a surprisingly good view of the alien camp below, perfect. There was a stream coming through here, joining the river not far away to the northwest somewhere, the flow of the water enough to erode away the soil over the centuries, exposing the stone underneath. Obviously, all the big trees and the brush and shite had a rather harder time growing directly on the bedrock, so there was a relatively clear area around the stream, a narrow corridor surrounded by thick jungle on either side. The aliens had camped along either side of the stream, filling the cleared space, Kepfisa's lookout a bit to the south, on a little hill near a curve of the river upstream, the elevation and the open space around the stream giving them a very clear view.

Of course, since they had a clear view, they had to be careful about not being seen. The last little bit of the trip had been very slow and cautious, following the treeline up to the hill, moving in fits and starts. Kepfisa in the lead, slowly picking through the brush, occasionally he'd stop completely, holding up a hand, and dip closer to the ground, huddling close against the greenery — a moment later, one of the aliens' aircraft would pass overhead, eerily quiet, little more but a shadow, like a cloud crossing the sun. They still weren't sure how the hell the aliens' shite actually managed to fly without any obvious engines or anything, at this point they were just assuming it was some kind of magic. (The same magic their shields worked by, Beth suspected.) Once the shadow was gone, Kepfisa would wait a few counts, before getting up and moving again, leading them slowly on.

The trees didn't go all the way to the edge of the hill, instead one of those thick sunny patches — so Kepfisa had them get down on their hands and knees and crawl their way to the edge, under the protective cover of the greenery. It was kind of miserable, the dense vegetation poking and scratching at her, before long she was practically covered in mud — except for her hands, which she'd protected with an imperturbable charm early on so she could still use her wand — and there were bugs bloody everywhere. Kepfisa insisted the mud was actually a good thing, since it'd help keep them hidden from the aliens, but it still sucked. Beth heard almost constant cursing from the Captain and Nkulu, though David was quiet enough, and she could barely tell where Kepfisa even was.

The hill dropped off over the cleared area around the stream pretty quickly, the greenery running almost right up the edge. They were able to poke their heads through, getting a pretty damn good view, and still be mostly covered by the brush — close to the ground on the hill and surrounded by plants, Beth was pretty sure you'd have to know exactly where they were to find them, not a bad spot. David immediately started digging into his pack to get his equipment out, while the Captain and Kepfisa shuffled closer to Beth from both sides, so she could translate what Kepfisa had managed to learn to the Captain.

Figuring out how to translate for Kepfisa had been a bit of a pain. His first language was Lese, which was a very local language, spoken by practically nobody outside of the area; he also spoke Balendru, which was also a local language, but a rather more common one, used in some of the proper towns in the highlands east of here. Nkulu had grown up with a mix of Kikongo and Lingála — and French, in school and stuff, but he hadn't retained enough to speak it at all — but was also fluent in Swahili, and was more or less passable in Balendru. (Which was slightly ridiculous for a normal person who didn't have absurd omniglot powers, but okay then.) So, Kepfisa would say something in Balendru, which Nkulu would translate into Swahili, which Beth would then finally translate into English for the Captain. Their first few hours here, Beth had needed a second Congolese intermediary to translate the Swahili into French, but by this point her Swahili was comfortable enough (and she'd started picking up enough Balendru to help fill in the gaps) that she didn't need him anymore, the officer who'd been helping her with that hadn't even come along this time. It was still a little tedious needing to pass it through Nkulu, but as her Swahili got closer to finished her Balendru was starting to speed up, so hopefully it wouldn't be necessary for very much longer.

Of course, with her luck, they'd probably decide to move her somewhere else as soon as she actually got good enough with the local language — they were mostly only here to scout out the area and prepare for the arrival of a much larger force — but oh well.

The Captain and Kepfisa shuffled uncomfortably close to her, really, but they wanted to be as quiet as possible, so Beth guessed she just had to deal with it. Their sixteen-person group was lead by Luke Green, who'd been in some Army thing before being transferred here, Beth didn't know exactly. (It didn't really matter.) He was in his thirties, Beth thought, tall and relatively slender — like, footballer slender, not as big as some of the other Army blokes but not exactly little either — with dirty-blond hair just long enough to stick out of the bottom of his cap, darkened by sweat, scraggly stubble grown over the last few days scattered over the bottom half of his face. He was a rather stiff, professional sort, and had been less than entirely pleased at first to be saddled with a fifteen-year-old girl — he'd nearly gone to go complain at Ramsey (who was definitely literally Voldemort, but Beth still hadn't managed to convince anyone of that), and actually might have if Bill hadn't had a quick talk with him. He'd loosened up a bit as Beth picked up the local languages absurdly quickly, and after actually seeing her use magic for the first time setting up camp, but she thought he still wasn't happy about it.

Kepfisa, right on her other side, was sort of the odd man out in their little five-person party. Nkulu was in a very similar sort of modern military uniform as Beth, David, and the Captain — the jacket and trousers were somewhat more loosely fit than the British version, the camouflage pattern visibly different, and of course the Congolese army had their own patches and stuff — but Kepfisa, obviously, didn't have anything like that. He was in what looked very much like cargo shorts, made out of a heavy, durable cloth (probably cotton of some kind) — the things had definitely seen better days, stained and threadbare, a few tears here and there. And that was it, he wasn't wearing anything else, his chest and even his feet bare. Before going out today he'd sketched on his own skin with ash and natural paints, which was something Beth had seen him do before. She assumed it had some cultural or religious meaning or something, but she wasn't sure if it was appropriate to ask (it might be private?), so she'd just left him to it.

Of course, since he was a pygmy and all, Kepfisa was weirdly short — Beth was even taller than him, if not really by that much. It was honestly still kind of surreal, Beth wasn't used to being taller than grown men...

Pointing out at the alien encampment ahead of them, Kepfisa started talking. A lot of the languages around here sounded kind of similar, in that they had most of the same sounds — particularly, some consonants started off with an attached nasal sound (like in Nkulu's name), and some of the consonants did this weird thing where your breath flowed in while making it instead of out — and even a lot of the same grammatical quirks — like the types of prefixes nouns got (which were maybe kind of like grammatical gender in European languages?) and how the verbs could get a bunch of shite all smeared together — despite their vocabulary being completely different, and maybe not actually being related at all. Like, listening to them, Swahili and Balendru did sound pretty close, and there was a similar word here and there, but most of the words were all completely different. Kind of like if, say, a Chinese person were to adapt all the sound rules and grammar of English, but keep all the original Chinese vocabulary, so they ended up sounding similar but still being completely different.

She thought the languages were totally unrelated, but had just absorbed similar features from living next to each other over literally thousands of years. Which wasn't a completely new idea, similar things happened with like Spanish and Euskara or Chinese and Korean or whatever, it was just wild to notice it on her own when picking up the languages.

Anyway, Beth was starting to pick up enough Balendru to kind of get what Kepfisa was saying, in places, but Nkulu's Swahili translation a moment later was still necessary to get all the details. "Ah, Kepfisa's starting out explaining what this place used to look like, to give us an idea of how the aliens changed it, you know? This stream here, if you look how narrow it is straight down here, it looked about like that all the way up, with rocky bits around it..." Beth trailed off for a second, asked Nkulu a question in Swahili before turning back to the Captain. "His people measure things differently, we think it's like two or three metres on either side. You know, a little open area around the water, cleared by floods? And then a grassy patch, like the one we're sitting in now, before the trees start again, maybe eight to ten metres away from the water."

"Well, they've been busy, then," the Captain said, glaring off at the alien camp.

"Yeah, looks like it." Beth waved for Kepfisa to go on, following his finger as he pointed at the camp, trying to connect it to Nkulu's translation a moment later. There were two sections to the camp, a rather larger cleared area and a smaller residential area, where the actual buildings were...or, Beth decided "building" was the wrong word, since they were technically grown, but whatever. At the centre of the little village was the largest of the structures, almost looking like a big damn six-legged starfish, the outside surface hard and mottled greenish-brown, by the size of the figures she saw walking around the extended pointed segments might be three metres tall, the central segment even bigger, enough it could easily be two storeys, stretching up in the middle in these big fan-looking things, that... Were those leaves? Was it, like, a funny-looking tree? Fucking weird, but okay then. Clumped around it were a bunch of smaller buildings, the smallest only a couple metres wide (maybe storage for tools or supplies, or sleeping space for single people?) but the largest the size of a modest house — and these were made out of what were obviously shells, with the same sort of smooth spiral shape made by some animals on Earth, coming in various shades of off-white, orangeish, or a sort of greyish-blue.

They would almost be kind of pretty, if not for the fact that they belonged to omnicidal maniacs from literal outer space.

"Um, the big building, the one that kind of looks like a starfish? That's the oldest one, it just dropped out of the sky straight there. It's a little bigger than it started, and the big damn leaves at the top are new, but it hasn't changed much. Kepfisa assumes that's the heart of it, the commanders will be in there. The shells are from... They have these...big damn snail things? The people landed in the starfish, and they brought out the snails, and they ate all the plants around — growing like fucking crazy, apparently. And they can eat solid fucking rock, all the channels for the bigger flooded patch up there were carved out by the snails too."

From the Captain's other side, David interjected, "Look almost look like rice paddies." Beth would take his word for it, she'd never seen one before. Extending in blobs off the stream were shallow flooded areas, stitched through with rows of plants — still somewhat young, she assumed, comparing against the figures walking around...knee- to waist-high, maybe? Of course, she had no idea how big they were supposed to get, it was hard to tell anything about them from this far away. David could probably see details better than her — he had his camera out, the lens extended out like an old-fashioned telescope, calming snapping away as they talked. "Not rice though, probably alien. Two or three different crops."

Before she could forget what Kepfisa had said, Beth went right back to her translation. "Anyway, the snails went around eating all the plants in the way, digging out their fields there, getting really fucking huge in the process. Once they were done with them, the aliens pulled them out of their shells somehow, and they were slaughtered — Kepfisa's pretty sure they were used for food."

"Efficient," the Captain admitted. "So, we think this is just a farm."

"That's what it looks like. And, I wouldn't say just a farm — remember all their technology is biological. I'm guessing this is more like a weapons factory. Doesn't look like much, but they've probably got dozens of these dotted around the jungle. And this is just a foothold, I'm guessing they'll be a whole hell of a lot bigger if we give them a couple months at it." Beth had done some gardening in her time, and considering they'd only been here for a few weeks, those plants already looked pretty big — they'd probably engineered them to grow unnaturally quickly, she'd bet it would only take a couple months to completely finish the growth cycle and get new...whatever the fuck this was for. Considering the climate here meant they could grow all year round, yeah, they definitely didn't want to let the aliens dig in too long.

"Yes, Potter, point taken. Unfortunately for them, we're not going to give them a couple months. Does our friend here have any idea of their numbers?" The Captain had trouble pronouncing Kepfisa's name, for some reason, it wasn't even one of the difficult ones.

Beth started the question in Balendru, before realising she wasn't sure what to call the things she wanted numbers of, exactly, so she switched back to Swahili instead. Nkulu went back and forth with Kepfisa, asking for clarification on one point or another, before summarising the whole discussion for Beth. "There are a few soldiers, Kepfisa isn't sure how many — posted here permanently, maybe only half a dozen? There might be more in the starfish who just never come out, hard to say. More come by now and then, he thinks there's a bigger military camp somewhere north of here, where the aircraft fly out from. He hasn't gone to check, the patrols get thicker as you go, didn't want to risk it."

"We've heard from the local mages that they're building up at Isiro — probably moving to hit Sudan or our allies in Ethiopia. Could they be coming from there?"

...Beth asked Nkulu where Isiro was quick. "Um, maybe. I guess it depends on how fast their aircraft are." She had a thought, quick asked Nkulu to ask Kepfisa a question for her. "It sounds like the aircraft respond to signs of people in the forest in about an hour, an hour and a half, so, yeah, maybe they're at Isiro."

"You think if we hit the village, you mages will be able to set up a trap for their reinforcements before they arrive?"

"I don't see why not." Since detection and analysis spells just kind of ignored the aliens, for whatever reason, scripting the trigger element might be a problem — her trap hexes back in London had just gone off if anything moved inside their range, but that wasn't going to work in a bloody rainforest — but they could just work up something to set it off manually, they'd figure it out. "Maybe get Bill to script out a trap ward and do as much of the carving as possible ahead of time, charge up some reservoir stones for some extra power. But yeah, that shouldn't be a problem."

"Good. So, half a dozen soldiers, who are all the other shells for? Workers?"

"That's what it looks like." Beth asked another question, went back and forth with Nkulu and Kepfisa for a little bit. "None of the dinosaur-looking buggers, just the humanoid ones — Kepfisa isn't sure how many, they look too similar to keep an accurate count. Though, some of them have these weird deformities, like an infection or something, he hasn't gotten close enough to see what that's about. Maybe some kind of skin condition they can get? Looks pretty painful, maybe even debilitating, but it's hard to tell from a distance. Probably over half the camp are actually human captives, though."

"He's certain? They aren't just killing them all?"

"No, I'm sure they want people for something. Back in the initial attack, I came across them rounding up people all over the place. Of course, when we show up to rescue them, they tend to switch right to slaughtering everyone, but they do want people alive, for some reason." Now that they knew they were setting up farms down here, probably for labour. It'd been pointed out that the fleet that'd shown up here was way too small to be a whole space-faring civilisation, this group was probably just here to turn Earth into a big damn factory for them, or something. As big as the mothership out around the moon was, they definitely hadn't brought enough of their own workers to run a planet-sized operation — so, they assumed the aliens didn't want to kill everyone, they'd probably end up enslaving most of the population instead.

(Africans just kept getting fucked by foreigners coming in looking for slaves to do farm labour, didn't they?)

"Yeah, the workers in the field are mostly human. Look," David said, holding the camera over to the Captain, pointing out at the little settlement. It took a little bit for the Captain to find what he was looking for, not familiar with the device, but Beth could tell when he did — he let out a low hissing curse, the camera creaking a little as his fingers tightened.

The Captain was still looking through the camera when Kepfisa hissed, "Down, now. Beth, hide us."

Nkulu immediately started translating, but he didn't actually need to, she'd caught that one. "Incoming, get down and hold still." While everyone laid flat, wiggling a little bit more under the bushes and shite, Beth flopped over onto her back, nudging Kepfisa with her shoulder. Her wand snapping into a hand with a flick of her wrist, she sucked in a breath and, carefully, cast the frustratingly delicate concealment spell.

The local mages had been dealing with the aliens for a few weeks now, so they'd had some time to start figuring out what worked on them through trial and error. For whatever reason, the aliens seemed weirdly resistant to certain classes of magic. They were completely immune to mind magic, any magic targeting the mind (or the soul) going straight through them like they weren't there at all — like Beth's omniglot stuff didn't get anything from them, legilimens like Ramsey (Voldemort) couldn't get shite from them, not even so little as a sense that they existed. Supposedly, even the actual Morrigan couldn't feel their presence at all, and she was so absurdly powerful of a mind mage that people used to literally worship her as a god. (Some people still did, technically, it was wild.) They were just as vulnerable to physical effects as anyone else (though had a resistance to transfiguration similar to, like, trolls or dragons or some shite), but they completely ignored illusions and compulsions, which meant that the vast majority of concealment magics were fucking useless. They couldn't see through expanded space, and obviously anything that completely stopped light or sound from even getting to them still worked, but that sort of thing was used more rarely, and were much harder to implement.

And even doing that, they then had the additional problem of not really being sure what the aliens' visual range was like — or what their technology could pick up, that was a big fucking question mark. Or, it had been, they were slowly starting to figure it out. Some of their tech could smell people, that was a pain to deal with, but after a bit of trial and error they'd figured out that their cameras (or equivalent) definitely saw well into infrared. Their spaceships and planes and gliders and shite all had heat-vision, basically...and probably a lot of other stuff too — the grenade-bug things tracked their targets with infrared, for example, cancelling out your heat signature often sent them flying off in the wrong direction (which was a neat trick Beth was looking forward to trying). Kepfisa had figured out the same thing on his own, the handful of surviving local hunters quickly discovering that the aliens would show up whenever they set a fire for anything. The wards Bill had put over their camp redirected light of all wavelengths around them, sort of a much more complicated and fucking enormous disillusionment spell. The effect wasn't perfect, the aliens would probably notice something wrong if they got close enough, but at a distance it should blend into the rest of the environment, good enough that they hadn't been discovered yet.

That was somewhat finicky to do with a ward, but not really a problem; doing the same thing with something castable, though, was a fucking pain. Just doing it on herself wouldn't be too bad, but extending it to cover their whole group made it one of the most difficult spells she'd ever cast. Not only did it take a surprising amount of power, burning and crackling its way down her arm, but it was also just extremely sensitive. And they hadn't come up with a version that was, just, cast it and leave it, no, she had to maintain it the whole time — the power searing down her arm, the magic twisted into a tense, jagged, asymmetrical shape, Beth struggling to hold it together, gritting her teeth and glaring blankly up at the sky as she concentrated on keeping the spell going as hard as she fucking could.

She'd been holding the spell for maybe fifteen, twenty seconds when a shadow passed overhead. It was an aircraft, the kind they'd taken to calling a skate, because it kind of looked like the fish — she'd seen them floating along in the distance a few times, but she'd never seen one from this close. The body part was flat and roughly diamond-shaped, a bulbous cockpit and stuff down the middle (along where the spine would be on the real fish), a long narrow tail extending out behind. The surface was armoured, segments of overlapping plates coloured in deep, vivid shades of green and purple — gleaming a little in the sunlight, but not like metal, looking more like the hard outside of an insect — bristling with defensive spikes, maybe to make them hard to board and take over? In a real animal, it'd be to make it hard to eat, but that wasn't really a problem a bloody plane would have. Despite how hard the surface looked, it was clearly flexible, the flatter parts of the body undulating as it flew, almost like the real fish — that couldn't possibly actually help the thing fly, she had no idea why they'd designed it to do that. Maybe only fifteen, twenty metres over their heads, it was completely silent, no noise of any machinery whatsoever, just a faint whistling noise of wind through the spikes.

It gracefully banked overhead, turning smoothly and slowly as though weightless, spiralling in towards the camp. It came in for a gentle landing near the starfish building, one of the humanoid aliens — from here, Beth could barely make out the hard lines suggesting this was one of the soldiers — climbing out of the thing, meeting a couple people near the tip of one of the starfish's legs, before disappearing inside.

David was already up, taking pictures, Beth released the spell with a sigh, grimacing at the hot-cold tingles crawling along her wand arm. The pilot had left the skate, and it was facing away from them, they were probably safe. "I caught a glimpse of the pilot, before he went inside," David whispered. "He had one of those weird fleshy capes."

Yeah, Beth had seen those, on the ship over Paris — their best guess was that it was a symbol of rank of some kind. "The bugger in command of the group in Isiro, checking in for some reason, maybe?"

Her suggestions just got a few shrugs and noncommittal mutters, since there was really no way to know for sure. The Captain glanced over at the locals quick, before muttering to Beth. "When I was looking through the camera, I saw... The captives, they have these...chalky-looking growths poking through their skin. Did our guides mention anything about that?"

"No, I don't think so. Like the dinos?"

He frowned, glaring out toward the camp for a moment. "...Yeah. Yes, they do look similar. They're not in the same pattern, but they might be the same material."

"They're probably not for the same purpose." The mottled, rocky-looking implants on the dinosaur-looking fuckers mostly seemed to be for protection — Beth had seen them bounce bullets — and sometimes as weapons, adding more force or a cutting edge to a hit. Didn't seem like something you'd be putting in people who'd just be doing farm work. "I think I heard one of the local mages back in Goma mention something about that, but I didn't catch much. Hang on, I'll ask." Switching to Swahili, "Hey Nkulu, the Captain noticed some little rocky growths on the captives. Do you know anything about that?"

Nkulu grimaced, turned to shoot the camp a hooded glare. "Yeah, we were told about it. A few people managed to escape captivity, and the mages have done a little spying, but we don't know much. They plant what look like seeds—" He held up a hand, his pointer finger and thumb a centimetre or two apart. "—about that big, under the skin. They're quite quick about it, all their captives are lined up and they go right down the row one to the next, like an assembly line. They grow quickly, the external growths start showing in only about a week. Hurts like the devil, looks like. But it's not just outside, as soon as the thing is in you, its putting things in your blood, carried all through the body. Even if you cut out the growths, the stuff in your blood is still there. The labcoats didn't know what all it does yet, the last I was told they were still working on it — for the time being, we have orders to euthanise them all."

"Wait, what? Does that word mean what I think it means?" The word Nkulu had used was clearly academic, professional jargon, stood out from the rest of his speech — Beth was certain it was a French borrowing, the pronunciation Swahili-fied — so she wasn't entirely certain, but she thought so.

Turning away from the camp, he gave her a grim sort of nod, eyes hard and dark. "Yes, Beth, it means what you think it means. The bits in your blood, they do something to your brain, messing things around, the labcoats aren't sure how yet. It makes people behave...different. Like they aren't themselves anymore, they hardly even recognise their own families. The ones we've tried to rescue so far seem to go mad, yelling and banging at the walls, even try to tear apart their rescuers with their bare hands. Whatever it is, even mages have been taken by it, and they didn't know how to fix it any better than the labcoats do. They're working on it, cutting infected bodies up and doing tests and whatever healing magic your people do, but they don't have an answer yet. I don't like it any more than you do, but..." He shrugged. "We don't have the means to hold hundreds or thousands of violent, insane prisoners while waiting for a cure. And it's possible they'll never find one, and we'd only be drawing out their suffering. My superiors have decided, rather than take risks to save those who maybe can't be saved, to instead focus our efforts on saving those we can."

...Yeah. Yeah, she got that. Just, fucking hell, that was just horrifying — they thought these implants physically rewrote the victim's brains? Just, fuck, that was all, just fuck. With what little she knew of healing magic, that wasn't possible to undo...though maybe they could find out how it worked and how it could be prevented, like a vaccine? And, even if you did manage to deprogram them, messing around with their brains like that would probably destroy all their memories and their personality while you were at it, so they wouldn't even be the same person anymore. And even then they'd most likely end up seriously traumatised for the rest of their lives, going through that fucking nightmare, Jesus. Just, fuck these aliens, evil creepy bastards...

Once Beth had gotten her horror and disgust and anger under control enough to get her voice to work again, she went ahead and translated for David and the Captain. David stayed mostly quiet through it, only hissing out the occasional curse, focussed on taking more pictures of the camp. As the explanation went on, especially getting to the part about Nkulu's orders, the Captain's mouth dropped open a sliver, his eyes tightening with...anger, probably. Finally he snapped, "No, that's not acceptable."

"I'm just telling you what Nkulu's superiors told him."

"Well, it's a crock of shite. I'm not going to go down there and just kill all those people. There's got to be thirty, forty prisoners down there? You want to be the one to go around and execute the poor sods, Potter, because I don't."

Seeing a flash of captives being cut down in Manchester, Beth grimaced. "No sir, but I'm not sure what choice we have."

"We'll figure something out! How many captives are there, do you think? Kisangani's a proper city of, what, half a million people? and there's Isiro and all the other towns up here, there could easily be a couple million people behind enemy lines. And they're all to be consigned to death are they? What, after slaughtering everyone in this camp, do the Congolese want us to firebomb Kisangani for them next?"

"Sir, I don't think—"

"You can tell Antoine over there—" Nkulu's first name, the Captain had trouble with the nk- sound. "—that his superiors can fuck off, because I'm not going to tell my people to— For Christ's sake, do they have any idea how many people that is? We'll figure something out, have the mages freeze them or something and pack them away, there has to be—"

"Luke!" Beth hissed, grabbing at his wrist — the Captain was startled enough that he cut off in mid-sentence, staring back at her, his face flushing with anger. "They know that, sir. Nkulu says they have people working on the problem, but until then they...they have to prioritise. He doesn't like it any more than we do, but. I'm sure the people who gave the order know better than we do how many people live up here, they know what it means. They know."

For a long moment, the Captain just stared at her, his mouth silently working. And then he let out a heavy sigh, his neck going limp, forehead resting on the grass for a second. "Of course. You're right, Potter, I... Triage, I get it, I'm only..." His shoulders rising and falling, he let out another deep sigh, ending in a low groan. In a low mutter, Beth almost didn't even hear it, "Fuck this war."

"Yes, sir," David said, "that about sums it up."

The Captain snorted, his head shaking. Then he looked up again, glanced over Beth to Nkulu. "Apologise to Antoine for me, I... I wasn't thinking."

"...You know he didn't understand a word of that." He just gave her a flat look, one eyebrow ticking up a little. Well, fine, she guessed, why not — she had to resist the urge to roll her eyes until she was turned enough away he wouldn't see it. Nkulu obviously knew she'd been told to tell him something, looking over Kepfisa back at her. "It's very silly, since it's not like you can be offended if you don't speak the bloody language, but... Well, I guess the Captain just had a white person moment."

Nkulu let out a single puff of surprised laughter, his lips twitching. "That so?"

"Yeah, I guess. You know the kind of thing, these poor unenlightened savages, they can't possibly know the significance of what they're doing — freaking out over your orders, you know." Beth was maybe being a bit uncharitable, but she did have to wonder how the Captain would have reacted if they were in, like, Sweden or some shite, and the tone he'd had suggesting Beth tell Antoine that his superiors could fuck off was, hmm. His rant had had a vibe to it, that was all. "It was a brief moment, he's over it."

Smirking back at her, Nkulu drawled, "I do know the kind of thing, yes. I guess I should be glad it was only a brief moment."

"Nah, fuck that, mock him for it all you want — it's not like he understands Swahili any better than you do English, he's not gonna know."

"Well, in that case, I'm shocked that he has any problem killing my countrymen, because it's not like his countrymen ever hesitated in the past."

"No but see, imperialism is over, we're all enlightened and democratic now."

"I see, I see. I must have imagined the president of my country being assassinated by European-backed traitors a few decades ago now. Or the massacres in Kenya. Or the war in Uganda and Tanzania. Or everything happening in Rhodesia and South Africa," both names said with obvious scorn. "Because the English don't have an Empire anymore, of course."

"Oh, we definitely still have an empire, it's just a nice empire now. We bring civilisation to the world, all these bad things happening literally everywhere we go can't possibly be our fault — Africa is a mess just because it has all these black people on it, you know how it is." She made sure there was extra sarcasm on her voice for that part, just to be absolutely positive he would know she wasn't being serious. Because, she had actually heard people talk like that, Vernon in particular was super racist about Africans, it was absurd...

"I see, I see. Forgive this poor unenlightened savage for his confusion, I understand now."

"You're welcome, of course." She rolled her eyes at him again before turning back to the Captain. "It's fine, we're good. Anything else you want to ask Kepfisa while we're here?"

Chapter Text

A couple days after she'd joined the project, Hermione had come to Director Payne's office and directly asked him why she was here. He'd seemed mostly amused by the question, which honestly had been rather irritating — she'd been being completely serious.

Hermione had been feeling rather out of sorts for a while, by the time the invitation came. Beth had already left to join the bloody Army a week previously — it was still slightly absurd to her that they were accepting actual fifteen-year-olds, but Hermione didn't make the rules. Ron had tried to join up with her, but they were at least requiring parental approval — Beth presumably only got through that hurdle due to her complicated legal status — and Mrs Weasley had refused to sign off on it. Instead, Ron was in...well, Hermione guessed it was a sort of militia, run by the Ministry — the Hit Wizards were training up a force to defend the islands, in case they were attacked while the majority of their fighters were overseas. Mrs Weasley hadn't been pleased with that idea either, but at least it was a domestic project, so Ron wouldn't be being sent to fight in a foreign country, like her husband and her adult children. Even Fred and George were gone, volunteering for some humanitarian relief group, Hermione didn't know the details...

Mum had been called up, Dad was very busy helping keep things in Oxford running, most of the adults in the Order were contributing in one way or another, either sent away overseas to fight or occupied with some project at home. And Hermione was left at Rock-on-Clyde, alone, with nothing to do. School would be cancelled until an as-yet-undetermined date in the future, so she wouldn't be going back to Hogwarts any time soon. She'd pop over to Oxford to help out now and then, spent a fair amount of her time back 'home' brewing potions for the clinic. It didn't seem very productive, but it was the only thing she could think of to occupy her time, she didn't know what else to do.

She just felt so helpless — people were dying out there, probably in the millions before all this was over, the entire modern world crumbling around her ears, and she was, just, floating directionlessly, no sense of what the hell she was supposed to do about it...

So the letter from the Department of Mysteries had been welcome, if completely unexpected. The aliens' physiology and technology, as well as magical and muggle governments collaborating side-by-side for the first time in centuries, had presented a wealth of magical and technological problems that needed solving. The governments of the world were cooperating to put together research institutions to try to come up with solutions — magical experts and scientists and engineers put in a room together, where they'd be given a problem, and as much information and resources as they needed to solve it. It was undoubtedly the largest public research and development project in history, spread out over countless institutions all over the world, and probably the first one to ever include both mages and muggles, at least since the beginning of Secrecy. Who knew what new discoveries and technologies would come out of the effort, at this point it was entirely impossible to predict. They might reverse-engineer the advanced alien technology, come up with some novel development by integrating magical and scientific principles, they could change the entire bloody world.

And, for some unfathomable reason, Hermione had been invited to participate.

She hadn't seriously considered it, when she'd gotten the letter — she'd just flooed over to Oxford to track down an associated office who might be able to tell her whether or not the invitation was legitimate, and impulsively agreed to join. The only hiccough had been tracking down her father to get his permission, since she was only sixteen and couldn't agree to the associated contract (to do with confidentiality and expenses and benefits and patents and the like) without him cosigning for her. A couple days later, she'd gotten a letter from the Commission with a reusable portkey — Hermione hadn't even realised those existed — which would bring her to and from her team's office space.

Somewhat to Hermione's surprise, the research team she'd been assigned to was actually based in the Netherlands, taking over a sizeable conference room and various offices and labs in the University of Groningen. The Netherlands was a rather small country, and had fared badly in the initial attack — the rough triangle formed by Amsterdam, the Hague, and Rotterdam severely damaged in the bombing, Utrecht also hit several times (in passing, between Britain and the major cities of the Rhineland). They didn't have anything close to a proper death count yet, complicated by the scattered state of local institutions and the damage to transportation and communications infrastructure, but it was suspected that, including the injured lost in subsequent weeks and associated effects of so many people fleeing their homes, they might well lose one to three million people due to that first week alone — and the total population of the Netherlands had only been about fifteen million before the attack.

The devastation in the UK seemed quite bad enough, but the Dutch might have lost as much as a fifth of their entire population in the space of a few days — that was simply horrifying.

Of course, the Dutch government (both muggle and magical) had been in the affected area. The British governments had been somewhat fortunate in that most of their leadership had been away from the focus of the attack on their country, or could evacuate in relatively short order, but the Dutch had been far less lucky. The Dutch equivalent of the Ministry of Magic had been hit in the first bombing run, a large fraction of the officials there lost almost immediately — most of their equivalent to the Wizengamot had even been present at the time (in an emergency meeting to address the alien attack), and had also been killed, leaving the magical government in shambles. The muggle government had faired somewhat better, the evacuation of the Cabinet and the States General in the Hague at the time well underway by the time the attack came. Of course, the evacuation hadn't been finished yet, but a surprising number of people had managed to survive — there was a story floating around of the Second Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Housing, and a pack of people from the House of Representatives jumping out of the burning Binnenhof into the Hofvijver and swimming to safety — and most of the military leadership had survived, so the government had mostly managed to hold itself together in the crisis.

Though, in a freak fluke of bad luck, the Royal Family had been hit in transit. Queen Beatrix, her husband Prince Claus, their son (and heir to the throne) Prince Willem-Alexander, and Beatrix's mother (and former Queen) Princess Juliana had all died more or less instantly. The Queen's younger sons, Prince Friso and Prince Constantijn, had both been seriously injured in the attack — Friso had succumbed a week later, but Constantijn was still alive, though nowhere near recovered enough to even so much as leave the hospital. (He was technically King now, though it'd be a while before they'd be able to make it official.) Beatrix's younger sister Princess Margeriet had also been present, but her injuries had been relatively minor — despite the personal tragedy, she'd been making appearances at refugee camps and hospitals and the like, not even bothering to hide the bandages and the sling her arm had been in, Hermione assumed for morale reasons. (Hermione had actually spotted the Prince Consort walking around Oxford a couple times, sometimes with Princess Mary, presumably the same idea.) The government had mostly been relocated to Apeldoorn, but Constantijn was actually at the hospital here in Groningen, the area around the building thick enough with security and well-wishers it was practically unnavigable.

The Netherlands had fared worse in the initial attack than Britain had, but not as badly as it could have gone. Northern Italy, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and Austria had all had their governments devastated, and the death toll in the major metropolitan areas of Germany was absolutely sickening. But she guessed hey, it could be worse! wasn't really much consolation to a nation going through hell.

So, given how dire of straights the Dutch were in at the moment, the University of Groningen seemed like an odd pick — but Hermione had, perhaps, underestimated just how unimportant borders had become in the crisis. Civilians had fled whichever way seemed best to escape the aliens, security forces rather too occupied to bother preventing them from crossing where they technically weren't supposed to. In some places authorities had just waved refugees through, getting them away from the fighting. (In particular, Italian refugees had been summarily welcomed into Yugoslavia, France, and Switzerland, to help get as many people as far away from the fighting as possible.) There were several examples of even militaries crossing national borders without waiting for permission, scrambling to help fight off alien attacks — after all, allowing an attacker to establish a beachhead in a neighbouring country would just be bad strategy, regardless of whether their help had been asked for. Germany in particular had been simultaneously 'invaded' by multiple neighbouring militaries, both Communist and Liberal — the country was still largely disarmed due to the settlement after the War, and would have had a hard time hunting down the alien soldiers within their borders on their own — and there'd been a very tense moment between the (Communist) Greek army and (Liberal) Turks after the Greeks swept up to Istanbul without invitation to help in the evacuation, the standoff interrupted when another alien attack arrived, the two enemy militaries falling right into a side-by-side fight seemingly without a second thought. The two countries had been cooperating to deal with the refugees displaced by attacks on the cities in western Turkey, though not without occasional issues — Greco–Turkish relations were...difficult for a reason. Hermione thought they were doing pretty well, all things considered.

Of course, directly involving the mages could also complicate things — their governments had formed a century or two earlier than the modern borders in Europe were drawn, on somewhat different principles, reflecting linguistic and cultural divisions rather than whatever territory some king generations ago had managed to hold onto, so their national borders rarely corresponded to muggle ones. Magical Holland didn't include Limburg in the southeast, instead part of Germany, and the provinces in the northeast were instead part of Saxony, a country which didn't even exist on the muggle side. Corresponding to roughly the northern half of Germany, minus parts of Schleswig-Holstein and plus much of Pomerania (which was Polish on the muggle side), Saxony was one of the more economically and culturally important countries in the ICW, though with a rather complicated modern history. And by 'complicated', Hermione meant it was Grindelwald's home country, the first aristocratic government to be deposed by the Communalist Revolution — it had been occupied for a time in the aftermath of the war, only to be immediately taken back over by Communalists once the ICW pulled out and allowed self-governance to resume. (The ICW had maybe made a mistake when they'd decided to implement a democratic system, but the Communalists had so thoroughly divested and dispersed the old aristocracy that they hadn't had much choice in the matter.) The Communalists had a very similar ethos of international solidarity as muggle Communists — Communalists weren't properly Marxist, but they were similar enough Hermione could guess what they would do in a given situation more often than not — so when various muggle and magical authorities had started talking about organising a big cooperative research institution, the Saxons had immediately volunteered to help set it up. Muggle accommodations would be most convenient, for various reasons, but muggle Germany was in terrible shape and had their own problems to deal with, but Groningen — or Grins, as the Saxon mages called it — had gotten through the attack unscathed, and there happened to be a major university in the city.

So, Groningen it was.

Hermione had been to the Netherlands several times, though they'd normally never stayed for very long — her parents liked to travel, and depending on which airliner their flight was with they might need to pass through Amsterdam at some point. She had only a passing familiarity with the language, could say basic things like where the toilets were and do you speak English/French? and she hadn't really seen much of the country. And she wasn't seeing much of it now, either: her portkey brought her straight to a courtyard at the University, only a couple minutes' walk away from her destination. Over her first couple weeks with the programme, she did get around the campus and the immediate area, but she didn't see much beyond that. She wasn't here as a tourist, after all.

The research team had been set up in a building that, from the signage and materials and equipment around, seemed to house physics and chemistry departments. A sizeable conference room had been set aside for them, a bank of windows overlooking one of the University's green spaces, each of the members of the team granted their own office — commandeered from University staff, part of some kind of engineering programme. When Hermione had gotten here, her office — nothing special, maybe even smaller than her bedroom back home, just room for a writing desk, a very modern-looking computer in a corner, a sofa she suspected had frequently been used to nap on overnight, the walls thick with bookshelves — had still had the previous owner's personal effects scattered about, Hermione had carefully packed them away in case they came by to reclaim them. (A graduate student, she thought, she had no idea whether he was even still alive.) The computers still worked, the University powered by the same generators keeping the lights at the hospital on, they'd been given free access to the University's archives, and even offered time on the big computers in a basement somewhere if they had a model they wanted to run or something. (Though only on request, the power drain was too great to keep them running at all times.) The various labs scattered around the University were free for their use, if they wanted to test or build something, whatever materials they needed would be made available, a modest staff of assistants lingering around who could be asked to track down whatever information or equipment they wanted if it wasn't in easy reach. Food was even brought up to the offices on a regular schedule, all the periphery stuff taken care of, permitting them to focus entirely on their work.

Hermione had met the entire team by now, seventeen members including Payne, and... Physicists and engineers and alchemists and enchanters, all highly-qualified specialists in their respective fields. A selection of experts chosen from the region — the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium, Germany — a spread of ages, leaning younger, very little grey hair in the room, but all credentialed and experienced.

And then there was just Hermione. The first morning meeting, seeing all the grown adults around the table, Hermione had felt extremely out of place.

For the most part, the members were free to work on whatever project they wished, within the scope of their team's remit. There were various other research teams out there, people with different specialities working on a selection of problems — there were teams working on quicker techniques to rebuild infrastructure and better accommodate refugees, other teams studying the aliens themselves, their physiology and their technology, other teams working on weapons development and/or building better defences against the aliens', and so forth and so on. The team Hermione had been put with was primarily focussed on two problems: energy, and communications. A fair number of power plants had been knocked out in that first week of bombing, distribution networks damaged in uncountable places, and most national energy grids were dependent on resources that were suddenly far less available than they'd been a couple months ago. Also, crossing wardlines did funny things to electrical currents, so the more open use of wards was also going to cause distribution issues — especially since they would want to use wards to better protect energy infrastructure going forward, that was a problem that would need a solution. An enchanter on their team (muggleborn) had already had a pre-existing concept of a generator that drew energy from ambient magic, which would at least solve the fuel problem, several people were working on scaling it up and picking away at the other problems on the list.

Communications were a somewhat more complicated problem...which also contained the energy problem — after all, modern communications technology required electricity to run. They'd lost contact with every single satellite in orbit, and a fair fraction of physical, wired networks were out as well. That possibility hadn't occurred to Hermione at first — a lot of cables were deep enough underground they were unlikely to be hit with anything short of a sustained, focussed bombardment, and they were hardly likely to hit the undersea cables — but, of course, those networks went through hubs, which often performed important routing functions, and those were above ground. It was difficult to tell whether a blackout was due to a critical hub being hit in the bombing, or simply having lost power, or if a cable had been damaged somewhere between here and there. There were teams of technicians scouring over areas where signals weren't getting through, but they were slowed down significantly by the destruction and chaos left behind by the bombing — set scattering again whenever one of the alien ships decided to swing by and lob a few more bombs at people, seemingly at random — the effort to restore the physical networks had seen very mixed success so far.

Wireless communications had their own problems. Cellular networks required the physical infrastructure to function, obviously — if a transceiver was damaged, or lost power, signal in that cell of the network would be lost until it could be restored. Even if power was available to charge the battery — and power was still pretty inconsistent most everywhere, so that was hardly guaranteed — phone service would still be extremely spotty. The old analog network had some advantages, since the lower frequency had a greater range and digital devices had a harder time holding a signal at the edge of it (due to the cliff effect, which was a new idea to Hermione), meaning there were fewer transceivers to be hit and better odds of finding one that was still connected to the greater network, but enough nodes on the network had been hit that even the old network was effectively blacked out. Various militaries were working at getting them back online in limited areas, but it was a work in progress. Plain, old-fashioned radios required much less physical infrastructure, so were far more reliable at the moment.

The problem with that was that magic and electromagnetic signals didn't mix. Magical and electromagnetic fields interacted with each other in odd ways — it wasn't precisely the same concept as wave interference, the maths were much more complicated, but the general result was that electronics went haywire (capacitors had a nasty tendency to explode), and radio signals were disrupted enough to quickly become unintelligible. And that was just from magic in the environment, wardlines tended to completely block radio signals (like a flawless Faraday cage), and some wards even bounced them. The latter was an interesting phenomenon — the signal didn't lose any strength or fidelity in the process, and in some cases was observed to grow stronger, Hermione had no idea where the energy was coming from — but it didn't really solve the problem. Especially since both the people who'd be sending out radio messages and the people they wanted to receive them were likely to be under wards.

Honestly, Hermione wasn't sure that problem was solvable. Other people on the team were looking into work-arounds, perhaps designing wards to specifically allow certain EM bands through — impossible to do without reducing effectiveness, she suspected (the most effective wards were even often visually opaque, included an element to project a seamless illusion of whatever was on the other side so as not to blind the occupants) — or simply mass-producing magical radios to replace the muggle version entirely — the problem with that being that magical radio were solely unidirectional broadcasts — or designing a kind of repeater that would transform EM signals into a magical analog that would get through wards — so far, it sounded like that was possible, but prohibitively complex — a variety of other ideas tossed around, at this point just brainstorming possibilities. One idea Hermione had overheard involved adding an element to the wards that would, itself, function as an antenna, capturing any EM signals that hit it and reproducing them somewhere in a form the occupants would be able to interpret. Not a bad idea, on the surface, but it wouldn't work at all on wards that inexplicably bounced signals...and also there were serious issues with the reproducing them somewhere in a form occupants can interpret part — that seemingly simple engineering problem actually required multiple steps to get from A to B, and would practically have to be invented from scratch.

None of the ideas she'd heard seemed particularly promising to Hermione. She suspected defensive wards and radio-based communications were fundamentally incompatible — it was possible she was missing something, but it seemed to her like they would have to pick one. Not that Hermione had participated in these discussions much, she didn't feel like she...

The team members were free to chip away at whatever project as they liked, they only had a very loose schedule here. There was a meeting in the morning, often over a light breakfast, usually simple pastries with butter and preserves — they'd had coffee for the first week, but they'd soon switched to tea grown in magical greenhouses within Britain or France or Germany, apparently the University's supply of coffee had run dry already — where they'd start off with a military attaché of some kind, never the same person more than a few days in a row and representing a random smattering of European countries, reading them in on the important news that had come in over the last day or so. Payne would follow that with his understanding of where they currently stood with the problems assigned to them, turning it over to the team for updates. They'd quickly spiral off on discussion of one project or another, until Payne decided they had a good enough of a picture of what was going on around here, and sent them off to get to work on it. There would then be a second meeting in the evening, where what breakthroughs or lack thereof they'd had over the course of the day would be discussed — this second meeting was normally rather shorter than the first, just checking in with everyone before most of the support staff went home for the night.

Between the morning and evening meetings they were more or less left to their own devices. So far, Hermione had spent the vast majority of those hours reading voraciously — she didn't know what she was doing here, she was terribly under-qualified, tearing through whatever materials she could find in subjects that seemed like they might be relevant. Over the course of the first couple weeks, she gave herself a quick-and-dirty education in wardcrafting and geomancy — getting into the latter had had half-formed glimmers of implications for materials science dancing in her head, but that was a distraction, she tried to ignore it — she'd briefly looked into how magical radios worked before realising within a single afternoon that it wouldn't be useful, had before long thoroughly buried herself in materials on optics and network infrastructure and particle physics and electrical engineering and computer science. Hermione had a general understanding of how modern technology worked, yes, probably better than most muggle(born)s her age, but she didn't understand the fundamentals well enough to be much help here at all, she needed to catch up, and now.

Hermione had come to the conclusion that wards and radios would simply never mix within the first week. She wasn't an expert in wardcrafting, of course, but it didn't take very long to see that the fundamentals of how photons worked would preclude any of the workarounds she'd heard people talking about. It wasn't a complicated concept, honestly. She had a feeling the mages didn't understand the science and the muggles didn't understand the magic well enough to put that together.

More often than not, Hermione didn't actually leave the University after the evening meeting — most of the support staff cleared out, yes, but people on the research team weren't obligated to leave for the night. Hermione's impression was that a bit over half of her colleagues (a word which felt very strange and inappropriate to use) would stay here overnight, given the importance of what they were trying to accomplish here...and also some of them didn't have homes to go back to, lost in the bombings. There were few nights Hermione didn't end up sleeping in her office, went from the evening meeting straight back to her reading, she needed to catch up, often it was well after midnight before she surrendered to the eye strain and passed out on the sofa. She'd discovered the pillow and blanket on her second night here, so, she was pretty sure she wasn't the first person to use this office sofa as a bed.

The first night she'd stayed over, she'd gone back to Rock-on-Clyde in the morning to pick up a couple things — hygiene stuff, mostly, a couple changes of clothes — to find a panicky Mrs Weasley talking with a couple Order people (Hermione only recognised Professor Lupin) about how they would...find Hermione. Oops. She suffered a suffocating hug and some lecturing, promised to send word back to the Order that she was alright at least once a day. In her defence, she was very preoccupied, it hadn't occurred to her — also, Mrs Weasley wasn't her mother, there was really no need for her to hover so much. When she'd dropped by Oxford one day to see Dad, told him about the incident, his only comment had been to remind her to eat something occasionally...

(Dad was very proud that she'd been recruited by the Commission, apparently he'd been bragging about it to coworkers at the hospital and the clinic and random Party people, but he was also aware of how obsessive she could get sometimes — he hadn't forgotten about her near breakdown in year three of primary, or running herself ragged for the first couple months of her first year and...pretty much all of her third year at Hogwarts. He'd said things about pacing herself, but that was easy for him to say, he wasn't a teenage girl surrounded by qualified experts in their fields, she was so far behind...)

Hermione was practically consumed tearing through whatever science and enchanting materials might seem useful, day after day filled with diagrammes and equations and countless pages, dancing in the blackness whenever she closed her eyes. As focussed as she was on catching up, only the occasional distraction managed to worm its way through. Since Hermione was working with the Commission now, letters sent by the British Forces Post Office were starting to find her in Groningen — there must have been some kind of handshake between the Commission and the BFPO at some point, they knew where she was now. She got a letter now and then from her mother (some of which she carried on to Dad), but they were mostly pretty innocuous. Someone somewhere had decided that a qualified doctor would be more useful supporting relief efforts in India, so she was well away from the fighting, the worst she dealt with the occasional panicky crowd. Things were kind of a mess in India at the moment, tens of millions of people displaced by the bombings and the invasion, but Mum wasn't in imminent danger, at least.

Beth's letters tended to be more concerning.

C1.000167 Tpr. Elizabeth HA Potter (HLCCP)
2 SCFRS C.9
UNCDD GOMA, DRC 2063

Hermione,

It's been a little bit since I could send anything, I know, but I'm still alive.
Like, nearly a week ago now, I think (time is getting weird, is it still September?) we moved out of Goma to the middle of fucking nowhere. I think the place is called the Ituri rainforest, after the big river going through here. It is far too warm, and far too humid, and there are so many bugs, Hermione. Honestly, at this point, I think the bugs are more likely to kill me than the aliens, I've started putting up palings just to keep them off me when I'm trying to sleep. Some of the plants are cool though, lots of flowers and shite, and the trees are fucking huge, and have you seen an okapi before? Funny-looking things.
Oh shit, that's what they're called in Kiswahili, I have no idea what the English name is. Oh well.
Yeah, I speak Swahili now, add that to the list. I'm picking up a good bit of Balendru too — never fucking heard of Balendru before, I don't even know what the language is called in English, being an omniglot is bloody wild sometimes.
Anyway, yeah, I just got your last letter today, I've been out of contact for a little bit. My team — excuse me, troop (who cares) — were sent out into the bloody rainforest to scout out the place and set up the camp before more people could come in after us, the post caught up to us just now. I have the feeling that's going to happen sometimes, they're going to be sending us way out in front like this a lot, I might go in and out of contact unexpectedly. I didn't really have much warning this time, I don't think it'll be any different next time.
There hasn't been any fighting here yet, just checking out the area and interviewing our local guide, a bloke called— I just realised I'm not sure how to spell his name. Keffisa? Kèpfisa? Dunno. The rest of his village fled when the aliens turned up, but he stuck around to keep an eye on them, brave little bastard. I was wondering, by the way, is "pygmy" a slur? That's the word everyone here uses — in English and French, the Kiswahili word is different, but I don't think that one's very nice either — but it kind of gives me a funny feeling. Kèpfisa here is Efé (I think you'd spell it), but I think that's a particular, like, clan group or something, I'm not sure. Anyway, he's managed to get pretty close to the alien camp without getting caught, he has way more information about them than you might expect. Like I said, brave little bastard.
I was totally right, by the way: the aliens landed in the tropics so they can grow shite. The camp near here is a farm of sorts, pulling water from the river into big grids of irrigated whatever. Some of the plants are already pretty big, despite not being here that long, but they're expanding out further along the river and into the forest every day. And this isn't the only camp either, we've been hearing about other sites dotted all over the place in the occupied parts of the Congo. You'd think you'd put them closer together, instead of spread out so randomly, but the way this one is spreading out, I think they're like seeds, the points they're spreading out from, they're probably all meant to be one big thing down the line.
The weird thing is, most of the workers are prisoners. Like, they have their own people too — without all the scars and tattoos and bone breaks and whatever, and Kèpfisa thinks they have some kind of skin condition? But a lot of them are humans, captured from around Kisangani, we think. The really freaky part is that the aliens have them under some kind of mind control? According to Nkulu — that's the Congolese army rep with our group here, Antione Nkulu — the aliens stick some little thing under your skin, looks like a seed, and it gets in your blood and rewrites your brain? It sounds seriously creepy, what the fuck. Especially since nobody knows how to fix it? Nkulu says they have people working on it, but the mages are as stumped as the muggle doctors. And they go crazy violent when you try to get them away from the aliens, they'll end up just hurting themselves trying to break out.
We have orders not to bother trying to take the prisoners alive. I hate it, but if what Nkulu is saying is true, I don't think there's really anything we can do about it? You're doing science shite now, have you heard anything about that? If they can come up with a fix for that quickly, that'd be great, because I really don't want to have to blow up innocent people. I'll do it if I have to, but it sucks.
Anyway, we think the aliens don't know we're here now, but there aren't many soldiers over there. So the plan is to hit the farm camp, and set up a bunch of traps, when the reinforcements show up wait for the traps to go up and then pounce on them while they're still dealing with that. We still have people coming in, but we should be ready to go in a couple days I think. I wouldn't worry about that fight coming up, I think we have a pretty good shot of knocking them all out before they can even do anything about it.
So that's what I'm up to, how's everyone doing back in Britain? Some people are saying there are still bombings going on, but we don't get a lot of news in the middle of the fucking jungle. I would say tell me about your science junk, but I won't understand any of it anyway, sometimes I don't know why a bloody genius like you bothers with a dunce like me.
Joking, Hermione, just saying.

Still alive,
Beth

፠

Beth must know that telling her not to worry was very silly — of course she was going to worry about it, she was going into battle against alien invaders. Honestly...

The day she got the letter, she took a couple hours that afternoon to look into this mind control method Beth had mentioned. Hermione's group wasn't working on any projects directly to do with the aliens' technology, but there were other groups out there who were — contacting them could be relatively difficult, but all of them were regularly putting out notes on their progress for other teams and people outside of the Commission to have available. She wasn't certain where to go to find the data she wanted herself, but she just asked one of the support staff people, he came back an hour later with a stack of papers and floppy discs.

Unfortunately, most of the actual useful information was on the discs — it was relatively simple to translate the digital data on a floppy disc into a format that could be relayed by radio, easier to transmit information in that form than to physically move papers around — it took a bit of bumbling with the computer before she started finding what she was looking for. (Hermione hadn't spent a lot of time around computers before.) The information was, of course, very technical, but the man who'd brought her all this had helpfully included a pair of texts on neurology and haematology she could use as references. Her parents did have a lot of medical materials in their library at home, Hermione had perused them out of curiosity and/or boredom more times than she could count — she understood some of it, but it was very dense, it was helpful to have the texts at hand.

It took a couple hours to pick through the data on the discs enough to get a general understanding of what was going on, which was completely horrifying. The blood chemistry of affected persons was significantly altered — electrolytes and hormone levels all way off, certain free proteins that suggested mass die-offs of cells going on somewhere, showing early signals of possible liver and kidney failure — and they'd found compounds in the cerebrospinal fluid that they couldn't even identify. Exotic proteins, it seemed, as well as small amounts of what they suspected was the same stone-like substance used in a lot of the alien's construction, the growths on the more reptilian ones. Their theory was that whatever process they were using on captives was similar to the one the reptilian aliens all underwent, but less refined, still tweaking it to work with human physiology. They now suspected that the reptilian aliens were some kind of subject people under the humanoid ones — their different equipment and battlefield deployment had suggested as much, but this was only more evidence.

Because this process did, apparently, rewrite the victim's brain. They theorised brain chemistry was being affected, yes, but it also seemed like the structure was affected as well. Scans (both muggle and magical) had show signs of...little filaments of some kind of material spreading through the victim's brain, branching like a complex root network — and it was conductive, directly interfering with the brain's natural electrical signals. With the technology available to them, it was hard to interpret exactly how it worked — people simply didn't understand how the brain worked well enough to figure out the finer details — but it seemed like it was...well, some kind of mind control, as Beth had put it. Theoretically, they could transmit feelings and thoughts and images directly into the victim's brain through these filaments, essentially stealing their free will away at a physiological level. And the longer someone was in captivity, the more severe the effects got, until the larger structures of the brain started to shift, neurons reshaping themselves to parallel the alien parasite growing inside their skull, and...

There was no coming back from that. Neither medical doctors nor magical healers knew how to shape the brain like that — once that damage was done, there was no returning the person to normal. Even if they could get those filaments out without causing massive brain damage, there was no returning the brain to what it had been. It was, simply, irreversible.

Hermione told Beth as much in her return letter that evening, her heart in her throat the whole time. All the while, trying not to imagine how much worse this war was going to get before it was finally over.

(She couldn't help the terrible feeling that the aliens would, inevitably, enslave and murder them all. Hardly for the first time, that night she barely slept, nightmares.)

The only pause in her research binges, trying to catch up, was when she finally remembered to eat something, or when one of the twice-daily meetings came up. Hermione hardly spoke in the meetings, feeling extremely out of place — the rapid-fire conversation bouncing around between the actual real adults, scientists and enchanters and whatever else, the details often highly technical, far too much of it going over her head. She understood the general idea, almost always, but the particulars could be— She had so much catching up to do. When a thought did occur to her, she kept it to herself, not sure if... Well, she couldn't help the feeling that she might be missing something, that any comment she made would immediately be torn apart for the oblivious idiocy that it was, the curious looks she got from 'her colleagues' sometimes replaced with scorn, what was this little girl even doing here...

It was very unsettling, honestly. Perhaps at some point during primary school, Hermione had grown accustomed to almost always being the smartest person in the room — being the least knowledgeable person in this room, expected to work together to solve very important problems, was extremely uncomfortable.

Sitting in that room, listening to all the qualified, experienced experts discussing one matter or another, was the most useless Hermione had ever felt in her life.

So, it only took a couple days of that feeling before Hermione had surrendered, gone to Payne's office to ask what the hell she was doing here (only somewhat more politely than that sounded). The Director's office was really no different than Hermione's or any of the others she'd seen so far — the personal touches from the previous occupant had already been entirely removed, the walls bare and the shelves emptied, the greatest intrusion of colour the window overlooking the grassy alley between this building and the library nextdoor. A computer, somewhat newer-looking than Hermione's, had been set up on a table pushed against a wall — haphazard-looking enough she assumed it hadn't been there before — the rest of the table and the desk scattered with binders and loose papers and books and stacks and stacks of floppy discs, the shelves partially refilled with whatever documentation crammed into place seemingly at random. Payne himself was a scrawny, long-faced man of maybe forty, forty-five, lines sketched across his face but hair still a solid rich brown, kept short in a careless tousled mess. Oddly enough, he tended to wear denims and tee shirts, occasionally topped with a zip-up jumper against the North Sea autumn chill. Hermione would often see him walking around barefoot — apparently, relaxing into his reading he would take off his shoes, and he didn't bother putting them back on if he had to leave his office for anything.

His accent was clearly American — not from the South, but not from New England either, probably the Midwest or the Pacific coast — but before this he'd been living in Germany for some years. He'd had an administrative position at a German university, she'd forgotten which...

When Hermione found him, he was typing at the computer — from the glimpse she got over his shoulder, writing some kind of report to send up the chain. (Hermione wasn't entirely sure how the higher-order organisation of the Commission worked, but she knew there was someone, somewhere, keeping an eye on the whole project.) When he heard her coming, he swivelled around in his chair, pulling off his reading glasses, ah, Miss Granger, what can I help you with? No one giving you trouble, I hope...

She'd started hesitantly, before...kind of venting at him about it all, honestly. She, just— She didn't know what she was doing here, everyone else was— She was so far behind, she didn't know what having someone like Hermione here was supposed to accomplish, and she felt a little, well. Blowing up on him was kind of embarrassing in retrospect, honestly.

But the whole time she was ranting, the Director had just calmly watched her, idly chewing on the end of his spectacle frames, silently. When her rant finally petered out, an edge of self-consciousness starting to trickle in, Payne had said, "You're here to learn, Hermione."

That answer was so far outside of what she'd expected, she'd ended up just blinking dumbly at him for several seconds. "...What? What do you mean, learn?"

"Mm, it's pretty simple really, when you think about it. You are a promising student, of course — it's not everyone the British Department of whatever the hell they call it up there will give a personal time machine so they can take more classes than humanly possible."

Hermione had felt a tingle of warmth on her cheeks, because, well, that really was very silly, when he put it like that. "The Department of Mysteries."

Payne had rolled his eyes. "Of course it is — damn wizards are such dramatic bastards sometimes." He was a muggle himself, of course, he hadn't known anything of magic before the start of the invasion. Not that Hermione disagreed, necessarily. "As I was saying, no, we don't really expect any special brilliance from you, you probably will contribute less to whatever comes out of this effort than most. Though, hard to say, you might be surprised. They say old dogs don't learn new tricks, and there is something to that. Neuroplasticity and somesuch — your parents are medical doctors, I hear, I suspect you're familiar."

"Ah, the basic principle, yes." He was referring to activity-dependent plasticity, she thought — as a person went through life and experienced the world around them, the brain would prioritise certain connections over others, forming new ones and letting old ones die, changing the very structure of the brain at a microscopic level. It's the very fundamental process through which memory and learning worked, basically. While the process didn't stop after a person reached adulthood — the brain would continue to reshape itself so long as it continued to operate — it did slow down and lessen in scope with age, the brain developing deepest and most quickly in childhood and gradually tapering off over the course of a person's life. So, old dogs could learn new tricks, it just took more effort.

"Right, well, we might have an impressive collection of nerds gathered together here, but— I don't know how much familiarity you have with academia, but the more time someone spends in a specific field, the more they begin to see everything else in terms of their particular expertise. When all you've got is a hammer, you know. Occasionally you'll see a physicist or a mathematician comment on some matter in the social sciences and, well, I've read some papers, let me tell you, never goes over well. The arguments I've heard, it's entertaining as an outside observer sometimes, but it does not look like fun for the people in them.

"The point being, we've got my sort, who don't know the first damn thing about magic, and approach every problem in scientific terms; and then we have their sort, who don't know the first damn thing about modern technology, and approach every problem in magical terms. And then we've got you, with a foot in both worlds, but not so far down the road in any field to get fitted for academic blinders yet. Not to say I expect you'll be sweeping in and solving everyone's problems for them, no, but maybe you'll give them a little nudge now and then, point out something they've overlooked. Little things, but sometimes the little things can make a difference in projects like these. History tends to remember the big figures, the names on the papers everyone reads, but they tend to forget about the grad student who quietly cleaned up the data, or the less well-known figure who refined an observation into an actually useful form a few years later, or the wife of the famous, respected, big-name scientist pointing out over drinks one night that he's missing something blindingly obvious. Just because you won't come up with the big, brilliant idea yourself, and likely won't be remembered for your work here, doesn't mean it won't make a difference.

"But all that is only a maybe," Payne had said, with a careless shrug. "If you do help a little here and there, that's good; if you don't contribute much, that's also fine. That's not the real reason you're here. Normal people and mages have been isolated from each other for hundreds of years, since before the Industrial Revolution proper — we're not used to working together. And new technologies always come out of a crisis, especially with as much effort as we're consciously putting into developing them. But this will be more than, say, the first computers coming out of the Second World War, but an entire new approach to engineering, our modern technology and their magic, working together making something new.

"I'm not sure how many even recognise the significance of the work we're doing here. If this all goes well, we won't just have a few new technologies to show for it, but a whole new kind of technology, something this world has never seen before, something new — and who knows where that will lead, in the years and decades to come. It's very exciting, honestly," he'd admitted, with an edge of a smile, "would that it had come without a crisis as horrible as this to motivate it, but." He'd shrugged. "But since we're all old dogs, with our old tricks, the true potential of what we're working with might not occur to us at first glance. We only see the problems and solutions we're used to seeing, after all. Hammers and nails.

"That's why you're here, Hermione. Not to solve the great problems of our time, but to see how they're solved, to understand the new technology that will come out of the Commission from its very fundamentals, backwards and forwards. There's one of you in each of the Commission's research teams, a young, promising student — recruitment prioritising muggleborns and squibs, with a foot in each world — who are here, primarily, to learn. Your more experienced colleagues may make the first insights, and make those first steps; your job, yours and the others of your generation, will be to make the second steps, to take what we develop here further than we old bastards can imagine. And to teach the rest of your peers, and the generation after you, with the insight and deep understanding afforded by having been here to see these new technologies at their very inception. I guess you could say we're trying to set a speed record on Industrial Revolutions — we simply don't have the time to bumble around and let it develop naturally.

"So, I'm not asking you to come up with some brilliant new solution all on your own. I'm asking you to learn, Hermione. If that sets your mind at ease at all."

No, it really didn't. If anything, that thought was even more intimidating than sitting in the room with all 'her colleagues' talking over her head. The idea was just...too big, what the Director was talking about. No, I don't expect you to invent "a whole new kind of technology", I just expect you to use it to change the world after we do that part — no pressure, don't worry about it, Hermione! Just, honestly, Hermione found the whole talk overwhelming, spent the next half hour sitting dazed at her desk...

When she paused to think about it, Hermione felt she'd gotten in far too deep over her head, drowning, it was all she could do to scramble to keep up. She could hardly sleep, huddled up in her office with textbook after paper after paper after textbook, pouring through data compiled on dozens and dozens of floppy discs, the numbers on the screen and the words on paper burning into her retinas...

She needed to catch up, she couldn't slow down, she was so far behind...

Payne had probably been trying to reassure her, that she didn't need to worry so much about not contributing as much as the specialists on the team, but she thought that talk might have had the opposite effect. Having been selected to be one of the inaugural experts of a Fourth Industrial Revolution was a hell of a responsibility to put on someone's shoulders!

Beth, as always, was very skilled at bringing her down to earth — after a couple weeks of panic, a letter from her was very sobering, despite the fact that she definitely wasn't doing it on purpose.

C1.000167 Tpr. Elizabeth HA Potter (HLCCP)
2 SCFRS C.9
UNCDD DUNGU, DRC 2032

Hermione,

So, the Ituri rainforest is gone. You read that right, it doesn't exist anymore.
Our little ambush went off pretty much as planned. There were some fighters at the farm, but it wasn't difficult to down them, we had them well outnumbered and they didn't see us coming. Inside of those buildings were some more of those weird people with the tentacles on their heads and their hands replaced with some weird crab-looking thing — we think they're their scientists or engineers or something? Dunno. Apparently they're not completely useless in a fight, one of them tossed these little poison darts at Andy before going down. Some kind of neurotoxin, Bill thinks, he and one of the local mages (didn't catch her name) managed to stop it from spreading without too much trouble, though his face is still a little numb on that side.
The prisoners pretty much went mad as soon as we showed up, running at us screaming and swinging random tools or sticks, trying to hit us with rocks or even bare hands. Completely crazy, and they looked like they were in a lot of pain, we think the aliens sent some kind of signal with their weird mind control stuff? Whatever. We kind of just had to kill them all, which sucked. Fighting aliens is fine, but I don't like killing people, especially these poor bastards, it's miserable.
If there really is no way to reverse it, I guess we don't have any other choice. It still sucks.
Anyway, once all the aliens (and prisoners) were dead, Bill and a couple helpers quick set up the runestones for our trap, and we pulled back out of the little camp. Reinforcements from Isiro flew in a couple minutes later, a few transports and a bunch of soldiers — mostly the dinosaur-looking ones. Bill triggered the trap, and BOOM, those fuckers were dead. We went through the camp just to make sure, but we got all of them, and the vehicles were wrecked too.
Bill doesn't look it, but he's kind of a scary son of a bitch, you know? I guess that runes shite can be really useful, if you put your mind to it.
The bombing started while we were still on the way back to camp. We lost some people, but only a few, on the rush to get back under the wards — Bill's work held up long enough for us to set up our emergency portkeys, and then we were out of there, back to Goma. Once everyone got sorted, we were told one of the spaceships, the big one that looks kind of like a conch shell or something? Yeah, apparently the ambush cheesed them off bad, because the big ship sidled up over Africa and levelled the entire fucking rainforest. The bombing went on for a couple hours, but now it's just gone. I'm in Dungu right now, which is like a hundred kilometres away, I think? You can see a wall of smoke to the south, just
I hope Kèpfisa got out, he didn't come with us, but I kind of doubt it.
Fuck these bastards, that's all.
We were moved to Dungu today — or near Dungu, it's a tiny town and the military people outnumber the locals by a lot. My group, lots of British and Soviets and the like, are meeting up with the big buildup in Ethiopia around here, Arabs and such. There's a lot of fucking people here now, gotta be thousands of soldiers, and it's super fucking noisy, tanks and shite are loud.
I'm bloody tired, long day, but I thought I'd get a letter out. We'll be starting the attack on Isiro soon, and from there pushing on to Kisangani, I don't know how long it'll be until I can write again. Full-on war stuff starting up in a couple days, I'm gonna be busy. So, sorry if I don't have much to say about your last letter, I'm just too tired for friend-like feelings talk right now.
I'm sure it's fine, you're bloody brilliant, Hermione. You worry too much.
Anyway, I'm going to go hand this off and get to sleep. Try not to let your usual self-confidence stuff bother you too much and do some science over there — you bloody nerd.

Still alive,
Beth

፠

There was nothing like an entire bloody rainforest being burned to the ground and your best friend nearly being killed by space aliens to get your priorities straight.

The same day she'd gotten that letter from Beth she was sitting at the evening meeting — slumped silently in her chair, the adults around her chattering away — still dazed with...something like shock, she guessed. She wasn't as worried about Mum, honestly — India had more need of qualified medical personnel than soldiers, according to her letters she'd spent far more time in clinics and operating rooms than anything directly military-related. But Beth being out there, could be fighting at any moment, was, just, unnerving. Usually, when Beth was getting into some crazy danger, Hermione was around, helping however she could, or at least knowing what was happening. Sitting here, thousands of kilometres away, while her best friend was fighting in a war was an odd sort of torture, the uncertain dread killing her more than anything...

She wished she knew what was happening at least. Communications across that sort of distance were still very spotty, Hermione didn't have direct access to the radio equipment necessary, they didn't get news until days afterward...

(Beth could have died in the time it'd taken her letter to get here, and Hermione would have no idea, probably not for weeks.)

Hermione barely heard the conversation going on around her, her thoughts continually drawn back to the burning of the Ituri rainforest. Once she'd heard Beth was being sent there, she'd read up a little on the region, though she had actually heard of it before — there'd been some anthropological studies of the people living there, some concerns had been raised about how they were faring in the political unrest of the decolonisation period. It was likely that entire cultural groups had already been extinguished, due to the aliens choosing to land nearby, taking who knows how many hostages. The forest being bombed meant the survivors would never be able to return, an entire way of life permanently destroyed, it could be generations before the region was recovered enough to support them again, if ever...

An entire people, multiple entire peoples — the region was very diverse, a mix of sedentary and nomadic tribes representing a complex tapestry of languages and religions and cultural traditions packed into a relatively small geographical area — gone forever, just, completely wiped out only in the span of a month, a month and a half. And they had been isolated enough that what scholarship existed of them was far from complete, there was much about the peoples there that they didn't know...and now they never would. Entire cultures, just, gone, forever.

For some reason, it occurred to her that the Ituri rainforest was also home to...perhaps half of the okapi in existence? She wasn't sure. They were already considered endangered, and most of the rest of their range was also occupied by the aliens, the war proceeding, they were probably doomed to extinction now...

(Like so many others, it seemed. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon were equally diverse and equally endangered as the people of the Congo, the landings in India and Indochina no less potentially disastrous...)

From the sound of Beth's letter, they hadn't had any warning before the bombs started to fall — and they should have had warning, someone should have seen the ship coming. But Goma couldn't have radioed a warning to them, the wards around their camp... They might have personal radios to help coordinate their different groups on the ground, but Hermione wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't bothered to bring the long-range equipment along at all. They couldn't send or receive anything through the wards, after all. They would need to set the equipment up outside of the wards, and they were trying to remain concealed, that would have defeated the point...

Perhaps they should distribute magical radios anyway. The prohibitive element of magical radio was that the format was unidirectional. It required equipment of significant scale and complexity to send a broadcast out any real distance, projected in...sort of the equivalent of a carrier wave, pushed out into the ambient magical environment — projecting that carrier required a deep contact with the ambient magic, each broadcasting station needed to be specially tuned to the geomantic properties of the region, the particulars obligating the station to be completely immobile, rooted into a single location, like proper wards. (The mechanics also limited the range of the broadcast, though how far it would reach depended very much on the geomancy involved.) The receivers were mobile, and while they couldn't reply to any message they got, the signal would get through wards just fine...well, most wards, anyway, as long as they avoided isolating certain registers it was fine. They wouldn't solve the problem of establishing two-way communications, of course, but they might still be useful to get out emergency messages, keep people informed of critical developments...

Beth's evacuation of Ituri had been far too close. They could hopefully prevent something like that from happening again.

Hermione had been thinking about it, for weeks now (pages and equations dancing behind her eyes), and she didn't think the problem was solvable. They could have modern communications, or they could have wards — they had to pick one. Radio transmissions would be bounced or blocked at the wardline, even wired signals would be scrambled crossing the line without special shielding. Magical defences, shields and wards, were simply better than mundane armour and fortification, especially when it came to resisting their peculiar lava-bombs and for concealment, they definitely didn't want to give up wards. But magical radio wasn't nearly as versatile, and the problem of projecting the magical carrier was far too complex, Hermione wasn't sure that problem was solvable either. They had to pick one or the other, and Hermione was certain that they definitely didn't want to give up the use of wards — not to mention, high-intensity combat magic would scramble radio transmissions in the area anyway...

No, that problem wasn't solvable. They had to do something else. Something else...

The scramble to leave had been on such short notice, Beth had forgotten the enchanted mirror Sirius had given her — Sirius had called one day, one of the Potter elves had brought the mirror to Hermione. She didn't know how to get it to Beth, not sure if it would get through the post, and none of the elves were directly bound to Beth, so they couldn't find her...would probably have to wait until Beth visited home to hand it to her in person (Hermione had no illusions that she'd be coming back permanently any time soon, it would only be a visit), and who knew how long that would be before that happened...

When Hermione had first encountered the mirror, Beth showing it to her about a year ago now — Sirius had given it to her after their first summer together, to keep in touch while she was at school — she'd been completely fascinated. She'd been familiar with owl post and floo calls by then, but they'd seemed so terribly impractical, she'd had no idea there was something so...well, convenient. Better than modern telephones, really, since it came complete with perfectly-reproduced visuals — Hermione was familiar with the concept of video conferencing, but the technology was still in its temperamental infancy at this point. Her immediate thought, first observing a call between Beth and Sirius, was why the hell this magic wasn't way more common.

After a few days of research, trawling through the library before finally finding something useful, turned out to be pretty simple: the enchanting was rather complicated, resulting in prices for finished products that were far too high for wide-spread implementation. Also, the magic only worked between paired devices, each device limited to contact with a single other device. It was possible to link multiple devices together on the same circuit, increasing the number of people who could be on the same call, but if you wanted to call multiple people in separate calls, you needed a separate device for each person — which, of course, only further increased the relative cost, compared against telephones, not to mention the logistical problem of needing to keep track of multiple devices. It was possible to make notebooks that were bound by a similar principle, what was written in one appearing in the other and vice versa, Hermione had experimented with making her own out of curiosity. And she had thoughts of giving some to her parents and her friends, quicker than owl post, and she didn't need to make copies of her own letters to remember what she'd written...

The magic was quite modern, an adaptation of the Protean Charm — itself a relatively new enchantment (not a charm, the naming of things was so terribly inconsistent sometimes), only dating to around the Renaissance. The Protean 'Charm' was a means by which objects could be tied together, what was done to one also being done to another, but far more limited in scope: the 'Charm' produced a "master" or "primary" object, which projected any changes made to it onto a "client" or "secondary"; the "secondary" would resist any changes that brought it out of alignment with the "primary", but the "secondary" would not project any changes done to it onto the "primary", it only worked one way. The trick with the mirrors and the notebooks was, essentially, to create a loop, each object both "primary" and "secondary", mutually bound to each other. After a few decades fiddling with it, the enchantment had been streamlined, instead of the objects being bound to each other the effect mediated through a single 'key rune' — any design that could be carved or drawn into the enchantment, unique to the objects so bound — so several objects could be bound to each other, despite that not being at all how Protean Charms worked. It was approaching very close to old, esoteric witchcraft at this point, old sympathetic ritual — as I do to this thing, let it be done to this other thing — but mediated through modern enchanting, far more reliable and reproducible...

Unlike magical radio, the Protean Charm didn't have a maximum range — as long as the objects could 'find' each other, the magic would function, with no loss of signal strength. Exactly what that meant was a complicated concept, weird geomancy stuff. To oversimplify the idea somewhat, the objects required some medium for the information to be communicated through — that medium was ambient magic. There were natural discontinuities in ambient magic, but they were relatively rare — the harshest deserts, marine dead spots, outer bloody space, that sort of thing. (Life generated ambient magic; as long as there was life, in sufficient density, so there would be ambient magic.) The signal might occasionally be interrupted when there were significant fluctuations in ambient magic, powerful storms or volcanic eruptions or the like, but other than that...

Hermione had never heard of this enchantment being used for solely audio before, without including video, but there was no reason it couldn't be done...

Turning the dial on an older radio, at her grandmother's house, feeling the faintest click, an image in her head, the gears of a clock ticking along...

"That's it." It might take some work to manufacture enough to distribute to everyone who needed them, but that was an easier problem to solve than it might seem — entire sectors of the economy had basically ground to a halt overnight, they had a lot of idle hands to do enchanting. As Hermione had learned recently, it was possible for muggles to do witchcraft: the only difference between mages and muggles was that mages could channel magic and muggles couldn't, so anything that didn't require the user to actively channel magic was open to muggles too. To properly enchant, all the user needed to do was focus closely on what they were doing, the meaning of the symbols and how they came together to make the enchantment — it was intense labour, yes, surprisingly so, but muggles were perfectly capable of it. They'd already begun recruiting muggles to help make potions and enchanted building materials and personal equipment (heat-resistant armour in particular), this enchantment would be more complicated than those projects, would require more thorough instruction, but she didn't see why it shouldn't be possible.

(Though Hermione hadn't stopped being annoyed by the revelation that muggles could actually do witchcraft, her introductory magic theory textbooks had lied to her...)

An eager thrill bubbling up her chest, her face splitting with a grin, "The mirrors. I've got it, that's it." Of course, the chatter was still going on around her, she'd only attracted a couple curious glances her way. Without really thinking about it, her skin practically humming with pleasure — she'd always loved puzzles, that feeling of ha, I solved it! — she raised her voice, "Hey, I have an idea! Hey, everyone! Hold up..."

It wasn't until the room abruptly dropped silent, eyes turning toward her, that Hermione realised she'd stood up...and had also been shouting there for a second. Oh, er...

In the sea of confused and uncertain faces, the Director just seemed amused — lounging back in his chair, bare feet crossed up on the corner of the table (which just seemed so improper), smirking to himself. "Well, let's hear it, Miss Granger. What's this idea of yours?"

"Um..." Suddenly very self-conscious, Hermione fidgeted, cleared her throat. "Well. Wards disrupt electromagnetic signals at the boundary, right, preventing the effective use of radio communications — due to the fundamental mechanics of their operation, I know some of you are trying to find ways around that, but I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it can work, definitionally. We need to pick one or the other, but we definitely don't want to give up wards."

Frowning at her, Möller — a master wardcrafter, from Saxony — a bit of a German-sounding accent on his French, said, "Yes, Granger, that's about the shape of it. Were you approaching a point?"

"Yes, um. It seems to me, it'd be more practical to, instead of trying to find a way to get modern radios to work through wards, to just use something we already know works. Are any of you familiar with the Rossini–Costa Method?"

The muggles weren't, of course, bemusement crossing around the room; on the other hand, surprise flicked over the faces of the magical experts, rearing back in their chairs or glancing at each other. "I didn't even think of that," said Planche — one of the younger experts around the table, meaning he was still a couple decades older than Hermione, an enchanter from Antwerp (which was part of magical Holland). "You're thinking we can design an equivalent of radio entirely on magical principles, circumventing the problem entirely." Without waiting for a response, Planche began explaining the concept of the Protean Charm and the Rossini–Costa Method and communication mirrors — addressed to the Director, but for the benefit of all the muggles in the room — after a couple minutes Hermione realising she was still standing, plopped back down into her chair, her face warm. "But there's one problem I can think of off the top of my head," Planche said, finally turning back to Hermione. "These enchantments are paired, or bonded in a series — such a device may still be useful, yes, but they would be far less versatile than a muggle radio, without the ability to tune to different frequencies. Unless we expect people to carry a separate device for each line of communication, it's possible they could be made small enough that would be doable..."

Someone else muttered something about that sounding extremely impractical, but not loud enough to be speaking to the whole group, Hermione spoke over her. "Um, I thought of that, actually. I'm not an expert, I've only done a little fiddling with enchantment but, um, would it be possible to, sort of, put the key rune on the face of a gear, you know? And the user could turn a dial, like on a radio..."

She trailed off, Planche was shaking his head. "No, that would interrupt the plane of the enchantment, breaking the string. Perhaps you could, theoretically, but the enchanter would need to include that function in their image of the magic, which would be prohibitively complex. Perhaps it would be feasible to—"

"Oh wait!" Hermione blurted out, stiffening in her chair. "I got it! You don't use a key rune, you use a reservoir stone — you script the enchantment around a referent instead of a key, turning the dial bringing different reservoir stones into alignment. That also solves the problem of needing to come up with unique key runes, you can put any image into the reservoir stone, as long as you have a unique image for each frequency, you can get way more variety in that than a small-scale physical design, it's perfect!"

Planche's eyes had widened as she rambled on, a little bit of muttering from other mages around the table. A second later he jumped to his feet, yanked a few blank sheets of paper to himself, beckoning Hermione across the table with a hand. "Get over here, Granger, let's see what we got. Um, Gwen and Marcel, could use your eye too. Give us a minute to sketch this out quick," he said to the Director, a pencil already in his hand dividing out the major sections of the script.

The conversation went on around them as Hermione, Planche, Ceinwen Smethwyck, and Marcel Dupuy crowded around the papers, coming up with an outline of an enchantment. Planche started just with shorthand for the Rossini–Costa Method, but then Smethwyck — a British enchanter, Hermione had only seen her in passing (though she was aware the Smethwycks were a noble, pureblood, Light family) — crossed out parts of it, reaching under Planche's arm to draw in the specific glyphs necessary to alter the enchantment to project solely audio (the symbols in Egyptian). It took a little more work to figure out how to design the script for the referent, Smethwyck and Planche muttering back and forth, while Dupuy (a French alchemist with additional expertise in geomancy) scrawled out a series of equations elsewhere, occasionally glancing at the enchanting work — Hermione couldn't interpret all of it, but she thought he was outlining the specifications of the reservoir stone necessary to interface with the enchantment, as well as the ideal format for the image.

Some of that was over Hermione's head — she was just a student, and an occasional hobbyist — so she worked on drawing a diagramme of the gear system necessary to connect the dial on the outside with the functional parts on the inside. Reservoir stones could be sensitive, subject to interference from external magic, so they wouldn't want the person directly manipulating the wheel with the stones, instead turning a dial that came to a little axle here, connected to the centre of the gear with the stones. And they'd want to lock the reservoir stones precisely in place, so, we'd have a lever here, just behind the stones, which would add a bit of resistance the user would be able to feel, and hold the gear in place. Oh, um, depending on how miniaturised this was, they'd also need to be concerned with the images in the stones interfering with each other (not to mention the action of the enchantment), so they'd need an insulator...thin sheets of silver, perhaps — goblin silver, if they'd agree to help supply the project. Um, two discs, against the wheel like this (with a hole for the rod in one of them), a segment cut out to free the reservoir stone currently in use...and also thin strips between the stones... Actually, they should make a whole wheel around the stones, better insulation, silver on all sides when not in use, the one segment allowing access to the desired reservoir — maybe overkill, but they'd want to reduce the likelihood of the image being corrupted, this had the best chance of preserving it for as long as possible. There that would—

"Oh wait, we need some way for them to identify which channel they're on. Could that information be on the reservoirs too?"

"No," Dupuy said, from past Planche and Smethwyck. "You would need some referent to interpret the complex image used in place of a key rune into something the user would understand, which would be prohibitively complex. And you can't store multiple images on a single reservoir."

Smethwyck snapped her fingers. "So we use a second reservoir." She draw a hard line blocking off the main enchantment, which Planche was still poking over, making an occasional edit. Starting with a star inside a ring with an arrow leading off — shorthand for a standard referent script around a reservoir stone — she started an enchantment, Egyptian glyphs, um...

"Oh! A visual projection, I get it." Hermione drew a second gear on the rod, a quick arrow pointing back at her more detailed drawing of her wheel of reservoir stones — it'd be basically the same thing, except these stones would simply hold an image of a label or something, whatever they wanted to call each channel, which could be projected somewhere the user would see it. Slightly complex, figuring out the mechanism in a way that would fit the wheels and both enchantments without bumping into each other might be a little difficult, but that should work. "Hmm, images fade over time, and, we'll want some way to reprogramme the keys, if the owner has new people they need to talk to..."

"Got it, we can make a catalyst for that, like this." Planche drew his own hard line, started scrawling off an enchantment, a couple equations defining reservoir stones...

After fifteen, twenty minutes or so, they had a sprawling mess of sketches and enchantments — in a mix of shorthand and proper script, Egyptian and Akkadian — alchemical and geomantic arithmancy, some of which went right over her head. The four of them scanned over it for a moment, making an occasional annotation here and there, but it...looked fine to Hermione. She wasn't an expert, but...

"Director," Planche called, voice raised to cut through the chatter in the room. "I think we've got it."

Payne just nodded. "Do you need magic to use it? And can it be mass-produced?"

"No, and yes."

"You'll need magic to programme it," Hermione clarified, just to be perfectly honest about the practicality of the thing, "but every other step of the manufacture can be done without magic. And you don't need magic to use it, no."

There was some chatter around the table, excited — they had been working on this for weeks, actually having something to show for it was exciting. Payne just smiled, pointed at the door out. "Go get me a prototype, then."

Despite the abruptness of the Director's dismissal, walking out of the conference room — their papers bundled up in Planche's arms, verbally compiling a list of all the supplies they would need — Hermione couldn't keep a smile off her face, her steps feeling light and bouncy. She'd solved it.

(For perhaps the first time since that day in London, Hermione didn't feel completely useless.)

Chapter Text

19th October 1995 (63:6:28)
— Contact plus 00.01.17:05.30

The night before the march on Isiro began in earnest, Beth's troop was pulled aside and informed they'd be moved to Indochina in about a week.

Now that everyone had gotten their shite together, the alien landing in the Congo was well and truly surrounded. Pressed in from all sides by forces from most of the African countries, plus the Arab nations, Israel, and Europe, even the Chinese getting in on the action, plus more soldiers and a bunch of material support from the Soviets and the Americans, yeah, this was a hell of a thing they'd slapped together on such short notice. There'd been a couple sizeable battles already — one not far west of Goma right around the time Beth's team had been setting their trap, and more further west, forces coming in from the west hitting resistance around Mbandaka and from the south ambushed on the highway somewhere north of Kananga — and while they had lost plenty of people, yes, it sounded like the fighting was going surprisingly well so far? From what Beth was told, the initial approaches had gone badly, but as they adjusted their tactics, spreading out their people more so they couldn't get knocked out with a single lava bomb (and also more easily surrounding and cutting apart groups of dinos), the mages concentrating on shielding tanks and artillery and shite, flying up to knock out their funny skipray-looking planes or take occasional strikes at fortified positions — distracting them so their weird gravity shields would miss the rockets and mortars coming in — and they quickly started getting the hang of it, steadily pushing the front back toward Kisangani.

Their side was going to be somewhat more complicated, since the aliens had a bunch of air power at Isiro, but they weren't that worried. With the combination of the local and foreign mages and the artillery sent in by the Arabs and Soviets it should be a hard fight, yes, but they were mostly certain they'd be able to take Isiro. They expected the ground fight to get nastier and nastier as they approached the primary landing site near Kisangani — the aliens were tough bastards, and seemed to have no fear of death whatsoever, when a normal person might surrender instead jumping into mad suicide runs, in some cases leaping at vehicles and blowing their grenades and shite like that, it was crazy — but they didn't have any doubts at this point that they would be able to retake all of the Congo with the people they had here.

The landings in the Amazon and in India were...somewhat more mixed, but also trending in their favour. The Amazon landing was kind of like the Congo, in that the aliens had landed in the middle of nowhere deep in a fucking tropical jungle, but the landing there was even more isolated, with even less modern infrastructure in the area, meaning it was somewhat harder to get to. (Beth had honestly never considered how fucking huge the Amazon was before.) Also, there were fewer big militaries ready enough and close enough to get there on such short notice — Africa had the 'advantage' of recent wars of liberation against European empires and a number of subsequent conflicts going on, so had had military forces already built up and ready, with the Arabs and Europeans right on their doorstep, but the closest equivalent the Amazon had was the United States, half a hemisphere away. There had been civil wars and revolutions and stuff going on in the Americas, but their suitability for the current crisis was somewhat less, for reasons that hadn't been adequately explained (and also Beth didn't really care). And the Yanks were being slow to get people there — the first attempt to get air power down had resulted in a lot of planes being exploded, moving their navy south to try to provide a little backup for the locals had resulted in a lot of sunk ships.

The mages had been very helpful in keeping things from complete disaster — for complicated historical reasons, American magical countries were still mostly dominated by natives, and they were a bit paranoid about Old World mages coming back and trying to conquer them again, so they'd been cued up to respond to the alien attack in a blink. The American mages being weird and militant had actually kind of ended up saving the American muggles' arses, so, Beth guessed it'd worked out in the end? Though, they couldn't just teleport US soldiers and equipment down there, for complicated geomancy reasons Beth didn't really follow — Hermione had tried to explain it, something about magical currents and the Caribbean and bloody active volcanoes, but she always had trouble understanding complicated ideas without someone around to explain it in person — so they basically had to march aaaallll the way down Central America and over the mountains of Columbia, on foot. Well, in trucks and busses and shite, but. The Americans had mobilised pretty much everyone they could on short notice, and were picking up more friends on the way (pretty much the entire Mexican army, for one, plus a whole bunch of Communist volunteers from the south of Mexico and a some of the little countries there), so it'd be a fucking huge army when they finally caught up, it'd just be a little while yet.

Not to say they'd been doing nothing in the meanwhile — the local forces were holding on as well as they could, the mages sneaking around to identify where the aliens were most concentrated...so the Americans could then bomb the shite out of them, from all the way over in the North. Planes had a nasty habit of being shot down, sure, but the Americans had a large number of missiles and shite that could be aimed from surprisingly far away. Once the mages gave them coordinates, they'd fire off a bunch of missiles all at once, a few minutes later local militaries shelling the same spots, so the missiles had a better shot of getting through their weird gravity shields. It was working relatively well so far, but it was pretty patchy, the aliens spreading all over the place through the Amazon. They were pretty sure the ground forces on the way would be enough to clear them out (as bloody and miserable as the fight was likely to be), they just had to hold out that long and they'd be fine.

The Americans had even managed to down another of the big space ships. The aliens weren't complete idiots, and they were in space, obviously they could see the huge bloody army making its way down toward the Amazon. The column had been under almost constant bombardment by one of the smaller ships — smaller relatively speaking, of course, like the one that they'd boarded over Paris during the initial attack — sometimes a second or a third one showing up to help. They'd done some calculations, waited until they had a couple ships bombing their people at once...

...and then shot a bunch of nuclear fucking missiles at them. Special ones that were meant to go up into low orbit, coast for a bit, before coming back down, Hermione had explained — the Americans had probably used those because the rocket actually burned out once they were high enough (the arc it would take back down to earth from there was predictable), the lack of fire constantly blasting out the back making them far harder to see while in transit. Near as they could tell, one of the alien ships had been badly damaged, slowly limped back out to the moon for repairs, and another had been completely fucking disintegrated. The aliens were leaving the approaching column alone now, presumably preparing to hold them at the mountains north of the jungle, which seemed like a smart idea to Beth.

(Apparently nuclear fucking missiles were no joke even for the aliens.)

Of course, they'd fired up a bunch to make sure something would get through the weird magic gravity shields, and the nukes that missed had continued on to land somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, west of South America. According to Hermione, they'd presumably been careful about their aim and timing to make sure their misses landed around there — it was a pretty empty spot in the ocean, nobody really living out there, the fucking huge multiple nuclear blasts probably hadn't directly killed anyone. Wind and water currents would bring (weak) fallout over countries, like, Chile and Peru and Argentina, but the Americans had already promised help with the cleanup, and medical assistance for cancer down the road and the like. Apparently, the local governments weren't super happy about it but, you know, the aliens were kind of the bigger problem, the rumour was they were willing to eat the cost of (mildly) increased cancer risk to avoid literally everyone being enslaved and/or murdered.

(Supposedly, the Americans and the Soviets were having meetings to hammer out their nuclear strategy — Hermione said there were a limited number of nukes they could use before there'd be serious environmental consequences. And not just because the shite was poison, either, apparently something called nuclear winter was a thing? Sounded bad...)

Compared to the Amazon landing, the one in India was a mix of better and worse news. The place the aliens had landed was pretty rural, but India had rather more thorough transportation infrastructure these days, and the area was smaller than the bloody Amazon, so it was much easier to move forces in to respond. Also, India had a pretty decent-sized, modern military, and neighbours had immediately jumped in to help — particularly the Soviets, China, and Burma — they had the situation pretty well in hand already. Or, at least, they had the landing well-surrounded, keeping the aliens contained, working on pressing in, similar to here in the Congo. The military side was going pretty smoothly over there.

The other parts weren't going so well. While the landing might have been in a relatively rural spot, India had a lot of people, even well away from the major cities, countless little farming communities and bustling towns dotted all over the place. Between the initial (and still intermittent) bombings in the cities and the subsequent landing, hundreds of millions of people had been made homeless, who knew how many millions of people killed. Plenty of people had managed to flee the landing area — the aliens had only managed to capture a relatively small fraction of the population in the area, possibly even lower than ten per cent — which was good, yes, fewer people dying or having their brains rewritten (fucking creepy bastards) was always better...but that also meant India was now dealing with what was almost certainly the single worst refugee crisis in human history. Seriously, hundreds of millions of people displaced, it was absurd.

It was bad enough that, despite being sent there as part of an Army thing, Hermione's mum apparently hadn't seen proper combat at all yet — her superiors had decided she'd be more useful in a medical position, working primarily in a massive sprawling refugee camp a good hundred kilometres away from the front. Which Hermione was relieved about, definitely, but the stories coming out of there were still pretty fucking horrifying. Not to mention, the interruption to agriculture was going to cause a massive famine in India — hundreds of millions of people, remember — they were already mobilising resources to try to deal with it months in advance, but it was going to get bad over there. Especially since people starving had a nasty habit of causing political unrest...

So yeah, mixed bag, India.

Indochina, though, was not doing so well. Beth hadn't really known much about the region before — she'd never had any particular reason to, it was on the opposite end of the bloody planet — but, while the march toward Isiro was starting up, she was instead stuck in intense language lessons with someone sent over for the purpose (along with two other omniglots), which included talking about this stuff. The whole area had been a French colony not that long ago, but then the French had been kicked out by the Japanese in WWII, in the absence of their French overlords the locals then putting together armed resistance movements to kick out the Japanese. But then, after the war, the French came back, attempting to reassert their control over the area — France was one of the Western countries that'd had a harder time accepting that colonialism was over now, they'd made trouble in Africa too — which had led to a long, bloody war. Eventually, France had been kicked out, mostly thanks to Communist-aligned peasant groups, which had then faced reactionary backlash that often had ethnic elements to it (some of these groups known to be backed under the table by various Western meddlers), which had then led to a civil war in the region, culminating in Vietnam (with Laotian backup) temporarily taking control of Cambodia to stop a genocide, it was a whole complicated thing.

And then after that, China had invaded — for complicated historical and political and economic reasons, Beth didn't really follow it. Vietnam had suffered the worst of it in that war, since they were the ones who had a border with China, but Laos and allied militias in Cambodia had sent soldiers to help, so they'd all lost a lot of people in it. Large parts of the north of the country had basically been levelled in the fighting, it was a mess. So, those three countries — Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia — had been through a hell of a time, occupation by the French and then by the Japanese, an anticolonial revolt against the Japanese and then the French, and then civil wars culminating in a regional war, and then invasion by a much more powerful neighbour, a conflict which had never been fully settled, a slow background of border skirmishes continuing into the 90s.

And all that only within the 20th Century, by this point they've had barely a decade of relative peace ever since the arrival of the French in the latter end of the 19th Century. Their economies had just started to get off the ground again, reconstruction from the century-long string of war still ongoing in all three countries.

Aaaaand then the aliens landed, in the mountainous region along the three-way border. To put it bluntly, the locals were not prepared to deal with something like that. The devastation left behind from too many wars in a row and the general underdevelopment of the isolated mountain valleys made it even more complicated to deal with. Luckily for them, this particular landing was on a somewhat smaller scale than the other three, for whatever reason — the common assumption was that the stuff the aliens wanted to grow there was different, and the smaller footprint enforced by the mountainous environment necessitated fewer soldiers to hold it — but it was still, well.

It was a terrible fucking mess, basically.

The person who was telling them all this, while blowing through an accelerated omniglot-style language course, was actually a retired Soviet official, who'd been in the area during the war with France — the Soviets had provided some assistance at the time, though they'd never really had soldiers helping out for real, just advice and supplies. The Soviets were actually sending large numbers of soldiers and equipment and stuff there this time, because the locals couldn't handle it themselves and had asked for the help. There was some complicated juggling going on between the different Communist governments, about who would be sending people where and in what numbers, it was a whole thing, and also not really Beth's business.

Their language lessons were focussed on Vietnamese, though, like here in the Congo, there was no one dominant language they'd be able to get by on everywhere...especially in the mountainous border region they were being sent to, that place was apparently really diverse. Well, a lot of people spoke French, she guessed, but given the complicated history of the colonial administration and the war and everything, relying on French wouldn't be very politic, to put it mildly. (Also, the ordinary people in isolated farming villages and shite weren't likely to know much.) They'd probably have to pick up more languages while they were at it, whatever was spoken in the area they were posted at, but Vietnam had the largest military of the three countries, and most everyone in the military would speak Vietnamese (as a second language if not natively), so knowing this one would probably be most helpful at getting by, at least.

Like how learning Kiswahili when Beth got to Africa didn't actually allow her to talk to everyone around, but it at least helped — same idea, she guessed. At this rate, she was going to know so many new languages by the time the war was over...

Vietnamese — tiếng Việt — was kind of reminding her of the little bit of Hak-kâ-va she'd picked up from Cho? Kind of similar-feeling, in that there weren't any consonant clusters, syllables going consonant-vowel-consonant at most, sometimes with some Ys or Ws in there, and also there were the tones, can't forget the tones. Her feeling was that tiếng Việt had more different vowel sounds than Hak-kâ-va, and also the tones were...different? They had probably the same number of different tones, but, some of them were kind of... Like, it was less about the pitch changing, necessarily, and more like, sort of, changing how the...air moved? Some felt more hissy and sharper than others, like half-whispered or harsh and grinding a little, and, there was pitch to it, but Beth wasn't sure how much of the distinction between the tones was the pitch and how much was her voice feeling different. Maybe a mix of both?

Anyway, it wasn't that hard to learn. It sounded way different from English, but she'd gotten practice with Hak-kâ-va, once she got the hang of feeling out the funny tone stuff it wasn't a big deal. And the grammar was super easy, nothing inflected or anything, just stringing uninflectable words together and the meaning coming from which words you used and what order they were in, like in English. At that point, the game was just picking up more vocabulary, and Beth was a cheating information sponge, so that wasn't hard.

...Though, it didn't seem like the other couple omniglots she was working with were picking it up quite as fast. They got good at making the sounds correctly at about the same time Beth did, but it didn't take very long for her to notice that their sentences sounded very clumsy, and their vocabulary was always behind hers.

Apparently other omniglots actually needed to hear a word at least once before they could possibly remember it, which, um, Beth didn't see why? All the words were in the Soviet bloke's head, there was no reason they needed to hear it...

Langley had said she was absurd even by omniglot standards, so. She had actual proof of that now, she guessed. Bloody weird, but okay then.

(Shouldn't be surprised, it was literally impossible for Beth to just be normal about anything.)

The big damn international force here had started the crawl toward Isiro days ago now. The rest of her team had been...doing something in the fight, she didn't know — by the sound of it, scouting ahead and/or keeping an eye on their flank — but Beth was kept back, focussed entirely on absorbing tiếng Việt as quickly as possible. Which was kind of frustrating, honestly, sometimes it was hard to pay attention to the talk — she didn't like just sitting here while the rest of her team was fighting without her. Not like she was just lying back taking it easy or anything, basically every waking hour of the day in magically-accelerated language lessons, hardly even breaking for meals or toilet breaks, just completely mentally exhausted by the end of the day. Twice she ended up with awful headaches, and needed to go take a nap for a couple hours before coming right back to it. Even with the help of magic, the mind could only handle having so much information crammed into it at once, and they were walking that line here, so.

Well, Beth was, anyway, it didn't seem to be bothering her fellow omniglots as much. She still had no idea why — Hlynur asked what she was doing differently, and there wasn't anything, she didn't think, she was just like this...

The only fighting Beth saw in that week or so was a few days in, when the aliens decided to send aircraft over to fire down at the column. The attackers even included some of the scary-quick fighter planes, been a while since Beth had seen any of those. Beth had been in the middle of a language lesson at the time, but of course she had all her things on her, as the alarm went up she just pulled out her broom and flew up to meet them. The skirmish had been pretty short, all things considered, the aircraft blasted with artillery and harried by Beth and a cadre of African mages who'd appeared only a few minutes in, they downed a handful of them before the aliens retreated back over the front line. They'd looped around and came in from behind, Beth assumed it was an attempt at a decapitation strike, aiming for the commanders — they had lost a few officers, and there was a bit of a scramble for an hour or two, picking over destroyed equipment and scavenging around for anything useful and patching up the injured (or bundling up the badly injured to be teleported back to the hospital with the big command centre in Ethiopia), but the advance started up again before too much of a delay. If the aliens had been trying to knock out the leadership and send this group into disarray, it hadn't worked.

A couple days before they were set to leave for the East, Hedwig just...showed up. Out of nowhere, with no warning, Beth just woke up one morning to find her perched on top of one of those big bloody mobile missile launcher things a short distance from where she'd laid down for the night, a clump of curious people gathered under her, pointing and muttering. You didn't exactly see a lot of big damn Arctic owls in Africa, after all. Beth wasn't surprised that Hedwig had come to find her — the month between leaving for the training camp thing and when she randomly appeared in Africa was the longest Beth had gone without seeing Hedwig since her eleventh birthday — but it was still, just, bloody frustrating of her. Hedwig was smart, weirdly smart even for a post owl, you'd think she'd know better than to show up in an active warzone.

There'd been a little bit of fuss about it, higher-ups either demanding Hedwig be sent away, or put into quarantine until they were sure she wasn't... Well, with the way the aliens used living things, they were very much aware of the possible threat of, like, germ warfare and the like...and birds were particularly suspicious for that reason, though Beth didn't quite follow why. (Had someone used birds to spread germ weapons before? Was that a thing?) There was a bit of a debate that morning, since, naturally, muggle militaries didn't allow their people to bring their pets along, but magical organisations tended to make exceptions for familiars — and Hedwig had managed to find Beth a continent away without prompting (that she wasn't carrying a letter was important for reasons to do with how the magic of post owls worked), so it was assumed that she was a proper familiar, even if Beth didn't know what that meant exactly. Beth was a magical citizen, but was in a regiment under the command of the UK, which made the question of whether that exception should apply kind of complicated.

The officers weren't happy about it, but if Beth tried to send Hedwig away she'd probably just come back anyway, so. It was decided that, as long as Hedwig hunted for and didn't make too much of a nuisance of herself, she'd be allowed to stay with Beth for the time being.

(She suspected the fact that she happened to be a Lady of the Wizengamot might have something to do with the decision, for silly special noble legal privilege reasons, but nobody explicitly said so, so Beth could continue to pretend to be a normal person. Well, relatively normal, anyway.)

Honestly, Beth thought that was probably the right decision just for morale reasons. War was fucking bleak, and Hedwig being all interesting and expressive and super pretty was at least a pleasant distraction from how miserable everything was. It wasn't very long before the other people around were talking to her — Hedwig couldn't talk back, of course, but she could make herself understood with body language and the occasional hoot pretty well — or playing around tossing bits of their own food (which was breaking her agreement with the officers) or bits torn from the occasional carcass found around the column for her to chase, to occasional cheers as she gracefully snapped things up in mid-air. (She suspected there were bets going on over whether she managed to catch one thing or another.) Beth felt a little more at ease with Hedwig around, but looking around at the faces of the people around her, she had a feeling she wasn't the only one.

Letting people keep pets around for morale reasons would probably be a good idea, but most animals tended to get scared off by big bloody guns — Hedwig would just give the noise surly, irritated glares, so.

(The same glare Hedwig would give people for being rude in her presence, seriously, Beth loved that bloody bird.)

Beth and the other omniglots were given about a week to learn as much tiếng Việt as possible, given ongoing plans to start transferring more backup that way they couldn't really delay moving their advance teams in for much longer than that. By the end of that week, Beth could more or less keep up a conversation in the language already — she sounded really clumsy and almost childish to her own ears, but that would be enough to start with, at least. Mostly just missing vocabulary at this point, she'd continue learning after they got there. The other omniglots weren't quite as comfortable with it as she was, their speech noticeably simpler, but it'd be good enough for basic stuff, they'd have a harder time but they should be fine.

Once it was decided that they couldn't wait any longer, the units the omniglots were attached to were called back from wherever the hell they happened to be at the time, all their shite was packed up. A mage with the Egyptians produced a huge damn portkey from somewhere — like a big circular fishing net, woven out of some kind of rope, leather straps attached to it here and there. Everyone strapped in, tying their equipment to themselves to make sure they didn't lose anything, Hedwig gripping tight at the rope right next to Beth. (She'd tried to explain what they were doing, how important it was to hold on tight, but she really had no idea how much Hedwig understood.) The portkey was about as spinny and miserable as the Triwizard Cup, but the trip lasted much, much longer, Beth was feeling horribly dizzy and nauseous — and she wasn't the only one, through the storm of wind slamming her over the head she heard someone somewhere vomiting — she was just worrying about how long this thing could possibly go on when she was finally flung bodily to the ground, her knee banging against a rock and sand sent skittering, blasted with sudden heat from all directions.

The sun was painfully bright and it was absolutely sickeningly hot, Beth had to cover herself with an overpowered personal cooling charm and shield her eyes before she could even begin to get a sense of where she was. (After a second, she hit Hedwig with a second cooling charm while she was at it — poor girl wasn't built for this kind of weather.) They were in the middle of a fucking desert. The spot they were in was rockier, flat patches and towers of craggy stone poking out from under the sand, a sprawling camp huddled under the rock against the gusting wind, but the solid ground disappeared not far away from the camp, rolling dunes stretching out into the distance, bloody huge, arcs of sand rising and falling like frozen waves, here and there dust devils spinning off the tops, streaks of colour flying...

The sand was very red — from the pictures Beth had seen of deserts she'd expected, like, yellow-gold or something, but this shite was red. Like, brick-red, super red. Not quite proper Gryffindor red, and fading more toward a creamy sort of pink in places, but pretty obviously red. Bloody weird.

Beth had kind of assumed they'd been popped up to southern Egypt or Libya or something, but no, they'd been portkeyed all the way to Saudi fucking Arabia. That was, like, two thousand kilometres, or something like that? She'd had no idea portkeys could even go that far! Jesus Christ...

There'd already been some kind of transport hub here, used by the mages, doorways carved into the stone and in a complicated network of caves underground that led all over the place — a kind of portal, walk through the doorway and you just appeared on the other side — but since the start of the invasion they'd been expanding, sprawling out across the surface. Not with those neat enchanted doorways, those were more difficult to set up, mostly using portkeys and the odd transport spell Beth had seen a couple times in Africa now. The trip here was about the maximum range of a portkey, at least without risking serious accidents. Vietnam was another...five or six thousand kilometres or something — measured in a straight line, Beth didn't know if they'd be able to take those jumps over the Indian Ocean, so probably even longer than that — so they'd be using that transport spell to get the rest of the way.

They had to wait a little bit, though — the mages drawing out the spell circle on either side needed to do it perfectly in sync, and the time they'd arranged wasn't for another hour and change. And it was fucking hot here, someone said it was above forty degrees?! Bloody deserts, seriously. It was super windy, gusts constantly flipping her hair around, which did help to wick sweat away, but it didn't help that much. Not to mention, the wind tossed sand up at her, that was uncomfortable. Also it was sunny as all hell, and Beth would burn in fifteen minutes in British sun, if she wasn't careful — the fucking tropical Arabian sun was something else.

It was completely fucking miserable, basically, Beth had no idea how people actually managed to live here. Arabs must be made out of tougher stuff, because even with magic to cool and shade herself, she was dying.

As miserable as it'd been for various reasons, she was starting to miss the bloody rainforest — at least there'd been shade there.

After far too long suffering in the desert heat, a call went up passed around between the clumps of people gathered on the sand and stone all around. It was repeated in a couple languages, included English, but Beth actually understood Arabic well enough to get it the first time: it was time for the groups leaving for Indochina to get going. There was a little bit of a scramble, a disorganised crush of people heading for a flat spot of ground hugged between the towers of rock — clear of sand and unnaturally flat, transfigured smooth, the better to draw the spell circles on. Glancing around at the uniforms on the muggle soldiers surrounding her, she saw a mix of colours...mostly Arab countries, she thought, though the more red-looking ones could be anyone, she guessed.

(The Communists all using red flags made it kind of hard to keep the different countries they were from straight, but Beth suspected that was at least partially the point — l'Internationale sera le genre humain, and all that.)

They were actually splitting up, it turned out, which did make sense, when she thought about it, since she'd gotten her lessons with two other omniglots. In fact, they were sending at least five groups, but they only had the space on the floor to send two at a time. A magically amplified voice was rattling of directions in a mix of languages, Beth perked up at the mention of United Kingdom, S.C.F.R.S. C.-Nine — that was them, her team were in the first batch. She elbowed her way through a group of...um, Iraqis, she thought — she caught a snippet of Arabic, but the flags and shite in that region were all so bloody similar — managed to almost run into Sam, tucked in behind him. Beth was bloody tiny, and while Sam wasn't a particularly huge bloke or anything, he was carrying a pretty sizeable case that Beth knew had fucking RPGs and shite in it — Sam was one of their demolitions people. Beth had no idea how the hell he could carry that case so easily, she knew it weighed almost as much as she did. Point is, he had a much wider profile than Beth, getting through the crowd was a lot easier just following right behind him.

He glanced over his shoulder at her quick. "You know, it's a lot easier to spot you when you got that great bloody bird on your shoulder."

She rolled her eyes. "Shut up, Sam."

Beth's troop was shuffled over into one of the circles, the mages already at work drawing out the lines, the litany hissed under their breath. (This was technically a ritual, so "litany" was the proper term.) Seeing the spell had already started, they rushed a little bit to get themselves in place, but by the time they were all standing in a pair of clumps the mages were probably only a third of the way around the circle, plenty of time — and it didn't look like they had any stragglers trailing behind, the rest of the crowd hanging back, good. Beth spotted Bill and Luke nearby, and there was David over there, but she couldn't see most of their troop, mixed in with a few dozen other (mostly muggle) soldiers. She asked one of the blokes around her and Sam in her somewhat awkward Arabic, apparently the people in their circle were all Syrians...or mostly Syrians, anyway, they'd picked up a few people from neighbouring countries over the last weeks. People had been killed in the fighting, patching together full-strength units from whoever they had on hand, they were making it work.

They probably had to be pretty careful about that, she thought. The Arab world was a confusing mix of socialist and weird theocratic governments at the moment — and in a couple cases both at the same time, somehow? (she wasn't sure how that was supposed to work...) — and of course there were religious and ethnic conflicts and stuff. She knew from her Arabic talks with Hermione that there were multiple different branches of Islam who often didn't like each other much, a lot like Christianity in that way, and there were various religious and racial minorities scattered all over the place through the whole region, it was a whole thing. If they weren't paying attention to who they were sticking with who, that could get very nasty real quick.

Of course, the people in charge must knew that way better than Beth did. Syria was one of the secular socialist ones, she was pretty sure, as long as they stuck to patching up their gaps with more secular leftists it was probably fine.

(A few people did give the fifteen-year-old girl in the middle of a crowd of burly soldier types very odd looks, but she was used to that by now. Luckily, most people who didn't know better quickly decided she must be older than she looked — mages aged slower than muggles, so that wasn't an unreasonable guess — which was convenient, she usually tried to play along.)

They only had to wait another minute or two in the miserable Arabian sun before the circle was finished. The magic crawled up her legs, sharp and crackling, like static, the air suddenly feeling uncomfortably solid, enough it was hard to breathe — and then, zip, the magic released them. Teetering a little, dizzy — some of the muggles fell right on their arses — Beth let out a shaky breath. This weird Chinese spell-circle thing was definitely her favourite method of long-distance magical transportation, but that didn't mean it wasn't still uncomfortable.

It didn't help that the weather really wasn't that much better here — it was a bit cooler...maybe. It was honestly hard to say, because it was also really fucking humid, the air feeling thick and heavy to breathe. Which was especially annoying, because it was fucking nighttime here! It was slightly absurd that it was suddenly dusk now, considering it'd only been mid-afternoon a second ago, but she guessed they had popped, like, a quarter of the way around the world or something? She didn't know, whatever, the point was it should not be this warm after the sun went down.

At least it wasn't actively raining...but by the feel of the air around her, that could really change at any moment. Had they sent her into the middle of a bloody tropical rainforest again? Ugh...

Looking around, they were in a clearing, rather flimsy-looking buildings and tents scattered around, definitely a military camp of some kind. There were a few trees sticking up in the middle of it here and there, but nowhere near as dense as the forest around them...though, if they had sent her to another tropical rainforest, it wasn't the same kind. It was hard to say for sure, too dark in the approaching night to see much detail (especially with her eyes still dazzled by the sun reflecting off of the Arabian sands), but she thought the trees looked different — patchier, maybe? She didn't know.

They'd only been here for a couple seconds when she noticed the gunfire and shouting, shockingly nearby, people scrambling around the camp like an overturned anthill — they must be under attack.

Their group was already starting to scatter, spilling out of the circle, shouting and the rattling noise of a couple dozen people readying weapons all at once, when there was a magically-amplified vo— No wait, no tingle of magic, that must just be a normal megaphone. Anyway, it was very brief, someone calling in accented French, "We're under attack, lizards from the river, this way!"

An instant later, there was a pair of overlapping too-loud voices — these ones were magically-amplified — one speaking in English and the other in Arabic. (Beth was a little surprised the Syrian officer had reacted so quickly, but, hadn't they been occupied by the French too? The French were just bloody everywhere.) She didn't need the Captain's orders to know he wanted their mages to fly up there and give their new friends some cover, she already had her broom unshrunk and in hand before he was halfway through. Beth was slowed down for a couple seconds by someone nudging her shoulder in passing, Hedwig swept away with an irritated krek — finding a nice perch to wait at until the fighting was over, hopefully — and then Beth was zipping up into the air, more or less in sync with...just two of their mages, Olwen and Clement, Bill must be staying down with the Captain to shield the rest of their people. Actually, it wasn't just the three of them, a handful of people in Syrian uniforms had pulled out brooms too, the pack of them sweeping straight toward the noise of the battle, Beth's Firebolt slowly putting her ahead.

(Thankfully, Beth assumed the Syrian mages should be decent fliers, at least. Brooms weren't used everywhere in the magical world, being a primarily European invention, but the Arab countries were big in international quidditch, they should be perfectly comfortable with them.)

The trees shaded a thick layer of undergrowth, bushes and grasses, way denser than the tree-covered parts of the last rainforest she'd been to — the trees were patchier here, Beth guessed more sunlight reached the ground. The locals had set up a barricade along one side of the camp — very basic, and there were a few tents trampled underfoot, she suspected it'd been conjured on short notice — keeping up a staccato stream of fire from behind cover. (Mostly AKs, by the sound of it, Beth knew the ubiquitous Soviet rifles pretty well by now.) There was a sizeable pack of dinos coming in from the forest, though many of them staggered at the treeline — squinting, it looked like they'd tossed barbed wires or something over the brush, probably also conjured on short notice — the moment of disorientation more than enough for the muggle soldiers to cut them down. Looked like they actually had this mostly in hand...though as Beth approached a few dinos leaked around the trapped stretch of brush, bugs flickering through the night, multiple spots in the barricade cracking or going up in flames, to shouts from the muggles (Vietnamese soldiers, Beth caught a couple words), retaliatory shots quickly downing the dinos, there was a streak of fire from the roof of a nearby building and a patch of the tree line exploded, some of the plants bursting into flames, dinos thrown back, Beth caught a glimpse of slashed-open torsos and scattered limbs—

A little nudge to the side had her slipping between the first row of trees, she zig-zagged around a few as she slowed, looking around below her. The brush was pretty thick, it was hard to tell for sure, one dozen, two three... A fair number of the bastards, anyway. Beth tossed a couple curses down at them, a piercing curse lancing through one of them from top to bottom, an arc of sectumsempra cutting apart three more, but it was too hard to see, the things spread out to get around the trees, she couldn't use any big spells. Over the constant ear-piercing rattle of gunfire, she barely caught the buzz of bug-grenades, she took off on a slaloming course through the trees, a pattering and booming of the things slamming into trees behind her. She looped around, firing off more slicing curses at vague rustling shapes in the bushes, she—

Right there, one of the tall scarred ones! Must be in charge of this group, knocking him out would at least make the dinos fight stupider. Beth danced through the trees, occasionally dropping a curse on heads below her, slipping around bugs — once they were past her once she didn't give them a second thought, they'd almost certainly hit something trying to wheel around anyway — once she had a good angle she darted off like a shot, straight for the ugly bastard, "Fixam iaculor!" the yellow-white glow of the Lance of Modestus jumping ahead, and—

The alien ducked out of the way well in head of time, must have seen her coming, dammit! He threw a couple bugs after her, but those weren't a problem, she looped back around to make another run at him, the bugs whizzing off pointlessly. (In her peripheral vision, she saw one of the Syrian mages jink out of the way of a bug, his broom catching on a branch sending him flipping through the air — he used some kind of spell to halt his tumble, landed safely enough, but Beth lost sight of him.) The ugly was watching her, she could see, head turning to follow her through the trees, a hand going to his waist...and the weird spear-grenade things she knew some of them carried, fuck, that could get messy. Beth kept flying around toward him, looking for a gap in the trees, standing up on the foot-pegs in case she had to apparate out of the way. Just a second, right...

The ugly had just properly detached something from his waist, the blob extending into a big tapered dart, when an unfamiliar bright white spellglow suddenly slammed into him from straight overhead, the alien officer reduced to a bloody smear on the ground...which then immediately burst into flames as the spear-grenade went up, Beth reared back, shielding her eyes from the hot stinging debris flung from the explosion.

There was a rustling in a nearby tree branch, she wheeled around, preparing to fire off a curse — but it was a human man, definitely a local, brownish skin and vaguely Asian-looking features, dressed in trousers and a foreign looking wrap-around tunic thing. His wand came up to his brow before flicking her way — some kind of salute? — before he was moving, jumping over to another branch quicker and easier than should be at all possible, must be propelling himself with magic, hopping to the next and the next, raining curses down on the aliens as he went...

Okay, then.

The gunfire coming from the camp had mostly tapered off, the charge apparently having ended. But they hadn't killed all the aliens yet, stalking through the bushes, Beth could see them rustling now and then — she snapped off curses whenever one showed its face, but they were short enough to mostly hide in the brush. Looping around, she came around the camp side again, muggle soldiers carefully picking into the trees, a dino burst out of the bushes with no warning, gutting two soldiers before they reacted, took multiple bursts of bullets in the chest, injuring a third muggle before it finally went down...

Clearing this patch of woods the traditional way was going to be very costly, the things were just too quiet when they wanted to be, and deadly at short range. And they already knew detection spells didn't work on them very well. For whatever reason, magic worked better on the dinos than the scabs — Beth had even managed to pick up little snippets of the language from dinos during her time in Africa — but it was pretty inconsistent what would work and what wouldn't, and illusions and detection spells in particular were very unreliable. One advantage they had on their side was that this patch of forest wasn't very large. In her loops around, Beth actually got right to the edge — they were in a mountain valley, it looked like, trees on the hills and more open land hugged toward the middle, maybe some farms? The camp was right on the edge of the trees, the band the aliens were in was relatively narrow. But still, flushing them all out the traditional way would be bloody, and they couldn't find them with magic.

That meant they had to get creative. Grimacing, Beth slowed, her wand flicking up to her own throat. "Vocem vecta." Belatedly remembering to speak in French, "Does anybody mind if I burn down everything through to the valley?"

There was a brief pause — Beth spotted a dino, tossed a piercing curse but the thing saw her coming in time, dove out of sight, a bug flying up at her as he went, barely ducked out of the way, fuck. Beth had just given up finding him again when a magically-amplified voice rang through the air, an unfamiliar masculine voice speaking in accented French. (From her impression of the language she'd gotten in her lessons, that was definitely a Vietnamese accent.) "Retreat to the camp immediately." That part was repeated in Vietnamese, a similar call going up a second later in English and Arabic. "Mages, wait a minute for our people to clear the trees and light it up."

Beth spun around and darted back toward the camp, a few other fliers zig-zagging along nearby, she spotted at least two figures jumping between the trees like crazy people. The very slow progress of the muggle soldiers into the woods actually helped them here — they retreated much more quickly than they'd advanced, pairs taking turns darting ahead and covering each other, an occasional burst of fire as an alien showed itself. By the time Beth was flying over the camp, a stream of people were slipping out from between the trees, already slowing to a trickle. She drifted well over to the side, nearly halfway the length of the camp — she didn't think the aliens had spread out any more than this — just as she was setting up a last handful of people came running out of the trees, turning on their heels to blindly spray bullets behind them, a guttural alien scream, managed to hit at least one.

Right, that looked like it would do. Drifting closer to the ground, she hissed, "Millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." She'd experimented with shortening the incantation since the start of the invasion, but that was as far as she'd gotten so far — better, but still a pain to get out in a pinch. Twisting the final wand movement into a wide sideways slash, she started flying, paralleling the edge of the trees, a dense red ribbon of magic streaming out of her wand as she went. Around the time a call came in amplified French to start the burn, Beth's curse was already starting to cut into the trees, a dense series of sharp bangs followed by a crescendoing roar of flames. She traced along the whole side of the camp, before finally letting the curse go, gasping at the lurch of magic cutting off, her arm burning, she listed in mid-air for a second before catching herself.

The length of the forest at the edge of the camp, several dozen metres wide, was suddenly consumed with fire, battered trees still teetering and crashing to the ground from the force of the curse, alien voices crying out in pain and surprise.

But letting them escape wouldn't do any good, they had to box them in. She wasn't the only person to get that idea, apparently — as she flew up and over the trees (the air hot, ash clawing at her skin and smoke itching at her eyes and throat) she saw a few mages had beat her to it, walls of fire crashing down at right angles to hers, carving all the way through to the valley, cutting the aliens off from going around toward the camp. Beth crossed the narrow band of trees into the valley proper, setting up to put some more fire down on this side—

Belatedly, she noticed the battle wasn't only going on here. There was a settlement of some kind along the river in the near distance, hard to make out in the falling night, a short span away were... Well, Beth didn't know what the fuck those things were. They sort of reminded her of the things they used to take groups of captives, bugs with long, slender, chitinous limbs that could stretch around dozens of people at once and trap them in place, but much, much larger. Like, the size of a bloody building, walking on their weird, multi-jointed armoured legs, but these ones also had a larger, oblong sort of body, almost looking like big damn squids.

Also? They had tentacles that spat out streams of liquid fire — Beth saw a strip of grasses at least several metres long go up at once, that shite looked painful. There were already people fighting over there, the ringing of automatic rifles and the booming of artillery...

A column of aliens had moved toward the village, so the camp had sent out their heavy weapons and most of their men, caught on their back foot when a group of aliens unexpectedly popped out of the woods. Right, Beth was caught up now.

"Millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." This side of the trees wasn't nice and even like the camp side, the border more random and natural-looking, Beth had to zig-zag around a little, free hand tight on her broom and gritting her teeth against the magic tearing down her arm. In ten seconds, she had this whole side of the trees alight too — she pulled up, her fingers shaking a little, wavering in the air. She'd gotten plenty of practice with it at this point, but that curse was still serious business, especially casting it twice that close together...

She was just wondering how they were going to both burn the whole patch, to make sure the aliens were all caught in it, and prevent the fires from spreading where they didn't want them to go, when a bright orange-gold comet suddenly launched up into the air from the camp. A vague, almost bird-looking shape, wings spread, a trail of flame stretching behind it, for a second she thought it was a veela, but no, it was some kind of spell, a construct made entirely of hissing flames. It flew up, slowing as it rose, then arced back downward, the air burning with intense light magic as it passed by where Beth was floating watching, and then crashed to the ground, more or less in the middle of the marked off patch of forest.

A circle of woods erupted into tall flames, bright white and gold and orange, eerily silent, only a subtle hiss, crackling and popping of burning wood. The circle rapidly spread, swirling in an ever-growing spiral, the wind quickening around Beth, drawing her in, like a bloody fire tornado or some shite — thankfully the pull wasn't very strong, she leaned into her broom's flight spells just a little and she was fine. The fire got brighter and brighter as it spread, a blinding white-gold, the whistling of the wind almost seeming faintly musical — reminding Beth of phoenix song, just at the edge of hearing — and brighter and brighter, throwing deep shadows, Beth was forced to turn away, like looking straight into the sun. That was a hell of a fire spell, Jesus Christ...

Note to self: Don't fuck with the local mages.

(She would later learn that that was technically a product of ritual alchemy, and had very inconvenient limitations — not least of which being a handful of freely-offered phoenix ash, not something people normally kept around — but still, seriously impressive stuff.)

While the fire was burning, there was another amplified call of Vietnamese-accented French — the same bloke, presumably someone in charge around here. "The village is being attacked. Any who can move go to reinforce them."

Beth hesitated for a second, drifting closer to the camp. It looked like the fight going on over there was pretty big, flying on her own like a reckless fucking Gryffindor was probably a bad idea. There were more amplified voices a couple seconds later, Beth tuned out the Arabic to focus on the Captain. "Mages go on ahead, air cover; Weasley will get me to whoever's in command over there. The rest of you, stick with Ashmalyeh, catch up on foot. Go."

She was confused for a second — was Luke trying to say Al-Shamali? was that the Syrians' commander? — before brushing it off, leaned over her broom and zipped off toward the village, the fires and the wind roaring in her ears. Some of the other mages had started moving first, but she didn't overtake them immediately — instead of aiming straight for the fight her path took more of an arch. Jumping into the fight with big spells wouldn't do any fucking good if she didn't know what was going on and who was fighting where.

Beth was going to call upriver east, and downriver west, just for convenience — the sun had dropped far enough below the horizon it was hard to say, but she thought it was flowing more southeast to northwest (at least in this section of it, it curled around a bit further west in the valley), but who gives a shite. There were craggy mountains in all directions, covered in trees with occasional hard rock faces showing here and there, the valley a relatively narrow strip of flat ground winding between them. Not an expert, but it looked like most of the valley was cultivated in one way or another, fields marked off in squares — some of them with obvious curves, paralleling the river or against the slope up the mountains — big patches of what looked like grass were probably rice, those bushier-looking things were probably vegetables, and there were trees dotted around too, maybe a fruit or a nut of some kind? She thought there were even cultivated patches up in the hills too, but she had no idea what they might be growing up there.

The military camp was on the south side of the river; the village was a short distance away, spread along both sides of the river, but more the north than the south. It looked like there was a lot of irrigation and shite going on around the village, wasn't rice grown in semi-flooded fields? Whatever, Beth had had to do a lot of gardening growing up, but she was not an expert. The village was pretty anachronistic-looking, but she guessed they were in the middle of fucking nowhere in a poor country, so. It was rather sprawled out, a lot more space between buildings than she'd expect, the open space scattered with vegetable and (probably) rice patches. There were a variety of buildings, mostly little things that couldn't be more than a couple rooms, made in an odd mix of materials — some of the roofs looked like hatch, others some kind of tile (maybe clay?), one she saw topped with what looked like sheet metal, the walls local wood and a few sturdier ones done in brick. A few houses closer to the river or the fields were raised a couple feet above the ground on posts, probably worried about flooding. Beth saw signs of personality here and there, colour and decoration, but it was too dark for her to make out much.

Large patches of the fields to the west of the village were already on fire.

It looked like the aliens had come from the west, moving upriver. She'd guessed before that they'd hit the village to draw out the army so they could then hit the camp, but looking at the scatter of big weird squid things and the alien soldiers in seemingly random patches through the fields, she suspected they might not have even known the camp was here — it was hidden by the tree line, and there were enough trees in the camp that it might be hidden from above too. She had a feeling the aliens hadn't even known the army was here before they came roaring out of the trees. There were vehicles and mortars and stuff set up on the south side of the river — some of them wrecked or burning, some of them still in one piece — occasionally firing shells and rockets over at the aliens. Some of the infantry had remained with them, dino corpses scattered in a ring around their position, but others had seemingly forded the river on foot (there had been a bridge, but only a few bits of debris remained), set up a shaky line to defend the village. It looked like they were mostly holding, though Beth noticed a couple alien corpses between the houses, some of the attackers must have gotten through.

The infantry seemed to have the dinos handled, the rockets and mortars mostly aimed at the big bloody fire-squid things — they clearly had the same weird magic shielding as their space ships and stuff. There were four of the things, it looked like the defenders had managed to score a few hits — one of them was looking particularly mangled, visibly lopsided, falling behind the others and almost seeming to limp on its weird insectile legs — but none of them had been taken down yet, most of the shots Beth heard and saw on the way over absorbed to no effect.

Well. Looked like the big weird fire-squids were the priority, then. And good bloody timing too: they probably only had a few minutes before they reached the village.

The two in front were getting a little too close to the defenders to use big spells safely, so Beth picked the one in the middle. "Millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." Gritting her teeth against the draw on her magic, she leaned further forward over her broom, jumping ahead in a shallow dive, her hair flapping and her eyes itching in the wind. As she flew, slowly drifting sideways so the arc of the curse would slash across the fire-squid, she squinted against the wind, charting out her path after that. There were dinos here and there in the fields, staying close to the fire-squids or moving to loop around the line defending the village — though the defenders did notice that, the plants short enough they could see them, the dinos occasionally scattered by a mortar hit or picked off by sharpshooters. She'd want to take a sharp corner to the right just past the fire-squid — quickly, so she didn't get hit with her own curse — throw curses down at the dinos as she looped around back to the front pair of fire-squids. Right, good plan.

By the time she'd finished the slow drift to the left, anything cast from this point would just continue on into the fields behind the squid, she was still too far away — the scale of the squid-things had thrown her off, fuck, they had to be three, four storeys tall, at least. And the squid was moving to the right, so, from this far away her aim would be a little off, but most of the curse would still hit something, so whatever. Beth cut off the magic, gritting her teeth against the burning in her arm, and leaned further over her broom, pushing hard into the flight spells, jumping ahead of her curse. The Firebolt could supposedly get well over two hundred kilometres an hour, and even fast spells maxed out at maybe a hundred, so she should have enough time to—

The ground was coming up fast, Beth took a hard turn, reversing her dive and curling around behind the fire-squid — her weight seeming to double, her broom pushing uncomfortably against her thighs — snapped off a blasting curse in passing, to hopefully distract part of the shields, but she was moving too fast to get off a second shot, zipping over the fields. Turning into a sideways drift to bleed speed, packs of dinos were flicking by beneath her, "Sectumsempra!" slashing her wand in a wide zig-zag to spread the curse over a whole group, "Lacera lacera lacera! Solarem!" a burst of fire spread over a group just about to make a charge for the village. She heard the rapid staccato crack-boom-fwoosh! of her opening curse hitting home, followed by an odd whoomph sound she didn't recognise, presumably the fire-squid she'd hit was going up. Beth heard a familiar buzzing in the air, but it was too dark to see what direction the bugs were coming from, she drifted closer to the ground, "Detti!" the stonehammer charm aimed at the dirt, Beth wobbling in the wind, her hair flapping and ash stabbing into her eyes, but at least the bugs were thrown off-course, a quick heat-neutralising charm would prevent them from finding her again.

She was at the far end of the pack of dinos approaching the village — except for those over there, but a "Lacera!" tore them apart in a burst of fire, they wouldn't be bothering anyone. Trying not to wince, Beth started flying again, back toward the fire-squids, "calore vindico," painting the alien-infested fields with painfully hot blue-white flames as she went. She felt a little guilty about burning so many of their crops — Hermione kept talking about famine setting in soon, she was aware that would be a problem — but at this rate the aliens were going to burn all of it anyway, and she wasn't sure what else she was supposed to do...

Where the fire-squid she'd hit had been was a large circle of thick flames, the light and the smoke almost enough to completely hide the remains of the creature in the middle, mixed in with the orange and yellow were tongues of green and blue — what the fuck...

Ignoring the ear-piercing screeches of aliens burning alive in her wake, Beth flew up toward the fucking huge fire-squid things. The one in front moved, shifting surprisingly gracefully on its spindly, insectile legs — almost seeming to half-float, maybe they used their gravity-based shielding to make themselves lighter? — one of the thick tentacles curling around the sides of the head gaped open, a flicker of light sparking on. She cut off her spell and jinked to the side, and a blink later a stream of liquid fire was pouring through where she'd been a second ago, the heat stinging all down her side like an instant sunburn, Jesus. The tentacle was squirming in place to fix its aim, the other fire-squid turning to box her in, but she was moving too quickly, ducking between the thing's legs, "Sectumsempra!" the curse aimed for one of the joints.

Snape's special cutting curse was a hell of a thing. According to Sirius, he'd invented it himself as a teenager, the story Beth had been told was that he'd reverse-engineered it from the accidental magic that he'd killed his abusive alcoholic muggle father with — Beth had had no idea about any of that before that lesson, that the intimidating former Death Eater head of Slytherin had a muggle father who'd kicked him around as a child, it...kind of explained a lot, actually? Not making excuses for him being a big bastard, of course, just saying, Beth got it better now. But anyway, it was a pretty seriously dark curse, slipping straight through a lot of plain shield charms (though dark- or light-tinted ones worked fine), cutting through living things like tissue paper. And the curse lingered in the wounds too, they wouldn't heal naturally, and standard healing magic would just wash right over them to no effect. Snape had also invented a special healing spell that would reverse it — back during the war, once other Death Eaters started copying it from him, just in case — but Beth couldn't cast it herself, healing magic was hard. Sirius could, he'd demonstrated on a rat (which they'd later fed to Crookshanks) just so she could see it. The curse was less effective at getting through non-organic materials, but she'd still had pretty good success with it on the aliens, despite some spells not registering them as alive — she assumed just because this one was serious fucking business.

The arc of the curse was invisible, so she couldn't see it — but she felt the curse spang off the armour covering the legs, looking like nothing but the shell of a bright red-orange beetle, destabilised shards of dark magic flying off in random directions. Fucking hell, that was some serious armour on the legs...

The heads looked a bit more...poofier, in places the craggy not-rock their space ships were made of, but in other places smooth and mottled, looking almost more like skin. Thick leathery skin, but still, that was probably a better bet. She didn't stop moving, though — there were still dinos on the ground, had to keep an ear out for bug-grenades — curving behind the fire-squid, up and around, angling to come at the other one from above and behind. Their tentacle things were still facing away from her, she had time to slow and pick a vulnerable-looking spot on the head. "Transige!" The piercing curse splashed uselessly against the surface, but she'd kind of expected that, quickly followed it up with, "Iaculor!" The yellow-white spellglow struck the fire-squid in a blink, the colour shifting to a bright pink, before lancing through the rest of the—

"Fuck!" A stream of burning liquid squirted out through the hole, Beth barely leaned out of the way — a couple droplets landed on her sleeve, immediately setting it aflame, but Beth put it out with a cleaning charm before it could really do much damage. Not to her anyway, her uniform had scorched holes in it now. (Her instinct had been to use a cleaning charm, didn't consciously put together until afterward that the problem was whatever that fluid was, a water charm would have just spread it around.) The fire-squid sprayed out whatever that shite was only for a second or two before it stopped, the hole patched over with scar tissue already...

Pausing for a second, Beth frowned, glancing around. The other mages were here, killing the rest of the dinos from the air, taking pot-shots at the fire-squids. The one in back had been taken down at some point, laid out on the ground, but it was still alive, tossing up an occasional stream of liquid fire, continually pummelled by mortars and spells, fuck, these things were tough. They were poking holes in the other two now and then, but they healed too fast, and they were too close to the village for her to safely use the Thousand Lances, they needed to, to...

Oh shite, Beth got it. Looking up, she picked a spot in the air on the other side of the river, quick apparated away from the battle. Um, she needed one of the— Sam, she'd take Sam, a tracking charm pointed her straight toward him, she flew down to the pack of muggle soldiers jogging through the field toward the river. People heard her coming, rifles tipping up for a second before they registered what she was, she coasted over their heads for a moment, tipped sideways off her broom to fall to her feet in the middle of her troop.

Ricky grabbed her shoulder, halting her stumble before she could fall on her face. (She hadn't slowed down all the way, stupid physics.) "Woah, Beth, is there—"

She shook her head at him. "Sam! I need your help with something, grab a LAW and get on."

Thankfully, Sam didn't bother asking questions, and dropped his case to the muddy ground. In a blink, he had a bag of spare rockets slung around his waist, one already loaded into the launcher, slung over a shoulder to free his hands. Fitting two people on a broom was awkward, but it was doable — there were brooms designed to accommodate more than one person, but unfortunately Beth didn't have one on her. She sat a little further forward, Sam right at the base of the bristles; the levitation spell on, he stepped onto the foot-pegs, Beth had to put her heels right on top of his feet. He was wearing steel-toed boots, so her weight on them shouldn't bother him, but it did reduce her manoeuvrability somewhat. Honestly, the arm around her waist was probably the most uncomfortable part about it — Beth infamously didn't like being touched — but she was used to most of these blokes by now, it didn't bother her as much as it would have a month ago.

(There wasn't really a lot of privacy to be found in slapdash military camps — most of her troop had seen her at least partially undressed by now. She just tried not to think about it. It did help that most of them were super awkward about it, very much aware she was only fifteen, so, could be worse.)

The second he was settled in, she darted up into the air, Sam hissed out a curse, his arm tightening around her a little. "What am I hitting?"

"The big bloody squid things!" she yelled over the roar of the wind. "My curse will change colours when it hits, aim for the same spot! Shoot as soon as you see pink!"

"I can't aim when we're moving this fast!"

Beth grit her teeth — this was going to be a fucking pain.

She hadn't been gone very long, the state of the battle hadn't changed much in that time. She thought the fire-squid in the back was dead now, burning as intensely as the one she'd downed — maybe their ammo ignited on exposure to air? — and the other two were getting worryingly close to the village, one of the houses at the edge was already on fire. Beth came in fast, well behind the rear fire-squid (there were a bunch of people focussed on the front one), sweeping over the fields. There was an ear-splitting banging of nearby rifle-fire, a jolting in the broom in her hands, "No, get ready now!" it cut off immediately, the weight against her back shifting as Sam fiddled with something.

She looped around, tossing a piercing curse here and there as she spotted isolated dinos, curling back toward the fire-squid from the opposite side, flying close enough to the ground that the stalks brushed at their legs. The fire-squid was suddenly coming up fast, she adjusted her aim a little, nudged around one of the insectile legs, tipped the nose up and came to an abrupt stop — Sam's weight slammed against her back, he let out a low oof as the air was driven from his lungs, Beth nearly lost her grip.

They were directly under the fire-squid, the body sagged a bit toward the back, they'd hit it right there. She drifted a little that way, to make sure the rocket would go deeper into the body instead of just slicing right through the edge. "Ready? Lacera!" the curse blowing up a few dinos turning their way.

The arm around her waist lifted away, Sam doing something with some heavy clicking, occasionally nudging her in the back. "Ready!"

It all happened in the space of a couple seconds. Beth turned her wand upward, "Iaculor!" the spellglow raced away, splashing against the skin of the fire-squid; the instant it shifted pink there was a fwoosh, the broom listing hard at the force, Beth scrambling to hold them steady, a harsh scream as the rocket burned away, but this close to the target it only lasted for a fraction of a second; the Lance of Modestus pierced through the skin of the fire-squid, before any liquid fire could even start squiring out the rocket was already slipping through, disappearing inside; and then it went off with a muffled boom, the fire-squid listing, there was a deep sort of thrumming, almost like the popping of a balloon but a lot louder and deeper, and then an intense hissing of fire, the night sky overhead immediately vanishing in a yellow-orange dome...

The explosion had made the fire squid burst, the liquid fire stuff sprayed out in all directions — falling back toward the ground in a burning rain, they were completely surrounded. Stuff spraying out at low angles too, cutting them off— "Hold on!" Standing up on Sam's feet, she waited a split-second for him to grab on again, before digging in hard, pushing way more power into it than normal, and disapparated.

They appeared over the river, Beth's skin swept with hot-cold pins and needles (overchannelling, but she hadn't splinched herself), Sam letting out a groan. "Sam, are you okay? Sam?"

"Ugh, I'm gonna be sick..."

That was why she'd aimed for the river. "Are you missing anything?" The liquid fire was all splashing down to the ground by now, some of it reaching as far as the river, hitting the water with crackling hisses and bursts of steam.

"Missing anything? Fuck, no, I'm all here."

She let out a shaky sigh — good, that was good. Splinching could be reversed pretty easily if you could get to the missing pieces, but that wasn't really an option when they were buried under a big damn alien creature and also on fire. "Good to hit the second one?" It had been nicked in a few places, the skin scratched and scorched, but it was still lumbering along, a burst of fire enveloping another house as she watched.

"Give me a second." Sam took a few more shaky breaths, clearly very uncomfortable. But it was only a couple seconds before he was moving again. Beth didn't know what he was doing back there — she'd been taught to use the pistol they all carried, and the rifle the muggles all had, and she could probably pick up and figure out one of those shotguns if it came down to it, but she hadn't been taught any of Sam's stuff at all — some shuffling around and metallic clanking, she just kept watching the fight. The fire-squid lurched from a hard mortar hit, but it hadn't pierced its skin, picked off one of the fliers with a stream of fire, continuing on to spray over a nearby garden... "Ready."

"Vocem vecta. Clear the squid, blowing it in five." Belatedly, she remembered most people here didn't speak English, repeated the message in French. She started zipping forward before she was even done speaking, again coming in at it from behind, dropping a curse on a dino she spotted in passing. By the time they were getting close — fires burning in all directions, the air hot and dry and smelling of burnt bacon — the mages buzzing around the thing were gone, the air empty. "Ready?"

"Do it!"

Picking more or less the same spot on the underside of the body toward the back, she tossed off the curse, Sam again firing a second later. She didn't hang around to watch the hit, leaned over her broom and zoomed off immediately — Sam let out a curse, flailing, barely managed to hold on. The force of the LAW going off had her teetering at an odd angle for a moment, but it didn't matter, the speed was enough to get them out from underneath the squid. Boom-pop-hiss, she glanced over her shoulder, this fire-squid had burst as explosively as the last, and—

It was standing at the edge of the village, just starting to walk between the two already burning houses on the very outside. The liquid fire was spraying into the village, as far as it was flying, it'd probably catch a quarter of the houses alight, easily, maybe even more.

Options flicked through her head in the space of a heartbeat.

She apparated, appearing between the fire-squid and the rest of the village, the spray of liquid fire curling like a wave to crash over her head. Pulling as much magic as she could, the air around her seeming to shimmer and spark, "Kristallini akropoli!"

The magic burned through her, hot and cold, wrenching through her as hard as a bludger hit, her head spinning and her vision going spotty and blurred—

Numb and clumsy, she couldn't feel the broom, something was shaking her shoulder, she could barely feel it, meaningless words burbling in her ears, half-heard. Sam, shouting. Blinking, the world was a swirly shapeless mess, they were moving, dropping, Beth gripped the handle of her broom with scorched, stiff fingers, piercing white pain radiating down her right arm. Trying to turn the broom hurt, a deep thrumming stabbing she felt deep in her chest — dimly, she knew she'd overchannelled, badly, using magic would just make the damage worse — she tried to slow their fall, groaning as the agony flared worse, shredding her apart from inside out, a shape looming ahead, she tried to turn out of the way—

They hit whatever it– a roof, they hit a roof, not going too fast, but the tip of the broom caught on something, flipping forward, the world was spinning even worse, Beth numbly felt the impact, something scratching at her as she rolled, and she was falling again—

—"Beth! Dammit, Potter, are you still in there?"

Beth blinked her eyes open, but they were refusing to focus, colours swirling and shapeless. She was sitting on the ground, she thought, Sam holding her half upright, shaking her. Grabbing at his sleeve, she could barely even feel her own fingers, "Too much magic, gonna, gonna pass out. Tell..." Her lips numb, like a really bad frostbite, her head spinning, she could feel it coming over her, she already couldn't feel most of her body at all, like those seconds just before falling asleep. "Tell B-Bill, overchannel."

"What was that, overchannel?"

"Over. Channel."

"Got it, I'll tell him. Um, I should— Hey, you! Give me a hand here..."

Beth was dimly aware of being lifted up off the ground, but the numbness quickly took her over, and everything faded away.

Chapter Text

20th October 1995 (63:6:29)
— Contact plus 00.01.17:15.45

The first thing Beth noticed — drifting half-awake, unfocussed and numb — was the depressingly familiar smell of burning flesh.

She woke up slowly, exhaustion like hands trying to drag her down, the world feeling oddly far away. Finally her eyes blinked open, but it took a while for her to get them to focus properly, bleary dull blurs that refused to resolve. Slowly, she made out a triangular peaked ceiling, wood, the cross-beams painted with unfamiliar designs in red and yellow and white.

Beth had no idea where she was. Waking up and not knowing where she was wasn't that unusual of an experience these days — they'd been moving around a lot, she often didn't have long enough to get used to a place to the point that she expected it waking up before they were somewhere new again — so it wasn't really so concerning. She just blinked up at the ceiling, trying to think.

Indochina, they'd been relocating to Indochina. She wasn't sure if they were actually in Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia, somewhere around the three-way border there, up in the mountains. They'd arrived right in the middle of a battle, she knew that, but she didn't really remember much...

She was laying on her back, on some kind of mat — she could feel the weave of whatever it was made of, almost like one of those woven baskets, though smoother to the touch — and covered with a blanket — she immediately recognised the mass-produced wool of the things they had floating around in the Army, vaguely scratchy. Under the smell of sour burnt bacon — dead aliens from the battle, she assumed — there were various sweet floral and sharp spicy scents, some of them too unfamiliar to really sort out, and there was chatter going on outside, muffled, Beth's cheater omniglot powers instinctively trying to figure it out making her kind of dizzy. It wasn't tiếng Việt, but it had a similar vibe to it, it must be related.

Slowly, as Beth woke up further, the numbness faded away, she consciously realised the significance of how much of the weave of the mat and the itchiness of the blanket she could feel — she was naked. Waking up someplace unfamiliar wasn't really distressing anymore, but that was.

Beth twitched, half-sitting, before choking out a little gasp at the dull pain thrumming through her. It didn't really seem to be focussed anywhere in particular, just, kind of a generalised pulse, followed with a low burn along her side and—

There was a little gasp and a clatter of wood from nearby, Beth's eyes flicked that way. The little house was rather cheap-looking, and cluttered, work tables here and there with tools (some unfamiliar) hung on the walls or in little clay pots, baskets and jars and hanging strings of what must be food over there (she didn't recognise a lot of it), but it was clean, and clearly well-cared for, colourfully painted with curly designs she assumed must mean something to the people here. Standing at one of the tables — working on something, but Beth's mat was on the floor, she couldn't see whatever it was from here — was a...

Her first thought was boy, hair cut short and wearing trousers, but something about the face and the stitching along the hem of the long-sleeved shirt made Beth think she was actually a girl. She was maybe eight or nine? Definitely too young for Hogwarts, it could be hard to tell at that age without obvious cultural stuff to use as hints — and this was the middle of nowhere in rural Indochina, who the hell knew what they considered to be masculine or feminine things, that shite tended to change way more than you'd think. The girl chattered at her for a moment, before skipping on out the door, and she was gone.

...Going to get a grown-up, Beth thought. She hadn't understood the language at all, but that was the vague feeling she got. Gritting her teeth against the pain, feeling stiff and weak, Beth managed to push herself up to sitting. She wrapped the blanket around herself (trying not to feel too self-conscious about it, she was alone in here), and looked around the little house. It didn't entirely look like something out of a previous century, some of the cooking stuff looked like modern metal and ceramics, she belatedly spotted a radio on a shelf over there, but they did seem to be very much in the middle of nowhere. She didn't remember seeing power lines on the way in...

She'd only been looking around for a minute or two before someone was coming in through the door. Definitely a woman this time — the way the fabric of her top (a long-sleeved shirt similar in concept to the little girl's) draped over her figure wasn't indecent, exactly, but it did make it kind of obvious. Shiny and delicate, dyed a soft orangeish-pink, Beth thought that was probably silk? That stuff did come from around here, didn't it? She was wearing trousers too, loose and slightly billowy, dyed a dark not-quite-properly black. (Beth vaguely remembered something about black being a hard colour to get before modern industrial methods.) Maybe women wearing trousers was just normal here? Honestly, the outfit kind of almost looked like pyjamas to Beth's eyes, but different cultures wore different things, she had just stepped in from outside...

The woman set a sort of straw hat down on one of the tables, ran a hand through shoulder-length, solid black hair, shot her a smile. She said something, but Beth didn't follow it, in that same language the girl had spoken before — the vague feeling Beth got was asking how she was feeling, maybe?

"Um, I'm sorry, do you speak Vietnamese?"

Her head tilted a little, her eyes widening. "Yes, Vietnamese. It is, eh... A little." Yeah, her teacher had said they spoke different languages up in the hills, Beth wasn't super surprised. "You are awake! Are you well? There is food, if you are..." She trailed off, glancing away, obviously trying to think of the word in the right language.

"Hungry. And, yeah, a little, but maybe..." And now Beth's tiếng Việt was failing her. "Um, clothes?"

The woman smiled. She detoured to one of the tables, picked up a bundle of cloth before moving toward the mat — a fresh uniform, looked like, Beth's must have been ruined. She did have a spare in her bag...which she must have left back at camp? (Didn't remember.) One of the Brits must have brought hers over here for her, that would make sense...though she wasn't sure why she was waking up here and not back there, but whatever. Sinking to her knees, setting the uniform down on the floor nearby, the woman said, "You were hurt, in the fighting, your Sergeant Weasley, er..." She gestured vaguely to herself, apparently not sure how to describe the whole healing process thing. Her eyes flicking away, she hesitated for a second, before leaning in slightly, her voice dropping. "There was a woman in the room with you, always."

Beth was confused for a second, before realising she was trying to reassure Beth she definitely hadn't been raped while she'd been undressed and unconscious. That thought wouldn't even have occurred to her — it was just Bill, you know — but that was...thoughtful of the locals to make sure of it, she guessed? "Um, thanks? I'll do this now..."

Getting dressed was kind of awkward, given how stiff and pained she was, and there was a stranger in the room. She managed to get her vest and pants on without getting out from under the blanket, which made it less horribly uncomfortable, at least. She was shaky enough that she actually needed a hand up to get her bloody trousers on, which was embarrassing, but it couldn't really be helped at the moment.

Of course, it didn't help that the local woman was actually kind of pretty, an impression of some kind of spices lingering around her, and, ugh...

Before too much of an ordeal, Beth was presentable again — she plopped right back down to the floor, leaned against a post holding up the ceiling, feeling unreasonably out of breath, her limbs twitching. Jesus, what the hell happened to her, she should not be this wiped out just from getting dressed. The woman retrieved a basket from somewhere, started laying things out on the floor in Beth's reach. Her standard-issue pistol, which she never bloody used anyway, a pouch with a couple spare magazines, her wand holster, the handle of her wand visible — Beth immediately grabbed that one and started strapping it onto her arm — pouches she knew had food and water, basic first-aid stuff, an emergency portkey. Everything she'd had on her at the time, basically. She idly started reaching for the food, but hesitated — those bars really weren't very appetising, and hadn't this lady said something about there being food...?

"I will find the Sergeant now, and bring some food." Oh yes, food, good. "Okay?"

"Yes." Shooting her another smile, the woman started for the door. She was nearly out when Beth called, "Oh! Um... Thank you, Cousin." Vietnamese didn't really do normal pronouns, for whatever reason, tended to use random vocabulary and kinship terms instead. Of course, the word Beth used literally meant an aunt — your father's sister, specifically, because some languages thought that distinction was relevant — but it was also used for cousins, depending on relative ages and stuff, because it turned out tiếng Việt kinship terms were horribly complicated. She actually didn't quite get how it all worked yet, suspected her teacher hadn't fully understood the particulars either, would probably have to pick it up from native speakers over time.

The woman smiled at her again, said something in the local language, and then she was gone.

The troop must still be hanging around in the village, because it was maybe only two minutes at most before Bill was walking through the door. Like most of the mages Beth had run across over the last... Jesus, was it over a month now? It was nearing the end of October, right? Army sending her to tropical places was throwing off her sense of time. Anyway, Bill had partially accommodated the expectations of their muggle friends, like the rest of the SCF mages wore the uniform and all — though his was slightly scorched in places at the moment, a bit of mud or what looked very much like dried blood here or there — and the dangly nundu fang earring he'd had the first few times they'd met had been replaced with a simple stud, less likely to get in the way. He'd refused to cut his hair, though — when there was going to be fighting he kept it firmly plaited and pinned to the back of his neck, but at the moment it was let free in the more familiar pony tail, bright red-orange trailing down his back.

If Beth's hair was as pretty and well-behaved as Bill's, she probably wouldn't want to cut it either. Now that she thought about it, her hair actually hadn't regrown while she slept this time, that was odd...

"Good, you're awake," Bill said, sounding a little more sharp and gruff than usual. By the look of him, his face strained, Beth guessed he was just tired. He set a few things down on a table before approaching her sleeping mat thing — he let out a little groan as a sat in front of her, sore from the fight.

"Was there any doubt of that?"

"That you would wake up eventually? No. But how long it takes someone to wake up after overchannelling that badly is a sign of how miserable of a recovery they're in for. Your wand hand," he demanded, with a little flick of his fingers.

Grimacing, Beth pushed herself off of the post she was using as a backrest, sat up cross-legged right in front of Bill, their knees nearly touching. He took her hand, his wand drawn, frowning as he cast several unfamiliar analysis charms — no incantations, but Beth could feel the magic prickling at her, some like sandpaper and others like needles and others like being pinched by a thousand tweezers. Squirming in discomfort, she asked mostly to distract herself, "Was it really bad?"

"It could have been worse," Bill said, slowly, a little absent. "I was worried when I heard you'd passed out, but you managed not to burn yourself too badly. There was some nerve damage, but— Well, I'm not a healer, by training, but if you start to see damage to the surrounding tissues, that's an extra degree of severity, if you know what I mean."

"Like the different degrees of burns."

Bill nodded. "Yes, exactly like that. I got a couple healing potions and some salts in you last night, and you seemed more or less fine. What spell was that, by the way? I wasn't at a great angle to see it at the time."

"Crystalline Citadel."

There was a twitch, sharp enough Beth could feel it, Bill's fingers tightening around her wrist. He glanced up at her face, gaped at her — but the shock only lasted for a second, brow furrowing and eyes turning hard with a glare. "What were you— Beth, that was insanely reckless! Crystall— That's a personal shield charm, intended to counter multi-stage curses, it is not meant to be cast over that large of an area!"

"I know that." Beth shrugged, a little sheepishly. "I didn't... Well, a standard shield charm wouldn't have worked, and I didn't think a Heliodor Circle would have stood up to that stuff either." Heliodor shields were good for elemental spells, but that stuff had been, well, it hadn't seemed like a safe bet at the time. "It was the first thing I could think of. Did it work? Is the village okay? I mean, I guess some of it is..."

Bill bit out a harsh sigh, his wand hand coming up, pressing the back of his wrist to his forehead. After a moment of...whatever that was, he went back to the examination — his hand on her shoulder, gently prodding at her chest, which was uncomfortable, she was trying to ignore it. "Yes, Beth, it did work. Most of the village survived the attack. But you are very lucky you didn't incinerate yourself from the inside out."

Well...yeah, that was the danger with big spells sometimes. There had to be dozens of people living here, it'd just...seemed like the obvious thing to do at the time. "Do you have a better spell I could have used?"

The examination paused, Bill frowning over her shoulder. Letting out another sigh, he admitted, "No, I can't think of any off the top of my head — at least, none that could be cast on such short notice without risk of hurting yourself. You did save the village, but it was still very, very dangerous."

Beth shrugged. Most of the things she did in a fight were super dangerous, when you got down to it — the only difference this time was that she'd actually managed to hurt herself.

As though he knew exactly what she was thinking, Bill shot her a sharp, displeased look, but he didn't comment. Letting go of her shoulder, he reached into the bag slung over his shoulder, pulled out a little glass phial, vanished the stopper with a flick of his wand. "Drink this." Beth took it without question, shuddering at the slimy, sulphur-smelling stuff trickling down her throat, ugh. "And this one." The second potion wasn't as bad, at least — tasted vaguely of mint and anise, which was a little weird, but it went down easier. In the couple seconds afterward there was a funny pins and needles feeling in her fingers...but she thought that was her feeling coming back, she hadn't realised she was that numb until it started getting better. "You did some pretty serious damage to yourself, and I'd be happier if you'll go see a proper healer at some point, but you should be fine in a few days. Take it easy for a little while — I don't want you casting any magic, at all, until at least tomorrow afternoon. I've already talked to the Captain about it, and you're grounded for the next five days. After that, if the nerve damage has cleaned up and your magic is coming like normal, then you can fight again, but absolutely not before that."

"Right, okay." Not being allowed to do magic for a day was going to be a pain, but she'd deal with it. "How long was I out? What did I miss?"

"You weren't asleep for that long — it's only the next morning, about..." Bill glanced at his watch. "...quarter to ten, local time. It took some hours to hunt down all the dinos around here, bastards were hiding in the fields waiting to gut anyone who walks by. Once that was cleared up, we left a few people here to keep an eye on the village while we went to rescue the captives."

"Wait, captives? I didn't think they had time to take anyone."

Bill shook his head. "Not this village, there's another one around that way," he said, pointing vaguely past one of the walls, "behind the hills over there. The alien camp is a few kilometres downriver, we think they hit both villages at once — looking for slaves to work their farms, same as back in Africa. We moved fast enough to hit them on the way back, we managed to rescue the captives before they could be infected."

Oh, well, that was good news.

"We lost Olwen, Joshua, Clement, Rick, and Lewis."

It took a second for the meaning of what Bill was saying to filter in, but even after what he meant clicked it didn't seem quite real, Beth staring at him more in confusion than anything. "Wh– What?!"

Bill was only a couple syllables into an explanation when there was a noise at the door, Beth jumped, barely stopped herself from reaching for her wand. The woman from before was back, carrying a wooden tray, with little posts sticking down from the corners — like a tiny little table, Beth guessed. Shooting the two of them a smile, she walked over, gracefully sank down to her knees to set the tray down at the edge of the mat near Beth. On the tray was a ceramic bowl (modern-looking) filled with some kind of noodle soup — not Western noodles, they were wide and flat and semi-translucent — with some vegetables in there which were mostly unfamiliar to Beth, and maybe those bits were chicken? Hard to say. There was also a small plate, with a couple slices of...some kind of fried something, not sure what that was. A little cup had a drink in it, dark and...coffee, maybe — or, they were in east Asia, maybe it was tea? And then there was, just, a big leaf, held in place wrapped up in a wedge with some kind of twine, she had no idea what that was about. Also, the only utensils were a pair of chopsticks, which Beth had only played around with a couple times having Chinese takeout with Sirius, but she was sure she could figure it out.

The woman was saying something, Beth hadn't been paying attention, um...she thought it was just polite, hope you're feeling better, enjoy your meal stuff — not literally, of course, "polite" meant different things in different cultures, but that was the vibe she got. It was obvious Beth and Bill were having a talk here — had he just said five of their people had died?! — she excused herself quickly. Before she could get out the door, Beth called, "Oh, wait! Um, what's this?" she asked, holding up the leaf wedge. There was definitely something in here, and it was noticeably warm to the touch — had they...cooked whatever this was in a leaf?

Smiling back at her, the woman made a little box with her hands, folded them open. "Inside. You don't eat the leaf."

...Okay. Beth glanced over the knot in the twine, yanked at one of the ends, it fell apart pretty easily, she folded over one end of the leaf and— "Oh." There was a vaguely squarish wedge of rice in here, probably small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, coloured an intense orange-ish red, with little bits of what looked like some kind of fruit in it. The smell coming off of it was noticeably sweet, with a subtle edge of an unidentifiable spice — this was dessert, she guessed. "I see. Thank you, Cousin." The woman shot her another warm smile, said something in the local language with a nod of her head, before ducking back out the door. "Okay, now that she's gone, when you say lost, you mean..."

His face grim and cold, Bill nodded. "They didn't make it."

That was...kind of hard to imagine, honestly. Of course, it was a war, Beth knew that happened, but, it'd been a month, and their sixteen-person troop had only lost two people so far? Elliott was fine, he'd just gotten terribly ill not long after arriving in Africa — he'd still been in Goma last Beth had heard — and Curt had died just a few days ago, in the push to Isiro. (While Beth had been in her language lessons, useless.) Lewis had been sent to fill in for Elliott, they'd still been one short when they'd been moved to Indochina — and it'd been one day, and they were already down to ten? "What the hell happened?! I thought you said it's only the next morning!"

"It is only the next morning. Clement was hit by one of those...flame-throwing big walker things, attacking this village. That liquid fire they use is extremely effective on living things, he was dead before he hit the ground."

Beth twitched, her breath hitching in her throat — she vaguely remembered seeing, in passing, one of the fliers on brooms being hit with a stream of liquid fire. She'd probably seen Clement die, and hadn't even realised it at the time.

"The rest died rescuing the captives. Lewis and Joshua were hit with the fire, Rick was ambushed by a dino, and Olwen was hit in the back with bugs. I got to Lewis and Olwen in time to try to help them, but neither of them made it." Bill wasn't quite looking at her, staring off to the side, a tone to his voice of— Getting to a friend in time to try to heal them, but for them to still die on you anyway, Beth could guess that that probably felt pretty fucking miserable. She remembered, in the first attack, Hermione had tried to help...Beth had forgotten his name, one of the muggles who'd come up to help them hold off the aliens in the Underground. Even after Hermione semi-miraculously managed to stabilise one of the other muggles after being stabbed through the gut, Beth could tell she'd still blamed herself for not saving the other bloke — and that had been a practical stranger, she'd been living and fighting with Olwen for over a month now.

Olwen was nice. Beth didn't know Lewis so well — he was new, only been around for a week and change — but Beth had met Olwen way back at the training camp, she— Well, she was slightly silly about the Girl Who Lived stuff, or at least she had been at first, the way that British mages could be, but she'd gotten over it pretty quickly. And, you know, they were the only women around — there were muggle women in the Army, like Hermione's mum, but few of them applied to the SCF, for whatever reason — so they'd spent a fair amount of time together, and—

It was, just, surreal, that Olwen was dead, and Beth had been being unconscious and useless at the time. And Ricky, she'd liked Ricky, he was funny, and he—

It was hard to believe they were, just, gone.

"You should eat," Bill was saying, the words slowly dragging Beth out of her scattered, directionless thoughts. "Healing charms and potions require materials from the body to build with — there can be serious health consequences if you don't eat enough." Bill didn't say that the risk was less if the person was carrying enough fat reserves to cover it, but Beth was a skinny bitch, so.

"...I don't know if I could eat at the moment." She'd been pretty hungry a moment ago, but— Full on a third of their people had died, and Beth'd been—

Bill bit out a sharp sigh. "Don't blame yourself, Beth. I can't imagine anything you could possibly have done beyond what you already did. You already put yourself in more danger than you probably should, reckless fucking Gryffindors—" Said with an exhausted edge of humour, his lips twitching. He was a professional cursebreaker, after all, Bill was a bit of a reckless fucking Gryffindor himself. "—you did more than your fair share last night. Sam's explanation of how you two took down the flame-spitting things was very helpful, that second fight might not have gone quite so well as it did without the hint. You did enough, more than enough, nobody blames you for not being there.

"As powerful of a mage as you are, Beth, you're still human — and humans have limits. Sometimes people die, and there's just nothing you can do about it. It's not your fault."

Deep, cold exhaustion dragging at her, her breath turning hot and thick as her throat clenched, Beth felt the stinging in her eyes, bent over and pressed the back of a hand against her face. That was— Bill was right, she knew that. Multiple times over the years, Hermione had pointed out she had a saving people thing, and, she knew she could be—

It was actually Sirius who'd pointed it out, first. He tended to get Beth, sometimes, without her needing to explain herself, which could be as uncomfortable as it was convenient — the reason he got it was because he'd been abused by his family growing up, which, Beth normally tried to avoid thinking about her childhood if she could help it, so. But anyway, Sirius had noticed that, when crazy shite happened with the Chamber of Secrets, or the bloody dementors around the school, or Voldemort coming back and the war ramping up, she had a bad habit of blaming herself for things that really weren't her fault. The reason why was obvious, of course — whenever weird magic stuff happened around her growing up, or really anything the Dursleys didn't like for any reason, she was always punished, regardless of whether she'd done it on purpose or even knew it'd happened until afterward — but just because she knew that was a problem didn't make it automatically stop happening.

It still sucked that they were dead, yes, but it wasn't her fault. She'd done everything she could. She'd done more than she could, really — she'd almost seriously hurt herself pushing her magic too hard, after all. Be sad about her friends being dead, but it wasn't her fault.

Her breath thick, Beth nodded, wiped at her eyes quick before looking back up — or, mostly, she still wasn't quite meeting Bill's eyes. Didn't know why, just, she felt really awkward all of a sudden. "Yeah, I—" She cleared her throat, her voice coming out thick and wavering, took another pass at her eyes, the back of her hand coming away damp. "Yeah. Fine, I'll try. To eat, I mean. Um. I don't know if I can..." She waved vaguely at the chopsticks.

His wand appearing in his hand, Bill picked up the chopsticks and transfigured them one at a time — one turned into a simple metal fork, the other a spoon. "We should all get used to the local food — I think they mean to keep us here through to the end — but there'll be time for that later."

Besides, Beth probably only had to eat alongside some locals a few times before she'd pick it up from their heads anyway. Omniglots were cheaters like that. Fork in hand, Beth picked up the soup bowl, held close against her chest — she had no idea how easy it was to clean this mat, she didn't want to make a mess. Fucking hell, this stuff smelled pretty intense. Black pepper, definitely, and lots of it, and there were other spices too, and...was that some kind of mint? Whatever, this was going to be some pretty strong-tasting soup, that was all.

At least if her eyes kept leaking, Bill would probably just assume it was the food. Or at least they could both pretend it was — that very brief talk was enough feelings stuff for her, thanks, she was already exhausted.

Curling a couple noodles around her fork, she asked, "So, catch me up. What's the plan?"

Chapter Text

27th October 1995 (63:FL:1)
— Contact plus 00.01.25:01.00

As the observers filed into the lecture hall — the Dutch Prime Minister, a Deputy Prime Minister from Belgium and a Deputy President from Germany, various diplomatic staff in the Netherlands from several countries around the world, as well as representatives from the magical governments of Holland, Britain, and Saxony, and a third group of roughly equal size composed of people in military uniforms from multiple European countries, none of whom she was familiar with by sight — Hermione did her best not to fidget. She'd mostly managed to get over feeling terribly out of her depth, like she didn't belong here, but standing down with the presenters in front of this crowd was making her very uncomfortable. She should feel pleased, even proud that the project had come together so well, that they'd solved it, and she had been yesterday, talking to Dad about it.

The politically important people tailed by staff and bodyguards and the military people with the complicated-looking insignia (high-ranking officers, clearly) were just making her a touch nervous.

As soon as the idea for an entirely magical radio had occurred to Hermione, putting together the basic plan with Elbert, Gwen, and Marcel right there in the conference room, they'd jumped right into making a rough proof of concept. Hermione had contributed the original idea, though her input in designing the enchantment from there had been relatively minimal — she was in the room during discussions about it, but the others in their little team were far more experienced than her, they knew what they were doing. She did help draw out the physical design, primarily focussed on the internal mechanisms — the reservoir stones were on a specialised gear system, allowing the user to switch channels easily, reservoirs brought in and out of alignment — but also the external case that held it all, complete with some shielding to protect it against damage, as well as arranging the display and the dials in a way that would be intuitive to use for muggles.

That had required a crash course in how to use the metal-working and plastic-moulding equipment they had here at the University — their ultimate goal was to use alchemical ceramics whenever possible, as they could get better durability with less weight, but for these early tests whatever materials were available were fine. Hermione had worked with a muggle team for most of that, both since they were more familiar with the equipment in question and also as an additional aspect of the test. Mages were only a tiny fraction of the population, and while there were plenty with nothing better to do who could be recruited to do enchanting as needed, they'd be able to massively increase their production capabilities if most of the work could be done by muggles, who were much, much more numerous. With the way economies all over the world had basically crashed overnight, there were plenty of idle hands around, it wouldn't be difficult to find enough people willing to help.

Enchanting could, theoretically, be done by muggles — it was technically a form of ritual, which worked by drawing magic in from the environment, requiring none from the user themselves — but to most mages that was only theory. Most would accept that squibs could successfully enchant, but there was a persistent belief among mages that squibs were somehow fundamentally different from muggles, which...Hermione didn't think they were? Some muggle-avoidance spells didn't work on squibs, but those tended not to work on muggles either, so long as they were in the know — the spells shielding the Leaky Cauldron had affected her parents the first time they'd visited, but not any time after that. That would seem to suggest that the relevant factor was the target's understanding of magic, which had interesting implications Hermione didn't really have the attention to consider just now.

The alchemy that went into their completed device here had been done by Marcel, but the enchanting had entirely been done by Hermione's muggle helpers. (Mostly engineering students here at the time of the attack, sticking around to help.) Hermione had essentially needed to teach them all how enchanting worked from scratch — both as a general concept, as well as the meaning of the particular glyphs that went into this device and how they worked together — which had required a few hours of off-the-cuff lecturing (to people as much as a decade older than her), a couple days of practice with simple enchantments before moving on to the real thing. Their first attempt hadn't turned out quite right, but only about a week after the idea had first occurred to Hermione they'd had a rough but functional proof of concept, quickly made a second one to make sure it worked properly.

They'd shown that to Payne and the rest of the team, everyone dutifully impressed, and excited that they'd finally had a breakthrough in one of their big projects. Payne had immediately demanded they design a portable version — the proof of concept version hadn't been sealed in a case, the parts sitting open on a table — as small and user-friendly as they could make it, and work up some schematics they could send off to teams around the world. Once they had everything arranged, Payne would get the big-wigs in, they'd present the finished project — and if everything went well, they'd work up a plan to begin mass production, distribute them off around the world. It'd taken maybe a day and a half to sketch out a more compact design, another day for a computer person to help Hermione break it apart into a readable digital schematic — somewhat to her surprise, Thijmen managed to fit the whole thing onto a single floppy disc, a second disc for some supplemental alchemy details (also, Hermione knew basic computer-aided drafting now) — which was then carefully radioed out to other teams all around the world, who began building their own prototypes, in short order prepared for a full test of the device.

From Hermione's first thoughts to proof-of-concept to prototype to a test broadcast to the opposite end of the world had only taken a few weeks. It felt like time had positively flown by, Hermione absorbed in the details of the design and poking around modern industrial machinery she'd only been vaguely aware of the existence of before and teaching a slew of muggles basic magic theory and enchanting. She'd lost track of the passing of the days, hadn't realised she hadn't even left the University in a week and a half until she'd dropped by Rock-on-Clyde to get fresh clothes and was practically swarmed by Weasleys. Hermione getting buried in her studies was hardly a new phenomenon, but having an idea being so close to a finished product, watching all the pieces come together step by step, was almost intoxicating — there were days she'd entirely forgotten to sleep, only realising it was morning again when someone mentioned breakfast.

And the device was done. A simple beige and grey case, about the size of a red box — it was theoretically possible to make it smaller than that, but at that point etching the necessary runes into the gears would start getting rather tedious. Perhaps a little unwieldy for a private citizen to carry around, but they were far more mobile than standard magical 'radio' transmitters, and they shouldn't be too difficult to add to the equipment muggle soldiers were used to carrying around. And they would have a communications device that required no power, no rare earth minerals, was easy and intuitive to use, and had a range of, theoretically, the entire planet. Assuming it worked as they expected it would, anyway.

Though just because they'd come up with a functional communications device didn't mean they were done. Elbert had already worked up a design for an amplification system that could be used to project the sound over a larger area, to be used for public announcements and the like, and Hermione and Gwen were working on an idea of adding a second band. Talking about her project through letters, Beth had noted that it would be handy to coordinate on the ground, yes, but commanders would probably want to be able to get messages out to everyone no matter which channel they were tuned to — Hermione had gotten the idea of a channel for emergency announcements, which every device was always receiving but couldn't broadcast on, that ability restricted to devices held by officers. Thankfully, the enchantment necessary for that would be much simpler, and both could run in parallel, so it shouldn't be too difficult to add to the box. She had additional ideas for this second, receive-only band, maybe include a selection of channels with various announcements and programmes going — exactly like muggle radio, was the idea — but they would want the emergency band to always be going...and maybe include a relay switch, so emergency announcements from higher up the chain of command could be passed down quickly, they were working on it.

Payne would have told their guests that this was the first test of the devices's ability to broadcast internationally, but that was a lie — something Payne said people did all the time, just because it made the performance more impressive. They'd already tested it, confirmed it could reach their partner teams thousands of kilometres away, even all the way in America, with only minor interruption to the signal. Hermione would call that a success, it was already a success, the point of this presentation was just to make that clear to the people in charge.

Even if this magical radio was the only contribution Hermione ended up making, she'd still helped. That was worth something, she thought.

Though she could have done without the silly presentation and everything. She understood it was necessary, the whole complicated process that went into starting production, but she didn't think she was really needed here — they'd decided Payne and Elbert would be doing all the talking, she was just included because she'd been a major part of the project. (Though having to deal with this sort of thing wasn't really what Hermione would call a reward.) She'd rather be back in her office, honestly. It'd occurred to her that some kind of headset might be convenient, and while designing an enchantment that would reproduce the transmission for the user and pick up their speech was trivial, Lieke had immediately pointed out that the user would still have to fish the box out of their pack or whatever if they needed to switch channels. That was less than ideal, a solution for that problem hadn't immediately occurred to her. She was toying with an idea of a sort of bracelet, which would have a dial synced with the gears in the device, but getting that set of enchantments to work was complicated...

They might have put together a useable prototype, but that didn't mean they were done. Hermione still had work to do, she'd rather be poking away at that than stand here while everyone found their seats, waiting for the silly presentation to start...

Luckily, once everyone had sat down, the presentation itself went pretty quickly. Payne waltzed up to the front of the lecture space, clapping his hands to draw attention to himself. He kept his comments very brief, welcoming all their guests to the University, introducing himself, reminding them of the Commission's charge to develop new technologies to help deal with the current emergency. It was barely a minute before he handed it off to the team, waving forward Elbert, Payne moving to take one of the empty seats in the bottom row.

Elbert very briefly said hello, and went straight into explaining the complex puzzle they'd been working with. Magical defences being effective against the aliens' weaponry, and militaries around the world now working side-by-side with mages, but magic interfered with electromagnetic signals, badly disrupting the communication technology widely used in the muggle world. Not going into much detail, just skimming over the basic problem — everyone in the room should be familiar with the communications issues they'd been having lately, but probably didn't have the technical knowledge to understand the details (and didn't need to know that much anyway). He included the additional restrictions of wanting something portable, so individual soldiers could carry them on their person, preferably avoiding the need for electricity — not quite two months after the attack, they were already beginning to have serious difficulty keeping even essential services powered — which would ideally be scalable for mass production, the manufacturing process requiring as little magic as possible.

They'd been spinning their wheels trying to think of some kind of workaround to get radio signals through wards when their team's student member came up with the idea for an entirely novel device instead — Hermione perked up a little at her name, Elbert indicated her with a nod over his shoulder, she gave the crowd a little wave. He described communications mirrors, giving a very basic explanation of how they worked, Hermione's initial idea to exploit the same mechanism to make something far more versatile. Then he ran down a very brief summary of the history of the project, Elbert and Gwen refining the enchantments, Marcel coming up with a scheme for the reservoirs, Hermione working on the overall design and walking a group of non-magical engineering students through actually building thing. Yes, Elbert assured them, responding to the noises of disbelief in the small crowd, this device had been built entirely by muggle hands, it required no spellcasting whatsoever at any point in the process.

And that was a new development, only resolving in the last week or so. They'd thought a wand would be needed at least to set the unique image in the reservoirs, used to sync devices to each other, but Marcel had designed a workaround. Hermione was aware that physical alchemy could be used to produce gemstones — the stones used as reservoirs in enchanting were primarily manufactured — though she'd had very little knowledge of how it was done. The combination of filtering the raw materials and keeping impurities out of the workspace and building the crystalline structure was altogether far too complex to accomplish with a simple wanded charm — instead, alchemists designed rune circles that built the crystals automatically when exposed to the proper materials. The enchantments involved were extremely precise and complex, and it could often take hours for a single stone of usable size to form, but the process was very reliable and reproducible, there were standard schema for all manner of materials out there.

Their original concept had been designed using quartz for reservoirs, but after a bit of playing around Marcel had switched to chemically-perfect diamonds instead — apparently, pure carbon could be easily isolated from ash through related methods, and was easier to work with than the silicate that went into quartz. The total weight of the diamonds in that box worked out to a little over fifty carats, which was slightly absurd...but diamonds simply didn't have the same value on the magical side, being quite easy to manufacture with only a bit of (relatively advanced) enchanting and a handful of ash. Sometimes Hermione still showed her muggle-raised sensibilities. Honestly, it was nice to have muggles on the team and among the assistants sometimes, if only so she wasn't the only one dumbfounded when one of the mages did something like casually manufacture fifty carats of diamond in the space of an afternoon.

Getting their muggle assistants to successfully produce the diamonds was trivial, it was just enchanting. Quite complex enchanting, yes, but the chemistry and geometry that went into it was actually easier for their muggle peers to understand than the far more esoteric concepts that went into the rest of the device. Working out a scheme to project the image they wanted onto a reservoir, normally done with a charm, was an entirely new innovation, though it'd taken relatively little original thinking — Marcel adapted it directly from the same techniques alchemists used to create gemstones. Normally, the work area was ringed with runes that defined the chemical structure the alchemist wanted the circle to produce; Marcel had instead designed a scheme that defined the magical structure he wanted it to produce, a separate enchantment drawing the image into the reservoir.

And this trick even solved a second problem Marcel had been considering: two different mages casting the same image would produce slightly different results. There were a lot of complex reasons why, due to changing ambient magic conditions, the properties of the mages' wands, as well as the differing character of each mage's own magic. These imperfections could be reduced by various means, but never entirely eliminated. However, along with the plans they'd sent out, they'd included his schema to automatically produce these images, one for each channel they'd be using — and, due to the part of the enchantment that isolated the work space, all of the images would have come out perfectly identical, no matter where they were produced. Since it could be designed with any mathematical or arithmantic or graphic formula the user could think of, the technique had also greatly broadened the range of possible images, the number of channels they could use now effectively infinite. There were a number of potential issues that might have come up which were no longer a concern, and as a bonus the devices were now much simpler to programme as well, it was a neat trick.

It was a relatively small step from common alchemical practice, Hermione had been somewhat surprised that nobody had ever thought of doing that before — but then, they would never have needed to, since any alchemist doing this sort of work would obviously have a wand on hand. Using mathematical functions to programme reservoirs, which could then be further manipulated, was giving her ideas, but only in broad strokes thus far, she wasn't sure if that would go anywhere...

Elbert was just finishing the basics of how the device functioned, as well as a couple ideas they had for greater convenience on the user end. "But," he cut himself off with a clap of his hands, "that is all a matter for the future. For today, let's get on to the test, shall we? As you can see, there is a dial on the side of the box here, through which the user selects the channel they wish to use. May I have a volunteer?" There was a bit of muttering and a few glances, before someone sitting near the Dutch Prime Minster got to his feet — a young man, Hermione assumed he was some kind of assistant. "Yes, very good, come down here."

As the young man slipped between the rows and started up toward the desk, Elbert quick glanced at his watch — the other teams were giving similar presentations to similar authorities in their area, they'd coordinated the schedule ahead of time. (Which they'd done through the device, because this 'test' was just pointless showmanship.) Once the assistant had gotten close enough, Elbert said, "Very well, sir, just go ahead and put your hand on the box." Giving Elbert a bemused glance, the man did so — he immediately twitched, letting out a little surprised oh, yanking his hand away. "That was the display you just saw. Mind describing it for the class?"

A little sheepish about his reaction, the man touched the box again. "It looks like there's a flat screen, semi-transparent, floating a couple centimetres above the dial just here. There are words on it, in black, spelling Ahmeh... Ah, Ahmeba, Ahmedabad?" Hermione tried not to wince at the man very obviously struggling with the Hindi name.

"Yes, Ahmedabad — that would be the School of Building Science and Technology in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. India, that is." The region was broken up into multiple different nations on the magical side, some of the mages in the group sometimes had trouble keeping track of that sort of thing. "We'll be talking to them later. Go ahead and turn the dial just there until you see Moscow — that would be a similar project to ours hosted at Moscow State University on the other end." The point Elbert was making being that it was very easy to use, and didn't require a mage to do things like tune it.

The man thumbed the dial for a moment, then dug a nail into the surface to turn it. "There's a lot more resistance to it than tuning a radio, and it feels like it clicks into certain places."

"If you will recall from my explanation of the concept before," Elbert said to the audience, "the signal is carried through a sort of magical resonance, picked up by small diamonds inside the box. In order for the enchantment to properly interact with the diamonds, they must be precisely in line with... It is sort of like a circuit board, a surface which bears the enchantment, one section marked off for the diamond carrying the signal. The enchantment only works if one of these diamonds is in the correct position, so it has been designed to hold firmly in place, to prevent the mechanism from drifting out of alignment and losing the signal. Have you found Moscow for us?"

The man reached out to touch the box again, probably to double-check he'd tuned it correctly. "Yes, the display says Moscow."

"Perfect. That's all I needed you for, you can go ahead and sit down again." Detaching a gently curved length of plain metal from the box, Elbert said, "Another problem that occurred to us was how to focus the sound that would be picked up. Without any intervention, the enchantment we were working with would reproduce every sound in the environment, precisely how they would sound standing in the device's place. This presents an obvious problem, when you consider all the noise that might be in the environment. The problem only becomes more serious when you imagine attempting to use such a device to coordinate a battle — I understand those can get quite loud.

"The preliminary solution we devised is this little thing here," he said, holding up the plain, uninteresting-looking object. "There are a couple basic enchantments here, which act as a sort of filter — the device will only transmit the voice of the person holding this little piece of metal in my hand. Not only will it only transmit my voice, but it will only do so when I wish it to. There are various means by which to design an enchantment to respond to the user's intent — we considered simply designing the enchantments on the device to only pick up sound projected with this intent, but we were concerned more marginal cases may result in the device improperly failing to transmit the user's voice, but those cases can be avoided with the addition of physical contact. So, despite that I am holding the device now, I don't wish for our friends in Moscow to hear what I am saying, so they will not be getting a single word. Now, requiring the user to constantly carry around this little thing is a bit impractical, Miss Granger's group are working on a more permanent solution. Do you have a good idea of what that'll look like at this point?" he asked Hermione, turning to look over his shoulder.

Oh, well, put her on the spot, why not. Hermione took a step away from the blackboard, trying not to cringe as the eyes of the crowd full of a couple dozen very important people turned on her, firming herself with a deep breath. "We have already finished a tentative design for the equivalent of a headset, it just wasn't ready quite in time for this presentation. It looks like a curled tube of metal, about..." She held up a hand, fingers and thumb bending to make a shape sort of halfway between a C and a lower-case E. "It hooks over the top of the ear, just against the side of the head here, held in place with a basic sticking charm. It works as a pick-up, yes, but it will also reproduce the incoming audio as well, directly into the user's ear — it occurred to me it may be difficult to hear if the box is in a backpack or something. We're currently working on another device, perhaps a wristband, which can be used to change channels without needing to retrieve the box, but the enchanting on that one is more complicated, it may or may not be included in the first production model."

Elbert seemed faintly surprised — he might not have realised the headset was actually finished, they'd wrapped it up very recently — but he just nodded and moved on. As he started speaking again, Hermione ducked back closer to the blackboard again, standing with Gwen and Marcel, let out a little breath. "Very good, then. In that case, our little friend here will just be for our demonstration today. There may be situations in which multiple people will need to be heard through a single device, for whatever reason — for those cases, there will be a separate attachment, which may simply be set down in the middle of a conference table or what have you. Alternatively, the basic device without the inclusion of any of these focussing attachments may be used, but there may be issues with volume, and picking up unwanted noise, using some kind of focussing element is recommended. Any questions before I call our friends in Moscow?"

While Elbert dealt with a couple questions from their audience, occasionally checking his watch to make sure they weren't running late, Hermione considered that last problem. The focussing attachment Elbert was referring to didn't actually work by intent, as Hermione's earpiece did — in a long-distance conferencing situation, people who were in the same room speaking to each other wouldn't be picked up by an intent-based enchantment, potentially leaving people in other locations out of significant parts of the conversation. Instead it worked directly with sound, attempting to boost the clarity of voices and filter out everything else, which was difficult, but not unique. The equivalent to microphones for magical radio worked on similar principles, it was relatively simple to adapt them.

A problem they hadn't solved yet was designing a multi-purpose device — at the moment, they could build a box which used no attachments, or the one Elbert was holding now, or Hermione's earpiece, or the conferencing one. If a box was designed to work with one of them, it needed to use it at all times, and it couldn't use any of the others. Last she'd checked (talking to Gwen about the status of the project just last night), they were working on a solution to that, it was just somewhat complicated. They planned to pair these attachments with their device using a sort of serial number as a key rune; make an addition to the key rune for each attachment, and create a second dial much like the channel selection, to swap out the section with the key rune in the relevant enchantment.

The big problem came in when the user wished to skip using an attachment altogether. It was relatively simple to swap out a referent in an enchantment — Hermione suspected it might actually be a completely unique development in enchanting, but once the idea had occurred to them it wasn't difficult to work with — but a null referent would simply cause the enchantment to fail to work, meaning the device wouldn't produce or transmit sound at all. What they needed was basically a second switch to turn on and off the part of the enchantment that interacted with the attachment, but by that point the interface was starting to get too complicated. They had been playing with designing ways to place the attachment in the box such that it interrupted this part of the enchantment, only letting it function when the attachment was removed, but that presented problems when using multiple attachments, and what if they didn't want to use the critical attachment? would they have to remove both each time?

They didn't actually have a working prototype yet, but Gwen had come up with the idea for one they were still refining. The inspiration had actually come from working with the switches necessary to pass on emergency broadcasts — Gwen had designed a bridge between the main body of the enchantment and the relay, which would detect whether or not there was a meaningful referent in place. If the relay enchantment contained a null referent, the device would directly receive and produce sound; but if it contained a meaningful referent, the bridge would close, allowing the relay to function.

It was, essentially, a simple logic gate. Which was giving Hermione ideas, it was honestly hard to stay focussed on the presentation.

Eventually, Elbert called Moscow — the faintly-accented voice on the other end came through perfectly clearly, as though standing in the room here with them, without any of the distortion inherent to most muggle audio. There was a little hissing in the audience at the demonstration that the device worked, Elbert and his Russian counterpart were bantering a little. Hermione wasn't paying that much attention, thoughts constantly drawn to the half-formed idea trying to resolve itself at the back of her head.

Once they were done with Moscow, Elbert delayed for a couple minutes (with another glance at his watch), talking about the sort of thing that might interrupt the signal. There needed to be a contiguous flow of ambient magic between devices in order for them to talk to each other, so major disruptions in ambient magic could result in difficulties in transmission — for example, ambient magic over land and ambient magic in the ocean were discontinuous. (Hermione wasn't sure why that was, just one of those funny things.) The signal didn't need to pass in a straight line, but any funny bends it had to take would sometimes result in distortions in the audio.

Elbert called Juba next, in Sudan, which was currently host to a large international presence supporting the effort to dig the aliens out of the Congo. This person's voice didn't come through quite perfectly, with an odd... "Echo" wasn't the right word, exactly, it sounded like the timing was just slightly off, as though his voice was speeding up and slowing down just noticeably, at random. It was only a small disruption, lensing from looping around the Mediterranean and squeezing through the Levant and the Sinai, still perfectly understandable. Probably clearer than a radio transmission from the same distance, honestly.

There was a little bit of crackling, though — not constant, like static, just a brief burst now and then — Elbert explained what that was while stalling for a minute or two before calling India. Volcanic activity could also cause significant interruptions in ambient magic — in particular, the volcanoes in Greece and the fault lines in Anatolia and the Levant. One of the faults in Anatolia was particularly noisy, that's probably what the crackling was from. A reasonable guess, since they called Ahmedabad just after that, and this transmission also carried the same crackling — drawing a direct line between Groningen and Ahmedabad would go over the faults in Anatolia, but not the Dead Sea Fault, and would also mostly avoid the more active tectonic boundaries associated with India, so.

Hermione was only temporarily distracted, inexorably drawn back to the idea percolating in her head.

While Elbert called their associates in Shanghai — the signal coming through very clear this time, cutting across the plains of central Asia more or less uninterrupted — Hermione finally gave up, cast a quick privacy charm around herself, Gwen, and Marcel. "I think I'm having another big idea."

"Oh, no," Marcel drawled, "here we go again."

Gwen cut him a glance around Hermione. "Be nice, Marcel." Hermione was pretty sure that had been sarcastic, just teasing, but okay. "What are you thinking about this time?"

"Those switches you've been working on with Elbert, are they generalisable? I mean, the mechanics of the logic in isolation, without needing explicit referents."

For a couple seconds, Gwen just blinked at her, obviously confused. "Well, yes, I suppose. Or, I should say, the basic structure doesn't require specific referents to function — obviously it will need inputs and outputs to resolve properly."

"She got the idea from Babbling, the one you know." The Ancient Runes Professor at Hogwarts, Marcel meant. Hermione had had no idea she was actually somewhat well-known outside of Britain, for her work before she'd started teaching at Hogwarts — she was one of the big-name innovators in modular enchanting, a method of breaking enchantments down into pieces that could be swapped in and out at will to adjust the effects. Hermione had checked out one of her papers since joining the programme at Groningen, and Babbling had explicitly referenced modern muggle computers as an inspiration. The ultimate goal was to break enchantments down into such small pieces that you could create complex effects from basic elements and instructions, but it was still a very new field, there were few practical applications of the technique at this time. Other than making wards somewhat easier to set up, she guessed.

"Mm, Elbert and I never explicitly mentioned Babbling's work, but I'll admit it might have been an influence. Why?"

Hermione didn't immediately answer Gwen's question, instead turning to Marcel. "Your trick to put an image on a reservoir, can it be scaled down? To, say, something similar to a referent circle."

Marcel let out a puff of breath, his eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a second. "I don't see why not. The runes may have to be quite small, but it should be doable."

"The runes in the circle lay out the terms that define the structure of the image, right? Is there any reason that, instead of describing the image with runes, these terms couldn't instead themselves be images on reservoirs, which your enchantment manipulates in some way to create a composite image?"

"You would need to— No, you wouldn't need to isolate it, as long as the terms— Hmm..." Marcel frowned, thoughtfully glaring off at nothing — Hermione could practically feel the calculations going on in there, lips and fingers twitching now and then.

By this point, Elbert was finishing up talking to Shanghai, beginning his introduction to their final demonstration: Elbert would be calling the American general commanding the large international force marching south toward the Amazon. Their American associates had agreed that the most dramatic demonstration possible to cap it off was a good idea, just for the showmanship of it, so one of their people had apparated south in multiple hops, catching up with the army in the middle of the mountains of Columbia. They'd already talked to one of the general's staff earlier today — the signal was the messiest of all their tests, lensing somewhat getting through the Bering Strait and choppy from the Ring of Fire (especially crossing the volcano belt in Mexico), but it was still perfectly comprehensible. Which was a neat trick, Hermione hadn't realised they'd be able to get messages across the oceans at all, but going the long way around, the Bering Strait was narrow and shallow enough that the signal seemingly island-hopped across. They'd confirmed the signal would reach Japan, presumably jumping across at Sakhalin — or perhaps across the Korea Strait, but that seemed less likely — but they hadn't tested whether they could reach much of Indonesia, or the Philippines and Australia. Someone would get around to that at some point, not their job.

Finally, Marcel said, low and slow, "Yes. Yes, I do think that's possible. The enchanting and alchemy work would be somewhat tedious, but I can't think of any issues that would prevent such a device from functioning as intended. Though, I'm not certain what possible use it could have. It could be used to generate complex formants, or automatically perform certain esoteric calculations, I suppose..."

Oh, well... There was something to her random idea, then. That was interesting to know. "Calculations were sort of exactly what I was thinking, in a way."

"Excuse me?"

"I think it might — might — be possible to design a magical computer."

Gwen and Marcel looked more confused than anything, which was honestly kind of funny, Hermione felt her lips twitching. "You mean those funny boxes the muggles use to do maths?" Gwen asked, sounding very sceptical.

Hermione recalled Gwen mostly avoided having anything to do with the more finicky technologies, not entirely comfortable using them. Which was fair enough — mages had to be very careful to limit any outbursts of magic when in the vicinity of an (unshielded) computer, they could seriously damage the components without meaning to. "They're used for a lot more than just speeding up maths, but yes, those are what I'm talking about. Except, I think, if we can do it right, a magical version will be much more powerful? The images on reservoirs can be far more complex than digital memory, for one..."

"Depending on how small you plan on making them," Marcel said, "they won't be that complex. There's a limit to how much information you can pack into a reservoir, relative to its size and purity."

"Well, digital memory only has two states, so."

Marcel jerked backward, turning to give Hermione a baffled, wide-eyed look. "What? Really?"

"Yes? Didn't anyone explain to either of you how computers work?" By the blank looks and shrugs she got from Gwen and Marcel, she was going with no. "Right, well, I'm not an expert, but you have a basic instruction set which contains all the operations it can perform, and then machinery that actually does the calculations, and a few different kinds of media that store the data being worked with — the muggle version of reservoirs, if you like. A magical version would have to work on the same basic principles, but we'd have a lot more freedom with...every part of it, really. See, computers work entirely on electricity, and—

"It's sort of like electronic lights, you see," Hermione said, abruptly switching tack in mid-sentence. "There's a switch that turns them on and off, right? Well, you can think of it like, inside of a computer are thousands and thousands of switches, turning the power in little tiny bits of it on and off. And there are things called logic gates, like the switches you're working on," gesturing to Gwen, "that detect the state of one of these power switches, or, more specifically compare a switch against the switch next to it, to see if they're both on or both off or one of each, and give some kind of output depending on their current state. And, the instruction set is designed to translate maths and images and the like, that might make sense to us, into a form that can use these logic gates, manipulating the on and off switches to produce the effect that the user wants. It's all very complicated, and I'm not an expert, but that's the basic idea. Am I making any sense?"

"I suppose," Gwen said, uncertain. "The structure sounds similar to a ward, in a way. Very different in the specifics, obviously."

Marcel seemed more vaguely interested than confused. "I'm curious how they manage to fit so much machinery in such a small space — you said there are thousands of these switches? And they really only have two states? How does that work? I can't imagine how you could do much of anything given only two states to represent data with."

"It's binary code — numbers are expressed in powers of two instead of powers of ten. All kinds of different operations, and shapes or colours or whatever else, are assigned a number, and— You know, that's not actually important, we wouldn't be using binary anyway. Reservoirs have much greater variety of possible states than digital data."

"Yes, even the smallest alchemical crystal arithmantically possible could hold a minimum of...fifty-nine distinct states? I would need to double-check the literature, but I think that's correct. And the smallest possible crystal would be prohibitively difficult to work with."

Depending on how this went, they might progress to miniaturising this stuff pretty damn far, but probably not that far — if Hermione remembered what he was referring to correctly, the theoretical smallest possible crystal was literally eight atoms of carbon. "Exactly. My thought was that we might — might — be able to copy the basic structure using magical principles. Which, computers have all kinds of uses, but, like radios, they require electricity and rare minerals — supply lines being thrown into disarray will make both of those increasingly hard to come by. And, if we're very lucky, our computers should be...much more efficient? In the actual process of the calculations being done, at least. You see, we can skip the whole process of translating whatever operation is being done into binary and then translating it back — I doubt a magical computer will be able to do nearly as many operations a second, but it will need to do far fewer operations. I think the biggest issue would be figuring out how to make it universal, freely programmable, and automatic."

Hermione suspected making a reproduction of early computers — where the instruction set and the initial data essentially had to be input by hand, bit by bit — would be extremely simple, with a little bit of refining on the basic components Elbert and Gwen and Marcel were working on. Making an equivalent of a modern computer, on the other hand, where much of that could be done automatically by simply loading a programme from memory, would be much more complicated. Which was only fair, she guessed — on the muggle side, clearing that hurdle had taken decades. Hopefully they could improve that precedent somewhat...

"I'm still not sure I understand," Gwen said. "I'll take your word for it that we could work up a magical equivalent, but I didn't see what the point would be. Especially when there are other more pressing projects we could be working on."

"I'll admit, it might not have much in the way of short-term applications. But in the long term, we're talking about fundamentally changing almost everything about the modern world forever." Especially since their devices would be cheaper and easier to produce than digital computers, and they could exploit the work they've already done on communications to make the jump to a worldwide network very quickly. The implications for communications and sharing research and the like alone would be huge. But this was too big of an idea to explain in the space of a couple minutes, such a complicated development too difficult to predict, doubly so when talking to people who only had the loosest familiarity with the Digital Revolution in the first place. "Trust me, Gwen, if this works, it'll be a big deal — as in, it will cause such a major shift in science and industry and the economy and society in general that the project will be in history books. And I'm not joking, I mean that literally."

That was an intimidating thought, if Hermione was being honest. That future students studying the history of technology might one day read about the ideas Hermione was having right now, at the age of sixteen, was...odd. Just, deeply surreal — she was trying to keep herself focussed on the specifics of the project, and not anything absurd like whether Hermione Granger might one day end up listed shortly after Alan Turing, because that was just too much.

While Gwen and Marcel were still digesting that idea, Elbert finished his part of the presentation, Payne again taking the floor to take some final questions, talk about what would be required to mass-produce their radios, and whatever other issues might come up, Hermione didn't know, honestly. Marcel didn't waste any time at all catching him up on what they'd been talking about — somewhat to Hermione's surprise, Elbert grasped the significance of the idea almost immediately, suggested they bring it to Payne as soon as the presentation was over.

It took Payne maybe two minutes of discussion, once they finally got around to it, to suggest they pass off the radio project to new people as soon as possible, and immediately start on this one instead. He would make sure they got whatever people and resources they needed, they could pull anyone in the team they thought would help, without sabotaging any other critical effort they were working on. Gwen and Marcel seemed rather taken aback by how seriously Payne was taking this, but Hermione wasn't, really — as she'd tried to tell them a few minutes ago, cheap, simple to manufacture magical computers would be a significant, world-changing development. Payne's response was a perfectly reasonable one.

Leaving the lecture hall, Hermione couldn't help the feeling that she'd just stumbled across a project that would come to dominate the rest of her life, completely by accident. She didn't know how she felt about that, but it probably wasn't a bad thing — there were definitely worse things she could be doing with herself.

Chapter Text

4th November 1995 (63:7:5)
— Contact plus 00.02.01:12.30

Beth was having a very odd day. It began with waking up to find an unfamiliar naked woman in her tent.

The couple weeks since Beth's arrival in...whichever country she was in — she was pretty sure they'd started in Vietnam, if only barely, but she thought they were in Laos now? — had mostly been relatively slow. After that first night of fighting, they'd hung around the camp near that village for at least a week, settling in and preparing the way for larger groups of foreign fighters being moved in behind them. It turned out Beth's idea of burning down a section of the forest had been perfectly fine, since they'd needed to clear some of the area to expand the growing base anyway. The construction had proceeded very quickly, using magic to cheat, simple wood shacks popping up one after the next after the next, every couple days another party of soldiers teleported in to occupy them. (The foreign fighters coming in to help were mostly Soviets, with some socialist-leaning Arabs.) Beth had been useless at first, thanks to her medically-mandated recovery time, but she volunteered to help with the construction once Bill signed off on her doing magic again, picking up all the necessary spells within an hour — thankfully, it didn't require much transfiguration (transfiguration was temporary, after all, not really useful to make housing), so she was mostly able to keep up.

By the time the camp had been transformed into a bustling little town, Luke had gotten orders from his superiors. As messy as things were at the moment, and as scattered all over the world as the Army was, they didn't have people available they could send over to fill in the missing slots in their troop on such short notice — in particular, suitable mages were hard to come by. They didn't think it was safe for their troop to act independently, at reduced strength and especially short on mages to fly cover, so they'd been reassigned to work directly with the locals' reconnaissance efforts. A lot of sneaking around, trying to feel out exactly where the aliens were set up, counting the people and equipment they had on hand as well as they could, planning out the best direction to approach from and where the army behind them could most safely set up camp and place artillery for best effect, that sort of thing.

So, very similar to what they'd been doing in the Ituri rainforest, just working side-by-side with local soldiers this time. Mostly Vietnamese and Laotian military, but the higher-ups had intentionally assigned locals to the job — which was the natural thing to do, obviously you'd want your scouts to be familiar with the lay of the land — which meant a lot of them were from the more isolated hill tribes and things, who all had their own languages. Most of them could speak Vietnamese and/or French, but in the week or so since her troop had started working closely with them Beth had already started picking up Lao — completely unrelated to Vietnamese, with a few more different sounds, but with a very similar vibe to the feel of it, probably due to existing next to each other forever — and bits and pieces of various small local languages. It was honestly kind of a mess, she was trying not to spend too much time thinking about it. If only because getting a migraine while trying to sneak through the bloody mountains would be distracting.

One of the big advantages of having a few mages around was that they could pop back to the nearest forward camp at the end of the day, and then pop right back to where they'd finished off the night before come morning. They could have made do camping out in the hills — magic would probably make that a whole lot easier too — but carrying the extra supplies necessary would be more of a pain than just having the mages side-along everyone back and forth a couple at a time. They were following the river, crawling across rural hill country, scouring the area for signs of aliens, marking off anything suspicious on the maps a few of them were carrying (multiple people doing the job, in case something went wrong and the map was lost), before going back to camp at the end of the day, where they didn't have to worry about being murdered in their sleep.

Not to say there hadn't been any fighting, they had ended up in a couple little skirmishes. Their first sign they were getting close to something was when they stumbled across a couple of the lizard-looking blokes — quickly killing them, to make sure they couldn't run back and alert their people — once even a crew of about a dozen brainwashed locals, overseen by a single lizard thing. It looked like they were seeding some kind of vine through the hills, nobody could guess why, they'd taken samples back to camp to be sent off to the labcoats. They went ahead and burned any of the vines they came across going forward, just as a precaution.

They'd eventually spotted a sizeable farming settlement, rather like the one back in the Congo — though this one was somewhat more spread out, some of the shell-huts half-hidden in the trees, maybe twice the number of workers. They spent a day carefully sneaking around, mapping it out as well as they could, Beth even used her invisibility cloak to walk right through the middle of the outpost, so she could get a more accurate count of the fighters. A lot of concealment spells didn't work on the aliens, but Beth's cloak in particular did, they weren't sure why.

(Bill said her cloak was not a normal invisibility cloak, but he didn't have any better of an explanation than she did. It was useful, at least, so she wasn't complaining.)

Today was set to be a slow day — they would be waiting for more soldiers and equipment to be moved up to their forward camp, so they could hit the alien settlement. Once that was taken care of, they'd continue inching their way down the river, until they reach the Mekong somewhere west of here. The long-term plan from there would be to continue crawling their way south — they were certain there was a large landing somewhere near the Mekong Delta, but they wanted to cut off their ability to retreat north before beginning a full-out assault — but they might have to help one of the other groups in the valleys around here first, or the situation might change by then, who knows. Hopefully, the big future battle in the south would finish off the aliens here, but sometimes things went wrong, they'd have to see how it turned out.

So she didn't really need to get up early, since today was practically going to be an off-duty day, but by this point it was routine, she couldn't help it. Beth woke up more or less with the sun, dawn light setting her tent aglow.

Before, Beth had been sharing a tent with Olwen, but of course she was dead now, and nobody had been sent to replace her, so Beth had the tent to herself. She did most nights, anyway — sometimes a local woman or two would end up being put with her, especially their first night at a new forward camp, still early in the process of setting things up. (It turned out, Communists could be pretty serious about the whole equality of the sexes thing, there were plenty of women among the Vietnamese and Soviet soldiers.) The tent was nothing special, Army-issue, plain canvas, enough space for a couple people to lay down, short enough that Beth could only stand upright in the very centre. As bloody hot as it was here, Beth would leave the flaps at either end open overnight — the little bit of wind that got in was enough to stop it from getting too stuffy — only closed them when she was changing clothes or something. The tents were mostly just to stop them from being rained on overnight, it was warm enough here that they weren't needed for anything else. There was netting to keep bugs out, but that stuff didn't really obscure much — super necessary, though, the mosquitos here were murderous...

(Sometimes literally? Malaria and dengue were no fucking joke, several foreign fighters had started getting ill already.)

So Beth was understandably confused to wake up to find someone crouching over her. Still half-awake, she twitched away from the woman, her heart jumping into her throat and her hand scrambling for her wand — before she stopped, frowning. The unknown woman in her tent was maybe thirty, thirty-five, sitting rather oddly, crouched on the balls of her feet so deep her bum was practically touching her heels, arms resting against her sides with her hands on her knees. The thing that got Beth to slow down for a moment, blinking in confusion, was that she looked really weird. Her hair was long and shaggy, curls kinking this way and that as though not properly brushed in some time...and it was a pure, snowy white, with darker flecks here and there — kind of like some people with blonde hair would have bits of brown mixed in with the yellow, but here the light parts were an unnaturally solid white, the dark bits a proper black, a little bit of an ashy grey here and there, it was very odd. Mostly white, though, almost seeming to glow in the strip of early morning sunlight stabbing into the tent. Her eyes, wide and steady on Beth, were a bright inhuman yellow, like a cat or a bird.

Also? She was completely naked — Beth thought that was important to note, because she was a total bloody stranger, and she was just sitting there naked in Beth's tent first thing in the morning, what the fuck?!

"Um..." Frowning up at her, thoughts slow and bumbling — it was far too early, Beth wasn't awake yet — she struggled to figure out what the fuck to say. She was, just, naked women randomly appearing in her tent was not something she knew how to handle, okay. "Hello?"

"Hello," the woman muttered, her voice low and grinding, kind of like the crackle on the ngã tone from northerners.

...And that was it, she didn't say anything else. Just, continued to stare at Beth, perched there naked, was seriously fucking weird. Beth must be starting to wake up, because she was getting annoyed now. She sat up, moving at an angle to keep her head well away from the woman, glaring at her. "Okay, who the hell are you? Mind explaining what you're doing in my tent first thing in the morning?"

"Hedwig. I'm hungry."

Beth's mouth opened to respond, and then immediately closed again, blinking stupidly over at the woman. "...What?"

Her nose pinched, sneering. The expression looked...off, somehow — it almost looked disgusted, but that wasn't the vibe Beth was getting, for some reason. Maybe irritated, or frustrated? "Is wrong here. Too many trees, all too fast. Can't catch nothing. I'm hungry."

...No, Beth wasn't any less confused, really.

A while ago now, way back in...second year? She thought it was second year. Hermione had figured out that Beth didn't really feed Hedwig at all, and had been somewhat worried about her health — snowy owls didn't exist in the wild in Britain, concerned she wouldn't be able to support herself here — so Hermione had gone on a research binge and then ranted to Beth about it. As bloody huge as they were, snowy owls weren't the most agile fliers in the world, but they were very quiet, their wings designed to glide on the air almost silently. On the wide, flat, frozen plains they lived on, they would fly low over the ground, coming up behind things, swooping in and snatching them before they even saw them coming. It worked best when they had snow for camouflage, and the ground needed to be flat, so they had room to glide over the surface like that.

After a bit of thinking about it, Hermione had decided there was probably enough room for Hedwig to catch things in some of the more open patches of land around Britain. It wasn't an ideal environment for snowy owls, no, the lack of snow and the more hilly ground likely made it more difficult, but it must be possible. The fact that Hedwig seemed healthy enough after a year and a half of living with Beth would suggest that she was successfully hunting somehow, so. Hermione suggested Beth keep up a stash of owl treats and give her one every once in a while, just in case she had a rough patch for whatever reason.

Beth had ordered the owl treats, but she hardly used them, honestly — they didn't seem super appetising to her. Instead, she'd usually just grab a sausage or two or a hunk of chicken from the dining table and bring it up with her when she visited Hedwig in the Owlery. She did visit Hedwig regularly, which a lot of the other kids in her year thought was odd, but she just wanted to, okay.

It hadn't really occurred to her that Vietnam might be a problem. By the time Hedwig had caught up with her in Africa, they'd been in a more plainsy area — like Britain, probably not ideal, but at least it gave Hedwig enough room to wind up to a catch. These thickly-forested, narrow mountain valleys they were moving through here obviously didn't, and Hedwig wouldn't know which direction to go to find somewhere more advantageous.

Also, there wasn't really food to give her either? As off the beaten path as Beth's troop was, working closely with the locals, their food was primarily local stuff — a lot of rice and noodles and vegetables and beans, and very very little in the way of meat. What meat they did get was usually boiled to hell in some kind of soup, or sauteed or fried in a spicy sauce, which probably wouldn't seem very appetising to an owl. And Beth couldn't just give Hedwig noodles and greens, because owls were strictly carnivorous, they needed meat to survive. That probably should have occurred to her, it, just, things were super busy, okay.

All that flicked through Beth's head, but at the same time she was very very confused, making her a little dizzy. "Okay, wait, hold up a second. Are you saying..." She trailed off, the absolute absurdity of the situation making her draw up short, the words just refusing to come. Frozen in the middle of a gesture, she could see her own fingers were twitching. "You mean... Hedwig, my Hedwig."

"Yes." That was it, no more explanation than that, just, yes.

That was— No, Beth didn't believe her. "Prove it."

The woman's head tilted, giving her a sort of flat, unamused look — for some reason, the gesture struck Beth as very bird-like. There was a ticklish flash of magic, the light around her seeming to bend (very much like when Sirius transformed), and in a blink, exactly where the odd woman had been a second ago, was a very familiar snowy owl, staring at her with unblinking yellow eyes. Beth had never seen any other snowy owl, at least not in real life, but she was still positive that she could pick this one out of a hundred of them, that was definitely Hedwig.

Meeting her eyes, Beth felt herself stiffen, her heart thumping and an odd tingle of nerves running down her spine. The eyes. The eyes were the same, not quite exactly in the shape, human and owl skulls being built different, but the colour, the woman had exactly Hedwig's eyes — made very obvious when she switched back, the unfamiliar naked woman again crouching in front of her, the eyes hardly changing at all.

"I..."

Beth had absolutely no fucking clue how she was supposed to deal with this.

"I don't— You've been an animagus this whole time?! What are you—"

"No."

She cut off at the single, flat word, but then Hedwig — and it really must be Hedwig, which was fucking insane, what the fuck was even happening... — but she didn't follow the interruption with anything, just kept staring back at her. "No, what? You are an animagus, aren't you?"

"No, not that. Other thing."

"What, then?"

It might be Beth's imagination, but she thought the strange woman who had apparently been Hedwig this whole time looked a bit frustrated, her brow furrowed and her lips curling a little. She glanced away from Beth for a second, let out a little breath through her nose, before saying, "I can't say. I don't know what you call it, the word. I'm not human, other thing."

...Now that Beth was slowing down from her initial what the fuck what the fuck reaction, and actually paying attention for a second, the woman did sound rather...off. She meant, her voice all hoarse and grinding, and her English obviously wasn't very good — she was following Beth just fine, but her wording was awkward, and sometimes the pronunciation came out not quite right. Beth might otherwise just think it was a strong foreign accent of some kind, someone who hadn't quite practised the language up to fluency, but combined with the sound of her voice, she...

Beth had the feeling she didn't talk very often at all.

Because she spent the vast majority of her time as a bloody owl, obviously.

Her head swirling, Beth rubbed at her cheek, cursing under her breath — it was far too early for this shite.

If she understood what she was being told correctly, Beth's bloody post owl, who could apparently transform into a human whenever the fuck she wanted, was claiming to be some kind of nonhuman magical being. Beth was familiar with, like, elves and goblins and centaurs and merfolk and the like — and also giants, though she'd never met a full-blooded one — but she was aware there were others out there. Supposedly, there were a lot of some people called nymphs in Britain, somewhere, she'd never actually seen one before — the descriptions she'd heard came off like hippie nature types, presumably they just didn't get out much. And there were also veela, of course, and lilin, they were somewhat rare in Europe, much more common in the Near East, and there were other nonhuman beings that might be big in Asia or America but didn't really exist in Europe. There were all kinds of people out there, the world was complicated like that.

So, it wasn't impossible, what she was saying. But it was seriously fucking weird, and Beth wasn't an expert on this stuff, she had no idea...

...Though, it was interesting that Hedwig-as-a-human had white and black hair and yellow eyes. Like, Padfoot had shaggy black fur, very similar to Sirius's long curly hair, and McGonagall-as-a-cat had an inexplicable air of McGonagallness about her — it was hard to explain, exactly, she was still recognisable despite looking nothing alike. But, you know, they'd been born human, and became animagi later, it'd make sense to say their appearance as an animal was somehow influenced by what they looked like.

Humans didn't naturally have yellow eyes, or funny white and black hair. Maybe it was like Pettigrew, how he'd started to look weirdly rat-like after spending over a decade transformed, but that didn't seem quite right somehow...

There was definitely something weird going on here. Something weird besides a random naked woman appearing in her tent first thing in the morning and claiming to be Hedwig, she meant.

Jesus, this was so fucked up...

"Okay, I... I need to go talk to someone about this." Bill, he'd gotten around working for Gringotts, all over the world, and he was a very worldly sort of bloke — if Hedwig turned out to be some weird nonhuman being Beth had never heard of before, Bill would likely know all about them. "Um. If I go find someone quick, will you wait here? I'll be right back. And, um, once that's straightened out, we can...go get breakfast, I guess."

The woman nodded. "I will wait here."

Right. Good. That was...good.

Awkwardly, Beth pulled on her trousers and her uniform jacket — the bloody weird situation was awkward to begin with, but also Hedwig just kept bloody staring at her, she— Oh, fucking hell, Hedwig had definitely been in the room when she was changing, more times than she could—

Hedwig had been in the room while Beth touched herself before. That was very embarrassing in retrospect, and also super creepy — they were probably going to have to have a talk about that, but Beth was not looking forward to it...

Once Beth had all her stuff back in their proper places — including her pistol and all the shite in her belt pouches, none of which she expected to need today anyway — she slipped out of the tent and into the camp. It was still very sloppy at this point, canvas tents in various colours and sizes scattered around, only a few sturdier buildings here and there — mostly local construction, the mages here could do this thing where they shrank a house down, relocated it, and unshrunk it again, which was very neat. The camp was rather scattered and haphazard, tents pitched wherever they could find a relatively flat spot on the craggy mountainside, the brush cleared but trees still standing here and there all through the area. The nearest alien outpost wasn't so far away, they were trying to go unnoticed, at least the tree cover would prevent any aircraft from easily spotting them — some wards and palings to distribute the heat helped, but those were imperfect, the addition of actual physical cover was a safer bet.

Of course, Beth had heard that they were pretty sure the aliens knew they were here by now, supposedly scouts had spotted each other out in the trees somewhere. They just had to hope they could move enough people here before the aliens could pinpoint their exact location and a full-on attack came — and who knew how long that would be, they were basically racing the clock at this point.

It wasn't hard to find Bill, he was exactly where Beth expected him to be — at the morning meeting of the command staff here, looming over Luke's shoulder. The group was somewhat larger than the last time Beth had caught sight of them — from a distance, she obviously wasn't invited to these meetings — representing the people brought in yesterday, Luke and Bill the only attendees in British uniforms, the rest a mix of Vietnamese, Laotian, Soviet, and Syrian. (Or from one of the socialist-leaning Arab countries, anyway, their flags were all similar-looking.) Beth ducked into the shade of the marquee sort of thing — like a big tent, but without solid walls, just for the shade — sidled up to Bill's elbow. A couple people, gathered around a table with various papers and maps scattered around, glanced her way, but quickly ignored her. A couple whispers back and forth, Bill quick told Luke he needed to go check something out, and they were leaving.

On the way back to her tent, Beth tried to explain what was going on — she wasn't sure she was making a lot of sense, just, this was a super odd situation, that was all. But she must be saying something right, because they weren't even halfway back when Bill said, "Wilderfolk."

Beth twitched, glanced at him over her shoulder. "What?"

"That's what they're called, wilderfolk. The simple explanation is that they're animagi in reverse — animals who can take human form at will."

"How does that work? If they're animals they shouldn't be able to..." No wait, this was familiar, actually. She was pretty sure she'd heard of these people before. Sirius had definitely mentioned them, for one — everybody knew there were wolves in the Forbidden Forest, the same ones Malfoy had absurdly called werewolves way back in first year, but Sirius claimed they were actually wilderfolk. He hadn't explained what that meant, exactly, but Beth's impression had been that they were animals with roughly human-level intelligence for magical reasons. Supposedly there were a fair number of them in Britain, but nobody was sure how many, since they mostly lived out in the wild, or just went unnoticed. Like, Sirius had suggested Mrs Norris was wilderfolk too — that was why she could do things like identify rulebreakers for Filch, and was even still alive over a decade after Sirius and her parents' time, wilderfolk had magically-extended lifespans — which was just fucking absurd to think about...

(In retrospect, everyone joking around about "Filch's cat" being petrified was really fucked up.)

Sirius had been less clear about them having the ability to shift into humans, though that did make sense when she thought about it — obviously, Filch knew who Mrs Norris had seen breaking the rules because she verbally told him. Also, now that she thought about it, Sirius had suggested (without explicitly stating) that some of the wilderfolk hiding in plain sight did so as random animals, yes, but some were seemingly human, Beth hadn't quite caught that implication at the time...

"It's somewhat complicated," Bill was saying, "as can happen when you mix up magic and genetics, but wilderfolk are essentially part human. The child of an animagus and their target animal, and at least a portion of their descendents, will be wilderfolk."

"Wait, an animagus and their— You mean...?"

Bill gave her a kind of wry smile, a little shrug. "There are reasons polite society prefer to pretend wilderfolk don't exist."

...Right. Well, that was fucking gross...but she guessed that wasn't really the fault of the wilderfolk themselves, was it? Still, no wonder mages didn't mention them, as silly as they could be about blood purity or whatever...

When they got back, Hedwig was an owl again, perched on top of Beth's tent. As they approached, Bill said, "Come inside for a second, we need to talk." By the time Beth ducked into the tent after him, Hedwig had already swept in through the other side, backflapping for a second — and then there was another swirl of light, and the white-black-haired, yellow-eyed naked woman was crouching in Beth's tent again. Sitting down in front of her, his legs crossed, Bill said, "Hello, there. My name is Bill."

The unfamiliar woman who had apparently been Hedwig this whole time flatly stared at him, inhuman eyes unblinking. "I know."

"Yes, I imagine you do," Bill drawled, sounding rather amused. "Do you have another name you would prefer?" Oh shite, Beth hadn't even thought of that...

"No. I was called other things, is Hedwig now."

"Very well." Turning to look at Beth, he said, "That's not unusual — wilderfolk tend to have less attachment to human cultural ephemera, such as names. I got to know a wilderfolk woman during my stay in Egypt, and she went by multiple names in multiple languages, depending on who she was speaking to, and didn't seem partial to any of them. They're just like that sometimes."

...Beth was pretty sure got to know was supposed to be a euphemism. Given how much most mages seemingly didn't like wilderfolk, she had to wonder what Mrs Weasley would think of that — she felt very certain Bill had never told her.

It was hard to tell, she obviously wasn't used to human facial expressions, but Beth thought Hedwig was curious, her head tilting a little and her eyes slightly narrowing. "You know us?" Another of her kind, Beth was pretty sure she meant.

"Yeah, a few. The one I knew best was a kite — another bird of prey, similar to yourself in some ways, though rather smaller. Hang on, she..." Bill drew his wand, after a second of concentration cast an illusion with a flick. To their left was a vaguely Arab-looking woman — though with unnatural white and grey-silver hair, only partially hidden with some kind of shawl, her eyes a vibrant red — sitting on the floor with her feet extended out in front of her, crossed at the ankle, leaned reclining back on her hands, face tilted into a toothy smirk. To their right was a bird, sitting in mid-air as though on an invisible perch, round head with a pointy little beak (looking more like a hawk, maybe), feathers a bright white on most of the body, the wings a darker greyish-silver deepening to black toward the edges — not a small bird, exactly, but snowy owls were bloody huge, so it was maybe a third to a half of Hedwig's size.

"I see these," Hedwig said, pointing at the bird. "Before we come here."

"Yes, they're native to the same region of Africa we were in before we were moved here, it wouldn't surprise me if you saw a few around." The illusions dissipating, Bill replaced his wand — and then hesitated for a moment, his fingers tapping at his knees. "I have a couple of questions, they might be...uncomfortable. If I remember the story correctly, Hagrid bought you for Beth from Eeylops. Is that right?"

Hedwig just nodded — which, now that Beth was considering the implications of Hagrid buying a person for her as birthday present, Hedwig just calmly nodding about it was so fucked up...

"How did you come to be there? I imagine you weren't born there — you look too old, thirty? forty?"

"I don't know. It was colder, there were mountains. East, over the sea."

"Daneland? Finnland?"

Hedwig just shrugged, clearly had no idea. Honestly, Beth guessed the borders of magical countries were probably completely meaningless to a bloody bird. "We were being raised to... As post owls? Only some were like me, I don't know why."

"That can happen — owls are a common animagus form, due to their importance in magical culture, it's believed a fraction of post owls are wilderfolk. Likely not a large proportion, though, it's not really a surprise only a few there were like you. Did they know?"

She hesitated for a second, head tilting and her eyes tipping up to the canvas overhead. "I think not? I don't know. I know they thought I'm smart, but I don't think they knew why. I was never...as this, then," gesturing to herself.

"I see." Bill seemed somewhat sceptical, but he didn't voice whatever he was thinking, just moved on. "How did you leave there?"

"We were sold, to a shop. I was sold, to someone, I left, came to a shop again, was sold again, and left again, and again and again. Is this important?"

"Why do you keep leaving and going back to shops?"

"Some people are cruel, or don't need me, so I grow bored."

"I'm sure you could get by on your own — why do you keep returning to shops to be sold again?"

Frowning a little, Hedwig said, "I want to. People are..." She hesitated another moment, eyes flicking away from Bill for a blink. "Humans are more interesting. True owls are boring."

Bill shrugged. "Fair enough."

Beth was extremely sceptical for a second, but when she thought about it there was...maybe a point there? She meant, if Hedwig had human-level intelligence, going out to live with normal owls probably would be super boring. Of course, that didn't mean she had to stay a bloody post owl, she could just, you know, be a person. But, this wasn't a spectator sport, if she had a question she could just ask. "Why don't you... I mean, if humans are interesting, why do you just stay an owl the whole time?" Beth wouldn't be cool with just being some arsehole's pet, so, that seemed like a reasonable question to her...

Apparently Hedwig didn't think so, giving her an odd look. "I am an owl."

"Well, sure, but I meant, um..."

She really had no idea what she was getting at, but thankfully Bill came to the rescue. "That's just the way most wilderfolk are, Beth — they're normally more comfortable with their animal shape than their human one. And their psychology is often more in line with their animal heritage, which can make functioning socially in human society...fraught. Not to mention, their legal situation can be complicated — wilderfolk don't have any legal rights in Britain. They're not even truly considered people."

"Wait, really?"

Bill nodded, an expression on his face Beth could only describe as grim. "In magical Britain, wilderfolk are— The legal term is aliens, though in a different sense than is common these days. They're essentially considered magical creatures — that is, animals — but ones which, by their nature, are a special danger to the Statute of Secrecy. Any alien found within Britain's orders is remanded to the custody of a human mage, who is responsible for all their physical needs, yes, but also keeping them away from muggles."

...Well, that's fucking stupid. "So, you're saying that, legally, Hedwig is in my custody? Like a child would be? That's ridiculous, just look at her, she's gotta be three times my age!"

"You're human; she's not. And it isn't like a child, 'custody' was maybe a poor word choice. The legal term is corporal indenture — most Britons will deny it, but I would argue indenture is slavery, plain and simple." Because of fucking course it was, Beth couldn't even say she was surprised. "As an owl, Hedwig is free to go wherever she wishes, whenever she wishes. As wilderfolk, she would be bound to the custody of whoever the Ministry charged with her supervision, and her freedom of movement would be severely curtailed. Even if she wished to live openly as wilderfolk, there would be immediate, serious consequences, I'm not surprised she stayed hidden for so long."

For a long moment, Beth just stared at Bill, her eyes occasionally flicking to Hedwig, speechless. Trying to process the— She didn't... "You know, I fucking hate this country sometimes."

Bill and Hedwig both laughed at her, because of course they did. Hedwig's laughter sounded odd, sharp and huffing, but Beth guessed she probably didn't do it very often...

After that, there was a bit of talk about what to do, what Hedwig's options were from here — sometimes restating things to make sure Hedwig understood, since some of this was super complicated. Magical British law was abysmal where wilderfolk were concerned (and kind of just in general, honestly), but some other countries were better about it. Not to mention, she had more options than she might have had a couple months ago just in general, thanks to the Statute of Secrecy being well and truly shattered. She could leave for some other magical country, or defect to a muggle country, or just show up at some refugee relief thing literally anywhere. Muggle governments didn't specify species the way mages did — they'd thought they were the only beings on Earth, after all, so there was no need to specify things only applied to humans — so she could pretty easily backdoor herself into proper full legal rights and everything with a muggle government, which was a neat trick.

Hedwig had other options, but she didn't want to take any of them — she wanted to stay with Beth. That would be doable, theoretically — now that it was known she was wilderfolk, that actually changed her previous status as Beth's familiar very little, because magical Britain was fucked up — though that might take some explaining for their muggle friends. After all, modern muggles had opinions about slavery, which was technically what this was...

"Wait up a second," Beth jumped in, "why would you... You want to stay with me? Why?" She'd understood it when it was, just, the magical world was horrible sometimes and she didn't have anywhere else to go, but...

By this point, it was very obvious that Hedwig didn't really do facial expressions the same way as everyone else — which did make sense, she had a bird face most of the time, didn't have the practice. So Beth had absolutely no idea how to interpret the flat look Hedwig gave her, almost Snape-ishly unamused, and... "You're alone."

...Beth had no idea how the hell she was supposed to interpret that either. "What?"

"There is Sirius now, but he is not..." Hedwig trailed off, frowning, clearly failing to think of the word she wanted.

"Responsible?" Bill suggested. Beth glanced his way, saw there was a funny look on his face. Watching Hedwig with a smile, but not really a happy smile, exactly, Beth didn't know what that was...

Giving him a sharp nod, Hedwig said, "Yes, this. I will stay, until you are done growing, at least. Maybe I will go then."

...

Okay, Beth hadn't thought this oh hey, turns out your owl has been a person this whole time, and Hagrid bought her as a birthday gift for you, have fun! thing could get any more fucking weird, but apparently Beth had underestimated the universe's capacity to fuck with her. She, just, she was done, she had nothing at this point, she had absolutely no fucking clue what she was supposed to do with that.

(It was easier to focus on her confusion and irritation than this strange woman who'd been Hedwig this whole time apparently taking it upon herself to look after the ratty little orphan girl — Beth knew she'd looked very pathetic at barely eleven, but... Well, it did kind of make sense in retrospect, Hedwig occasionally nagging her to write to her friends over the summer, since she'd moved in with Sirius she'd even found a way to remind her to eat or get to bed when she was distracted with something, because Sirius could be shite at that sort of thing himself sometimes, and she was—)

(Yeah, not thinking about that at the moment and focussing on how fucking weird this was instead was a good idea — because if she let herself think about it too much she'd probably end up breaking down crying in the middle of a bloody army camp, and that sounded awkward and embarrassing.)

"She means until you leave the nest, so to speak," Bill explained, as though that was the part Beth was confused about. "Wilderfolk can have rather different ideas of adulthood, that often don't map onto the human experience one-to-one."

Beth frowned at Bill — well, that was a fucking stupid thing to say. She just said, "Um...?" gesturing vaguely around them with both hands. Army camp, middle of the mountains of Indochina, yeah, she'd say she'd thoroughly 'left the nest' at this point. 'The nest' was on the opposite end of the bloody planet from here...

Bill's lips twitched. "Figuratively. For some, starting a family of your own is the line."

...

Turning to Hedwig, Beth drawled, "You know, if that's what you're waiting for, I'm pretty sure I'm a lesbian, so you're going to be waiting a long fucking time." She didn't think she'd ever actually admitted that out loud before but, well, alien invasion, there were much more important things to worry about these days than her sexuality. Bill hardly even reacted, so.

Hedwig gave an odd, stiff shrug — apparently she wasn't concerned about that.

And, despite how fucking weird this whole conversation was, that seemed like pretty much the end of it. Hedwig had been told her options, and she wanted to stay, so, Bill guessed that meant it was time for breakfast. He'd go and explain the situation to Luke, and they'd definitely have to talk to someone in charge about it — probably separately, though it should hopefully be clear that nothing too skeevy was going on with them, since Hedwig was significantly older than her and Beth had had no idea she wasn't a normal post owl until literally just now — and people might be super uncomfortable with the situation, but, well, muggles expected magic shite to be weird at this point, they'd probably just brush it off without too much thought. More important things to worry about, you know. Which was fucking absurd to Beth, she still wasn't over this, it was extremely weird that Hedwig had been a person this whole time...

(And had apparently been trying to look after the pathetic orphan girl, just because, but Beth was still trying not to think about that too hard.)

Hardly without Beth even realising what was happening, Bill had conjured some clothes for Hedwig — copying the SCF uniform style, but without any of the tat on it — and they were leaving the tent. Beth automatically started toward the kitchen tents, Hedwig walking along a step to her left. She seemed obviously uncomfortable, her posture stiff and awkward, occasionally rolling her shoulders and picking at her sleeves or tugging the hem of her shirt. She'd made a very unpleasant face at being told she couldn't just go to breakfast completely naked — Beth would guess she didn't wear human clothing very often...or at all ever. Beth tried to keep walking, and not stare at her, just...

This was fucking weird right? This still seemed fucking weird.

She had absolutely no idea what the fuck she was supposed to say to Hedwig, so she, just, awkwardly remained silent, picking her way through the camp — thoroughly woken up at this point, people wandering around or hanging around chatting or working on one thing or another, noisy with chatter in several languages and the purr of engines and the clanking of metal against metal and the occasionally crackle or snap of magic somewhere. At least, Beth felt awkward, if Hedwig noticed how seriously uncomfortable this was she wasn't showing it at all. She didn't seem to notice the funny looks she was getting now and then from people they passed — the camp was big enough now that people wouldn't expect to know everyone they saw, but Hedwig's hair really did look very odd by normal human standards — which she guessed was very Hedwig-like behaviour, when Beth thought about it, she hardly ever seemed to give a damn...unless someone was being rude in her presence, of course...

(Beth loved the shite out of that bird, but her having been a person the whole time was seriously fucking weird, she didn't know what she was supposed to do with this.)

Now that they had a pretty stable set-up here, staying in one place and building up people to hit the alien settlement nearby, they were able to manage somewhat better conditions, like actually having halfway-decent food. Though, she guessed magic helped — they were never more than a couple apparation-hops away from somewhere with real food, so they didn't have to live entirely off of army rations. While her troop had been spending every day scouting up along the river, they'd gotten by eating whatever they got — mostly a mix of Vietnamese and Syrian army rations, occasionally fresh local food when they passed by a village or the camp got a supply drop by portkey — but they got a steady drip of supplies here, and didn't have to worry about packing everything up and moving it every day, so they'd gradually built up a more complex kitchen/cafeteria set-up, expanding as more and more people showed up, staffed by a mix of official military people (from various countries) and random locals displaced by the fighting following the army out of a lack of anything better to do.

There were a few of those big marquee tents, like the one the commanders met under, kitchen areas organised around either electronic or magical camp gear or even open fires, the stuff they were making a funny mix representing all the groups they had gathered here. No English food — as far as Beth knew, her troop were literally the only Brits here — but there was a variety of Vietnamese or Laotian stuff — there were regional variations in what people usually ate, but they seemed to completely ignore the border — as well as Arab stuff, pieced together with supplies from home or locally-grown produce cooked Arab-ly — it was generally pretty good, if rather spicey for Beth's very English palate (the spices were mostly dried anyway, so they were more easily transportable) — as well as the eastern European stuff the Soviets had brought with them. The white people in the camp who weren't Beth's team were all Soviets — mostly from the west of the Union, European Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and places like that — but just because they were also white people didn't mean the stuff that they ate was much like English food at all, they had their own, sometimes very different shite. They didn't make a point of requiring people to only get stuff from their people, since keeping everything separate would be more work than it was worth (and would also screw over Beth's troop), hungry people were free to take whatever they wanted (within reason, obviously), so meals at this camp tended to be very eclectic, people eating a mix of whatever had been made available that seemed appetising at the time.

Unfortunately, a really common thing to have around was porridge — which made sense, since she guessed it was relatively easy to just portkey the dried shite around and heat it up with water or whatever else you had on hand (here, often coconut milk) when you wanted it. The problem with that was that Beth hated porridge. Every time she ate the stuff, no matter where she was, she would feel the sun on her shoulders and gritty dirt on her hands and bleach faintly burning in her nose. There were long summers when she was growing up when plain, bland porridge was one of the very few things she ate — after hours doing her chores, working in the flower beds under the sun, she'd be given a meagre bowl of tasteless porridge, and then shoved into the cupboard for the rest of the evening. Even if it was better stuff, with add-ins and flavoured with whatever, the feel of it in her mouth sent some part of her back there every time. Sometimes there were no other options, especially when they were in the middle of nowhere, she would eat it if she had no other choice, but she hated it.

But now that they had a nicer food set-up, there were actually other options. The Soviets had porridge too, but now that there was a proper kitchen around they often made bliný, which were a kind of pancake — thin like crêpes, but a bit chewer and with more substance to them, Beth assumed they were made with a different grain. Sometimes with quark cheese when they could get it (which was only intermittently, didn't ship as well), sometimes with sausage, and they were increasingly getting creative with local stuff, using fruit or vegetables that grew here to make fillings, raw or stewed or fried, or the pickled varieties of stuff the locals ate sometimes (which Beth personally found extremely unpleasant). The Arabs also did porridge (because of course), but sometimes it was instead a vaguely similar dish that was done with beans instead of grain, which was much better just for texture, not-being-reminded-of-the-Dursleys reasons — the spices could sometimes be a bit much though. The locals often just had noodles for breakfast — which sure seemed like a midday or evening meal to Beth, but whatever — but sticky rice and crumbly flavourful bread — which she was told was actually made of rice, because of course it was, that's just what they had here — were also common, more frequently with fresh fruits and vegetables and stuff (since they were actually close to where local food was grown, obviously), only some of which were familiar to Beth, and often with a lot of herbs and spices and shite, the steam made her eyes water sometimes.

Apparently black pepper grew here naturally, this was where it came from in the first place — Beth had seen the vines growing semi-wild up in the hills, hadn't recognised them until Sam had asked her to ask their guides if the fruits were edible. (Only semi-wild, because the locals had let them 'escape' on purpose, came up into the hills to harvest them every year.) They used so much of the stuff here, not to mention the garlic and the turmeric and the ginger, and they grew hot peppers transplanted from Mexico, the American plants perfectly happy in the humid tropical environment, there was this paste they put in fucking everything, so fucking spicy, ugh...

(She was getting accustomed to the local food, but it was very much a work in progress.)

Of course, today she didn't have only her own tastes to consider — she had to think of what Hedwig would be able to eat too. She was familiar with what owl-shaped Hedwig liked to eat, but they didn't exactly have a lot of meat available here. Maybe the Soviets would have sausages today, but that was really it. Swallowing down her awkwardness with the Hedwig is a person now situation, Beth shuffled a little closer, pitched her voice to carry over the noise of the chatter of the dozens and dozens of people getting breakfast at the moment. "Um, I don't know what... There's not really gonna be any meat or anything, can you eat human food like this? That was the point of being human-shaped now, right?"

Hedwig gave her another unreadable look. "Yes."

"Um. Do you have an opinion on what to get? I think the spicy shite might be a bad idea, but other than that..."

By the way her nose scrunched up a little at the mention of spicy shite, her eyes flicking toward the Vietnamese section of the kitchen, Beth was probably right about that. "I don't know. I never eat like this."

...Right. Beth guessed they'd just have to figure it out, then.

After a moment of thought, she headed toward the Soviet side of the kitchens. The cooks could only make so much stuff at a time, and they had a big camp going, Beth wasn't the only one standing around waiting her turn — she wasn't entirely surprised when they greeted her by name, good mornings and how the fuck you doin's going around. The Communist and more socialist-leaning army groups she'd come across did tend to include women, a larger or smaller fraction depending on which country you were looking at, but they were generally, you know, adults, and not fifteen-year-old girls. She was aware talk about her had gone around by now, but that talk also normally included taking down two fire-squids and shielding that whole village their first night here, and the rumour of her just waltzing like a badass through the alien settlement completely undetected was starting to make the rounds, so she mostly didn't mind. In fact, she was asked about the latter, she spent most of the wait explaining about her invisibility cloak — yeah, other mages had invisibility cloaks, but hers was exceptionally good for some reason, no, she didn't know why...

(Along with absorbing as much of the local languages whenever possible, she'd also fleshed out her Arabic and picked up Russian — that's just what happened naturally when there were so many people speaking those languages around, omniglot thing. Russian had been quicker than Arabic, since the novgorodske she'd already spoken was very closely related, she could follow the rapid slangy conversation without any problem at all now.)

Oh, they had tvorog today! A pot of porridge was being refilled (blech), and there was a platter of bliný being set out, but the fillings and shite included a bowl of quark cheese — excellent, she'd been thinking generally carnivorous Hedwig would do better with some dairy at least. Beth made a face at the soldiers loading up their bliný or porridge with the pickled local stuff, getting laughs and teasing in return, when their turn came up just getting a couple bliný with some of the tvorog for herself and Hedwig. She'd started out just making suggestions, but Hedwig was so incredibly awkward with the utensils that Beth quickly took over for her — trying to ignore the funny looks they were getting, feeling the heat on her cheeks.

She circled around the Arab section of the kitchen and— Ah, they did have fūl midammis today, excellent. They'd definitely used some local spices, simmered the beans with coconut milk by the look of it, but it didn't smell too overly spicy, should be fine. While scooping up a bit of the stuff for herself and Hedwig, she was again asked about sneaking into the alien village, yep, that was true, invisibility cloak, ha ha, yes, she was very tiny, never heard that joke before. She then detoured to the Vietnamese section for tea. The lighter, translucent, almost flowery-smelling tea the locals drank wasn't her favourite, but the army coffee the Soviets had was harsh and practically undrinkable without sugar (and they often didn't have plain white sugar) — and they didn't have real cream either, but the flavours of the tea worked much better with this stuff that was, like, sort of sweetened condensed milk, but made with coconut instead. Honestly, she'd had no idea they could do so many things with coconuts, she'd only been familiar with the dry shavings before...

The tea didn't smell good to Hedwig, she wanted to go back to get some of the Soviet coffee instead. Well, fuck, Beth thought that shite was awful, but whatever, she guessed.

(Beth would later decide introducing Hedwig to coffee had been a bad idea — she'd never had caffeine before, it made her...odd.)

She didn't see any of her troop around, which wasn't a big shock. Since they didn't have any obligations today, she expected most of them had been drinking with the Soviets like idiots again — they might not even be up yet, and even if they were she was unlikely to spot them in the crowded kitchen tents, dozens and dozens of people all around. And she couldn't just spot the white people, since there were so many Slavic Soviets here now. Oh well, she just picked a spot at a relatively empty table — conjured, she suspected — silently congratulating herself for getting Hedwig to put her things down before sitting when she nearly fell awkwardly clambering over the bench. Definitely not used to being human-shaped, but Beth guessed she could see how that would be an adjustment...

Hedwig squeezed one of the lime slices (another thing that grew natively here, so they could get somewhat consistently) that came with the fūl over her coffee — ugh, that was gross. Well, yes, Beth had done the same thing with her tea, but tea was different than coffee, okay...

Beth and Hedwig were only sitting alone for a couple minutes before they were joined by a group of Arabs. Well, not Arabs, they were from Iraq but they were actually Kurdish — Beth had never heard of the Kurds before meeting a couple back in Africa, but they definitely weren't Arabs, their language vaguely reminding Beth of the Patils' Marāṭhī. (So, very distantly related to European languages, but not related to Arabic at all.) Or, it was actually a very mixed group sitting around Beth and Hedwig, Iraqis and Syrians, Arabs and Kurds and even a Turk, just the one Beth was most familiar with was Aştî, who was Kurdish. Ever since arriving in Indochina, Aştî had made a point of checking in with Beth now and then, because she was nosey like that, but she was generally nice and super casual about it, so it wasn't really a big deal.

Thankfully, they mostly wanted to talk about her walk through the alien settlement and the plans for the battle going on, which was a much less embarrassing topic than random strangers deciding to make sure the fifteen-year-old girl was doing okay. They did ask what the deal with Hedwig was — not helped along when Beth had to show Hedwig how to use a spoon, physically taking her hand to wrap her fingers around the handle correctly — but Beth didn't feel like talking about that just now, so she just said Hedwig only spoke English and moved on.

(Beth's Arabic still wasn't perfect, but she could follow a conversation just fine by this point. Though Aştî and her friends occasionally lapsing into Kurdish didn't help...)

By the time Beth's food was gone, nursing the remainder of her tea, their group broke up — the Iraqis were supposed to report soon (they weren't sure what for yet), and the Syrians were on construction duty today. Goodbyes went around in a mix of Arabic and Kurdish — Beth had only picked up a tiny amount of Kurdish by this point, but enough to tell that's what they were saying — and then they were gone, leaving Beth and Hedwig alone.

It only took a few seconds for Beth to begin feeling unspeakably awkward again. She really had no idea how to deal with Hedwig being human now, it was too bloody weird — also, they should probably have a talk about boundaries, now that she knew Hedwig was a person, but she really wasn't looking forward to that. Hedwig had literally been in the room while Beth touched herself before, how the fuck was she supposed to bring that up...

After a few moments, Beth uncomfortably shifting in her seat, she said, "I don't really have anything on today — I should probably check in with Luke later, but. I was just going to get another cup of tea and drop by the post office."

Hedwig nodded. "I will change back, I think. I don't like being human."

"Yeah, it's really fucking awkward to me too."

"I know." While Beth was still trying to figure out what the feeling was on that flat statement, or if there even was one at all, Hedwig pointed deeper into the kitchen/cafeteria area, in the general direction of the Vietnamese section. "Are they supposed to be here? They watch."

"What? Who?"

"Those two, there."

It took a moment for Beth to figure out who Hedwig was talking about, the cafeteria crowded enough that it was hard to tell the exact angle she should be looking. There were a pair of men standing between the Arab and Vietnamese kitchens — tall and square-shouldered and stern-faced, wearing slightly ratty-looking Soviet uniforms. Must have seen battle at some point, but hadn't they all. They didn't seem to be going for either kitchen, just, standing there, steady eyes slowly sliding over the crowd around them. Now that Hedwig had pointed them out, they did look a little out of place, though she couldn't quite put her finger on how...

"You're right," she finally admitted, "there is something about... I don't know, maybe they're looking for someone?"

"They're hunting."

Beth blinked, turned to stare at Hedwig. "What?"

"Watch," she said, nodding at the pair again.

She didn't know what she was supposed to be seeing. They were kind of sticking out, but they could just be looking for someone, she didn't think it was too—

Their uniforms didn't match.

She meant, they were wearing Soviet uniforms, but they looked...not like locals, but. Indians, maybe? A little darker than the Patils, but probably still from that general area of the world, yeah. Now, that wasn't entirely out of the question, it was definitely possible that there were Indians living in the USSR — and there were some, like, central Asian states in the Union...though they didn't look much like Indians at all. Sort of, vaguely, but not really close enough to confuse the two. They would have to live somewhere in the USSR, because India had their own landing to worry about, they weren't sending their people anywhere else.

Except, that didn't make any sense either — the Soviets were sending help to multiple fronts, and obviously any Indian citizens they had would have been sent to India, just to help make things go more smootherly. (She assumed that was why they'd sent mostly central Asians, predominantly Muslim, to work with the Arab forces approaching the landing in the Congo from the northeast.) Beth hadn't met literally everyone the Soviets had sent, but everyone she remembered seeing in Soviet uniform here in Indochina were all white people, so far.

And they did look rather out of place, standing in the middle of the cafeteria and scanning the tables. Beth didn't know what Hedwig meant by hunting, but it was odd. And the more she watched, the more they were giving her a bad feeling.

Beth adjusted her wand holster, making sure she could draw her wand quickly...and after a second's pause reached under the table to unlatch the flap covering her thigh holster. (Firearms generally didn't like getting wet, and they were in a tropical bloody forest.) "Stay here," she muttered, before getting to her feet and circling around their table. They were probably just being paranoid, but if it turned out there was something amiss going on, she didn't want Hedwig along. Beth might still have no fucking clue how to handle Hedwig being a person now, but she definitely still didn't want her to get hurt — if something did happen, Hedwig had no means to defend herself.

(Honestly, she should probably get Hedwig a wand at some point, just in case. Could wilderfolk even use wands? She should ask.)

As she started across the cafeteria toward the suspicious pair — at an easy, casual pace, taking a somewhat indirect path toward them, trying not to draw attention to herself — the men started to move, drifting a little closer to the Vietnamese kitchen, and deeper into the cafeteria area, the tables thick with locals and Arabs and the more adventurous Soviets. (Most of them preferred their own stuff, but Beth noticed a trickle had started to favour Arab or local food instead, white faces increasingly popping up at their tables.) The pair were occasionally greeted by someone, the two just wordlessly nodding back, continuing on their slow, directionless way deeper into the cafeteria. Beth noticed some of the Soviets were watching them, frowning — apparently Hedwig wasn't the only one to notice something was off with the pair.

They slowed near the Vietnamese kitchen area, not quite approaching the counter — a line of people were there waiting their turn for noodles, Beth spotted Al-Shamali with a Laotian officer (couldn't think of his name, only knew him by sight). Feeling inexplicably on edge, the hairs at the back of her neck standing up, Beth came up behind them, one of the two spotting her, turning to stare blankly and steadily. Jesus, these bastards were tall, bulky and broad-shouldered. Coming to a stop a couple feet away, Beth cleared her throat, did her best to brush off her unease. "You blokes looking for someone?"

The one facing her sneered just a little, and said—

Beth froze, her entire body suddenly thrumming with tension.

That wasn't a language she knew, but it did sound familiar — similar to Marāṭhī, but not quite the same, different enough she didn't follow it. Hindi, presumably, they were closely related. But it shouldn't matter whether she actually spoke the language very well at all, because omniglots were huge fucking cheaters...or at least Beth was, she'd gotten the feeling from other omniglots that she had a somewhat easier time of it than most, for whatever reason. Even if she didn't understand the words at all, she'd still get the general feeling of what was being said — not enough to perfectly understand it, of course, but it was enough to get a vague impression of the intent, enough to point and grunt their way through a simple conversation if she really had to. And it didn't stop with languages she was already fluent in, either, though she normally wasn't fully conscious of it, her mind reflexively grasping for bits of slang or other useful information, at the edge of her awareness. It felt natural to her, she never noticed, only brought to her attention when it didn't happen — like when Snape or Dumbledore blocked her off with occlumency, for example.

This time, she got nothing. Not even the hard wall of mind magic either, just a blank, cold, empty void, like suddenly finding herself standing on the edge of a cliff.

"SCABS!" she shouted, her wand popping into her hand with a flick of her—

In a blink, the bloke facing her stepped forward and kicked, the blow catching her in the stomach — she didn't feel the pain at all, at first, just the pressure, folding her over and driving the air from her longs, she crashed hard onto her back, a hard sharp ache lancing through her middle—

The men had yanked open their uniform jackets, standing back to back, their hands over their heads. They weren't wearing shirts, showing bare skin, but there was something wrong with it, bulging out and moving, like there was something shifting around just underneath, dozens of them, little hard lumps pulling up and crawling over each other, and they shouted in unison, deep and loud and harsh, "Dūɦa roïku pratte!"

Beth didn't get anything from the tall, ugly aliens, for whatever reason, but the lizards were somewhat more readable — but they didn't exactly talk much, so she'd still only picked up tiny snippets of the language. But she knew this, it was a battle cry or something, she'd heard it enough that she knew what it meant.

Death to our enemies.

"Kristallini akropoli!"

The glittery silver shield went up the instant before the world vanished in fire.

Beth was deafened by a cacophony of clanging and banging and booming, gusts of wind and roars of fire, screaming and yelling coming from all directions — she could hardly see, beyond the curve of her shield charm only smoke and flames, her vision blurring and smearing grey at the intense pull on her magic, searing heat down her arm, wrenching a groan from her throat. She could feel the shield struck with dozens of heavy impacts all across the surface, its pull on her magic wrenching to keep up, interference crawling like static up her arm, a memory of Sirius talking to her about shield charms that could handle gunfire whispering in her ears — there weren't very many, magical shields generally weren't designed with those kinds of forces in mind — and then there was a second wave, another chorus of crashing and roaring and hissing ringing in her head and chest, and she felt her shield shatter, the interference from the impacts disrupting it and tearing it apart, Beth hissed through her teeth at the backlash sizzling up her arm and into her chest, a deep whistling buzz as something passed by over her—

Bugs. The bugs the aliens used for grenades, that's what those were. The pair must have strapped dozens and dozens of them to themselves, hidden somehow under a human disguise. Beth hadn't realised they could look like people, when the fuck...

Her head was still spinning from the backlash of the failing shield charm, dizzy and nauseous, but she forced herself to concentrate, squinting to get her eyes to focus — the canvas of the tent overhead was on fire, greedy yellow-orange flames rapidly crawling over the surface, smoke churning in the air. There was a lot of shouting going on, in pain or calling for help, but Beth couldn't make sense of any of it, too many languages going on and too disoriented from the backlash to keep them straight. Groaning, she pushed herself up on her elbows.

It wasn't a suicide bombing, both of the aliens were still alive — they'd been standing back to back, their hands up, the bugs must have been on their fronts and sides. Their false human skin had burst open, a great bloody hole rent open from shoulder to waist, revealing grey tattooed skin beneath, still fixed to them everywhere else, the pair not having paused to fully remove their disguise. (The bombing hadn't killed them, but she guessed they didn't intend to get out alive anyway, pausing to properly strip off their disguise meant they could do less damage before they were put down.) They both had weapons, not the funny snake spear-whip things the scab soldiers normally used but the curved short-swords seen in the hands of the dinos and workers and the like, as Beth watched moving to butcher the injured. And there were dead and injured around, gashes and holes punched into bodies, or scorched from the fire, she could hear moaning and shouting, but she didn't have time to think about that, she brought up her wand, aiming for the nearer one, only a couple steps away—

Before she could get a curse out he skipped across the couple steps separating them and lashed out with a kick. The hard impact against her arm wrenched her sideways, her hand going limp letting her wand tumble away — the pain hit a heartbeat later, intense, taking her breath away, blinding white hot agony stabbing up her arm into her elbow, making her head pound and her stomach churn, for fuck's sake, not again...

The foot came down on her hip, hard, the alien's weight pressing down as he leaned over her, she groaned through her teeth, glaring back up at him. Sneering, he growled, "Rrūshk mo plzhālitc junɦo-zhat si, al-dzhēdaj." The exact meaning was beyond her, but she got that he was saying something like go to hell, bitch. His hand raised, prepared to bring his sword swinging down toward her.

But Beth had already drawn her side-arm.

Her hand shaking a little from the pain and the backlash, bang-bang-bang! the heavy jerking of the pistol in her hand almost a physical impact, the sound from so close deafening. All but flailing, shooting with one hand — and her left hand, at that — her aim was pretty shite, but at this distance it didn't have to be very good. The first shot tore through the alien's hip, sending him lurching, the second missed completely — but the third struck him right in the head, under the jaw and up through the palate and into the skull, the back of his head bursting out in a splatter of gore. The alien immediately went limp, collapsing out of Beth's view down and to her right, the weight against her hip lifting away.

Dropping her finger well away from the trigger, Beth's hand — faintly numb and tingly from the force of the pistol going off, wrist aching a little from the kick-back — fell limply to her side. She let out a deep, shaky sigh, and for a moment just laid there, staring up at the flaming tent, her injured arm burning and stinging and her whole body all but shivering with adrenaline. That had been too fucking close.

She guessed she owed Luke an apology — she had ended up using this bloody thing.

(In retrospect, she'd realise there'd been a moment for a cool one-liner in there, but she'd been too dazed and in pain to think of it at the time.)

For the next several minutes the scene was absolute chaos. She had heard other gunshots, someone else must have downed the other one, some mages turned up and quickly put out all the fires. The tents were a fucking disaster, equipment and people torn apart by the force of the rain of bug-grenades, the blood turning the dirt thick and muddy underfoot. As healers and medics started crawling through the injured, Beth had managed to sit up by that point, fuck, people with awful weeping blackened burns covering big sections of their body, slashed open by passing bugs, some of them with holes punched right through them, blood and scorched flesh everywhere, the smell was terrible, mixing with the smoke into something that made her eyes water and her stomach lurch, she—

A healer got to her, quickly determined she wasn't badly injured — though her wrist was broken again, because of fucking course it was. (This was the third time she'd broken her wrist in this fucking war, bloody thing.) He quick immobilised it with a charm and a conjured splint, they'd fix it properly once they were done stabilising the more serious cases. After all, Beth's wrist wasn't going to get any worse, but the time a healer spent on her might well save the life of someone else. Beth was firmly ordered to get the fuck out of here so she'd be out of the way while they dealt with the really bad ones — she didn't need telling twice (it smelled fucking awful in here, and it was really hard to avoid staring at the unnervingly mangled bodies), but she didn't see where her wand went, did anyone find a wand over here somewhere? A Soviet medic held out a wand she found, yeah, that was hers, thanks. It was a little hard getting the damn thing back into its holster, the splint kind of in the way (fiddling around making her wrist twinge), but she managed it, and then quickly got herself the fuck out of the way, stumbling away on shaky knees.

She didn't make it very far out of the ruined kitchen tents. A crowd had begun to gather, the lanes between the scattered tents and sheds and shacks that made up the camp choked with people, some running around in one direction or another and others just standing around arguing. Pushing through the crowd would probably just result in Beth further injuring her wrist, so she plopped down onto the dirt instead, leaning against a simple wood-sided shack, hastily constructed with magic. (This was food storage, she was pretty sure.) She was only alone for a couple seconds before Hedwig turned up, silently crouched down next to her — oh good, Hedwig looked perfectly fine, she hadn't gotten caught up in it, then...

Over the next minutes, her troop gradually gathered around her, having been summoned by the commotion and quickly spotting her sitting here. Before too long all of them were here, short only Bill and Luke (who were presumably busy elsewhere) — by this point the adrenaline was wearing off, leaving Beth feeling tired and sore and shivery, her wrist aching something awful, a heavy piercing throb echoing each beat of her heart. She didn't feel like telling the story of what happened over and over and over, so after the first couple times she just left it to Sam to catch up everyone else.

Without really noticing it was happening, she ended up leaning her head against Hedwig's shoulder, her arm warm and firm around her back. She belatedly realised Hedwig had probably sat on Beth's right side to prevent anyone else from coming up and jostling her injured arm, the splint resting still against Hedwig's knee...

Exactly who the hell Hedwig was came up almost immediately, but the muggle blokes took it much more easily than Beth was — it was fucking weird, of course, but all magic was still kind of weird to them, they brushed it off pretty quickly. Kind of jealous of that, honestly, she was sitting here snuggled up with the woman and she still wasn't used to it, it was uncomfortable. She probably wouldn't be cool with this if she weren't so very unsettled at the moment...

News slowly trickled out to them over the next...however long, Beth didn't know, impossible to say. There were definitely a bunch of people dead, but it'd probably be days before they had a final casualty count. Among the dead was Major Al-Shamali, the Syrian officer who'd come with them from Africa. Over the next couple days, it'd quickly become very clear that if the aliens had been intending to intimidate them with their little sneak attack, they'd drastically miscalculated — Al-Shamali had been quite popular with his men, and the Syrians were infuriated with losing him by such a dirty trick, they'd soon be extremely motivated to attack the settlement and kill everyone there.

Not that the same couldn't be said for the rest of the camp, honestly, the Syrians were hardly unique in that attitude. They'd had plenty enough reasons to want the aliens all dead already, but posing as humans somehow and blowing up the cafeteria in the middle of breakfast had been crossing a line. By the next day, after the news had spread around, everyone wanted blood — that settlement was completely fucked.

They were just starting to get a sense of how bad it was looking in there — dozens of people were dead, at least, including a fair number of local volunteers who'd been working the kitchens — when someone turned up looking for Beth. That she'd been at ground zero had gotten around, the officers wanted to talk to her. Right, okay, then. As weak and shaky as she was feeling, it was a little hard to get up to her feet (not made easier by still not being able to use her right arm), she ended up needing help from Hedwig and Sam. The rest of her troop stayed where they were, but Hedwig stuck with her. Which was a little awkward, but whatever, fine.

That Hedwig had invited herself turned out all right anyway, since the officers rather wanted to know how she'd identified them in the first place. Unfortunately for them, she didn't have a good answer — their body language, the way they'd been lingering and looking around, they'd just seemed off to her, like they didn't belong. They were less than satisfied with that, but they moved on easily enough.

(Beth wasn't present for this conversation, but apparently a few days later Hedwig would be tapped by the officers to keep an eye out for suspicious persons in the camp. They would start being more careful about keeping track of who was leaving and entering — before they hadn't really bothered, just let locals come up to help if they felt like it — but they didn't know what the aliens were capable of, might as well have Hedwig keep a look out anyway. Which wasn't a bad idea, because she'd end up identifying infiltrators a few times over the course of the campaign, alerting people so the aliens could be quietly surrounded before being taken down with little fuss. Beth was pretty sure that was how Hedwig had ended up technically enlisted, with a salary and everything, complete with back-doored British citizenship, thanks to some pencil-pusher at some point somewhere fiddling about with paperwork in response to a note someone must have made about it, but they wouldn't figure out about that until much later.)

During the meeting with the officers, she was told that her warning and the shield had probably saved the lives of...well, some people, they didn't know exactly at this point. Some had reacted quickly enough to dive to the ground, the bugs flying clear over them, and her shield had held up well enough that an entire cone stretching out behind her had been practically untouched. The attack had been bad, but it could have been a lot worse — there was a bit of praise at her quick-thinking and shite, honestly Beth barely reacted, still a little dazed from the incident and distracted by her injured wrist. Nobody seemed to care that she wasn't acting properly flattered or whatever the fuck at the moment, at least.

The officers didn't have much better of an explanation for what the fuck just happened than Beth did. Best they could figure, the aliens must have some kind of...skin-suit, that let them look like humans — they thought it was another of their weird engineered creatures, and not literally skin they'd flayed off of some poor bastard in India, but at this point they weren't really sure. It was a little curious that the aliens had pretended to be Indians, even speaking what Beth was pretty sure was Hindi. It was possible that the aliens didn't understand them well enough to properly reflect racial differences — though they had gotten convincing Soviet uniforms, probably pulled off of soldiers killed or captured in a previous skirmish — but they couldn't depend on the aliens continuing to fuck that up forever, they wouldn't be putting it on the list of things to watch out for, just in case. It was just interesting that the aliens seemed to know as little about them as they knew about the aliens.

Which wasn't really a surprise, when Beth thought about it — they had seemed blindsided by magic, and even a few muggle tricks too. (Especially nuclear weapons, how quickly they'd backed off after the Americans managed to nail a couple of their big ships was pretty suggestive, and also oddly funny.) If the aliens had gathered intelligence before planning their attack, it sure seemed like they hadn't done a very good job. One theory Beth had heard floating around was that they'd only observed Earth from very very far out, perhaps hundreds of light-years, so they'd drastically underestimated their level of technological development. They were having serious difficulty dealing with magical and even muggle opposition, but turn time back a hundred years and conquering the whole planet with the forces they'd brought probably wouldn't have posed them any problem at all. The mages would have been a pain, yes, but with much less advanced (and less numerous) muggles to help pull their weight...

Beth suspected they were familiar with the concept of magic — the more times she heard it, the more convinced she became that dzhēdaj was an insult specific to mages — but that they hadn't been prepared for the number of mages they'd be facing, or how useful magic could be in a fight. Perhaps, they had had mages in the past, but they were superstitious about it and wiped them all out or something, so their magic had never become nearly as developed as it was here? Or perhaps there were more of these aliens out there somewhere, attacking other worlds, and they'd encountered magic elsewhere, also possible. If they were unfamiliar with magic, but they'd stumbled across less thoroughly-developed magical traditions somewhere else, that would also explain it...

At this point, there was a theory going around that there must be other inhabited planets besides Earth out there, and they weren't the only ones being attacked. The aliens had attempted to communicate with them on various occasions, using languages other than their own — unfortunately for them, those were equally unfamiliar to literally everyone who'd been shown a recording, completely unidentifiable. Their suspicion was that these languages were spoken by other people out there, somewhere, but there was really no way to confirm it at this point. There was no way to make contact with any potential allies in bloody outer space — most muggle scientists had been under the impression that faster-than-light travel and communications were impossible up until the instant the aliens showed up — so for all intents and purposes they might as well not exist. It was interesting to think about, though.

And it would make sense if these aliens were aware of other people out there, and assumed the people here were somehow related — for complicated military strategy and logistics reasons Beth didn't really follow, the higher-ups suspected the fleet attacking them was only a small detachment of a much larger force. As far as they could tell, whatever other resources the aliens might have out there hadn't been mustered to back them up here — either it would take time for them to put something together, they were too strained with too many ongoing engagements to send back up, or the commander here was simply too embarrassed by getting his arse kicked failing to crush the primitive, planet-bound civilisation here that he was delaying telling his superiors about it — so for the time being it was only an interesting question to ponder and not immediately relevant.

As far the attack today, there were rumours going around that the aliens could disguise themselves as humans, but only rumours. They actually had no idea whether anyone had managed to confirm it yet — if someone had, word hadn't gotten to them here. They'd been told that their communications problem had been solved, they'd be getting sent new equipment as soon as possible — the same magic radio Hermione had helped invent, Beth assumed — but as of now it still took time for information to spread to everyone who needed to know it, letters carried around with portkeys and apparation. The mages had been told to preserve the alien bodies and ship them off to the labcoats. Hopefully someone would be able to come up with answers, because this shite was fucking unacceptable.

Of course, they would want to plan a response to the attack as soon as possible — in fact, while Beth was still in the meeting with the officers she started hearing mortar and rocket fire in the distance, emplacements up in the hills bombarding the settlement in retaliation. They wanted to know if she could sneak down to the settlement under her invisibility cloak and plant mines. Well, sure, she guessed? There was only so much room under the cloak, though, they'd have to test if an expanded bag would fuck up the explosives. They didn't think so, but putting a concealing charm on them would interfere with triggering them remotely. Just use a mechanical trigger, then, on a timer — the Soviets had some low-tech shite like that laying around (in case an EMP burst from a tactical nuke fucked with their electronics, which was an absurd precaution to take but whatever), and so did the Vietnamese, so that wouldn't be too difficult to put together.

They should probably get Sam to do it, though, she didn't know shite about setting mines. Um, yes, Sam would be able to use the invisibility cloak, but only if she specifically allowed him to — Lavender had tried to steal it once and Hermione borrowed it without asking first, and it hadn't worked properly for either of them, but if she let Hermione borrow it it worked just fine. If they wanted to borrow her invisibility cloak for something, of course she'd cooperate, just, it would only work correctly if she personally handed it to the person who'd be using it. Don't ask her why, magic is fucking weird sometimes, that's just how it works.

By that point, the officers weren't really paying any attention to her anymore, talking among themselves about stuff, and her wrist was starting to really fucking hurt — she hadn't been given any pain killers, of course, and it was getting all swollen and shite, painful enough it was starting to make her nauseous — so she asked if she could be excused to go find the healers. The kitchen tents were still a mess when she got back, but somewhat more orderly, in the process of being turned into a field hospital. Since they had mages on hand, they'd even conjured up white tents to section areas off, people bustling around in a somewhat more orderly fashion. Of course, now that there were tents and shite up she had absolutely no idea where she was supposed to go.

The first medic she bumped into told her to stay here, before vanishing into one of the tents. A couple minutes later, he came up with two tiny little potion vials and a big ibuprofen tablet — the serious pain relief potions were all reserved for the more badly injured, apparently, which was fair enough. The potions were relatively slow-acting, the man prodded through her splint at her arm for a moment (Beth gritting her teeth against the harsh flares of pain), right, everything was all aligned correctly, keep the splint on overnight and check back in with a healer tomorrow morning before taking it off. The man pulled a roll of bandages out of a pack, wrapped around the splint for a bit to make sure everything stayed in place, there, just leave it like that, she'd be fine. The medic then went off back to whatever he'd been doing when she showed up — it looked like he was off on a supply run — leaving Beth alone again.

Well, not alone — Hedwig was still silently looming over her shoulder, presumably out of a lack of anything better to do. It was a little weird she was still human-shaped, Beth would figure she would have switched back at the first opportunity...

...

Right, so. Beth didn't have anything better to do either — except get her invisibility cloak to whoever they were going to tap to lay the mines, she guessed, but they'd find her for that later — so she was just going to go ahead and check the post office, then.

For the first few weeks she'd been out here, the different militaries around had all kept their own internal postal systems going, working in parallel. Which, that was a thing militaries normally had, for morale reasons, you know. Beth had been told that letters and shite were actually getting around quicker than people were used to, since now they were exploiting portkeys and apparation and shite to move things around — and with the addition of space-expanding enchantments, it really wasn't difficult to cram a dozen letters in a box and have someone pop away with it. It hadn't taken so long, though, for someone somewhere to decide that keeping their separate systems going was just impractical. Especially with how they had different units scattered all over the place across the world, often moved around on short notice, it was just more effort than it was really worth for every military operational in a location to have their separate shite going when they could streamline it, send everything in and out through one channel. Also better for security and efficiency reasons, when she thought about it, that probably helped.

So, when Beth had started out, all of her letters had gone through the BFPO, but now they went through the streamlined, universal system they'd gradually slapped together over the last couple months. It made little difference to her, the only change on her end was that the format of her 'address' was somewhat different after the switchover, no big deal.

The post office was run out of a little three-walled shack, magicked into shape by someone at some point. On the insides of the walls were a bunch of different cubbies, sorted by which military you were with and different units and shite, which Beth mostly didn't have to bother keeping track of, since her troop were the only British people here. (Her box was marked with her service number, though of course she'd memorised that by now.) There were people who filled the boxes and shite, but they didn't stick around to hand people their stuff, they all just walked up and grabbed it themselves. Thanks to the commotion with the hit on the kitchens and the intermittent bombardment of the alien settlement she still heard going on in the distance, the post office was pretty empty, Beth just walked right up to her box — she did have a few letters, not a surprise, been a few days since she'd checked. She grabbed the lot and walked off, flipping through them as she went.

Got a letter from Sirius, as usual — he'd been writing her at least once a week, making sure they were both still alive and all that. He was still in Africa, which was going reasonably well, last she'd checked. (Though the alien occupation was very rough on the locals, Beth suspected entire ethnic groups were going to be wiped out before it was over.) Another from Hermione, as usual, which was noticeably thicker than Sirius's, also as usual. Not that Beth minded the babbling, Hermione going off on current events back home and her nerdy shite was a decent distraction if nothing else. She had another letter from Parvati and Lavender, which was unusual — they didn't get along great, to put it mildly, but they'd heard somehow that Beth had joined the SCF and apparently gave enough of a damn to keep in touch. (Beth appreciated it way more than she would have expected, honestly, the girls' letters silly and gossipy but normal, it was strangely sweet.) And the last one in the bunch was from—

Beth froze, staring down at the front of the envelope.

—Mr Weasley? What...?

...She suddenly had a very bad feeling about this. Beth quickly found an out of the way spot to plonk down onto the ground, squirrelled away somewhere among the Soviet tents. She tore open the BFPO-branded envelope — there'd been notices in newspapers and shite back home about how mages could write to loved ones overseas, there was some way they could owl order envelopes — pulled out the sheet of parchment.

Elizabeth—

I do hope this letter finds you well. We don't get much in the way of news back home, and what we do hear of the progress of the war mostly concerns the fighting in Africa — Hermione tells us you were moved to Indochina. She does tell us stories now and then, when she comes by. We don't see much of Hermione either, she spends so much time working on her project, which is very fascinating, but you know how Hermione can be. Covering that village was very brave of you, if perhaps unwise, though I'm sure you realise that by now.
Molly insists you must come home for Christmas if you can manage it. I have told her that likely won't be possible, but you know Molly.
I didn't know how to start this letter. I don't want to be too much trouble, I know you must be very busy there, but it didn't feel appropriate to jump right into bad news. I debated whether to tell you at all — I wouldn't wish to endanger you by providing what might be a distraction in a very dangerous situation. But leaving it until the fighting is over and you return home seemed even more cruel than not mentioning it at all.
I don't know if you're aware, but the twins joined a volunteer relief group helping with the refugees in Africa. They had tried to join the SCF with you and Sirius, but Molly put her foot down — of course, those two couldn't just sit here and do nothing, they found a group who would take them and were gone before Molly could say a word about it. Very proud of them, of course, all the work down there that needs doing, so many people killed or forced from their homes, starving and ill. As much trouble as they can be at times, they're such good boys at heart.
The camp they were working at was hit. I'm sorry to tell you this, Beth, through a letter from halfway around the world, but Fred and George are both gone. Trying to help evacuate the refugees, it seems. They were caught up in one of those fire bombs, I'm told it would have been so quick they probably didn't even see it coming. No drawn out suffering, they were simply helping to evacuate the camp one second, and the next they were just gone. There isn't even anything left to bury.
We'll be holding a vigil on the second. November, that is. I understand if you can't make it — you are very far away, and I have no idea how long it will take this letter to reach you. And if I'm being honest, I think my brave, selfless boys would have preferred you stay where you are, to continue doing what you can to protect the people there. Please don't trouble yourself if you can't be here, I understand.

That's all I had to say, I suppose. Good luck out there, Beth. We'll see you when this is all over.

—Arthur

For long moments, Beth could only stare at the letter, blank and cold and uncomprehending, the words dancing behind her eyes.

The Second. Today was the Fifth.

She'd already missed it. Before she could even be told what happened, she'd already missed Fred and George's—

Fred and George were dead, and she'd missed it.

Beth didn't cry, exactly. She kind of expected she would cry? She'd known plenty of people who'd died in this war by now, and she didn't always cry about it, but nobody she'd really known that well before the invasion started had died yet — though she had spent a lot of time with her team, so she wasn't sure how much the distinction mattered at this point. And, there might have been people she knew before who'd died at some point, but if they had they weren't close enough for Beth to have even heard about it yet. She was reasonably close with the twins, like, there was the quidditch team and everything, Wood was such a fucking insane slavedriver about it, but she wouldn't say they were that close because, like, it was hard to have a moment with the twins because they were never serious about anything ever, but it was still—

She would have expected she would cry, but she didn't, really. She, just, sat there, between the tents, staring blankly down at Mr Weasley's letter in her hands. She was definitely feeling something, but she couldn't say what it was, a big heavy black frigid something pressing down on her, squeezing around her ribs, she could hardly even breathe, she could see the letter was moving, her hands shaking, but—

It was hard to believe the twins were, just, gone. Too big, the thought, she couldn't...

She wasn't really paying attention, twitched a little at the arm going around her shoulders, gently tugging her a little to the side — Hedwig, that was weirdly human-shaped Hedwig, right. She let herself be pulled in to lean against the bloody odd woman, without really thinking about it, her breath sharp and harsh, she— It was still hard to breathe, the thought too heavy, cold and hard...

"What is it?" Instead of trying to talk, Beth lifted the letter up toward her. "I can't read. Not well."

...Oh. Well, obviously, Beth should have guessed that — it wasn't like Hedwig would have ever gone to school or something, after all. Post owls didn't need to be able to read the address to get the letter to where it needed to go, it was a magic thing...and apparently post owl magic worked for Hedwig, despite her being a person...but Beth guessed she was also an owl, so...

(This surprise, Hedwig is a person! thing hadn't stopped being extremely fucking weird yet.)

"You know the twins? Ron's older brothers."

"Yes. I carry orders for them sometimes."

"Really? I didn't know that..." Not that it was Beth's business, of course — she'd actually told Hermione before that she didn't need to ask for Beth's permission before sending letters to her parents with Hedwig, she probably wasn't happy cooped up in the owlery all the time anyway — especially now that she knew Hedwig was a person, but she would have thought the twins would have mentioned it at some point...

"They bribe me with food. They're nice."

...Oh, well. Okay. "They're dead. They were volunteering at a refugee camp, and it was hit, and... They're dead."

For a moment Hedwig was silent, still, just, holding Beth — which she couldn't imagine was pleasant, she felt all rigid and cold and, probably felt all stiff and boney and jagged, you know. "I'm sorry. I did like them."

"Yeah." Beth didn't really have anything else to say, just— She hurt, a hard cold burning in her chest, her limbs seeming to ache for no apparent reason...though her broken wrist did still hurt, obviously, she didn't mean like that. She still wasn't crying though, not sure what was up with that...

After sitting in silence for a couple minutes — Beth guessed there really wasn't anything else to say, it sucked and that was that — she felt her hair shifting. Little bits at a time, lifted this way or that, fiddling with this or that, straightening shite out along the part...

Hedwig was picking at her hair with her other hand.

She always did that, seemingly just because — except she'd usually use her beak, but of course she didn't actually have one of those just now. (And it'd be weird for human-shaped Hedwig to play with Beth's hair with her teeth.) Whenever they were sitting together, the big bloody bird sitting on Beth's shoulder while she read or just stared out the owlery window or whatever, there she'd go picking at her hair. Didn't know what the deal with that was, she'd kind of just assumed it was an affectionate thing? Beth's hair was always a fucking mess, and at first it kind of put her in mind of, back at Little Whinging, mums idly straightening kids' hair, you know...

It was a little odd with Hedwig being person-shaped now, those being actual fingers plucking at her hair, without the more sharp edge of a beak. But it was still familiar, she'd done this so many times...

"You're playing with my hair again," Beth muttered. She still wasn't crying, but her voice came out thick and croaky anyway, didn't know what was up with that.

Hedwig's fingers paused for a second. "Yes. I can stop."

"It's okay." She tried to relax against the woman, but it was hard, still feeling all stiff and cold and painful and she didn't know, exactly, the heavy whatever the fuck it was still crushing down on her. Hedwig was warm, and the fingers playing with her hair was oddly nice, but it was still weird that she wasn't crying...

She'd already had a long fucking day and it couldn't be much later than ten in the morning yet. If they decided to hit the aliens today she'd be out of it, thanks to the broken wrist, but she'd still need to hand off her invisibility cloak to someone to set the mines. Until then she didn't have anywhere to be, just tried to relax, breathing against the crushing cold weight pressing in still unreasonably difficult, trying to focus on the feeling of Hedwig's fingers playing with her hair, her arm warm and firm around her.

(It was still seriously fucking strange that Hedwig was a person now, that she'd been a person this whole time — but even with all that, Beth still loved this bloody bird.)

Chapter Text

20th January 1996 (63:9:10)
— Contact plus 00.04.17:14.00

Beth woke up with a terrible headache.

Her head was pounding, thick and hard, and her mouth was all sticky and dry and gross, her throat aching — and also she was far too warm, sweating. Blinking her eyes open, wincing against the filtered light... Had she closed the tent flaps? Why the hell would she do that? It was fucking January, and it seemed like it was only getting hotter, thanks to them being well more inland now, the mountains blocking off the moderating influence of the sea. The temperature peaking over 30 most days, it was fucking miserable. It wasn't so bad during the night, sure, almost getting down to reasonable British temperatures, but she must have slept long enough for it to start warming up again. At least it wasn't constantly fucking raining anymore, but still, ugh...

Also, she terribly needed to pee.

Yep, hung over, this was a hangover. Beth had only had one once before, after winning the school quidditch tournament back in third year — Katie had convinced Beth to try some gin, and she'd quickly proceeded to have far too much. (In her defence, she hadn't realised how strongly alcoholic it was, she'd thought it was just like mead or wine or something?) She didn't remember the latter end of the night at all, honestly, Hermione had ended up bringing her up to bed, completely blacked out. She'd been terribly nauseous and miserable the next morning, and, she hadn't tried to move yet, but she didn't think she'd fucked herself that badly this time...

There was sometimes alcohol being passed around in the camp, but Beth had never touched any of it, not wanting to be incapacitated if a surprise attack came. There'd been multiple attempted infiltrations since the aliens had bombed them at breakfast a couple months ago now, some of them even getting far enough to kill people, so she called that a very good decision. But they had, finally, after months of fighting, managed to finish off the northern part of the alien invasion — cutting off all the little tendrils spread out into the mountains, pinning the greater part of the landing against the river, and obliterated them all. It'd been a hell of a bloody slog, not at all helped by the aliens having reprogrammed thousands and thousands of locals, but the worst of the alien emplacements had been softened up with missile strikes by the Soviets, the mages popping in as soon as the blasts cleared to follow up with fiendfyre and the like and popping away again while the flames were still burning...

Beth's arm still ached from all the magic she'd been channelling over the last week or so. Fiendfyre was shockingly easy to cast, but stopping it before it could wash over their people was much harder. Though, once they'd started closing in on the last alien outpost in the north they hadn't let up, and it'd expanded enough the place was huge — cast enough powerful curses for long enough, a week straight with few breaks, and yeah, it wasn't any surprise that her wand arm still hurt. At this point she was probably going to end up with long-term nerve damage...though there were potions for that...

After the long bloody fight, and they'd won, there'd been a big fucking party, because of course there had been. Not right away, there was cleanup to do, injured to evacuate, but once they were certain the aliens had been cleared out, the word had come down from the officers that they were getting a break — they'd be moved south soon to help the group closing in on the other major landing site remaining, somewhere in the Mekong Delta near the southern tip of the peninsula, but until then they could take a break, rest for a while. Around the same time the news had been spreading that the African landing had just been finished off, the international force there proceeding with cleanup as they prepared to relocate to India, further driving in the idea that the aliens could be beaten. They might not be able to reach the ones up in space, but on the ground they were winning.

Of course, the enormous army camp, spread out over what had to be a few square kilometres, instead of relaxing had instantly burst into celebration. Really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, Beth thought — turned out fighting against a literal alien invasion was seriously fucking stressful. She was hardly the only person who'd needed a break.

As she woke up further, bits and pieces of the events of the previous night gradually trickling in — she didn't think she'd blacked out at all, like last time, but her memory still felt fuzzy — — starting to notice more about what she was feeling than just how fucking miserable she was, it clicked that she wasn't uncomfortably warm just because the tent flaps were closed. It also explained why drunk, past-Beth had decided to close them in the first place.

She wasn't alone in here.

Distantly, still half awake, she felt the soft pressure of another body to her back, what had to be an arm limply hanging around her waist, a soft, slow in and out of breath against the nape of her neck.

Beth glanced down — she belatedly noted she was naked, her still-too-pale skin practically glowing in the warm morning light seeping through the fabric of the tent. The arm, the hand resting against the foam of the bedroll near her waist, was significantly darker than Beth, the kind of funny olive-ish not-quite-brown of a lot of the locals.

...Oh.

Slowly, Beth was remembering this now. She'd already been rather tipsy after accepting some vódka from Taisa and her friends — had a funny taste to it, not nearly as good as that gin Katie gave her, the Russians kept laughing at the face she made — had wandered into a more local-coloured area of the party, someone had gotten music going somehow — functional electronics were an increasing rarity as the weeks dragged on, running out of fresh batteries to power them — and someone had been frying up some food, it smelled amazing, and she'd suddenly been terribly hungry. Hanging out for a while, accepting some more liquor, getting quite drunk, and she'd ended up dancing somehow — she'd obviously been very drunk, because Beth did not dance (especially since she didn't know local dances at all) — and she'd ended up getting very, um, friendly with a woman, apparently too drunk to care that they were in public, not to mention that she'd hardly even kissed a girl before, and...

She had sex.

Beth had sex last night. She was remembering this, now, the dim, blurry memories flicking in her head making her breath catch and, just, get even more uncomfortably warm. She'd kind of been fumbling, and— Hadn't known what the fuck she was doing, obviously, but the woman hadn't seemed to be too frustrated with Beth not knowing what the fuck she was doing (or maybe she'd also just been too drunk to care), there'd been a lot of giggling, and—

(Remembering the woman touching her, Beth's hand fisted in sweaty hair, could barely breathe, shivering as it hit her, was making Beth squirm. Just, fucking hell, that happened...)

It occurred to Beth that she didn't even remember her name. She must have been told it at some point, but she'd been drunk, and she didn't remember. Beth had just had sex, for the first time, with a perfect bloody stranger, and she only kind of half-way remembered it, because she'd been drunk halfway out of her mind.

...

Oops?

Beth's squirming must have been enough to wake the woman up — she froze, going almost painfully rigid, the arm around her tightened a little, shifting against her back... Beth thought she was stretching, a breathless little groan leaking from her throat, before she relaxed again, settling against Beth. Her breath brushing along the back of her neck, the woman muttered...something. Maybe not awake enough to think in other languages yet, and also Beth was kind of freaking out a little bit at the moment, she didn't pick up on it.

"Um." She scrambled for a second, trying to— Tiếng Việt, she looked like a local, Vietnamese was probably her best bet. It took another couple seconds to get herself to think straight, and even then all she managed was, "Sorry, what?"

Beth felt the woman stiffen against her. After a moment she moved, the light pressure against her back lifting away — Beth's sweaty skin being exposed to the air felt really good, actually, but. She tipped her shoulder back a little, glanced behind her, to find the woman was sitting up, leaning on a hand, looking down at Beth. She was definitely a local, her skin tone a little more noticeable reddish than was super common — more typical of the people in the mountains inland, Beth thought — her eyes that brown that was so dark it was almost black, narrow, almost dainty lips and big round cheeks. Her hair was cropped short, and an unbelievable mess...which Beth was pretty sure was her fault, when she thought about it...

(She tried not to remember how she'd messed up her hair, didn't want to get too distracted.)

"I'm sorry, I...thought you were someone else." From her instincts picked up from Vietnamese people through cheating omniglot powers, Beth recognised the accent as Thái, a minority group up north near the border with China — Beth barely knew any Thái, so, that might be why she hadn't understood that first bit, actually. The words seemed a little hard to get out, but not because of the language — even with the Thái accent, she could tell that was perfectly normal northern Vietnamese, like from around Hà Nội — the woman was obviously struggling with something. Over the next seconds, her mouth worked silently, her eyes drifted away, staring blankly at the fabric of the tent, seeming to slip away into her thoughts for a bit.

...Beth got the very clear feeling she'd lost someone, recently.

She visibly tried to shake it off, turning back to Beth with a somewhat crooked smile. "Good morning, then."

For a second, Beth just blinked dumbly up at her. "Um. Hi."

Her eyes narrowed just slightly, her smile dimming. For a second, her gaze dipped down, drifting over Beth. She was struck with the urge to cover herself, since she was just lying here completely naked, but that was ridiculous — besides, there wasn't even anything to cover herself with. But her eyes quickly jumped back up to Beth's, forcing another smile that suddenly looked very fake. "For my part, I have a terrible hangover, and I need breakfast." She didn't explicitly ask if Beth wanted to come along, but the implication was obvious.

"...That would be nice." At least, Beth didn't feel particularly nauseous this time, she could probably get food down...last time she remembered she hadn't really felt like eating until the next evening, but...

"Good, good. Ah..." The woman sat up the rest of the way, glanced around the tent. "This is mine, and..."

Oh, right, clothes, that was...probably a good idea. Feeling, just, incredibly awkward, Beth pushed herself upright — gritting her teeth against her head pounding in protest, but at least she didn't feel sick, so, food would probably be fine. She kept her legs straight, self-consciously crossed at the ankle. The inside of her tent was a little bit of a mess, they'd clearly just tossed stuff wherever. Beth spotted her wand holster nearby, immediately grabbed that and started strapping it into place. (Despite the fact that it didn't actually cover anything, she felt significantly less naked with her wand to hand.) "Um. Don't take this the wrong way, but, er. What's your name?"

For whatever reason, the woman laughed out loud, shaking her head to herself. "Đường Sóc Ianin."

"Ianin, right." That didn't really sound like a Vietnamese name, but she didn't think it was Thái either — they were mostly Buddhists around there, she thought, it must be Sanskrit.

"And you are Beth?"

"Yeah." It came out sounding sort of like Bẹt, but she could tell what she meant — locals tended to have trouble with that sound, Bẹt was really close enough. "Hello."

"Hello, Beth."

Trying not to feel unbearably awkward, Beth helped find and split up their clothes. Apparently Ianin had been in a Vietnamese military uniform last night — not the in active combat version, but the hanging around the camp or whatever version. Nothing fancy, just trousers and (short-sleeved) jacket made out of a sturdy but relatively breathable cloth — they were in the bloody tropics, after all — a pleasant forest green with red and yellow bits here and there. Passing over her jacket, Beth noted the badge with a single pip and two bars — um, she thought that was for...trung sĩ? which was some kind of NCO, maybe a sergeant? She didn't know, these things didn't always translate...

(Not surprised Ianin outranked her, since it was almost impossible not to, and she was definitely older than her, but it was impossible to tell by how much. Beth was guessing Ianin was maybe twenty-five to thirty? Who knows.)

Of course, Beth also had to struggle not to stare, because one of the things they had the most trouble finding were Ianin's pants. She realised it was kind of silly to be all shy and self-conscious and weird about this, they'd literally slept together, but she couldn't help it, she felt so fucking awkward. They clawed through Beth's tent looking for the things, Ianin had pulled on a vest by this point but nothing else, it was really really hard not to look. Beth was trying not to be weird about this, especially with how super casual and unconcerned Ianin was acting, but it was, just— This was a new one on her, okay, she kept remembering last night, she couldn't help looking, she could practically feel her face glowing...

They finally did find Ianin's pants, tucked under a corner of Beth's sleeping pad thing — how the fuck had that happened? Whatever. Ianin gave her a funny look when Beth chopped off most of her hair and vanished it — it's too bloody hot here for long hair, but this shite grew back in her sleep every time, it's very weird, magic is just like that sometimes. So, right, that was everything taken care of. Beth took a final girding breath before pulling open the tent.

And immediately cringing against the sunlight stabbing into her head, because of course. Fucking tropical sun, honestly, it was January...

The war in Indochina had had Beth's troop and the detachment they spent most of their time with crawling up the river they'd started at (a tributary of the Mekong up in the mountains), occasionally jumping over to a neighbouring valley to help another group with another pack of aliens. Their progress had felt painfully slow, carefully picking through every kilometre of mountainside searching for alien positions, carefully staking them out before bringing down overwhelming force, helping clean up the remnants — gathering and magically isolating samples to send off to the labcoats while they were at it — for a couple days before moving on to start the process all over again. At a certain point, Beth had completely lost track of the passage of time, just, sinking into the routine, scouting runs and skirmishes sliding by one after the next, weeks bleeding into months. Between all the magic she was doing and kilometres of hiking in the bloody mountains, not to mention the fighting itself, there were many days that when she was let off she had little energy to do anything but steal some food quick and pass right the fuck out.

Honestly, she'd completely failed to notice how much time was passing until they'd been told one day that they'd have a few days off for Christmas — which was on January 7th. Apparently the Orthodox Christians among the Soviets and the Arabs celebrated Christmas at the beginning of January instead of the end of December, she'd had no idea. She'd completely missed western Christmas happening...though when she thought about it the holiday had been mentioned in some of her letters with people. She just hadn't given it much thought, because she'd known there was no way she'd be back home by then. Apparently there was some special shite the Army normally did for Christmas, involving decent food and the like, and they had actually managed to get stuff to Beth's troop all the way out here on their own, but they'd delayed it a little to match the timing with the eastern Christmas at their camp, which, that was fine, Beth just hadn't even noticed that they'd missed Christmas — that announcement had been on the 29th, when they'd been told they wouldn't be able to delay their advance closing in on the main alien settlement past the New Year, but they would find a spot they could take a break for Christmas, in exchange for making sure the locals would get a break for Tết in February...

It was hard to believe that the aliens had first attacked four and a half months ago. She couldn't say whether it felt like it'd been more or less time than that (or both, somehow), but four and a half months just felt wrong for some reason.

They'd managed to push the aliens out of the mountains and down into the Mekong valley, which was really wide and flat and open in this part of Laos, the river broad and slow-moving and dotted with islands and muddy with sediment. The aliens had taken as their central base of operations in the north a place the locals called the Four Thousand Islands — right on the border with Cambodia, the river slowing along a curve before approaching an unnavigable series of rapids and waterfalls, forming a complex web of islands and sand bars. She thought it might have been really pretty here before the aliens took over. She was told it was a very rural area (like most of Laos, honestly), farming communities spread on both shores of the river and through the islands, at times trees and even entire villages seeming to float out on the water, rooted on islands hidden by the seasonal flooding, isolated and calm and quiet.

Of course, the place was a fucking wreck now. The shallow silty shores of the area suited the alien farming techniques Beth had first seen in Africa very well. When she'd first caught sight of the region — David handing over his binoculars to give her a look from a fair distance away — several kilometres of the river had been converted into a massive alien plantation, the river and its many islands sectioned off into blocks of different crops, some flooded and some fully on land, rows and rows and rows of unfamiliar, alien plants. Every half-kilometre or so there'd be a worker village, clumps of their little shell huts, housing thousands of their own workers and uncountable captured and altered locals, at the centre a complex of their funny star-shaped living buildings, crawling with soldiers and the funny tentacle-headed crab-handed people they thought were scientists or engineers or something? The place was huge, practically a respectable town in its own right, and they'd already completely altered the landscape, twisting it to suit their purposes.

And it was all gone now, that entire length of the river nothing but a blasted scorched scar on the land. They were camped somewhat upriver, but they were still within sight of the devastation to the south, countless thin trails of smoke still curling up toward the sky.

While helping with the cleanup, Beth had noticed the river downstream had visibly darkened, thick with ash and blood black and red and green, staining the rocks in the rapids in streaks and splatters.

The camp was huge, the largest numbers she'd seen gathered since leaving Africa, but it was rather quieter and calmer than it'd been before the battle — after all, Beth would guess she wasn't the only person around with a murderous hangover. Beth's troop were set up near the commanders and shite — so she'd be close at hand, since she often pulled double-duty as a translator — rather more dense with the pop-up structures the local mages carted around. So they were actually quite close by to the nearest kitchen area, mostly organised around open fires, kept burning by some kind of enchantment (they burned a funny blue, and she never saw them add wood or anything), seating shielded under a solid wooden roof held up on narrow posts, the underside sketched with what Beth assumed were runes? It was in Chinese, painted on in bright clashing primary colours, completely illegible to her but she thought it must be some kind of Eastern enchanting.

There were people doing the cooking, looking rather the worse for wear from the partying the previous night. Judging by the big pots they had on, the scents on the steam seeping into the camp, Beth thought they had some kind of noodle soup thing going. She'd gotten mostly used to having non-breakfast foods for breakfast by this point, and actually that might not be a bad idea anyway — hadn't she heard something somewhere about salty food being good for hangovers...?

In line for food, she noticed Luke and Bill and David at a nearby table — David kept eyeing her, kind of a funny look. Probably because of Ianin, though it was hard to tell if it was over the gay thing or concern, since she was only fifteen and all...

(Honestly, she was a little surprised one of them hadn't tried to butt in at some point — David and Leo in particular had apparently decided they were her big brothers now or something, which was vaguely irritating but not really worth making a big deal over — but it was a big camp, it was very possible they hadn't noticed.)

Standing waiting for food, Beth continued to feel, just, painfully uncomfortable. She didn't know what she was doing? Like, she had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to be doing or saying now, and Ianin wasn't really helping — the light was obviously bothering her, she'd gone really stiff and quiet ever since they'd left the tent, ducking her head against the sun. She'd never been in this particular situation before, or really even encountered anything similar...other than Sirius talking about his dating life, she guessed, but he normally avoided bringing anyone home during the summers. She had absolutely no idea what she should be doing right now, so she kind of...stood silently, a couple steps behind Ianin, feeling painfully uncomfortable.

And also trying not to stare, because she'd actually had sex last night, with this woman right here, and that was, just, so incredibly surreal, she had no idea how the fuck to process that. But, she was very much aware that they were in public right now, and openly staring might be kind of obvious?

Not that she really cared if people knew she was a lesbian — she'd been mostly sure before last night, but now she was very very certain, fucking hell. Anyway, she had cared before, which she realised was probably programming from her fucked-up childhood still lingering, the old fear that she would be punished for showing any abnormality, but well. They kind of had more important things to worry about now, you know. She'd even casually mentioned it in jokes and stuff over the last couple months, because whatever...and also it kind of made some of the boys less weird around her when it came to certain things, wasn't sure why, just one of those things, she guessed. Nobody had really acted that surprised, but Beth guessed she was kind of obvious — especially since she'd started chopping off her hair every morning, even looking more stereotypically gay now — so whatever.

She still hadn't told Hermione, or anyone at home, but she thought that was a conversation that was better done in person. And also she wanted to be able to see their reactions, so she could change her mind and play it off as a joke if Hermione took it badly. Not that she thought Hermione would, but, you know.

So, she didn't care if staring at Ianin and generally acting weird made it obvious, but she had no idea what Ianin's situation was. You know, if she was out or whatever — that was what that meant, right? Whatever. Not to mention she didn't know how people felt about gay people here, so, there was also that. Didn't want to make things difficult for her, you know.

...Also, now that Beth thought about it, she had no idea what the age of consent was here. That was awkward.

After a few intensely uncomfortable minutes standing around, they were able to get a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. It looked like they'd chopped up some of the dried, absurdly-long-shelf-life meat the Soviets got sent from home — fresh stuff had gradually trickled off as the months went on, resource problems at home worsening in advance of the serious famines Hermione said were going to start setting in in the spring and summer — for the protein in place of...she didn't know, chicken or whatever, which she guessed was fine. The soup seemed a little less substantial than she remembered from the early months, the thin vegetables unrecognisable blobs, but they'd still managed a sizeable bunch of fresh green herbs to top it with — Beth guessed some herbs could be pretty stubborn about growing anywhere they felt like it, must not be a problem to get those.

And of course she could feel the black pepper lifting off of the stuff, itching at her lungs and her nose, but that wasn't really a surprise at this point.

Ianin glanced back to make sure Beth was following before picking a spot at the end of a table — under the canopy, shaded from the sun, because of course. Immediately, Ianin pulled a pair of chopsticks out from somewhere — the reusable ones most of the Vietnamese military types she'd seen seemed to just always have on them, vaguely metallic-looking — and Beth belatedly realised she didn't have any eating utensils. Her food things were in a pouch back in her tent, they weren't doing anything today so she hadn't bothered packing up everything, it'd completely slipped her mind...

Ianin had just picked up her bowl when she noticed Beth's problem. A smile flicking at her lips, she set her things down again and stood up. "I'll be back in a second." She walked off, toward the kitchen area, talked with the people there. It didn't take long, she came back a minute later — before sitting down, she held a pair of wooden, disposable chopsticks out to Beth.

"Oh, um, thanks." She had picked up how to use the bloody things at some point, it was hard to say when and from who — being an omniglot could be weird sometimes, it was better to just not think about it too hard.

And then, without a word, they started eating. It certainly felt uncomfortable to Beth, she had no idea what she was doing, but it didn't seem to be bothering Ianin...

After a couple minutes — Beth had managed a couple bites, her awkwardness making her fumble a little — when Ianin spoke. "I don't know how... Can you do something so we won't be heard?" she asked, indicating their surroundings with a circular swirl of a finger.

"Sure." Drawing her wand with a flick of her wrist, Beth cast a quick privacy charm. "They can still see us, but the words will just sound like meaningless mumbling."

Ianin let out a little hum, looking around at the dome of the spell, visible as a faint heat shimmer on the air around them, with a bright smile on her face. "To be honest, I'm still not accustomed to magic, yet. It's all still so fascinating to me."

"It still is to me too, sometimes. I didn't know about magic and everything myself until I was eleven."

Her smile dimming somewhat, Ianin just let out a little "ah" sort of noise, turning back to her breakfast. She was obviously working up to saying something, hadn't even quite gathered up a pinch of noodles before she let out a little sigh, set her bowl down again. "I have to ask, it's going to bother me until I do. I, mm." Ianin glanced away for a second, before turning back to Beth with a sheepish, uncomfortable sort of smile. "In the sober light of the morning, you seem...younger, than I thought."

Beth grimaced — oh sure, start off with a topic she just knew was going to make Ianin nearly as uncomfortable as Beth was already, why not. She kind of didn't want to answer, it's not like it even fucking mattered at this point, but fine. "I'm fifteen."

With a sharp little breath through her teeth, Ianin winced. After a second she set her bowl down, chopsticks carefully balanced across the top, and leaned back from the table, taking a long breath. Her hands came up to her forehead, and...

...Beth didn't know, just seemed like a complete overreaction to her. She was trying not to take it the wrong way, honestly...not that she knew what the right way would be, exactly. "Yeah, that'd be why I didn't want to say anything."

"I'm sorry, Beth, I don't mean to..." Ianin trailed off, clearly not sure how to finish that sentence. "I am...simply coming to terms with the reality that I committed a sexual crime."

"Oh come on," Beth groaned (in Cambrian, for some reason), rolling her eyes. "There's no reason to— Honestly, it's fine."

Shooting her a look across the table Beth didn't know how to read, Ianin said, "Maybe it does not seem so to you, but, well. There are laws about this sort of thing for a reason — the line in Vietnam is sixteen, so I have, in fact, committed a crime."

"We're not in Vietnam. What's the age of consent in Laos?"

Ianin blinked at her for a second. "Honestly I don't know. It might be fifteen. But I am Vietnamese, in any case, so I find I don't care so much."

...Fair enough, Beth guessed. "Well, if it makes you feel better, where I'm from it's actually thirteen — I'm considered a legal adult back home."

"No, that doesn't make me feel better. Thirteen," Ianin muttered, shaking her head to herself. "Where are you from? I thought you were Russian..."

"What? No, I'm English."

"...English." Beth wasn't sure how to read the flat tone, or the faint frown. As far as she knew, Britain had never literally invaded Vietnam, but she wouldn't be surprised if the English had a rather worse reputation around here than the Soviets did, just for historical reasons.

"Yeah, English. And, in magical law over there, people can legally represent themselves at thirteen — you know, sign contracts and stuff. It's really the only age of majority they have over there." There were things you could only do if you had your OWLs, like apparation and stuff, but that was out of concern for preserving Secrecy, it wasn't a legal majority thing. "That's the only reason I'm allowed to be here in the first place."

Ianin stared at her for a second, before blurting out, "But that's completely absurd! Children don't know enough to sign contracts at thirteen!"

...Beth might actually be a little offended by the tone, honestly (not to mention the use of children), but she tried not to be. At thirteen, she had been perfectly capable of making decisions for herself — in fact, she had made a serious decision for herself at thirteen, when she'd left the Dursleys to move in with Sirius without permission, and that had probably been the single best decision she'd ever made in her life. But she realised most thirteen-year-olds generally weren't, and that was what Ianin meant. "Yeah, well, that's magical Britain for you. But honestly, I've been here fighting with everyone else for months now, what does it matter at this point? And how old are you, anyway?"

Ianin seemed less than convinced by Beth's argument that her age shouldn't matter. Which was a little irritating, honestly — they were in the middle of a war with alien invaders, there were more important things to worry about. After a few seconds of flatly staring at her, Ianin said, "As of last month, I'm thirty-four."

...Oh.

Somehow, it hadn't occurred to Beth that Ianin might be literally twice her age. She hadn't changed her mind about it not really making any difference in their present situation, but she still spent a moment blinking back at Ianin like an idiot.

She finally managed, "I would have guessed younger than that." Or, if Ianin was magical that would make sense — after reaching about twenty or so, mages aged much slower than muggles — but she wasn't, so, she did not look that old...

Ianin let out a little breath, shaking her head, the corner of her mouth curling just slightly. "I knew you were younger than me, but I thought, maybe, twenty-five."

"I guess we both fucked up, then."

In the middle of a bite of noodles, Ianin let out a little surprised cough at the cursing. It took a moment for her to stop almost choking (oops), a reluctant sort of smile pulling at her cheeks. "Ah. Yes, I suppose so."

Beth didn't know what to say at that point, and apparently Ianin didn't either, another stiff, uncomfortable silence falling between them. At least, she thought it was uncomfortable — and it looked like it was bothering Ianin this time too, brow occasionally furrowing, or fingers tapping. Clearly thinking about something. She even seemed to almost start talking a couple times, before changing her mind and going for her tea instead. It wasn't like Beth knew what else the fuck she was supposed to be doing right now — Ianin freaking out about Beth's age hadn't made this any less awkward — so she, just, waited.

Finally, Ianin set down her bowl, chopsticks set across the top again. Her soup wasn't actually gone, yet, but Beth guessed she didn't want the distraction. Not looking up at Beth, she stared down at the table, a vague sort of frown on her face, her fingers fidgeting. "It is... Even if I were not uncomfortable with your age — which, to be clear, I am — I am not... Last night is not to happen again."

"Yeah, I figured." She hadn't really expected otherwise? They had both been drunk, and Ianin was clearly super not okay with Beth only being fifteen ("uncomfortable" was underselling it), so. "I don't regret it at all, but I'm sorry you do."

Ianin's eyes snapped up to Beth's, visibly widening in surprise. "Oh, no! I didn't mean to... It isn't that I, ah..."

It took a second for it to click that Ianin was worried she'd...Beth didn't know, hurt her feelings or something. "No, it's fine, 'regret' might not have been the right word. I just, you know, don't want to make things...difficult."

That didn't seem to reassure Ianin much, still giving Beth an uncertain sort of look, but she apparently decided to leave that be. "It is not that I... If I were not drunk last night, and stressed from the battle, I would not have. And I realise that that doesn't sound any better..."

For fuck's sake, apparently Beth wasn't the only person here who didn't know what the fuck she was doing. Right, well, she was just going to make this easier on her, then. "You lost someone. You're not over it."

Ianin blinked, surprised. "Yes. That first week, in the bombing of Hà Nội, I... My partner was killed." The term she used was gender-neutral, as happened sometimes in Vietnamese, but Beth was pretty sure she meant girlfriend.

"Yeah, I thought I might have... I had a feeling you thought I was someone else this morning."

"...I did, for a moment," Ianin admitted — her voice low, barely above a whisper. "I was not fully awake, it... It was unpleasant, to wake up. This is to say nothing about you, of course, it is only..."

"You don't have to explain." She wasn't ready to move on yet, Beth got it. Well, no, she didn't really get it, she didn't personally know what it felt like to deal with something like that, but she got the general idea, it was fine. "How long were you together for? I mean, you don't have to talk about it, just, curious."

"If she were still..." Gendered term that time, definitely a woman then. "It would be eight years in March."

"Jesus. That's awful, I'm sorry. I mean, I'm sure it sucks no matter how long you've been with someone, but..."

Tellingly, Ianin just let out a little hum — Beth guessed there really was nothing to say to that, she wouldn't know how to respond either. She never knew what the hell to do when people were being all sympathetic about her parents, and that was hardly even comparable... "Have you lost anyone?"

"A few friends, only a couple I was really that close with." It was going on two months later now, and it was still didn't feel quite real that Fred and George were gone — she suspected it wouldn't until she returned to Britain and they weren't there anymore — and nobody in her troop had actually died since their disastrous arrival in Vietnam...and she really hadn't known the ones who had died for that long, really. Honestly, she'd been kind of freaking out a little when Sam and Leo got pretty badly injured several days ago now, and that time Bill had almost died last month (made all the more terrifying by Bill normally being the one to stabilise them long enough to get to proper healers), but other than that, she'd known people who'd died, but mostly just acquaintances. "I hope you get something out of blowing the shite out of a bunch of aliens, I guess."

An empty smile flickered at Ianin's lips. "Mm. As my father used to say, we're unlikely to find any real justice in this world, and so we must make do with killing them, and killing them, and killing them, until they stop coming back." She paused for a second. "Of course, he was talking about the French, but..."

Beth snorted — oh sure, same thing, why not. Though, she was thinking that kind of as a joke, but to the locals, after a century of one foreign invasion after another after another, maybe it did just seem like one more to them. From a certain point of view, she guessed the only big difference was that the aliens were also other people's problem, so they were getting much more help dealing with it...so in a way it was actually less of a disaster than previous invasions, since at least they had thousands of Soviet and Arab soldiers fighting alongside them this time, much wealthier countries regularly shipping supplies in by portkey...

That did kind of make sense, when she thought about it, but fucking hell was that fucked up...

Ianin left not long after that — she wasn't even done with her noodles yet, Beth assumed she was looking for her people or whatever. Either that, or she was more intensely uncomfortable with the whole I just slept with a minor when I was too drunk to know better thing than she was letting on. She did ask if she was going to have to talk to someone, which was confusing for a moment, before Beth realised that she was, like, asking if Beth was going to be reporting her to their superiors for what happened last night — if only to keep them separated from now on, she thought, though Ianin would probably end up with some kind of black mark on her record, even if no actual criminal charges were made. Which was, just, completely fucking unnecessary, honestly, she was fine, don't worry about it. And she was technically an adult, due to funny legal horseshite, so she wasn't even sure what she'd be reporting Ianin for. (She couldn't be considered competent only sometimes, that just wouldn't make any sense — if she could consent to joining the bloody Army, she could consent to sex.) The reassurance didn't really do anything to clear the uneasy look from Ianin's face — that Beth was fine with what happened and didn't want anything to be done about it seemed to be making Ianin more uncomfortable, for some inexplicable reason — but at least she didn't make a point of arguing about it.

Ianin went with a comment about Beth taking care of herself, which, Beth kind of got the feeling that there was something else Ianin was not-saying. Like, obviously, they were in the middle of a bloody war, so, yeah, hoping each other don't get killed was perfectly reasonable, but it felt like Ianin also meant something else, and Beth wasn't sure what. Confused by that, Beth barely managed to get out a vague, yeah, you too, before Ianin was walking away.

It took a few seconds for Beth to realise she was watching Ianin walk, wrenched her eyes away — right, not being super obvious about it, don't make things in the camp weird...

She wasn't alone long enough to get too lost in her thoughts, which was probably a good thing. Because, you know, catching herself watching Ianin walk was making her think about Ianin's legs, which made her think about the feel of the curve of Ianin's hip against her, and then she was remembering the feel of her hand between Ianin's legs, and then she was remembering Ianin's head between her legs, and fucking hell, something else to draw her attention wasn't unwelcome, because getting distractingly horny in public always made her feel unbearably awkward.

(Made her remember back when she'd had a pretty serious crush on Hermione, and they'd be huddled up in the library, Hermione talking her through something while Beth desperately tried to act normal, pay attention to what she was saying and not how warm and soft she felt or how good she smelled. Yeah, unbearably awkward.)

Anyway, before she could get too carried away, David slid into the vacated seat across from her. "Hey. How's the hangover?"

"Mm." Beth was halfway through a sizable bite of noodles, it took her a moment to swallow. "Better. Still have a headache, but. I think the soup helps."

"The tea might too — the caffeine is good for some people, anyway, not everyone. Ever gone drinking before?"

She grimaced. "Once. Friend gave me gin, I had no idea how strong it was — blacked out and everything, I was completely miserable the next morning. This one isn't nearly as bad."

With a calm sort of nod, David took a slow sip of his tea. David was definitely the least boisterous out of their troop (even including Beth), a calm, almost solemn sort — which, he was a sniper by training, which Beth guessed made sense, patience and all that. Though he also carried some of their intel-gathering stuff, when they were scouting out places was often taking pictures of shite, at times Beth almost thought there might be an artistic angle to his skill with a camera, but they didn't really have film to waste on frivolous stuff, so. (He seemed like a good bloke, but Beth had carefully avoided asking if he'd ever done an assassination before. She suspected the answer would be yes.) "Mostly you just have to get plenty of water and wait for it to go away. Unless mages have some secret to curing hangovers you've been holding out on us."

"...Not as far as I know. There are pain potions for headaches, but I'm guessing we're using all of those for more serious stuff." They were much better than muggle drugs that did the same thing, after all, more thorough and targeted and with less serious side-effects. There were things muggle drugs were better for than the magical equivalent, Hermione had said, but from what she'd seen when it came to pain relief in particular they'd entirely switched to potions. "I remember something about hangover potions being a thing, but I think you're supposed to take them beforehand? Like a preventative thing."

"Well damn, that's bloody cheating."

Focussed on her soup, Beth felt her lips twitch into a smirk. "I can write Sirius about it — if the formula isn't too complicated I might be able to make them here."

"Do that and I'll tell Luke to put you up for a fucking medal."

Beth grimaced, tried to play the joke off with a shrug — she was all but certain she was going to end up with several of those. Luke had mentioned in passing at one point that she was definitely going to get some kind of recognition for covering that village their first night here, at the very least, and Hermione still suspected she was going to end up with a knighthood or some shite for covering the Queen's husband and the kids during the initial attack. (By the time the Queen had returned to Britain and the government had started getting their shite together well enough to even consider getting around to that sort of thing, Beth had already been out of the country.) And it wasn't until last month that Bill had pointed out that the Laotian and Cambodian governments would probably do something to acknowledge the foreign fighters who'd come to help, and Hermione had pointed out that some governments did shite for allies who'd gone out of their way to cover their people, which potentially brought in the Soviets and Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and Egypt too (not to mention the Congo), so she'd probably end up with tat from several different countries, which was just fucking ridiculous.

(Honestly, she was only fighting these bastards because somebody had to and it was the only thing she was good at, she didn't need to be rewarded or whatever the fuck. All that just sounded terribly embarrassing.)

"You all good?"

"Yeah, why wouldn't I be?" She was pretty sure he wasn't talking about the hangover, but.

David hesitated for a second, an uncomfortable wince crossing his face before disappearing again. "Ah, Leo and I thought we should maybe do something last night, but, Sam and Bill both insisted to leave you to it, so. With that woman, I mean," he added, when Beth didn't get it right away.

"Oh! Right, I— I wasn't even sure you boys knew about that. It's a big camp, you know."

His lips twitched. "We saw you come back through our part of the camp. And, ah, tents aren't exactly sound-proof, you know."

Beth gaped at him for a moment, her face— She didn't— "Fuck, did I forget privacy spells?" She did use them, sometimes, when she was by herself — not that she needed them very often, she didn't get a lot of alone time, and she was usually too damn tired to properly get off by the time she got to bed — but if she'd been drunk and distracted it might not have...

"Yeah, you forgot the privacy spells. Bill got it for you, once he noticed." David sounded far too amused about it, not quite fully hiding the curl to his lips behind his tea cup.

Forcing a glare, trying to ignore the heat on her cheeks, she spat, "Oh, piss off. I was drunk and, um, clearly not thinking straight..."

"Hey, no judgement here, I know what it's like to get so wrapped up in a bird you bloody well forget where you are."

That wasn't making her face feel less on fire. "Shut up, David."

"Fine, fine. You are good, though? I was worried it might not— Well, you know."

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, I'm fine, for fuck's sake. Not that it's any of your sodding business, any of you, but I'm not freaking out or anything, she was perfectly nice, it's fine. Mostly I just wish I remembered it better, honestly — I didn't black out at all, but most of last night is still kind of fuzzy..."

Thankfully, unlike Ianin, David just gave her a slow nod, seemingly accepting that. In fact, crooked smirk curling his lips, he drawled, "Perfectly nice, huh?"

And her blush had just started going down again, damn it. "Shut up."

"Got a thing for older women, eh?" Ianin was probably only older than David by a few years, she thought, but she guessed these things were relative.

"Fuck if I know. Definitely got a thing for women, full stop, no doubt about that now, fucking hell..."

David's eyebrows arched up a little bit. "First time?"

"Mhmm. Like I said, wish I remembered it better."

"...Damn." He glanced over his shoulder, the direction Ianin had gone when she left, as though trying to spot her in the crowd. (Beth was pretty sure she'd left the kitchen area entirely.) "Hell of a trick for your first time, is all I'm saying, that was a damn fine woman."

Despite herself, Beth felt herself smirk back at him. "And you haven't even seen her naked."

She was going to go ahead and call that surprised little laugh a win — if only because it was better than David embarrassing her to amuse himself.

(If this was what having actual older brothers was like, she was kind of glad she didn't have any.)

Chapter Text

7th February 1996 (63:9:28)
— Contact plus 00.05.04:17.30

Beth walked across the scorched earth — slowly and carefully, her footing turned slick and sticky with water and blood soaked into the soil, half-healed burns throbbing and stinging. It seemed quiet and loud all at once, the pounding of countless guns and the roaring of fire gone silent, replaced with the chatter of voices and the rumbling of equipment and crackling of magic...

It was over.

The final battle against the alien landing in Indochina had taken two, maybe three weeks from start to finish. Beth wasn't sure exactly how long it'd been going on, her troop (with their Syrian, Soviet, and Laotian friends) hadn't arrived until well after it'd already started. They'd linked up with a sizeable British force just moved in from the Congo — the fighting more or less done there, they'd been splitting their resources between the other battles still ongoing here, in India, and in the Amazon — the gaps in their troop patched up with people from wherever. They'd been put on the edge of the British division, with a second SCF troop, so the magical translators could better help coordinate between the English-speaking soldiers on one side and the Vietnamese-speaking ones on the other. (Though the other troop's translator was actually a mind mage instead of an omniglot, still worked.) The slick magic radios just starting to come in helped a little, but they didn't have enough for full coverage yet, so having a few translators on the ground in more mixed areas helped keep things from getting too messy.

Like, for example, accidentally hitting each other with friendly fire. That had still happened, as Beth's injuries proved, but they'd tried to keep it to a minimum, at least.

The fighting had been long, and slow, and bloody, and miserable — though Beth had actually missed big parts of it, thanks to getting herself injured, twice, like an idiot. The aliens hadn't been right on the shore, more toward the heart of the delta region, so they'd been able to land people behind them — mages under concealment spells sneaking in over the water, and then marking spots to transport hundreds and hundreds of soldiers and countless tonnes of equipment in by portkey — so they could press in on the aliens from all sides. Or, they'd mostly surrounded the aliens, they couldn't actually cover literally every inch in the circle. The aliens had spread out over a pretty large portion of the wide, flat, muddy, heavily-cultivated delta region, the endless rice paddies converted for their own uses (the local population either killed or captured and brainwashed), they simply didn't have the numbers to constantly watch all of it. There were occasions where small groups of dinos or scab assassins managed to slip through the gaps and try to hit them from behind, turning the battle even more confusingly chaotic.

At least they'd had pretty significant air support this time, thanks to most of the aliens' aircraft already being knocked out and the big spaceships being scared off. Before Beth's troop had even gotten down here, the entire region had already been softened up by a constant rain of missile strikes — Soviet equipment, mostly, but they'd also been hit from the other side by American installations in the Philippines, and a surprise attack from the Korean navy, dropping concealment spells once they were in place just off shore and instantly opening fire. (Which was a neat trick, Beth had heard they'd gotten help from Chinese and Japanese mages to get together the raw power necessary to hold the proper spells to hide them from alien detection for that long.) After that bombardment had gone on for a few days, they'd stopped with the big, long-range missiles and swapped over to bombing runs — every once in a while, Beth would hear a deep, sharp roar of engines coming from one direction, they'd get an order to halt and get into cover (throwing up whatever defensive magics they could manage on short notice), and muggle aircraft of some kind would scream across the sky, and large strips of the land would just light up, blotting out half of the landscape with fire and smoke, the noise incredible, her head rattling and echoing in her chest...

Beth completely missed this as it was happening, but apparently the battle was going badly enough that the aliens up in space had moved their ships in to bombard the airstrips the planes were flying out of. And also targeting the Korean navy, apparently — after unloading long-range missiles from the shore, the ones that would fit had continued picking up the various branches of the river, essentially acting as armoured mobile heavy weapons platforms to back up the infantry on the ground, which was clever. (Beth had never seen one at it, but she'd heard the oversized naval guns pounding away in the distance a few times.) Unfortunately for them, just like the Americans months ago now, the Soviets had been waiting for them to try that: they'd barely even been in position, just started firing lava bombs down at the surface, when a volley of nuclear fucking missiles tore through their formation. One of the smaller ships was completely destroyed — Beth had seen the burning debris streaking across the sky, like a dense little meteor shower — and they'd even managed to clip the big, seashell-shaped one, blowing a decent-sized hole through it, sending it limping away for repairs. From that point through to the end, they had completely uncontested control of the skies over the region — the pilots had to be careful flying too close to the ground, since the aliens still had surface-to-air weapons, but the bombardment could go on more or less uninterrupted as their forces on the ground slowly crawled their way along.

The first time she was injured during the battle, she learned that Sirius was actually with the British forces who'd been moved here — she'd had no idea until he'd turned up while she was in hospital. (Apparently, Sirius and also Hedwig were on her file as her only living family, to be contacted in an emergency.) The aliens were being pretty liberal with the use of their bug grenades, they'd rigged up devices that would fly over and then burst, flinging out dozens of them in all directions. Beth had seen one coming, and managed to tag it with Sunflame, but that'd only killed most of the bugs — one of the survivors had imbedded itself in her side before she could react. One of the slicing bugs, cutting deep into her before getting caught on a bone somewhere, and it'd still been alive squirming around insider her, which was extremely fucking uncomfortable fuck fuck fuck. (Just remembering it still made her nauseous.) Bill had had to pull some reckless battlefield surgery shite to dig the fucker out, which Beth didn't really remember very well, to be honest, the whole thing just a smear of noise and pain and the squirming and blood — she'd either passed out or been stunned pretty quickly, waking up in hospital in Biên Hòa.

She'd spent a single afternoon with Sirius while she was recovering — the first time they'd seen each other in like half a year. Sirius looked surprisingly good, actually. His messy mane of hair had been chopped short — which he'd sarcastically whined about, but it was just too bloody hot here — months of tropical sun having chased away the unhealthy pallor he'd still had from Azkaban. And he'd seemed fitter, not so terribly thin anymore, a bit more energy in his smirk than usual. Tired and strained from the fighting, yes, but paradoxically in better shape than he'd been before the invasion started.

As indescribably awful as the war was, as many people would die before this was over, that Sirius seemed to be doing better was one good thing Beth could take out of it, she guessed. Though, honestly, not being able to just laze around the house drinking probably had a lot to do with it...

Beth had been sent back out to her troop as soon as she'd been well enough to fight again. Closing in on the centre of the alien settlement, so dense it was practically a small city, they'd only been a few days away from the end of the battle before Beth had gotten injured the second time — and this one was, again, kind of her fault. They'd been picking through a bombed-out alien village, little more than scorched shell and bone and mounds of mangled charred flesh (the familiar burned bacon smell of dead alien tech heavy on the air), corpses both human and alien strewn about, too badly torn apart and blackened to be quite recogniseable, their species only determinable by the different blood colours. Apparently some aliens had been hiding out in the rubble for people to come by, leaped out at the back of the Vietnamese team just to their left. Beth had apparated over behind them, came out cursing...and then suddenly she was on fire.

She wasn't sure what happened, exactly. It was possible she'd been caught up in a curse or some kind of incendiary explosive from their side, or it could have been one of those spear-fire-grenade things the aliens had going off, or some of their bugs for that matter. She had been shot, though, at least five times — that definitely hadn't been the aliens. In retrospect, apparating opposite the aliens from their people had been a fucking stupid idea, since any bullets that missed them would continue right on and hit her, but she hadn't been thinking at the time, heard the noise and saw what was happening, saw Quyên go down in a spray of blood, and she'd jumped without thinking.

She was told that the distraction had been helpful, giving their people a few seconds to react, but mostly she just remembered how much being on fire fucking hurt. She didn't even remember getting shot at all — her memory faded out pretty quickly after the burning alive started, which was probably for the best, honestly.

Beth had still been in hospital, unconscious — kept in a coma as her skin was grown back, which was a thing magical healing could do — when the battle ended. She heard about it well after the fact, when half of her troop came to visit her — still a bit delirious, silly from pain meds. By the time she was let out, the clean-up operations had mostly finished. They suspected there were probably still aliens in the region somewhere, they had teams scouring the whole peninsula looking for any signs of them, but the battle proper was certainly over.

The delta was wide and flat, stitched through with countless river channels and artificial canals, the ground under their feet gradually built up over millennia by silt carried in from upriver. Before, practically the whole delta region, with the exception of a few towns dotted here and there, was all farmland — rice, mostly, but some other crops mixed in to give the area a bit of texture, broken up with strands of palm and coconut and cashew and various fruit trees. (A lot of the food they grew here was actually new to her, especially the fruit, apparently they only grew in the tropics and didn't transport well.) By the time the war came here, some of the local plants were still there, but much of the farmland had been stripped, replaced with unfamiliar alien plantlife. They had these funny stalks grown in paddies a lot like rice, with these fruits on the end that glowed in the night, weirdly pretty...

All that was gone, of course — the delta was a wasteland now. The ground under Beth's feet black and green and red from ash and blood, the sun dim from acrid smoke, so much of the plantlife burned away that you could clearly see how wide and flat the terrain was here, stretching on and on, a mangled ruin of an alien building or some muggle equipment scattered about, stitched with canals (both man- and alien-made) or just countless puddles formed in craters from explosions, the filthy water gleaming dull in the murk...

Beth would say it looked like hell on earth, but she was pretty sure hell wasn't supposed to be this damp.

There were people around, construction and digging equipment — portkeyed in, roads didn't reach here and the ground was too muddy for them to move easily — working out the remains of the alien structures, clearing out canals and reforming the irrigation and dikes and shite for new rice paddies as quickly as possible, mages inching through behind the muggles to filter contaminates out of the soil with some complicated transfiguration spells. An enormous proportion of Indochina's (and a good chunk of the world's) rice had been grown here, and famine was looming on the horizon. They'd lost the vast majority of the crop that had already been here at the time of the landing, they wanted to get a new one down as soon as possible. As thorough as the destruction had been, that was going to be difficult — not just rebuilding everything that was lost, but there was stuff to do with companion plants and helpful insects and shite, Beth didn't know. She'd heard gossip that it could easily be a decade or more before their output here was back to normal. Shorter than that with the help of magic, thankfully, but, just losing the rice from the delta was going to be significant blow to the world food supply, just by itself.

Honestly, Beth was considering asking to stay in Vietnam, to help with getting food production back up and running. There was still fighting going on in India and the Amazon, but with how bad the food situation was going to start getting soon, she suspected this was actually where she'd be able to do the most good. Someone would have to teach her the spells, sure, but she would learn them quickly — she was a cheating omniglot, after all — and she was a pretty powerful mage, so, once she had them down she could probably blow through shite pretty quick. Not to mention, they knew there were still survivors stalking about, they could use a few wands watching their backs...

As much of a fucking mess as this place was, it was honestly hard to imagine they'd get it back together in time to make any difference at all, at least not any time soon. Magic could pull off some crazy shite, true, but, fuck, it was going to get bad...

"There you are!" That was Sirius's voice, she glanced that way — toward a patch of boards they'd put down for flat ground, at the centre a pavilion shading a table strewn with maps and notes and shite — to see him picking across the muddy ground, cursing through his teeth as one boot splashed into a puddle. He still looked somewhat off to Beth, without the curly mane of hair around his shoulders, his skin with some actual colour to it, but Beth guessed she looked rather different now too, so. He had his uniform trousers on, but he hadn't bothered with the jacket, just wearing a pale off-white vest, streaked with ash and speckled with sweat — it was bloody hot and humid out here, so. "I've been trying to find you, your boys didn't know where you'd gone." Her troop, he meant, he liked to call them that for some reason. "What are you doing all the way the fuck out here, anyway?"

Beth shrugged — she didn't really know how to answer that question. She'd just wanted to get out of the camp, didn't know why she'd come here in particular... "How'd you find me?"

"Blood tracking."

She rolled her eyes, her cheeks puffing out in a sigh. Sirius might be one of the good guys, but he had grown up in the House of Black, he'd learned all kinds of weird esoteric magics. Including blood magic you could use to easily direct yourself to close relatives — proper tracking spells normally needed something that belonged to the target (like a hair or something), using blood magic was cheating. It wasn't even the first time he'd done it with her, apparently that was how he'd found her in Little Whinging that summer too. "Of course. Fucking purebloods..."

"If there's one thing we're good at." Beth was pretty sure that was supposed to be an incest joke. He came up next to her, turning to follow her line of sight — not that she was really looking at any particular thing. Just, fuck, this place was a mess, that was all... "So, what's up? You okay?"

She shrugged, the motion tugging at her still-tender skin, sweeping over her in funny little prickles. "Dunno. Just thought I'd take a walk."

Sirius gave her a single raised eyebrow. "Here?"

She didn't really have an answer for that, so she just shrugged again.

"No seriously, kid, how are you doing?"

"I'm fine, Sirius, I just..." She glanced over the devastated landscape, mud and ash, swallowing down...something. "I don't know. It's been a long few months, that's all."

"...Yeah." A solemn quiet coming over him, Sirius glared out into the distance for a silent moment. Beth was aware he still wasn't happy about her fighting — right up until the aliens attacked, he'd been hoping he'd be able to keep her out of the war with the Death Eaters, that his generation could clean it up before she was old enough. Of course, that probably wouldn't have worked very well — Beth was hardly any more likely to just sit back and do nothing about the Death Eaters as she was the aliens — but Sirius could be stubborn like that sometimes. He'd argued about her joining the SCF, really hadn't wanted her to go, but he also hadn't tried to stop her when she got stubborn about it. She couldn't guess what exactly was going on in his head, but it seemed likely he was beating himself up in there about not stopping her from getting herself involved in this shite.

So, when he shuffled closer, she let him wrap an arm around her, turned to lean her head against his shoulder — despite the unpleasant tingling from her still-sensitive skin, and how bloody hot and humid it was here.

After a moment standing there in silence, Beth groped for his hand, gave it a quick squeeze. "We are winning, you know."

"I know." A little bit of the stiffness leaked out of him, and she could hear the smirk on his face as he said, "Bet those bastards are fucking regretting ever showing their ugly faces here."

Beth was pretty sure they were, yes. She didn't exactly have much of a bird's eye view just cursing the alien right in front of her, but according to Hermione the smart people were certain the aliens had expected their planet to be a much softer target than it'd ended up being. At this point, pretty much the only thing they had to worry about was reinforcements coming in — which was possible, they were certain there were more of these bastards out there somewhere...

They were going to win — not just here in Vietnam, but everywhere. A lot of people had already died, and a lot more were going to as the worst of the famine finally hit. It was already starting to get bad, Hermione said, but they hadn't seen anything yet. Things were still going to suck for a while, but they were going to make it, in the end.

(And that was worth it, no matter what happened to Beth. Sirius understood that — he hadn't stopped her for a reason.)

"Come on, kid," Sirius sighed, giving her shoulder a final squeeze before letting go. "Some friends and I were going in to the city for the evening. You look like you could use a good night out."

Biên Hòa, he meant. The Vietnamese (with some foreign help) had managed to hold most of Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh throughout the entirety of the war, despite having a landing so close by. The city centre had been hit pretty badly in the initial bombing, and intermittently afterward, the vast majority of the civilian population evacuated northeast across the rivers, the metropolis descending into a massive urban battlefield. Naturally, the Vietnamese had posted soldiers and equipment all over the place, converting the city into one big death trap — the fighting had been pretty much constant, the damage to the city's infrastructure crippling, but it'd never technically been lost, and they'd even managed to save most of the residents.

The fighting was almost entirely kept west of the River Sài Gòn, the strip of land between the Sài Gòn and Đồng Nai heavily fortified and built up with local residents and military people moving in from elsewhere in Vietnam and a litany of allied countries. The towns of that strip — Thủ Đức, Dĩ An, Thuận An — were very professional-like, an oversized army camp, set up all practical and ready to jump at an incoming attack on the city proper across the Sài Gòn at any moment. The more civilian environment was just on the other side of the Đồng Nai, in the city of Biên Hòa — that was also where they'd put stuff like the hospitals, further behind their lines where they'd have time to catch infiltrators. (They'd quickly learned that the aliens liked to do their suicide sneak-attacks on healing centres, if they could find them.) Beth had heard there were, like, restaurants and pubs and dance clubs and the like that were still operational there...when they could find the supplies, and power for sound systems, apparently there was a lot of negotiation going on behind the scenes the people running the places were doing to keep everything up.

They did get plenty of help doing that, of course, for morale reasons, but sometimes the leadership had to pick and choose priorities. Shortages of various supplies were starting to become a serious problem — fuel in particular, they were rationing electricity pretty strictly these days...

Not that Beth really felt like partying that much — she was still recovering from being set on fire and shot five times, she felt all slow and tired...

"...Yeah," she agreed, letting out a sigh. "Yeah, why not? Not sure I'll be great company, I'm a bit, you know."

Sirius nodded. "Healing comas can do that to you. The best thing you can do to get through it is try to do things, to get your body and mind going again. Going for a walk isn't a bad idea — even if you could have picked somewhere with a better view." After looking over their bleak surroundings with a grimace, he turned a smirk back on her. "Come on, Beth, we won! That calls for celebration! And hey, if you get lucky, you might get lucky again."

Tipping her head back, Beth let out a groan. "Bill tell you about that, did he?"

"Sam, actually." Of course, the nosey bastard. "Seemed to think I should know for adult, making sure the kid you're responsible for is okay reasons, but honestly I'm impressed, Beth. I didn't start successfully seducing older women until after I'd gotten my NEWTs — my teenage self would be very jealous."

"Oh shut up," she said, rolling her eyes, "I've heard the stories of what you were like as a teenager, I know you think you're funny but I— Hold up a sec." While rolling her eyes she'd caught an odd hint of movement, gave it up a double-take. There was something... "I want to check something quick, and then we can go."

A short walk away, one of the teams was working at something, she couldn't tell exactly. They had one of those big damn digging machine things with them — Beth didn't know what they were called — and while turning up a heap of dirt she'd caught a glimpse of something odd. She walked closer, Sirius patiently trailing along behind her, stepping carefully to not slip in the mud, circling around the occasional puddle. The engine of the big bloody thing was loud, a deep hard thrumming making her teeth vibrate in her skull, the hydraulics hissing and puffing...

There! There it was again! She was closer now, she could see it better: when the scoop of the digger disturbed the earth, it shook loose a bunch of these tiny little reddish-brownish bugs, enough of them moving around that the surface seemed to undulate a little before they settled again. As she watched, there were a couple other bugs, larger, some a brighter red and others a pale sky blue, but they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the tiny little reddish-brown ones. What the hell were those?

"Hey, um..." Beth glanced around, spotted a middle-aged local man nearby, had a vague air of being in charge about him. Trotting closer, waving a hand over her head, she called, "Hey, boss! What are those bugs?"

The man gave her a bemused sort of look, eyes glancing down over her uniform quick. "Dunno. Never seen them before, turned 'em up when we started digging. Every time we see a new one we catch it and send it off to the scientists."

"...I see." Beth had thought it was possible that they were a local thing she'd just never come across before — but the man confirming they were new to him too had unpleasant prickles running down her spine, like eyes on her back, a cold stone dropping through her stomach. "They must have been left behind by the scabs."

"Must have."

"Any idea what they're doing?"

The man gave a noncommittal tilt of his head. "Nope, I'll leave figuring that out to the lab types. Stink something awful, though."

"...Right. Thanks." Beth retreated from the team of workers, occasionally glancing back at the digger. A bunch of bugs were turned up by the next scoop too, dozens and dozens of the little things crawling all over...

"What is it?" Sirius asked.

"I don't know." Once they were well out of the way, Beth crouched down. Drawing her wand with a flick of her wrist, she turned up a chunk of dirt — unsurprisingly, a bunch of the little reddish-brownish beetles scurried around, scrambling to burrow back below the surface, Beth snatched one up before it could. The bug was flat and round, the shell almost a disc — sort of reminding her of the aliens' bug grenades, but much smaller in size, easily pinched between the pads of her finger and thumb — with...six tiny little skeletal legs, and two more at the front formed into bulkier grasping arms, like a miniature scorpion. Again, a lot like their bug grenades, except this one didn't seem to have wings at all. It was a tiny little thing, maybe half an inch wide...and there was a funny smell to it, a faint whiff of rotten eggs...

Beth cast a slicing charm off at an angle, skimming over the surface, cutting a long, shallow channel. Bugs came swarming up all along the length, some here and there had even been sliced apart by the curse, scrambling around for a few seconds before they disappeared, burrowing underground again.

"I don't know, but I don't like it. I've got a really bad feeling about these things, Sirius."

"...Yeah. Yeah, me too, kid." His hand coming down softly on her shoulder, he let out a thin sigh. "There's nothing we can do about that, though. Let the brains of the operation figure that shite out — that's their job. Our job is to blow up shite, if we can help with this they'll tell us."

Yeah, he was probably right about that. Beth didn't like just waiting, though, this was going to bother her now...

"Come on, kid, let's go get pissed. Drinks are on Michael, he owes me twelve for saving his stupid arse too many damn times."

"...Fine." Beth tossed the bug away, obliterated it with a piercing curse before it could slip away into hiding. She stood up, held out a hand to Sirius. He took it, and a blink later they were apparating away, leaving the delta behind.

Physically, at least — the whole night, Beth couldn't get the blackened, ruined landscape out of her mind, countless alien bugs churning unseen just under her feet.

Chapter Text

16th February 1996 (63:FS:02)
— Contact plus 00.05.13:21.45

"All right, next," Beth said, waving the next group forward. A family, a few adults and several children in a smattering of ages, along with an older woman she assumed was (some of) the adults' mother. Looking around curiously, they walked into the checkpoint, stepping onto the black strip of ceramic. "Stop there," holding up a hand, to make sure she was understood. "Do all of you speak Vietnamese?"

The group glanced at each other, before one of the men said, "Yes?"

"Good." She flipped over to the page on her clipboard for Vietnamese-speakers. Looked like they had...let's call that three families' worth — Beth had seen the set-up they had down there, the way it was divided up, they would need three. Starting to mark off the blocks on her map, she said, "Okay, I need all your names, please." The first man started speaking again, but Beth immediately interrupted. "I'm sorry, I need everyone to say their name to me, themselves."

The man gave her a very confused look, but didn't argue about it. They went through the group one by one, Beth quick noting down the names as they went. Lots of repeated surnames, though the women's were unique, which they tended to be within families — Vietnamese women usually (though not always) keep their own surname on marrying. Beth couldn't help smiling a little when a little boy added that he was seven years old and he played football. She carefully listened to each name, feeling the echo of...

And that was everyone, they all checked out. "Right, thank you. You can come forward now, one second..." Beth pulled out a card, wrote down the blocks she'd assigned, before holding it out to the man who'd spoken for them before. "Just behind me you're going to go to the right, there'll be a set of stairs to the left, and you'll take the first left. Show this card to the people there and they'll get you settled in. Okay?"

A few polite thank-yous and what not back and forth, and the group shuffled by her, slipping past the armed guards backing Beth up. "Next, please," she called, waving the next group forward.

Just as they thought they were winning — in Indochina, yes, but against the rest of the landings too — things started to turn bad. And they went very bad, very quickly.

The process had probably started months ago, but they hadn't noticed the signs of what was happening that early. The vines had been the most obvious evidence that the aliens were doing something — while doing their scouting jobs, Beth had found these odd stubborn vines with an almost rubbery texture to them, weirdly hard to cut, along with teams of aliens seeding them seemingly at random through the hills. They didn't know what the fuck the things were, but if the aliens wanted them around they couldn't possibly be good. So they'd taken samples to send back to the labcoats, and just burned the rest, whenever they found them — they might be weirdly resistant to being cut, but fire took care of them just fine.

But just burning the ones they came across didn't entirely get rid of them. The things grew surprisingly fast, spread voraciously. They'd been found randomly showing up dozens of miles away from the nearest alien settlement, just, oozing out of the woods, choking undergrowth and crops. Beth hadn't been paying attention to this at the time, preoccupied with the fighting, but she knew now that they'd been sending out teams with...well, they were magical flamethrowers, basically — devices that drew on ambient magic to produce fire, so muggles could use them, but didn't need to expend increasingly-precious fuel. They'd been trying to burn the stuff out, but it was fucking everywhere.

And then the beetles turned up. They were identified first in the Congo, after they'd already cleared out the invaders, and then a week later in Indochina — the higher-ups had already known they were there well before Beth had spotted them, but she'd been rather busy killing aliens and getting herself set on fire like an idiot. After they were found in Indochina, thousands of miles away from Africa, the science people had gotten the military people in both India and the Amazon to check, and they were found there too. They were definitely some weird alien biotech, must be doing something, it wasn't immediately obvious what. But there were fucking a lot of them, and they were spreading, the borders of the soil contaminated with the things growing rapidly hour by hour.

The effect was gradual, slow enough that they hadn't noticed at first — but, as the concentration of the odd beetle things increased, spreading further and further, the process accelerated. They were changing the environment. The air was changing, Hermione said in a letter written over two weeks ago now — before Beth had noticed the bugs, but the letter hadn't gotten to her yet — that the levels of carbon dioxide had spiked, and they were also seeing carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide...

Beth didn't know what any of that shite was, but Hermione assured her they were all very poisonous. And the levels started small, just little traces, but they quickly started to increase, noxious clouds developing where the centre of the alien landings had been — or still were, in India and the Amazon. At first it was just a bad smell, but it quickly started to become an irritant and then, over the last week or so, actively toxic. If Beth wanted to go back to the delta, where she'd first spotted those damn beetles barely two weeks ago, she would need to wear a breath mask. (Or use a bubblehead charm, she guessed.) And it'd need to be a full one that covered the eyes, because apparently the shite in the air turned into acid on contact with water...like, you know, tears, or the insides of your lungs. If she apparated back there without one, she'd be dead in minutes. Extremely painful minutes, even.

And it was spreading. First a faint smell of sulphur, or rotten eggs. Then the acid rain hit. And then...

The science types were studying the bugs, working on a solution, as quickly as they could. A more recent letter from Hermione said that her bosses were taking it absolutely dead seriously (as they bloody well should), everyone who had literally any background at all in biology or chemistry or herbology or alchemy pulled from whatever project they were on to study the beetles, figure out how they worked and how the fuck to stop them. Beth wasn't sure why the hell alchemists should be involved, Hermione just said that like it should be obvious, with no explanation — she did that sort of thing a lot, forgetting everyone wasn't as bloody brilliant as she was...

Hermione wasn't put on that project — she didn't have the expertise necessary, they kept her working on inventing magic computers instead (fuck) — but she heard that the big theory they were working with was that the aliens were terraforming the planet. Thankfully, she'd guessed that Beth might not be familiar with the concept, so she'd actually explained it in her most recent letter: it was an idea from fucking science fiction novels and shite, people going to, like, Mars or whatever and altering the environment to be more like Earth's. So, the aliens were changing Earth's environment to be more like theirs — obviously they could breathe the air here, but maybe their homeworld had more carbon and sulphur oxides and stuff, their plants might be happier with it, so they were fixing it up for themselves?

Beth didn't know about that. Yeah, sure, maybe their planet was a little different — she had a feeling their homeworld was warmer than Earth, just from how they'd mostly landed right along the equator. (And she remembered the inside of that ship had been pretty warm too.) Maybe the beetles were part of a process of adjusting the planet to their liking, sure, but she had a feeling that they were over-doing it on purpose. The last time Beth had gone out, trying to help evacuate people caught up in the edge of the cloud, they'd been attacked by a group of aliens — and they were wearing breath masks too. Weird fucking alive ones, looked like bloody starfish or some shite latched onto their faces, but. They obviously couldn't breathe the air either.

They'd probably reverse it once it was done, but Beth was positive the point was to suffocate the entire fucking planet, so they'd stop fighting back and allow the aliens to use it. They had been taking slaves, to work their fields, but it seemed like they'd finally become a big enough of an annoyance that the aliens had decided to just kill them all instead.

Beth would almost feel smug about that, if millions of people weren't going to die. Billions, literally everyone, if the scientists didn't figure this shite out...

(Millions were still going to die because of it, no matter what — the famine would have gotten bad enough to be getting on with before, but it was only going to be worse now.)

They'd tried to slow it down, with bombs and whatever magic they could come up with, but it didn't seem to work at all, the beetles burrowing deep enough under that nothing could stop them from spreading. So instead, they were just trying to evacuate as many of people as they could, and get them into shelter — and simply wait, for the science types to come up with a solution. If they didn't come up with something, and fast, they were fucked.

Building underground bunkers quickly was trivial with magic, and they didn't have to worry about fresh air, or water, or sanitation. The limiting factor was food — they could shelter millions of people down underground, away from the increasingly toxic atmosphere, but they couldn't wait forever.

Packing people together in close quarters underground was already going to be tense. Add starvation on top of that, and...

Yeah, the science people better hurry the fuck up, that's all Beth was saying.

This was the third shelter Beth had been brought to work with already. They were crawling out from the epicentre of the disturbance, relocating people away and squirrelling them down into bunkers to wait it out. Figuring out the first ring — the entrances well inside the danger zone now, huddled trapped underground, waiting — had been a bit of a mess, magical and muggle engineers debating about how exactly to design the things, figuring out a system of how to sort the people coming in, actually convincing people, no, the danger was absolutely serious, they needed to evacuate, volunteers moved on to start work on the second ring. Getting it all together, they'd underestimated how quickly the cloud would spread — it'd started to hit Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh while the evacuation was still ongoing. The survivors of the landing had decided harrying the people trying to evacuate civilians was a great idea, so there'd been countless skirmishes in the city as they tried to get people out, the sky to the southwest smeared with yellow-orange-brown poison, scrambling through the streets ducking bug-grenades, skin stinging from acid rain, occasionally having to leave someone behind as they were killed or too badly injured, or simply suffocated on the increasingly unbreathable air...

It'd been a fucking mess, was the point. They'd managed to evacuate most of the city in time, but the scramble at the end had been miserable.

Setting up the second and third rings of shelters, spreading out in tiers from the inexorably spreading poison, had gone much more smoothly, at least, as they better figured out what they were doing, and had more time to warn people to evacuate. Beth had actually been separated from her troop — they were sheltering back in the first ring — tapped to help sort the evacuees coming in. Each shelter was built different, thrown together by the people working on it, but they usually had multiple entrances, someone at each taking down names and directing them to the right section. Just for administrative purposes, they'd decided it was a good idea to sort people by dominant language, so it'd be easier to communicate with their neighbours and with support staff, and everyone doing Beth's job had maps of their chunk of the complex, keeping track of the people coming in to prevent overcrowding. If it came down to it, they could bring in portkeys to move people who didn't fit to neighbouring shelters in this ring, or move them up to the fourth, they'd figure it out. Sanitation and air and water and food and stuff was planned out for a certain population of residents, so, better to figure out how to move them on than put too many people in one shelter.

Though, keeping track of the people coming in wasn't Beth's only job — there was a reason they'd pulled omniglots and mind mages and Seers specifically.

Beth went through one family after another, a bunch of individual people or small groups. Mostly tiếng Việt speakers, or closely-related local languages — things like Xtiêng and Kaho were different enough they were definitely their own thing, but listening to them she could tell they were related, like some of the languages she'd heard up in the hills ages ago now — and also a fair number who spoke Phéasa Khmêr — the big Cambodian language, vaguely similar to Vietnamese but without the tones — and even a family who spoke klei Êđê, which was a Chăm language, different from the rest. Beth didn't actually speak that last one very well at all — she'd picked up a little over the last week, just the absolute basics — but one of the women in the family spoke Vietnamese well enough to get them through the conversation. A few people offered identification papers of some kind, but she didn't actually need those, just verbally tell her names, please. Nothing suspicious, though a lot of them looked rather strained, tired — in a lot of the adults' eyes, relief warred with worry, they'd be safe here but for how long...

There was a low hoot in the room, she glanced up to her left. The room was plain, with nothing in the way of decoration, stone and ceramic polished smooth with magic. She was standing just before a T-junction, a long hallway curving up to the surface stretching out in front of her — though she couldn't actually see most of it, crowded with a long line of people, occasional curtains every few metres enchanted to progressively filter the air of any contaminants — Vietnamese soldiers lingering behind her, playing one of the card games floating around. (Local cards, with different colours and suits and using Chinese characters, Beth knew practically nothing about it.) Behind her, short hallways to the left and right led to a few doors — living space for the army people posted here, as well as some medical stuff, a quarantine space — and stairs leading down further into the complex. Everything was pretty plain and barren, functional, the only thing sticking out a sign across the hallway just in front of her, writing in tiếng Việt and Phéasa Khmêr asking everyone to please wait their turn and follow directions.

Perched on that sign was Hedwig, in owl form. As low as the ceilings were, it was kind of cramped for her up there — Beth had actually asked permission before transfiguring the ceiling up a little bit to make room for her head. She'd been sitting there motionless and silent for...shite, felt like hours by this point. But now she'd turned her head, staring down at Beth with unblinking yellow eyes. Once she saw Beth was paying attention, she turned back forward. Couldn't tell what she was looking at precisely, but Beth got the message: Hedwig had spotted someone suspicious coming up.

After waving the family she was on through, Beth glanced back at the soldiers. "Eyes up, Hedwig noticed something." She turned back to deal with the next family, hearing the soldiers behind her shift around, an occasional click of a holster being loosened or a safety being switched off — timed in sync with footsteps or shuffling in their chairs, avoiding drawing attention to it, to not make anyone too nervous. Beth waved the family through, and then a couple lone people, and then a group of friends — university age, came together but they weren't related — waving the next family forward...

Beth spotted who Hedwig meant over their shoulders. Two men, tall and broad-shouldered, accompanied by a young girl, maybe eight or nine. The men were somewhat paler than the people around them, which wasn't inherently suspicious, nor the way they stood stiff and strong and composed. Almost regimented but, well, there were a lot of former military types in Vietnam, that wasn't unusual. The girl seemed terrified, practically shivering, tracks from dried tears down her face — but that wasn't unusual either, Beth had seen countless frightened children today. Even that the pair of men were alone with a girl wasn't odd, families got split up all the time, people sent all over the place on different jobs, or simply due to deaths. A few times, she'd run into people who'd taken responsibility for random orphans they'd found after the bombings, or who'd managed to run away from alien attacks on the ground — children unattended or accompanied by adults other than their biological parents were not an uncommon sight these days...

There was nothing immediately, obviously suspicious about them. But Hedwig had a better eye than Beth — and as she took the names of the family in front of her, she noticed how the men watched their surroundings, gaze slowly tracking around smooth and cold and distant. Yeah, she had a bad feeling too.

Directing the family on toward the Khmer-speaking section, Beth nodded at the trio. "Good, next." They stepped forward, the men's gait smooth and pantherine, the girl stiff and shaky— "All right, stop there. Do you speak Vietnamese?" She let a short pause pass, as though nothing out of the ordinary were happening — though she did loosen her wand in its holster, hidden behind her clipboard. She switched languages to ask, "Do you speak Khmer? no?"

One of the men spoke, Beth's eyebrows twitching when she recognised the language — that was Chinese (specifically Pǔtōnghuà). Hardly anyone here spoke that, at least not as a first language, that was decidedly odd.

Beth knew a tiny bit of Pǔtōnghuà, picked up over the last few months. Trying to act casual, she said, "I need your names, to write," pointing at her clipboard. Switching back to Vietnamese, she asked, "Could you tell me your name, lovely?"

The girl twitched, her eyes widened. "Ah, ah... Linh. Đặng Lưu Thắm Linh."

Good, Liz felt that — human. The men were tensing a little — suspecting she knew something was wrong — the second one said...something, she didn't follow all of it. (Her Pǔtōnghuà really wasn't very good.) She thought he was saying something about calling for...something, she didn't know.

It didn't help, trying to follow it, that she was getting absolutely nothing from him. From either of them.

Her wand falling into her hand, "Đen đen đen!" she yanked back, a silent summoning charm tugging the girl forward quickly enough her feet left the ground — and too fast for the men to react, a wild grasp for her hair missing by inches. A blink later, the girl was barely through in time, the wards snapped into place. Two walls, right along either edge of the strip of black tile, magic thick enough the barrier was semi-opaque, the aliens and hallway beyond partially washed out.

The girl slammed into Beth's middle, staggering her back a couple steps, she caught her before she could fall. There was a dull thump followed by a crackle of the wards reacting to an impact, a frustrated shout. Some hissing through teeth, rifles cocking behind her, and then a loud, stereo shout of, "Dūɦa roïku pratte!" Death to our enemies.

"You first!" she called, in her best guess at their language. "Burn!" Someone flipped the switch back there, there was a clunk, a thrum of magic.

And then the entire space within the barrier wards was filled with intense gold-white fire.

It only lasted a few seconds, flames hissing and crackling and roaring — but no sense of heat, the air motionless, held in by the wards. The girl clung on to Beth's jacket, shivering as though near freezing, not sure she'd even be able to stand if Beth weren't holding her up. Soon the fire lifted, quickly dissolving to wisps and fading, a low whoosh as the air was sucked up and out. All that was left of the aliens were a couple blots of motionless, blackened stuff on the floor.

After she'd confirmed they were dead, she called, "Đỏ, mát đỏ." The wards lifted, better revealing the remains of the alien infiltrators — skeletons white and charred black, smears of melted flesh scorched onto the floor, shells from bug grenades in fragments, burst as their innards flash-boiled. There were mutters and hisses from the line behind them, but Beth ignored them, cleaned up the mess with a quick string of cleaning charms. And that was that.

Though there was still the girl to deal with. Freed from her captors, she'd abruptly dissolved into noisy tears, stubbornly clinging on to Beth and wailing. Out of a lack of any better ideas what she was supposed to do, Beth sank to her knees, setting her clipboard aside, and wrapped her arms around the girl. Really seemed like she could use the hug — fuck, how long had those bastards had her, couldn't have been pretty. Between shushing noises, she glanced back at the soldiers behind her, "Get a medic, please, she'll need to go through quarantine."

Someone from the medical staff turned up a couple minutes later — a woman in the green uniform of the Vietnamese military, but without any of the rank stuff, Beth saw that sometimes with people who'd lost all their things for whatever reason — she crouched down with Beth, tried to gently entice Linh away. The girl was stubborn, and obviously badly shook up, it took a minute or two to peel her off of Beth. She was still crying as the medic led her off toward quarantine (she'd need to be checked for any alien implants or contagions), occasionally glancing back at Beth, not sure what that was about.

Beth took a deep, shaky breath. She picked up her clipboard, got back up to her feet, and waved the next group forward.

It was a little tense at first, stiff — everyone in sight of the incident seemed rather uncomfortable standing in the black strip of ceramic, perhaps wary of being incinerated themselves. Beth explained, projecting her voice back down the line a little bit with a quick spell, that she had a special magical ability that helped her detect alien infiltrators — she used the Vietnamese term for the Sight, Beth had picked up the term the mages used for omniglottalism but the muggles here wouldn't recognise it — all she needed was for someone to speak to her and she'd know. Security measure to prevent terror attacks inside the shelter, most efficient way to make sure everyone was safe. The next few groups went rather more smoothly after that, now that everyone knew exactly why she needed everyone to individually tell her their names, slipping back to the usual somewhat awkward routine once all the witnesses were past her.

Write names down on her map, copy out the block numbers onto a card, hand it to whoever while giving them directions, and then the next group, and the next, and the next, on and on and on...

After what felt like (and was) hours, a middle-aged local man — dressed in the slightly old-fashioned-looking baggy trousers and wrap-around tunic the mages here preferred — appeared to relieve her. She felt a faint tingle of prickly cool magic on the air, tickling at the back of her neck — mind mage, he'd be able to feel aliens in disguise as well as she could. (Better, technically, since he wouldn't have to wait for them to speak.) He politely waited for her to finish the group she was on, she handed him her clipboard and her stack of cards, and finally stepped away. Hedwig flew down off her perch, gracefully landing on Beth's shoulder, and Beth walked off, heading for the canteen. She wasn't particularly hungry, but she had maybe eight hours before she'd be expected to be up again — continuing to process people coming into this shelter, or maybe she'd be moved to yet another one, who knows — and it was probably a good idea to eat something before going to bed regardless.

First she dipped by the toilets, though. (Well, latrines, technically, but nobody gave a damn about the terminology.) There didn't seem to be anyone in here at the moment, but it wasn't as though Hedwig gave a damn — she'd hopped off of Beth's shoulder and switched back to her human shape well before Beth had even gotten her clothes out of her bag and onto the counter. Hedwig was dressed by the time Beth was done with the toilet (or whatever), though looking rather uncomfortable, grimacing and rolling her shoulders. Give her a few minutes and she'd ease into it, growing increasingly accustomed to human things, but she always looked so bloody awkward at first.

Honestly, if other people wouldn't make a fuss about it, Beth felt very certain that Hedwig would still prefer just walking around completely naked. She could play along with human cultural expectations, but it was still obviously very unnatural for her.

The canteen was rather cramped, maybe twenty people packed in here at the moment — mostly military people, posted here to guard the shelter, various other support staff — hardly enough space in the little room for all of them. For whatever reason, they hadn't gone with proper tables and chairs, instead smaller single-person lap-table things stacked here and there, the floor covered with a relatively soft mat (some kind of woven bamboo, she thought), cushions strewn around if someone wanted the extra barrier. Save space, maybe? Whatever. There was little actual conversation going on, everyone listening to the clear, natural-sounding voice filling the room, projected by one of Hermione's magical radios.

Those things were starting to get around these days, Beth had been seeing them more and more. There had been one in the canteen in the previous shelters she'd been in, and most officers were carrying them around. Supposedly (according to Hermione), they ultimately wanted to get them into the hands of as many soldiers as they could, so they could better coordinate while in combat — and that had been a problem sometimes, thanks to the increasing uselessness of mundane radios as enchantments and wards became more widely used — but they'd been focussed on outfitting people in active battle zones, in India and the Amazon. Manufacturing capability was limited, and they weren't a priority here at the moment, Beth wouldn't be surprised if she was never actually given one. Not that she minded, she was away from her troop anyway, and she couldn't imagine why she'd need one...

The radios getting around had solved the problem of how slow news could be — before, they'd have to rely on people apparating or portkeying around to ferry information in person, but now they could just call someone all the way across the world in an instant. She'd heard this station before, updates on the current progress in the war and other news running twenty-four hours a day. (There were a few different announcers, they rotated in and out over the course of the day.) A lot of the news would be repeated several times in a day — especially if it was important, to make sure everyone heard it — and she assumed some of the information was lightened for propaganda purposes. You know, didn't want to cause too big of a hit to morale by being too blunt about how terrifying of an existential, literal extinction-level threat the terraforming bugs were — literally every scientist and magical scholar they had available was on it, so anyway, about the progress of the fighting in India...

Honestly, she wasn't sure if having access to news was a net positive or negative for morale. The world was a fucking mess at the moment, but being reminded that there was stuff going on elsewhere, there were millions and millions of people working at the same problems they were here was...grounding, maybe was the word? She didn't know. She listened, when she had the time, but she didn't know if it actually did any good.

(She lost count of how many people she'd told that her best friend invented the things — they were cool, it was hard to resist the urge to brag.)

Beth detoured by the food counter to pick up a scoop of rice and beans and a bowl of broth. Unsurprisingly, as the supply situation worsened, the variety of things they had available to eat had declined noticeably — today they didn't have any meat at all, which had become normal at some point. Or, the broth had technically involved meat in the process of making it, but it was just flavouring at this point, and rather mild at that, you could hardly tell. Beans had become more common, as a replacement for the protein, and of course there was a lot of rice. (They were in Asia, after all.) The broth was still flavourful as all hell, sharp from black pepper and with a dollop of coconut butter and a bunch of fresh(-ish) herbs, but it was still a big change from the early months of the war. Supposedly that was going to change soon, due to issues with evacuating livestock ahead of the spread of the toxic cloud, but for now this was what they had.

Hedwig scowled for a second at the entirely plant-based food on offer, but took a serving for herself without complaint.

The two of them got a few nods and muttered greetings as they found spots on the floor — Beth and Hedwig were the only white people in the room at the moment, and one of them could turn into a great bloody Arctic owl, so they were recogniseable at least — but everyone quickly turned back to the radio. The announcer was a man this time, reading off the copy he was given in northern-accented Vietnamese (he was from the area of Hà Nội, Beth thought). At least some of the intermittent talking was someone turning to a neighbour and asking what the announcer just said — the people here mostly spoke southern varieties, the dialects were similar enough they could mostly understand each other, but there was occasional confusion. Beth poured a little bit of the broth over her rice, making sure to get some of the coconut butter with it, and settled in to listen.

Not that there was anything immediately relevant — it sounded like a politics story. She was aware there was a lot of politics ongoing, thanks to the world economy abruptly imploding and the necessity of everyone to work together to fight off the aliens. Beth didn't really have the brain for (or interest in) politics, so she mostly didn't pay attention, but Hermione wrote about that sort of thing now and then, she'd picked up some of it. The thing she knew about with the most long-term importance was probably the major government changes going on. Since the aliens had targeted major cities in their initial attack (and intermittently since), various governments around the world had had a lot of their political leadership knocked out — the UK had been somewhat lucky, but even they had lost a lot of the officials that actually made things work (not to mention the offices they worked out of, and all the records and shite there), basically having to start the whole administrative infrastructure over from scratch, but some countries had essentially been decapitated on day one. In those cases, they still had enough people lower down the ranks to help keep things together, but they often had to lean on assistance from neighbouring countries or just fall apart entirely.

One result of that was the strengthening of international organisations, acting as the intermediary by which more lucky countries picked up the slack for their neighbours. Also, you know, coordinating the various multinational military deployments and complex supply chains and shite they had going on, it was easier to keep all that nonsense straight if it was going through one body. Beth had noticed when her post started going through a new UN office instead of the BFPO, but apparently that kind of thing was happening with a lot of shite she wasn't paying attention to. Hermione didn't think they were going to end up with a literal worldwide government or anything, but, well, the world on the other side of this fucking mess was going to look very different than it had before, that was all.

(Assuming they made it through to the other side at all, of course.)

None of the news seemed particularly interesting — or at least nothing that was important to her, anyway. Something about some meeting happening in Beirut to do with some international politics thing, didn't care, some kind of decision by Laotian leadership, blah blah. Then there was another update about the atmospheric changes going on, and what was being done about that. There were reports that getting people to shelter hadn't gone so well in places in the Congo — the fighting had already been done there for a little while, most of the military people already moved out and attempting to move people back in to get some crops in the ground, so they'd been caught flat-footed when the air started turning to poison. Lots of people had died — probably hundreds, at least — before they could be evacuated. Probably fewer people than they'd lost here, by the sound of it, but the epicentre of the cloud here happened to be inconveniently near the largest city in the country, so. The ones in India and Amazon were still warzones, so there weren't many civilians to evacuate to begin with, so those ones hadn't been as much of a problem — the fighting had slowed down, actually, they suspected the aliens didn't have enough breath masks to go around, gone to shelter in their settlements. Either that or they were running low on people, could be either at this point.

The Korean navy off shore had called in reports of large numbers of dead fish and the like floating around. Hermione had mentioned that the stuff in the air turned water into acid, so, apparently the cloud was getting into the ocean too — that was...concerning. The Koreans and other people on boats around were trying to map out how the poison in the water was spreading, following the currents, they'd have information for fishers about that later. For the moment, the government was putting out a recommendation not to eat anything killed by this stuff, or even if you suspect it might have been, they had no idea if it was safe, wait for more information first...

There was some news coming out of Quảng Tây and Vân Nam — southern provinces of China, bordering Vietnam and Laos — but that was more politics stuff, and Beth didn't really know enough to even really follow it. And, honestly, now that she'd gotten some food and was sitting down and not doing anything she was getting kind of tired. She hadn't really been sleeping well lately, too much going on, maybe it was about time to get to bed...

Just as she was considering getting up, the presenter on the radio broke off in mid-sentence — the signal went dead for a few seconds. "Excuse me, I'm told we have an urgent report coming in. One moment..." Beth assumed there was muttering and paper-shuffling going on over there, but the 'microphone' worked through intent, so they couldn't hear any of that. The room went about as silent as the radio, the men and women stiff and tense, waiting. The broadcast was only very rarely interrupted with more news coming in. Whatever it was must be big. After a long, fragile moment, the presenter came back, they were learning just now that—

Nuclear weapons.

They'd used nuclear weapons in the Amazon and India, just earlier today.

The decision came after at least a week of deliberation between the Soviets, the Americans, and the effected countries — India and Brazil, yes, but also countries that had significant risk of ending up in the fallout...which did include Burma, but probably not them over here. (The dominant winds coming off Biển Đông should protect most of the peninsula...hopefully.) The attacks had come simultaneously, and with no warning, using portkeys to teleport warheads in to each of the alien posts in both regions they'd managed to identify, all of the nukes immediately going off simultaneously — observers noted they'd all detonated, the aliens failed to vanish any of them with their weird gravity shields before they went off. Hence the portkeys and the short fuse, Beth guessed.

There were multiple reasons behind the decision to stop playing around and break out the big guns. For one, attacks from the aliens had slowed down, yes, but their forces in both regions were increasingly hard-pressed to continue the fighting and evacuate people away and start building shelters — especially since they didn't have enough breathing equipment good enough to survive in the cloud for enough people to make a difference. Just leaving the aliens in there wasn't an option, since they'd be able to send out raiding parties and grow up some more weapons unopposed. (That they might use the break to make more of the big fire-squids was a particular concern.) Also, it was hoped that detonations close to the surface would kill all the air-changing bugs in the soil, and the radiation might slow down the spread — lab tests did suggest that the bugs could be killed with radiation, though they really had no idea whether the fallout would be strong enough to actually stop them.

Wiping the aliens out completely with overwhelming force meant they'd be able to focus on other priorities, particularly evacuating people in the area, trying to contain the bugs, and working on getting some crops in the ground to hopefully help with the worldwide food supply issues that were becoming a serious problem these days. The relative isolation of the sites meant that direct civilian deaths from the bombings should be almost zero, and they promised that radioactive fallout should be relatively easily dealt with with magic. (Not easy to do, considering how wide of an area a nuke could fling shite around, but the magic involved wasn't complicated.) A joint American–Soviet team of experts had carefully calculated how many nukes they would need to eliminate both landings, and the yield that would be most effective while still within what they could afford — the consequences for the climate from the ash and dust thrown into the air from the bombs themselves should be minimal, but the effects of secondary fires were harder to estimate...and both bombings had been in forested regions, meaning there was a lot of shite to burn. All the smoke and ash thrown up into the air might have a mild cooling effect, but then all the carbon dioxide produced by the fires — and less of it being taken out of the air with all those trees lost — would then have a warming effect, they really couldn't be sure which would be more noticeable...especially since the cooling effect would decline with time, and the warming effect might not, so the latter might be hidden by the former at first...

It was a big fucking deal, basically, the sort of extreme measure they would only ever even consider in the emergency situation they found themselves in at the moment. There were teams prepared to go in and suppress the fires as quickly as possible and start cleaning up the radiation as much as they could, but it'd probably be a couple days before it was safe to start doing that. The cloud in India was drifting north and east, over Bangladesh and toward China, as well as west-southwest further into India; the cloud in the Amazon was more spread out, and the winds were mild, but it seemed to be trailing vaguely northwest, toward Columbia. They'd have further updates as more information came in.

Even after the presenter moved on, for at least a couple minutes afterward, the room was filled with cold, shocked silence, everyone just staring blankly at the device, or glancing wide-eyed at each other.

...Jesus fucking Christ. Just blow up the entire fucking rainforest, why don't they...

In the cold, solemn quiet, Hedwig leaned closer to Beth. "What is this? What happened?" Oh, of course Hedwig didn't understand any of that...and it turned out she didn't know what nukes were either, that didn't help...

Explaining all that took a couple minutes. Or explaining it as well as Beth understood it herself, honestly — she really had no idea how nuclear weapons worked, or what the fuck radiation really was, just that they were bad. The bit about stuff flung up into the air blocking out the sun, making it colder, and different gases in the air holding heat better making it warmer, that stuff was easier to explain, at least. Hedwig was rather bemused at the claim that explosions that powerful actually existed, but not really by the idea that humans might permanently fuck up the environment by accident. She'd spent a lot of time in the wilderness in her life (or at least as close as she could find to something that could be called "wilderness"), and apparently things were really bad out there? Hedwig claimed it'd gotten noticeably worse just in her lifetime, by like a lot, which, Beth hadn't realised them fucking up the planet would be that noticeable over such a short span of time, but she guessed Hedwig would be in a better position to notice than most people, so.

Beth was getting really tired by the time that conversation was done, bed seemed like a really good idea at this point. But just as she was putting her things away, someone came in asking for her — she was wanted in quarantine. "What the hell for?"

The man's eyebrows scrunched up a little at the blunt question. "The girl from before, Linh? She has been cleared, but she is...being stubborn. She wants to see you."

...Well, fine, Beth guessed she could take care of that. As long as it didn't take too long, she really would like to get to bed.

The quarantine area was basically a hospital floor — modern muggle-looking stuff, all sterile white tile and those funny poseable beds. The room was long and rectangular, twenty beds total, ten to either side, separated off from each other by heavy cotton curtains (also white). The curtains were enchanted to isolate the internal environment, to prevent any potential alien contamination from spreading while the patients were being treated. Hermione claimed this sort of thing had adopted magical methods for isolating patients, because the clean rooms and shite muggles would use took far more space, and specialised equipment it could be difficult to move somewhere and set up on short notice...not to mention electricity. The enchantments only worked when the curtains were closed — they were told not to disturb any of the beds that were currently blocked off, let the medical staff handle them, following whatever proper procedure they'd worked up. There was a block of beds that was curtained off at the moment, from the look of it three beds in a row, the internal curtains removed to join them together. Must have had a family come in who needed to be checked out.

A little girl was sitting on the edge of a bed nearby, who Beth was pretty sure must be Linh. (It'd been a couple hours now, and she'd had other concerns on her mind at the time.) Beth didn't spend much time around children younger than Hogwarts age, but she figured Linh must be in the middle somewhere, like eight or nine, with the now familiar silky black hair, skin tone more toward the darker end for the locals — from sun exposure, Beth would guess. She'd obviously been through decontamination, changed into a pair of lose drawstring trousers and an overlong, baggy shirt, the basic clothes they had stored away in big stacks here for anyone who needed some. A little big on her, Beth thought, but it wasn't indecent, so that was good enough to be getting on with for now. She was sitting rigid on the edge of the bed, her fists scrunched up in the sheets, fixing a hot glare on the opposite wall, completely ignoring the woman talking to her.

Beth hesitated for a second — dealing with traumatised children was somewhat outside of her comfort zone — before lurching back into motion, forcing a mild smile on her face. "Hello, there. I'm told someone was asking for me."

Linh looked up, her eyes wide — a light, rich, not-quite-amber brown, somewhat rare around here but not unusual. She didn't say anything right away, the doctor (or whatever) next to her taking it up instead. Smiling up at Beth, she said, "Ah, hạ sĩ Potter, there you are. If you can get young Đặng Lưu here downstairs for me."

Despite herself, Beth felt her lips twitch. "Sure, I'll try. And I think you just gave me a promotion, Doc." She was pretty sure hạ sĩ was a corporal — before she'd gone off on this assignment, Luke had told her to expect a promotion or offer of some kind (depending on how things went and whether she planned on staying with the SCF after the fighting was over), but hạ sĩ was actually two ranks up...

"Regardless." The woman stood as Beth stepped closer, started leaving — but as she walked past Beth she caught her arm, leaning in to whisper. "The aliens attacked her family on the way to the shelter, killed them and took her. She saw them die."

Beth grimaced. Yeah, she'd thought it might have been something like that. "Understood." Once they were alone(-ish), she stood in front of the bed for a second, before deciding that felt wrong and sat on the bed next to Linh instead. Of course, then she had no fucking clue what to say. She sometimes helped out with the little kids getting all homesick or who had bullying problems — the Gryffindor prefects tended to be fucking useless — but she was kind of out of her depth here. "Hey."

Linh didn't respond at all (which was fair enough), still just sitting rigid, almost painfully still, staring up at her unblinkingly.

"...So, I hear you don't want to go downstairs with the other children." The brief-but-vicious war had made countless orphans, or children who were separated from their families for whatever reason. Beth hadn't been down there, but she knew there was a block of the living area set aside, with volunteers to look after them.

"I don't," Linh muttered — voice high and soft, a bit tense. Her throat still raw from crying earlier, Beth would guess. "I want to stay with you."

For a long moment, Beth just blinked down at the girl, dumbfounded. That that might be a possibility honestly hadn't occurred to her...though, when she thought about it, it probably should have. Beth had just saved her from the evil aliens who'd murdered her family, after all. "Ah..." She cleared her throat. "That's not going to be possible."

"Why?"

Well shite, there had to be like a dozen reasons. "I'm not staying here, for one. Once this shelter is all filled up they'll be moving me to help with the next one. And I'm just here helping out, you know — when the fighting's over I'm going back home to England."

Linh frowned. "England?"

"Sure." Beth twisted around to show Linh her left arm, pointed at the little Union Jack patch sewn into her sleeve there. "Why, where did you think I was from?"

"...I dunno." If Beth had to guess, she hadn't really thought about it that hard, but England was a lot further away than she expected. "You talk really well."

"That's magic — I can copy the language someone speaks right out of their head just by talking to them. It's why they have me looking for aliens trying to sneak in, I can't feel them like I can everyone else. And there aren't very many people like me around, so, they're going to need me elsewhere."

"Oh." Linh stared at her for another second, before turning away. And she didn't say anything more, just sitting there, hands still stiffly clamped onto the edge of the bed, small and still and silent.

...Well, this was awkward.

Beth groped for something to say — she figured Linh was feeling all scared, and alone, and... There wasn't really anything Beth could do that would make any of that better, necessarily. Honestly, she was tempted to just stun Linh and carry her off downstairs unconscious, make her someone else's problem, but that didn't seem like it was really helping. Besides, it was... She didn't want to...

"You know, I lost my parents, when I was little." Oh sure, you fucking idiot, remind her her family was just killed, what a great idea!

While Beth was beating herself up for that, Linh glanced up at her — her expression completely unreadable, blank but tense. "Really?"

"Yeah. Ah. I was younger than you — so young I don't remember them at all, honestly. There was a bad sorcerer, he... My parents died to protect me."

Her shoulders hitching up a little, Linh glared at the wall, eyes hot and jaw set.

It maybe wasn't a great idea to bring this up, she was a fucking idiot, scrambled to keep talking. She didn't change the subject, she was kind of committed now, but she couldn't help cringing a little — like watching a plane crash, there was nothing she could do about it... "Ah, I've met some of their friends, I live with my father's best friend now — or, I used to before I came here, anyway — and they tell me stories, but they often don't feel quite real to me, you know? I don't remember them at all, the things people tell me are, just, stories, about characters, might as well be fictional most of the time. And I wonder sometimes, if it's better that way or not. I don't remember them at all, all I have is the stories — but because I don't remember them at all, it...doesn't hurt as much as it probably would if I did. But I wonder if that's worth it? I don't know. I don't know which one is worse, losing your family or never having one in the first place.

"But I do..." She trailed off, not entirely sure how to word the thought she was having. Linh had hunched in even further, her face screwed up a little — Beth really had no idea whether she was helping or not, but, this part she thought was actually important to talk about. Even if the idea hadn't occurred to Linh yet, it was better to get it out right away. "Sometimes, I feel like... Well, I can be rather hard on myself sometimes — this might be a surprise to you, but I'm a bit of a mess." Not to mention, the Dursleys tried pretty hard to convince her she was a worthless freak who didn't really deserve anything at all, but that wasn't something Linh needed to know. "It feels like, sometimes, everything I touch goes wrong, and I hear these stories about what great, talented, honourable people my parents were. Much better people than me, no doubt about that. Yet they died, and I didn't. And I think, well, that seems wrong, doesn't it? The better people should have lived. That it's my fault that they're dead, somehow, because I'm here and they're not, and I hate it sometimes."

Linh had started crying, now — just a little bit, right on her edge, her leaking eyes screwed shut, her shoulders hunched up and pulling into herself, as though trying to hide. Shuffling a little closer, Beth looped her arm around Linh. The girl tensed at first, jerking away, but then she lurched the other way, tucked herself in against Beth's side.

"But it's wrong to think that," Beth hissed over Linh's head. "It's not my fault they're dead. And they wouldn't want me to hate myself because of it, that doesn't make anything better. The best thing I can do is live in a way that honours their memory as well as I can. And that's another reason why you can't stay with me — there are other little girls out there I have to go save. I fight to protect people, because that's what I'm good at, that's how I can live best, to give meaning to me still being here. And I hope you find that thing you can do to honour their memory best, Linh, I really do, but it can't be with me."

At that point, Beth had well and truly run out of words. She was honestly impressed with herself that she'd managed to come up with something that deep, but she was out of her comfort zone here, that was all she had. So, for the next several minutes, she just held Linh as she cried — she figured that was good enough for now.

(It had to be good enough.)

Chapter Text

22nd February 1996 (63:10:03)
— Contact plus 00.05.20:03.15

Judging simply by the sheer number of researchers and technicians involved, it was undoubtedly the single largest scientific effort ever undertaken in the history of humanity. The teams initially given samples of the peculiar beetles, assigned to determine their function, had very quickly realised the scale of the threat — they'd begun raising the alarm several days before the atmospheric changes had begun to become apparent on the ground. The Commission had reacted immediately, issuing a directive that literally every single specialist in relevant fields be pulled to work on a solution, they'd even gotten permission to commandeer outside resources and equipment and experts as necessary, scrambling to throw absolutely everything they had at the problem.

Which, as panicky as it might have seemed from the outside at first, Hermione was convinced that was a perfectly reasonable reaction: these beetles were an existential threat, they would kill literally everyone on earth if they weren't stopped. But, as the effects intensified and spread, creating toxic clouds that grew and grew by the day, everything living within them suffocated or dissolved by volatile acids, the scepticism Hermione had overheard in that first week or so had quickly tapered off. The projections Hermione had seen predicted the effects would cover the entire planet by July, ultimately resulting in the complete extinction of the human species when food stored in shelters finally ran out, certainly no later than a year from now.

That was a terrifying thought, of course, but Hermione was confident it wouldn't actually happen — when absolutely every available resource the world over was thrown into a single project, things could happen very quickly.

Hermione wasn't actually on the project — Payne had kept her team working on her computer idea, though Elbert and Marcel were occasionally pulled away for a consult — but she was keeping herself informed, skimming over the deluge of reports broadcast out by one team or another in one country or another, hundreds of pages of data coming out every day. Given this was an evolving situation and they weren't bothering to take the time to slow down and resolve the progress they were making into a proper summary, there was kind of a lot to get through to get any idea of how things were going — but the teams involved were aware a lot was happening, so they made sure to flag the important bits in as attention-getting of a way as they could, Hermione only occasionally checking back over the rest of it for context.

It hadn't taken very long for researchers to conclude that these things were definitely magic. That wasn't exactly a new conclusion, there'd been a debate ongoing for some time among people investigating the aliens' equipment over exactly how much of it was mundane and how much was magical. For some time now, most of the aliens' living technology had been officially classified as magical creatures — some of their properties were the result of mundane biology and chemistry, but some of it was definitely magical.

The magical nature of their propulsion and shielding had been the first example to be definitively proven. They'd suspected as much from the beginning — they appeared to manipulate gravitational forces somehow, even generating controlled singularities from nothing, which mundane physics would suggest was absolutely impossible...and even if it were possible, the energy such a process would require would be incredible. However, it hadn't taken long for mages to note that the devices caused peculiar reverberations through ambient magic, careful analysis showing unfocussed bursts of magical energy in the instant before a singularity resolved. That had seemed proof enough, but then someone had managed to capture one of the source creatures alive. Supposedly, the things gave off a steady pulse of magical radiation — an analogous concept to black-body radiation, waste energy generated by the bioalchemical operation of all living things, sometimes colloquially referred to as an aura — so intense that even the muggles in the room could feel it on the air. They hadn't been able to keep the creature alive for very long, without the support structure of the ship it'd been attached to it'd quickly shrivelled and died, but it'd lived long enough to prove to everyone's satisfaction that the aliens' technology did involve magic somehow.

Which was quite fascinating, honestly, and Hermione clearly wasn't the only one who thought so: that discovery had led to a number of other avenues of investigation, only halted once the terraforming beetle problem had presented itself. The initial impression from a lot of mages was that the aliens somehow seemed even less magical than earth-native life — they were highly resistant to many spell effects, even entirely immune to most magics directly targeting the mind or soul. In fact, the taller aliens — there was a technical term in the literature, but most people just used the military slang "scabs" — didn't even register to spells designed to detect the presence of a soul. (Often referred to as human-presence detecting magics, which was annoyingly incorrect — they detected any sapient being, not just humans.) The magical structure referred to by magical scholars as the "soul" was a necessary product of consciousness, even detectable in the more intelligent animals, various mammals and birds, that the "scabs" didn't seem to have one suggested they were life more on the order of fish, or plants. Alive, yes, they did have a detectable aura, but certainly not self-aware.

That was, obviously, false. Whatever one might think of the aliens' moral character, the horrifying glimpses they'd gotten of their culture, they were certainly beings. Yet they were completely invisible to magics meant to interact with a mind, an unreadable blankness to mind mages and omniglots — but that wasn't true of all the aliens, the xenosauria ("dinos") were detectable, and so were various other of their creatures. They really had no explanation for that at the moment. The only reasonable theory they had was that the minds of the "scabs", for whatever reason, operated through a spectral resonance that was incompatible with familiar magics. The metaphor wasn't perfect, but as though mind magics broadcast on a frequency that their minds simply didn't receive, somehow.

It was the only good theory they had, though they hadn't actually managed to find the right 'frequency' — but in looking for it they'd found what they were pretty sure were the peculiar magical–gravitational pulses the aliens used for communications. Last Hermione had checked, they'd been working on a device to jam the aliens' transmissions, but that project too had been put on hold as the terraforming beetles became a more pressing concern.

It'd only taken a brief examination for researchers to decide that the beetles made absolutely no chemical sense. They did pull materials in from the environment, their bodies performing chemical reactions that released carbon oxides, sulphur oxides, and hydrogen sulphide, plus the occasional other trace chemicals, all the while releasing countless little spores that grew into more beetles. However, it didn't seem like the chemical reaction balanced — not only did the researchers have absolutely no idea how the beetles were causing the reaction in the first place, but the inputs and the outputs of the reactions didn't seem to match up as they should. In particular, sulphur atoms seemed to just appear out of nowhere, the conservation of mass and energy both being broken at some point in the process.

Bioalchemists in various teams (at more or less the same time) came to the conclusion that that was exactly what was happening: the beetles were creating sulphur atoms, out of nothing. The beetles were performing molecular alchemy — altering atoms from one element to another, or else creating them a priori, and arranging them into the chemical the user desires. Molecular alchemy was still a mostly theoretical field, thus far there'd only been a few small-scale successes, done primarily to prove that it was possible, if not practical with the methods available to alchemists at present. All their alchemists had ever managed to do was make tiny demonstrations, only generating a few hundred molecules at maximum, the current research in the field focussed on ways to generalise the process to increase potential yields to something that was actually useable.

The aliens, clearly, had very different methods available to them.

From what Hermione had read, the people on the project really had no idea how the beetles worked — their understanding of alchemy required a conscious mind to visualise the process, which the beetles certainly didn't have. Dozens of meetings, in-person and over the new radios, had proceeded over the course of a couple days, and they'd decided on a...rather unorthodox strategy. The beetles simply spread too quickly for them to do anything about, and reversing the damage they'd done would be a huge project. And they couldn't design a device which could solve either problem at scale, since it would require fundamentally revolutionising their understanding of an entire field of magic. They simply didn't have the time.

So, instead, they'd decided to reverse-engineer the beetles: they'd produce one strain to hunt down the aliens' beetles, and a second to reverse the damage to the environment.

Hermione had initially worried that they'd only be creating a new problem they'd have to solve — or, more terrifyingly, accidentally create a runaway Von Neumann machine that would destroy the world regardless — but there was actually a built-in solution to that problem. In their dissections of the beetles, they'd discovered an organ that was seemingly designed to resonate with the magical–gravitational signals the aliens used for communications — the theory was that the aliens could switch them off once they weren't needed any longer, or perhaps even send them instruction sets to change the function they were performing on the fly. That organ could theoretically be reshaped to respond to purely magical signals, giving them fine control over the beetles. At the very least, they were sure they could turn them off, but it was possible they'd be able to do even more with them, they were in preliminary studies into the concept already.

Honestly, some of the research Hermione had looked over was fascinating. Some of the experts on the project thought it was possible that, should the effort to reverse-engineer the beetles succeed — of which they had pretty strong confidence, due to the versatility of modern blood alchemy techniques — they might be able to use them for all manner of things. She'd read theoretical outlines of programmes to automate the desalination and purification of water, to filter pollutants from the air, to desalinate and strip toxins out of soil, or instead seed nitrates and phosphates, acting as a self-propagating fertiliser, keeping farmland fertile indefinitely.

One preliminary proposal Hermione had stumbled across from a certain muggleborn Chinese alchemist suggested it should be possible to reverse desertification. It would have to be done in multiple steps, different strains of the beetles making successive alterations, but his work-up seemed...theoretically sound, so far as Hermione could tell. She'd flagged his name on her account to make sure she'd see anything else he put out, and he'd come up with the idea long enough ago that he'd since sent out a second version of it with a few refinements, along with answers to the various questions and suggestions he'd gotten from colleagues, and apparently even the Chinese government, curious how practical of a containment it might be for the inexorable advance of the Gobi Desert in particular.

This alchemist claimed that, assuming the bioalchemists could succeed in their efforts, there was theoretically no reason that they couldn't turn the entirety of the Gobi into fertile land, if they wanted to. Which was just absurd, the scale of the project he was talking about... But Hermione didn't see where he was wrong, assuming there weren't any errors in his chemistry she was missing...

Hermione had come to realise early on — during that first week, the concerted attacks on major cities still ongoing, Beth out fighting while Hermione hunkered down at Rock-on-Clyde with the Weasleys and countless strangers Beth had had evacuated there — that the world she'd known had already been gone, that everything would be different, forever. While the Statute of Secrecy being summarily abolished was undoubtedly a good thing, in her opinion, there was precious little cause to be optimistic. Millions of people were going to die, had already died. With the violence and chaos, the abrupt collapse in the world economy, with the peculiar terraforming beetles poisoning the air, they'd be lucky if the final death toll didn't end up being in the billions. For months now, the future had seemed terribly grim — if her project here weren't so deeply fascinating, she honestly wasn't sure she'd be able to work up the enthusiasm to even keep getting out of bed in the morning (or whatever time she happened to be waking up that day), her horror at the present state of everything looming over her black and heavy, all but driving every thought out of her head if she slowed down even for a minute.

But, sometimes, reading a proposal to make the most inhospitable of deserts bloom, she had to wonder. Slowly — so slowly, a distant image coalescing bit by bit as the days passed — Hermione was starting to see a future worth building on the other side.

On those days, the horror didn't feel quite so heavy.

But stopping the extinction-level threat they currently faced — and perhaps one day taking the same technology that had nearly killed them all to reshape the world for the better — that was not Hermione's job. Today, she and the team had a presentation to make to Payne. As preoccupied as Payne had been helping to ramp up implementation of the various technologies and techniques coming out of their teams here in Groningen, he'd had little enough time to stick his nose into their computer project — they had sent him occasional progress updates, more often then not offered to justify requests for supplies or equipment and additional staff, but it'd been months since they'd had a proper meeting with him about it.

Hermione had expected them to get around to it a lot sooner than this, honestly. As soon as they had the first working model of the technology, perhaps, just as proof that it worked, before moving on to more practical applications. But Gwen had stumbled across an idea, which had sparked a brainstorming session, and Elbert wanted to see if they could take that extra step before bringing it all to Payne. Because he could be a bit of a showman like that, sometimes.

The room was completely unrecognisable as the space set aside for them to build in. It had been a somewhat oversized classroom, centred around a ring of tables set up in the middle, chairs lined along the outside — the Commission had gradually taken over portions of humanities departments as well, by the books on the shelves and posters on the walls this used to be a philosophy classroom. They'd used the tables at first, schematics and enchantment schema and alchemical arithmancy spread out across oversized sheets of paper covering the whole ring, but before too long they'd packed it all up and started figuring out how to actually build the thing.

All the furniture in the room had been removed, along with the posters and books and whatever else, sent away to storage. (Who knew for how long that would be, if the University would ever resume normal operation.) They'd commandeered a large collection of bookshelves from here and there across the University, and Hermione, Gwen, and a team of muggles — the same people who'd helped with the radio project, becoming quite competent enchanters at this point — got to work laying down the enchantments and wards that functioned as the infrastructure of the device, while Marcel and his people worked at manufacturing the ceramics and reservoirs they would need. It turned out silver wasn't available at the moment, not in the volume they wanted, so they adjusted the design to work with bronze instead — a special magical alloy, Marcel had to mix it himself. The first round of materials went into the control box, put together by Elbert and his team, and then the alchemy team started producing reservoir cells, Hermione's team layering them with the proper enchantments, when each was finished slotted into its designated spot on the shelves...

They'd taken several diversions through the process of actually building the thing, when one person or another had an idea, or they realised in the implementation that one element or another wouldn't work out quite as they'd expected. Hermione had accidentally made a lot more work for them, putting one of the cells onto a shelf, the runes carved into the wood and the ceramic of the cells dancing in her eyes — and she abruptly realised that the sorting enchantments could be significantly streamlined simply by filtering out one class of formants early, its absence further down the line allowing those functions to be greatly simplified. Once she'd pointed it out Gwen and Gijs had practically been slapping themselves, because that should have been obvious, and now they had to redo nearly half of the enchanting work. The final product would be much more efficient — in the end they'd been able to increase the total volume of their reservoir banks by nearly a third (which meant they'd also needed more reservoir cells, adding to the alchemy work as well) — and Marcel suspected it should also have reduced hang time, and would make the process of miniaturisation in future much easier, but still, she felt like such an idiot for not seeing it sooner...

The project had been a bit of a mess start to finish, was the point — they'd been making alterations to the design far later than was really practical, needing to go back and make changes to elements they'd already built to integrate new ideas. Some ideas had been too fundamental or too late in the process to be used, they had a sizeable sketchbook filled with notes for subsequent versions. But they had finished it, and it worked as expected, so it was finally time for them to show it off.

Or, for the others to show it off, anyway, Hermione just found these meetings tedious.

Payne waltzed into the room only slightly later than their meeting was scheduled for (busy man these days), tailed by an assistant of some kind — she noticed the assistant was wearing one of the earpieces Hermione had designed, one of their radios must be in his shoulder bag somewhere. He let out a low whistle as he stepped inside, eyes wandering over the nearby shelves. "Looks like you guys have been busy."

She guessed they had been that. When they'd started, it'd just been a normal-looking classroom, dominated by a circle of tables, but now it was packed full of tall bookshelves, dozens and dozens of them leaving only narrow walkways between the rows. Payne followed the row to the middle, stepping into a more open area around the control box, where Hermione and the rest of the team leads were waiting. A square a few metres wide had been left open at the centre of the room, in the middle of the square a sizeable cube of ceramic and wood, a few places tarps pinned across gaps to shield the internal mechanisms. (There was no design reason they needed the ceramic on the entire external surface of the cube, so they'd taken shortcuts, directed resources elsewhere.) It sort of looked like one of those photographs of early computers she'd seen, but made out of less modern materials. Which was only appropriate, she guessed, since they'd started with the already existent technology as a jumping-off point.

Elbert immediately got Payne's attention, quickly transitioning into the rather slapdash presentation they had planned — not like there was really a script or anything, just a list of points they had to go down. He reminded Payne about the initial spark of an idea from Hermione, he and Gijs — a muggle engineer, some kind of computer specialist, she wasn't certain of his exact qualifications — trading back and forth going over early design concepts. Hermione had noticed it'd be pretty simple to put together the enchantments they'd designed in the radio project to make logic gates, which could then be iterated upon to make an equivalent of modern computers using only enchanting; but Gijs, after some discussion with Gwen and Marcel, had quickly realised that there was absolutely no reason to do that whatsoever. Reservoirs could hold far more complex data sets than simple binary code, and enchanting scripts allowed them freedom to design instructions without needing to reduce them to binary logic operations, so the entire process could be vastly streamlined.

Oddly enough, the computer specialist had been the one in the room to realise that they could simply throw out familiar techniques of computer programming. Gijs and his team had been very enthusiastic about the prospect, which had taken Hermione by surprise, but probably shouldn't have — it wasn't very often that you got the opportunity to rebuild your entire field of expertise from first principles, operating with very different constraints. The programming team had had all kinds of questions for Hermione she hadn't been able to answer, honestly, running away with the idea faster than she could keep up...

Hermione understood the physical architecture and the enchanting decently well, but the alchemy involved and the particulars of how the programming worked were a bit over her head. Which was fair enough, alchemy was mostly a new subject to her, she'd catch up eventually.

Anyway, the bookshelves were primarily for data storage, similar to various classes of memory in an electronic computer — some of them were already loaded with some basic assets the device would need to function, but the free space could be used to store new information, both analogous to the function of secondary storage, or to temporarily hold data for ongoing operations, analogous to the function of RAM. Given the different technical limitations involved, the distinct media in electronic computers were essentially the same thing here. Each of those ceramic blocks was a device they called a reservoir cell, which Hermione's team were in charge of (with help from Gwen and Marcel's teams), why don't you go ahead and show Payne one of those?

Hermione had been sitting on the edge of the control box, she hopped back down to the floor to walk over to a nearby shelf, pulled a cell off at random. It was a plain ceramic box, the outside surface sketched with strings of runes. The runes defined enchantments to pass along data one way or the other, with identifying key runes to ensure the proper data was being written or accessed. The enchantments here defined various sectors, on the inside of the cell — Hermione unlatched the lid and pulled it open, displaying the internal mechanism. The space was filled with sheets of alchemised diamonds, stitched together with steel wire (also alchemised), sheets of (alchemised) bronze segregating each sector of reservoirs from each other. Anyway, the runes on the outside and inside surfaces specified which sector to be read from or written to, with an additional identifier for the reservoir; close up, tiny runes were barely visible on the wires, which further directed information to the proper reservoir. Each sector contained 128 reservoirs, arranged in sheets of eight reservoirs by sixteen, and each cell contained eight sectors, for a total of 1024 reservoirs.

Hermione closed the cell back up and slid it into its place on the shelf — there was a basic sticking enchantment that held each cell into its spot on the shelf, to make sure the enchantments didn't become misaligned. Anyway, Gwen's team (with assistance from Hermione's) had handled the shelves. Every surface of the shelves was covered with runes, the etchings filled with special alchemised ceramic to ensure they could hold up to the wear of their operation. (Wood had a relatively low energy tolerance, for most purposes.) Like the cells, the shelves had enchantments to direct queries to the correct cell (whereupon the cell took over), but they were also enchanted with a set of basic instructions — when triggered by the control box, the shelves could autonomously perform a variety of simple functions, which could help to distribute processing operations, greatly accelerating complex computations when properly utilised. (Which was a complicated programming problem, but they were getting better at it.) The bookshelves they'd been sent had been of irregular sizes, to streamline the process they'd taken them apart and cheated with magic to reshape the material into shelves of consistent sizes. Each shelf (about five and a half feet of useable space) contained ten cells, and each bank — what they called a set of shelves, floor to ceiling — contained six shelves.

So, expand that the other way and each bank contained six shelves, sixty cells, and 480 sectors, for a total of 61,440 individual reservoirs. And they'd managed to fit a hundred even banks in here, so go ahead and add a couple zeros to all those numbers to get the total.

Payne was a little dumbfounded by the numbers they were throwing around — were they saying there were six point one-four million diamonds in this room?! Yep, that's what the maths came out to, sure did. (Though that was just in the reservoir banks, that number didn't include the control box itself, or the programme cards.) They'd had a team of people (led by Marcel) constantly running the alchemy — all day, for weeks — and another team (led by Hermione) assembling all the sheets and putting them into the reservoir cells. Payne had given them permission to recruit people here with the Commission who didn't have anything better to do, and even idle residents of the city looking for some way to help out, their teams had expanded to surprising size over the last couple months. Hermione's team alone, building and enchanting the cells, had ballooned up to around eighty people — traditional enchanting projects assumed a single master enchanter and maybe a couple assistants, larger teams allowed them to blast through projects at speeds that were frankly absurd by magical standards. They were hoping to streamline manufacture in future, cut down the amount of actual effort necessary at various points, but yeah, there were a lot of labour hours in this thing, it was honestly slightly daunting to think about.

Once Payne was done being flabbergasted about the time put into this — not to mention the materials, over six million diamonds would have been worth a sizeable fortune before the economy collapsed, no matter that they were artificial and suspiciously perfect — he asked what the storage capacity worked out to, exactly. So Gijs had to explain that they didn't actually have a number for that. Reservoirs function fundamentally differently from digital media — a reservoir could hold a single, discrete piece of information, the possible complexity of the impression proportional to the size of the reservoir. They had 6,144,000 reservoirs in this room, but that was not equivalent to 6,144,000 bits (about 750 kilobytes). Bits only had two possible states (on or off), but the smallest possible theoretical reservoir had fifty-nine possible states. Assume fifty-nine possible states, and the conversion works out to a little over fifty megabytes — actually a little larger than hard drive in the dated personal computer in Hermione's office, but still very small by database standards.

But they weren't using the smallest arithmantically-possible reservoir — that referred to a crystal of only eight carbon atoms, which obviously wasn't feasible to work with. Their reservoirs, small though they were, allowed images that were more complex by several orders of magnitude. It was difficult to calculate exactly (mages didn't describe things in the same way), but presumably many thousands of possible unique states, at least. The theoretical conversion of this computer's storage capacity into familiar binary data could easily be well into the terabytes.

Though, that kind of direct conversation didn't work, necessarily. Each reservoir could hold a single, discrete piece of information. That information could be as simple as a single digit, or as complex as a differential equation; as simple as a single colour, or as complex as a full photograph. The storage capacities of the different kinds of media couldn't be directly translated, because they encoded and manipulated data in very very different ways. The advantage was most often toward the reservoirs, though it was impossible to say by what proportion — give them a specific set of data, and they could give an estimate of how many reservoirs it'd need to be broken up into, and from there an estimate of the ratio of bits to reservoirs necessary, but those proportions were going to be far too context-dependent to generalise.

The technical term in enchanting for the information stored in a reservoir was impression, or image. Their teams had quickly taken to calling them blinks (in reference to some analogy Hermione hadn't been in the room for), and the coincidence of there being 1024 reservoirs in a cell had lent to calling them kiloblinks; but that term was somewhat awkward to pronounce, before long a French member of the programming team had started saying "kilocils" instead (presumably translating "blink" to ciller, and then shortening to cil, meaning literally "eyelash"), which had gradually ended up becoming the preferred term. "Cil" and "cell" were rather similar sounding, but "kilocil" was only used when referring to software and "cell" when referring to hardware — the usage didn't overlap, so they'd never had a reason to change the terms they'd settled on. Might be worth doing in future, when they started making up 'official' documentation, but regardless.

The point was, don't think in bits and bytes, think in images and kilocils, they weren't directly translatable.

And, of course, there was the control block in the middle of the room. This was essentially the equivalent of a CPU — some of the processing duties were distributed to the shelves when feasible, but most of the actual operation of the device was done here. There were also reservoir banks in here — analogous to processor registers and CPU caches — information going through several layers of enchanting to perform various instructions. The physical architecture was extremely complicated, and built in three dimensions, so they couldn't take it apart and show it to Payne without seriously breaking something. But hey, how about instead they show him the schematics?

They'd pre-loaded that programme, so all Payne had to do was flip a switch to turn on the projector, and a three-dimensional illusion of the control box's architecture appeared floating in the air over it. It wasn't a direct representation of the physical structure, more of a design schematic, but the elements were oriented more or less how they were inside the box, different blocks labelled with their function stitched together with a complex spiderweb of lines indicating what was connected to what, each labelled with the particular class of enchantments along that path. The different parts were colour-coded, yellow and blue and red and green, the image a tangled mess. Hermione was familiar enough with the technology and the terminology they'd worked up that she could pick out what things were at a glance, but she was sure it was complete nonsense to Payne and his assistant.

Elbert waited a moment before continuing with his explanation — Hermione had to admit that Payne's wide-eyed expression, gaping dumbfounded at the illusion, was very funny, almost made sitting through this silly thing worth it. Once it seemed the shock had worn off somewhat, Elbert started pointing at different elements in the schematic, explained the very basics of what they did and how they'd built them, in the very general broad strokes. (Payne neither needed to know nor would understand the details.) Elbert rotated the illusion with a wave of his hand, reached up to poke at an interpreter block — the programme highlighted it with a white glow — he pushed a button on the panel. The illusion winked out for a fraction of a second, quickly replaced with a schematic of the interpreter block, pointing out the reservoir bank and the bridges, how information was pulled out of reservoirs and directed to different paths out, undergoing various functions dependent on what instruction was loaded into this pin right here. That was set by the control unit — borrowing the computing term, though the concepts weren't perfectly equivalent — Elbert tapped the bridge leading off and pushed a button again to load that schematic, giving a basic explanation of how the different functions of a programme were split up into instructions that could be—

"Wait, wait, hold on," Payne said, sounding a little overwhelmed. "Not only did you invent a goddamn magic computer, but you just casually invented interactive holograms while you were at it?!"

The mages kind of tittered over that, shooting each other smirks, so Hermione decided to actually answer the question for him. "It's just an illusion — mages have been practising illusion for millennia. The enchanting necessary to alter an illusion in response to the user's intent is somewhat more modern, but it's still been around for hundreds of years." Though they weren't seen very often, since there were very few practical uses for them — Hermione hadn't actually seen any interactive illusions in person before starting with the Commission, but supposedly they were very common in medical imaging. They hadn't invented them, was the point, just adapted them for purpose.

"Jesus Christ, magic keeps sneaking up on me, I guess. The things you lot can do..."

That seemed like a great cue to show off the things you lot can do. Elbert closed down this programme and flipped through a couple menus, loaded up the fluid dynamics simulator one of their programming people had worked up. There was a flash of multicoloured light from a few of the shelves, making Payne and his assistant twitch with surprise — was it supposed to do that? Yeah, that was waste energy: electronics released waste energy in the form of heat, and enchantments released waste as light. (Technically, free magical radiation that generated friction against the ambient environment, which itself took the form of light, but the distinction wasn't particularly relevant.) The enchantments in the control box gave off light whenever it did anything, but they were all shielded from view, while the shelves weren't. Anyway, a bit more poking at menus and pushing buttons, and the frame of a military plane of some kind appeared above the control box (Hermione wasn't an expert), and a blink later the space around it was shaded according to relative air speed, the turbulence generated modelled in colourful little swirls falling back in a wake behind the plane — it was even animated, eddies pulsing off the frame and stretching back in constantly regenerated chaotic spirals. Elbert explained how the diagramme worked, then added a vector for background windspeed — demonstrating how the simulation adjusted in a blink, the complex calculations performed almost instantly — and then swapped this plane in for one of the aliens' fighter craft, travelling at a much higher speed, meaning pretty much everything would have to be recalculated, and even working in the complex effects of travelling at hypersonic speeds, but the programme handled that adjustment just as quickly, fiendishly complex calculations performed en masse in an instant with another colourful flash from the bookshelves.

While Elbert played around with that, Gijs tried to explain why the calculations could be done so quickly compared to the equivalent models done on digital computers. Payne didn't really seem to follow it, the technical details over his head — they were also over Hermione's head, to be fair. As she understood it, enchantments performed operations more slowly — semiconductors could take a charge literally thousands of times more quickly than a reservoir could take an image — but the different data structure used by reservoirs meant the number of operations necessary could be drastically reduced. Once it was formatted correctly, all the data going into the simulation could be encoded into only a few reservoirs; and instead of the numerous granular calculations a digital computer would need to do for each point on the graph, the proper functions could be applied to the entire data set simultaneously with a single transformation; the result could then be used as a base to generate the next frame without any fuss, spitting out a new iteration...maybe five times a second? Hermione wasn't positive, it depended on how many steps the transformation actually took to execute, she wasn't as thoroughly informed on that part of the process. It took a couple transformations to format the output in a form the illusion could display, but the control box could perform multiple functions at once, so the simulation could continue ticking away while that was being done. And, they didn't actually have to generate every frame — there was no refresh rate, like in electronic monitors, the illusion a smooth, continuous image, the enchantments that controlled it automatically animating between the ticks generated by the simulation. Like a magical photograph, sort of, it was complicated.

The most difficult part, from what Hermione had heard, was figuring out how to programme things in a way that took advantage of the architecture of the device and the particular properties of using reservoirs to store data. Gijs's team was more familiar with digital data, obviously, so they were kind of just making it up as they went. They'd started out basically translating the programming structures they were familiar with into forms that could be stored on reservoirs, before realising, obviously, those techniques were based on entirely different underlying architecture, with different physical limitations. They were still figuring out how they could best use the special properties of enchantment-mediated computation, it was a work in progress, but the applications for modelling chaotic effects like turbulence had been immediately obvious once they started thinking outside the box.

Speaking of chaotic effects, Gijs said, smirking, show them the Mandelbrot plot. Sure, why not, as long as we're showing off — Elbert switched over to another programme with some button pushes and poking at illusory menus, another flash of light from one of the bookshelves as the new programme was loaded. This was something a couple of Gijs's people worked up for fun. Have you seen those animations zooming in on a fractal? The Mandelbrot set was one of those ones they did that with. The precise mathematics involved weren't important to explain, but. Normally, it was plotted in two dimensions, but it could be expanded into quaternion numbers and plotted in four dimensions; a three-dimensional slice could be taken out of that, and then you could do the same zooming in trick to see all the pretty geometry and spirals and stuff.

Hermione had seen an animation zooming in on a plot of the Mandelbrot set before, she forgot where exactly, and it was very pretty, all the colours and the iterating geometric patterns, almost psychedelic. It was even more impressive in three dimensions, if only due to the absurd number of calculations that went into it — though she realised their magical computer was cheating again, jumping straight at the answer without the long sequence of calculations a digital computer would need to produce every pixel of every frame. The starting image was familiar, the two big lobes on an axis with spiralling filaments stretching off their surface, and as the image was zoomed in — at a skewed angle against the plane to prevent getting 'caught' in anything too quickly — more familiar structures showed themselves, but at an angle and in detail Hermione didn't recall seeing before, dozens of bookshelves around them lighting up as the image zoomed in further and further — the programmer had taken advantage of the capacity for distributed processing to help crunch the numbers — colourful blobs reminding Hermione of the Horsehead Nebula and twisting three-dimensional spirals (almost DNA-like) and starbursts whipping by, occasional discontinuities as the algorithm that generated the colours had to be tweaked to prevent the aperture they were viewing from getting 'caught' in the structure, so they could still see the border, on and on...

No, this wasn't pre-rendered, the calculations to produce it were being done in real time. Elbert stopped zooming in, waved Payne forward, explained how the controls worked — there were more flashes of colour from the bookshelves as he scrolled around, and you'll notice there is a slight delay, it does take a moment for the mechanism to keep up. Yes, the maths behind this were ridiculous, but that's what happened when magic lets you cheat and jump straight to the answer.

They had one more demonstration planned. Elbert closed out the programme, and indicated a cabinet next to where the control panel was. He opened up the door, showing Payne the rack of programme cards inside. He pulled one out, turning it in his hand — a ceramic-and-bronze frame holding sheets of wire-suspended diamonds. Each card was equivalent to two sectors, a total of 256 reservoirs, or .25 kilocils. Now, obviously that was a tiny fraction of the data that the computer could hold — the total storage capacity of the cells on the bookshelves was equal to twenty-four thousand of these cards — but the cards were, obviously, far more mobile, and could be loaded with custom instruction sets for new programmes. (They were also re-programmable, of course.) The programme Elbert was about to run wasn't preloaded onto the device at all, with the exception of basic things like colour and geometry data — all of it was going to be loaded from these cards, to show how this sort of thing could work. Okay? Okay.

Elbert inserted the card into the slot in the control box. A couple button pushes, and there was a flash of rainbow light from one of the shelves as the data on it was copied out. He pulled out the card, and swapped it with a second from the cabinet, another flash of light as that data was copied. Then he swapped it for a third card, a couple button pushes and the control box was running the programme straight off the card.

Floating over the control box appeared an image of the Earth, in perfect, realistic colour — a team of mages and programmers had worked together to compile it, most of the visuals gathered through scrying, accurate to the three or four days they'd accumulated the images over. They'd done it so it was daytime everywhere — save for a small patch in the far north where it was always dark this time of the year, of course — exactly as it'd been at the time. Hermione could easily make out mountains and deserts and lakes, cities, the detail incredible...

The toxic clouds building over Indochina, India, and the Amazon were impossible to miss, tinted a murky yellow-orange.

Elbert explained how they'd gotten the data for it, that this was actually what everything looked like in real life. He waved Payne closer, explained how the controls worked, knock yourself out. Payne fiddled around a bit, reached up to turn the globe with a hand — oh, he could actually feel something! Yeah, the illusion included a faint physical sensation to make interacting with it easier, that was standard for this class of enchantment. After sweeping around for a little bit, Payne zoomed in on Europe, and closer and closer, the globe growing in size until large parts of it were past the range of the illusion, disappearing from view. Eventually, he got in as close as he could — an image of northwestern Europe as though from space, the North Sea and the countries making a sort of U shape around it, the British Isles and the Netherlands and Belgium and France and Germany and Denmark and the south of Sweden and Norway, the deep rich blue of the sea, the land patches in various shades of green, the occasional greyish blot of major cities, smaller towns little more than tiny dots, speckled with the bright white of snow, sparse flecks in most of the image but dense in the mountains of Scotland and all but covering Sweden and Norway. It was possible to zoom in further than this, go ahead and tap the area you want to look at and push a button to load up another image — they couldn't fit everything on one reservoir, obviously, finer details were on separate reservoirs...

Payne zoomed in close over their present location, the layout of the city streets ballooning up until they could clearly make out the buildings of the University itself. They got close enough that Hermione could pick out the building they were standing in, tiny ant-like figures of people visible along the streets and criss-crossing through green spaces. (Rather a lot of them, but this area of Groningen was quite busy these days.) That was as far as it could go, more detail than that would be too impractical to cover everything. Still pretty damn good though, don't you think?

Seemingly trying to catch them out on tricking him, Payne zoomed out again, and panned over to North America, zooming in on... Those were the Great Lakes, and the hand-looking shape was Michigan, so this must be Illinois. Yes, as Payne zoomed in further she made out a sizeable city on the lake shore, that had to be Chicago. The image blowing up bigger and bigger and bigger, zeroing in on a town somewhere in Illinois (probably, Hermione didn't know the internal borders of the States particularly well), and quickly finding his parents' house — it looked pretty unremarkable to Hermione, some kind of suburban residential neighbourhood composed of blocks divided by perfectly parallel rectangular streets, but clearly Payne was familiar enough with the neighbourhood to recognise it. Moving out again, he picked a spot somewhere in the heart of Africa, before long finding what was obviously a sizeable military-base-slash-refugee-camp not far from the edge of the toxic cloud (in the Congo, she was pretty sure). And he went out and then back in again, finding a construction project of some kind in the Alps — Hermione knew central offices for various international organisations were presently being built in especially defensible locations, deep in the Alps considered to be among the best options available in Continental Europe — and then a military base of some kind in India, just skirting the evil-looking orange cloud...

He must know the locations of these things off the top of his head, but Hermione wasn't surprised — presumably he was being kept up to date on goings-on around the world, his position allowing easy access to information she didn't have. She assumed he was checking different spots dotted around the world, confirming that they hadn't simply predicted he'd want to check their present location, confirming the map was as impressive as it looked.

He finished with checking some sort of installation toward the edge of the Amazon region — southern Colombia, Hermione thought — before nodding to himself and stepping away from the controls. "I'm satisfied. This is a hell of a thing you guys put together in only a few months. Honestly, when you said you had a prototype to show me, I didn't expect anything nearly so involved as this."

"We wanted to work out the kinks," Elbert drawled with a little shrug — the nonchalant image he was going for was somewhat ruined by the smug grin.

Rather more seriously, Gijs said, "And we wanted to provide the University, and the Commission, with a useable device as soon as possible. We can begin transferring data storage here as soon as possible — we don't know how much longer we're going to have reliable electricity, after all."

"Good point," Payne admitted, nodding. "And you can do that, simply move files from one format to the other?"

"I wouldn't call it simple, but yes. And yes, we're already working on complete design documents — we can start sending them out to other teams as soon as we have approval."

"Good, good. I imagine that shouldn't be too difficult — some of the other teams have already been having issues with blackouts." Turning to his assistant, he started, "Can we see about getting a meeting—"

"Hold on," Gwen interrupted. "We have one other thing to show you."

"Oh?"

"Yes, Hermione and I had an idea partway through building all this," with a wave at the stacks all around. "You see that box right next to the cabinet with the programme cards?"

Payne glanced that way, turned a raised eyebrow back at Gwen. "Yes...?"

Holding up a finger to wait, Gwen walked over to the box, lifted it up to set it down on top of the control box — it took some obvious effort, even with the weight-reducing enchantments it was still quite heavy. "Elbert, mind killing the projector?" While he switched off the display, the view of somewhere in the Amazon winking out, Gwen reached into the cabinet, pulled out an oversized, canvas book. She laid it open atop the control box, pulled a ceramic programme card out of a sleeve. He held it up to Payne, so he had a second to make it out — closed on all sides with tannish ceramic and a few polished bronze panels, it was about the width of Gwen's hand, about three times as long as it was wide. Runes were inscribed at various points on the surface, small enough they were a little hard to make out even close up. Gwen flipped a couple switches on the top of the box, a menu display appearing in white and green — Payne twitched, leaning in closer with a hiss of breath — she inserted the card into a slot, poked at the menu a couple times.

There was a brief delay, and then an illusion of the Earth appeared over the box — much smaller in size than the display from the room-dominating control box, but just as detailed.

For a moment, Payne just silently stared at it, eyes wide. Then, "Jesus fucking— Is that what I think that is?" he asked, pointing at the device.

"If you think it's a working personal computer," Elbert said, voice shivering a little with badly-suppressed laughter (clearly enjoying Payne's reaction), "then yes, it is."

Once again, Gijs was the one to come in with the more moderated perspective. "It's a much less powerful system — its memory capacity works out to around eight hundred kilocils, a bit over an eighth of the full-size system, and it can perform far fewer simultaneous operations. And it's not ready for universal use yet, we're still refining the operating system, and working out strategies to write images. Even getting a basic word processor to function correctly has been surprisingly difficult, for example. It's only useable by specialists, currently, but we should have a more user-friendly iteration of the software available before too long — the end of March, if we're lucky, but don't hold me to that."

"I think I can give you a month, for that! Christ. How did you even fit eight hundred of those cells in this thing?"

Gwen grinned. "It turns out, the mechanism operates normally inside expanded space. That part was Hermione's idea — we noticed that Elbert's team were transfiguring parts of the control box larger in order to fit the necessary runes for the enchantments, then letting the transfigurations lapse before assembly, and Hermione asked if there was any reason we couldn't tuck the entire device into expanded space. Honestly, the thought hadn't even occurred to me, I was too focussed on getting the bloody sorting enchantments to work..."

Payne turned a bemused raised eyebrow on Hermione. She gave him a helpless shrug, trying to ignore the faint sense of warmth on her cheeks. "Expanded space often has limited usefulness, since the area to be expanded must be enclosed on all sides with rigid walls. That rule can be bent a little — to include a slot for programme cards, for example — but it can't be broken. And the constraints of working in such restricted quarters often makes it impossible to build complex enchanted devices with an expanded internal mechanism, it's simple not worth the effort — I'm not surprised Gwen didn't think of it, I mean. We actually had to transfigure the case up to nearly room-sized, place all the components and properly anchor them, and then reverse the transfiguration and trigger the space expansion in concert. It's a very delicate operation, we broke three simpler test devices trying to get it to work.

"On the plus side, the wards defining the space to be expanded should also work as insulation — we were a little concerned about the possibility of a signal skipping from one device to another, but the secondary effects of the space expansion should prevent that."

Payne shook his head, a crooked look on his face she didn't know how to read. "Sure. Well, color me extremely impressed, this is...a lot more than I was expecting, honestly. You already made me a magic radio, and now you're coming in with this shit, Christ. I'm going to be in calls the rest of the afternoon, I think. We're going to need more of the database version," he said, nodding at the stacks filling the room, "for other institutions across the Continent, so, until I get back to you with further direction, go ahead and have your people manufacture some more cells in advance. Do you need anything in particular for that?"

"Nothing we don't already have access to," Gwen said. "It mostly uses the same materials as the radios."

"Right, right. As complicated as this stuff is, I expect we're going to get requests to have a specialist come in to oversee production — I hope you guys like your absurd magic computers, because I have a feeling this is going to be your job now."

...Hermione guessed she could live with that. The design and the enchanting were fascinating, after all, so at least she wouldn't be bored. And here she'd been concerned about whether she'd be able to contribute to the Commission's project at all — helping to invent magical computers definitely counted as a contribution, she thought.

(Some days she could almost see the new world potentially to come, like a wavering image half-hidden by distance and heat shimmer. But its shape grew clearer, day by day. There would be a future after all of this.)

(And Hermione would be there to help build it.)

Chapter Text

25th February 1996 (63:10:06)
— Contact plus 00.05.22:23.00

The bunker was surprisingly spacious — they were all like that, and built on shockingly short notice. Beth wasn't sure how they'd managed that. She knew magic was heavily involved, a lot of the digging done by charms that were presumably similar to the ones she'd learned back in the initial attack, to help move rubble? Pretty much all the mages who hadn't been more useful on other projects — like healing, or handling translation and checking for infiltrators — had been conscripted to help with digging out the bunkers, since, you know, the air turning to poison was kind of a problem.

Of course, once they'd actually dug the tunnels and shite out of the ground, then they had to insulate them somehow. Those damn beetles were in the ground, after all — originally the tunnels had still had a lot of exposed dirt and stone or whatever, but they'd had to come through and cover it all with...stuff, to stop the bugs getting in. Beth wasn't sure what it was, exactly. It kind of looked like ceramic? You know, the reddish, brownish hardened clay that a lot of basic pots and shite were made out of. The amount of the stuff was kind of absurd — even if it was only a centimetre thick, enough to cover the entire inside surface of the shelters still worked out to an insane volume — and how it was moulded smoothly over every corner and curve... She really had no idea how they'd done that, where all this shite was coming from.

Maybe they'd conjured all of it in place? Conjuration was temporary, but you could extend a conjuration by setting an enchantment to draw in the power to keep the spell going from the environment. It didn't necessarily make the conjuration permanent, since magic in the environment could disrupt the spell, and of course if the runes got cracked the spell could break, but they only needed it to last for however long until the labcoats figured out how to fix this. So, it was probably fine? Beth didn't know, that wasn't her job.

Not that she really had a job, anymore. After running her ragged checking over people coming into shelters, like, twelve to twenty hours a day — there had been days when they were especially short on time that she didn't even sleep — going on constantly for...um, a couple weeks, at least, she'd honestly last track of time passing what felt like ages ago now. But anyway, whoever was running this operation had apparently decided that she could take a break now. After finishing sorting through all the people coming in to this shelter — had to be like her eighth or ninth by now, she'd lost count — she'd been told that that was it, she'd be staying here for the rest of the crisis. She'd be on rotation for security duties, standing ready in case aliens found them or if there was any kind of unrest inside the shelter (packing thousands of strangers in close quarters could get bad pretty easily), but the people in charge knew how she'd been running around for the last, like, month or whatever, so they were giving her a few days off before she was expected to report for duty.

Which, that was kind of nice of them, honestly, she hadn't expected that. But then, she guessed a mage who was half-dead on her feet probably wasn't very useful. She didn't care why they were giving her a break, really, she was just looking forward to sleeping for, like, eighty per cent of the next three days. But getting some food before passing out was probably a good idea...

Like the other shelters, this one was split up by dominant language, the exception being the military people, who were all put together — partially just so everybody would be easy to find on short notice, but also they had equipment and shite they probably didn't want people messing with. Though, the different sections weren't completely closed off from each other, they weren't firmly segregated or anything like that. This shelter was kind of a mess in general, the population in the area of the mountains this shelter pulled from was super diverse, so. They had some Vietnamese and Laotian people, but most of them were from a bunch of hill tribes, Ba Na and Xơ Đăng and Gia Rai and Êđê and Cơ Tu, and other little groups who might only exist in a couple little villages, they were hard to keep track of. They'd at least tried to keep the Chăm-speakers together, and sorted the other hill tribes as close to geographically as they could — with the thought that people who were already neighbours before would be comfortable being good neighbours down here — but it was a mess, it'd only sort of worked.

The military section was kind of in the middle, also where the storage and the kitchens and things were, the other sections in a ring around them. But they weren't blocked off, or anything like that, stitched together with hallways, in places the common areas didn't even have solid walls between them a lot of the time. Just, you know, sorting where people would be sleeping, and probably spending most of their time, around people who spoke the same language, just for convenience.

Beth did notice that the military section was more closed off, with doors that could be sealed closed pretty easily if they decided to — putting the exits and the food stores on their side of the doors. She was trying not to be creeped out about that, it was probably just meant as a security thing, just in case...

She plodded down the main stairs, the brighter lights of the upper level gradually transitioning into the dimmer orange-toned environment of the lower levels. It didn't look bad with the earthy reddish-brown colour of the walls, kind of got a vague warm glow — and was also easy on the eyes, nice for her low-throbbing headache. (Exposing herself to so many different languages to test people was draining, and also she was probably a little dehydrated?) Hedwig was hanging close at her shoulder, yellowish avian eyes watching unblinkingly. Concerned, maybe? Beth probably looked like shite — she felt like shite, so, that'd only be appropriate.

They came down into the central corridor, wrapping around one side of the military section, where all the exits were, and the storerooms and shite. All the doors were open, so it was noisy here, distant half-heard voices murmuring in several different languages — Beth grimaced as her headache flared a little worse, ugh, this was going to be miserable. Taking a tight little turn at the bottom of the stairs brought her into the military section. It was made out of the same plain ceramic stuff as everywhere else, the room she came into the common area, somewhat smaller than the Gryffindor common room, with little in the way of actual furniture, instead a lot of cushions and mats and lap-table things and the like. (Still the common way of doing things in a lot of rural areas, and it just took fewer materials, they were running this operation as lean as they could.) There were several people around, obviously off-duty, a lot of uniform jackets hanging open and hats missing — all Vietnamese uniforms...except a couple over there who were apparently Laotian military, not sure why they're here. People had gotten mixed around a bit in the fighting, and the border was, er, probably pretty close (she wasn't actually certain where she was right now), guess it wasn't that weird.

Beth and Hedwig were the only white people in the room, but that wasn't unusual at this point. She hadn't seen anyone else in her troop in a while, left behind at one of the shelters deep in the poisoned area now — the UK had kind of temporarily handed her off to Vietnamese command to help with setting up the shelters, it was a whole thing. (Luke had given her papers with a copy of her (and apparently Hedwigs'?) formal orders about it, but she wasn't actually sure where those are, might have misplaced them in a move.) She hadn't seen anyone else in a British uniform in...shite, weeks, didn't know exactly.

She walked across the room, occasionally waving back at someone, through the curtained-off door into the women's sleeping area — no solid door, but the barrier was a few curtains thick, you couldn't actually see through it at all. The floor was completely covered with...probably bamboo mats of some kind, more curtains hanging from tracks set into the ceiling to divide off sections of the room for privacy. Because there was only one room, beds set into recesses in the walls stacked three high — the ceilings in here were probably a bit under two metres tall (which wasn't so bad, honestly, under the circumstances), that was about as many as you could fit comfortably — between the stacks closets and drawers and stuff. It would be rather cramped in here, but by the look of it they were only using maybe a third of the beds — there might be more as some of the stuff upstairs was shut down and they settled in to wait, but. They must have made both the men's and women's sides the same size, the other one was probably more full.

The stacks were numbered, to help keep track of how many people they had in here, Beth and Hedwig had been assigned to the same one...here, okay. Beth dropped her bag on one of the beds — she'd deal with that later, or realistically just throw it into the closet so she could sleep — and then her cap, started unbuttoning her jacket. Keeping her voice low, she'd noticed some of the beds were occupied, she muttered, "I'm guessing you want the top bunk."

Hedwig nodded, reached to toss her bag up — not that there was a whole lot in there, just a single change of clothes. (Naturally, Hedwig was accustomed to travelling light.) "I am hungry, and you should eat."

Beth noticed Hedwig hadn't asked if she was hungry. But then, Hedwig was well aware that Beth could be really bad about remembering to eat, if she wasn't on a schedule — she assumed (by which she meant Hermione assumed) that her shitty childhood had fucked up her ability to feel hunger properly, so her body didn't tell her when to eat like everyone else. If she was on a schedule it was normally fine, or if she'd gotten a workout. Right now, the headache and generally feeling fucking exhausted meant she wasn't really feeling hungry at all, but she was aware that she really should eat anyway. "That's the plan. Come on."

Back out in the common room, the kitchens were...that way. (She hadn't actually been down here yet.) It took longer than really necessary to figure out, she got distracted by one of the women in here — she seemed very familiar, Beth was certain they'd meant before, but her worn-out brain wasn't coming up with where. The kitchens were through a door and around a curve of a narrow hallway — more brightly lit than the common room, there were signs hung up on the wall with maps of the shelter and the rules in multiple languages, and also chalkboards people could use, mostly asking if anyone had seen a particular missing family member or if they had an extra of one thing or another the writer could borrow — coming up on a somewhat more open area, lines of people extending from counters worked into the wall on the inside of the curve. The wall outside of the curve had big chunks taken out of it, opening up into the...um, some of the local groups, Beth forgot exactly where this was on the map. The Vietnamese and Laotian sections actually had to go around the loop or through the military section to get to the kitchens, just worked out that way for whatever reason...

Anyway, they joined one of the lines at the end to wait — no idea what they were serving, but she was pretty sure all the counters were the same, so it didn't really matter. A couple people ahead of her said something — one of the local languages, she thought they might be offering to let her ahead, noticing the uniform — but Beth just waved them off. She could wait.

The line was moving pretty quickly anyway, they were up to the front in only a few minutes. Unsurprisingly, they were serving noodle soup of some kind — Beth had probably had more noodles and rice in the few months she'd been in Vietnam than the rest of her life put together. Surprisingly, it actually had a significant amount of meat in it this time. Fresh meat had gotten rarer and rarer as the war went on, the people in charge of that sort of thing being more careful about portioning out their resources, but Beth had heard through the grapevine that they'd quickly decided that moving livestock out of the way of the expanding toxic cloud simply wouldn't be feasible. So they'd slaughtered everything and packed it away as quickly as possible instead — they'd pulled a bunch of people to help with the job, Beth had heard it'd been very bloody work, a slapdash sloppy operation they'd put together as they went. They definitely hadn't gotten everything out in time — there'd been a simultaneous attempt to harvest as much of the crops as they could, and she'd heard a lot of that had been lost, which was going to get bad later — but at least they'd managed to save some of it before it was wasted.

So their noodle soup actually had strips of beef in it this time, alongside the local vegetables and...fresh herbs somehow? There must be a greenhouse back here somewhere. They were apparently using some of their remaining chilli paste too, shite, this stuff smelled strong...

Beth took a bowl of soup, was unexpectedly handed a bread roll of some kind by one of the people behind the counter — military privilege, apparently, extra calories to keep them up through all the work they were expected to be doing — and a generously-sized cup of tea, and turned back around toward the military section, closely followed by Hedwig, with the same soup and bread but without the tea. (She never had developed a taste for it.) They picked a random spot in the common room, Beth handed her tea over to Hedwig before charming over a couple of the lap desks, and they settled in to eat. Right away, Beth transfigured a cup for Hedwig out of her spoon (which she wouldn't be needing), filled it with a quick water-drawing charm, while Hedwig knocked the contents of her bread roll — looked like strips of some kind of vegetable (maybe carrot?) and slices of some kind of offal minced and pan-fried together, and also more herbs — into her bowl, and handed the bread halves over to Beth. Hedwig had made plenty of progress when it came to actually tolerating human food, but the texture of bread still bothered her for whatever reason. She wasn't a big fan of the fresh herbs or vegetables either, but she would eat them, at least.

They'd also discovered that Hedwig was allergic to nuts — a snack they were given one day had a paste made with cashews in it, she'd had one of the full on allergy attack things, hadn't been able to breathe for like a whole thirty seconds before a medic got to them and realised what was happening. Oops.

While they ate a few people came by to say hello. Most of the people here were in groups that'd been together for a while — since at least the final battle around the Four Thousand Islands, by the sound of it — and Beth and Hedwig were in a different uniform, and the only white people in the room, so they kind of stuck out as obviously new. Thankfully, nobody hung around to chat too long — Beth would really like to get her food down so she could go sleep...

That one familiar woman Beth noticed before didn't come over, but Beth did notice her occasionally glancing this way. She wondered what that was about, it was—

Oh!

Oh, that was Ianin. Beth hadn't recognised her at first — they hadn't exactly known each other that long, and it'd been a while now.

...

And now Beth was remembering that time that she actually had sex (which was still slightly surreal when she thought about it), little flashes of memory flicking behind her eyes, which wasn't going to make getting some fucking sleep any easier.

Despite the distractions, they finished eating before too long. The food was making Beth very sleepy — the extra bread especially, feeling all warm and heavy, and, it was a little hard to keep her eyes open, honestly. Hedwig gathered up the dishes and things, volunteering to bring these back, Beth should get ready for bed. All right, thanks. She cast quick cleaning charms on their chopsticks and her spoon (untransfigured from Hedwig's water cup), tucked them away, and went back to their bunks to grab a couple things before continuing on to the bathroom.

Beth wasn't entirely surprised that there weren't separate, closed-off shower stalls, but she was a little surprised that there weren't actually showers at all — there was a tiled area, with drains in the floor, a few spigots on the walls and some benches, and a stack of buckets. Apparently they were expected to keep clean with...well, sponge baths, essentially, just filling up a bucket with water and wiping yourself down, not actually submerging at all. There were even a couple women in here right now, casually chatting while wiping themselves down (she immediately looked away, trying not to stare like a creep). Beth was aware this wasn't unusual in some rural areas, when they didn't just bathe in rivers or whatever was around, but it was still extremely uncomfortable for her, for various reasons. She was less neurotic about this sort of thing than she'd been before joining the Army, and needing to quickly get used to having pretty limited privacy, but she could still be an awkward bitch sometimes.

Thankfully, there were closed-off toilet stalls. Beth fully stripped, did her business, and then went over herself with cleaning charms before dressing in fresh clothes. Problem solved.

(Using cleaning charms wasn't quite as good as bathing properly, but she could put it off for a while, at least. It was possible they'd be trapped down here long enough that she'd cave and have to force herself to go through with it, depending on how quickly the labcoats fixed the beetle problem, but she didn't have to do it now. Sleep was more important.)

While she'd been in the toilet, Hedwig had shown up — she actually was washing herself properly. A couple women (not the same women from before, new people) were talking at her, but of course Hedwig's Vietnamese was still extremely basic, so the interaction was pretty stilted and awkward. Well, not really, she guessed, since Hedwig seemed immune to awkwardness. It seemed like it's be super awkward to Beth (especially since everyone was naked), but it didn't seem to be bothering anyone actually involved.

Beth didn't stick around, but from what she heard the women thought Hedwig's hair and eyes were neat. Which was fair enough, they were pretty cool. She wasn't sure whether the women had any idea what wilderfolk were — it'd been years after learning about magic before anyone had mentioned their existence to Beth — it was possible they thought it was some cosmetic thing Hedwig had done, and not just the way she was naturally. There was a lot of cool body modification you could do with blood alchemy, it was illegal in Britain but sometimes you saw people in other countries with funny hair or eye colours or whatever — since she'd learned about it, Beth sometimes idly considered doing something with her hair, it was such a bloody pain...

Anyway, Beth turned her back on the 'bath' area — she could translate, but Hedwig was doing just fine on her own, and hanging around would be awkward — and headed back toward the bedroom. She hung up her uniform in the closet, after a second of hesitation just tucked her old pants and shorts and vest in the corner of a drawer — she couldn't remember off the top of her head how laundry worked down here, she'd figure it out after getting some sleep. The funny bed-shelf thing was soft, but Beth couldn't really tell what material it was made out of it. Honestly, she suspected it wasn't made out of anything, the mages who'd built it just transfiguring something with the right properties and not bothering with the details, using enchanting to anchor the sloppy conjuration work in place. (Transfigurations that didn't make physical sense burned through the energy powering them more quickly, but you could cheat and keep them going with an external power source, which was a neat trick.) The sheets were, weirdly, actual silk, which immediately tipped Beth off that these must be magically produced — some magical economies in the far east (including in this region) mass-produced silk at a scale and low cost that was frankly slightly absurd, the stuff was ubiquitous. This was actually relatively cheap stuff, without any enchantments and just a plain bland yellowish colour with no decoration and not quite so super nice and smooth as silk could get, but it was still a little silly that they actually bothered.

Good thing Beth was bloody well dead on her feet, because she imagined trying to sleep on actual silk sheets would be distracting otherwise. She was pretty sure she could pass out right on the hard ceramic floor if she had to. She still thought it was silly.

(Of course, acromantula silk back home was expensive in part because they got it from hyper-intelligent man-eating spiders, so maybe that was skewing her perspective somewhat.)

She was still poking at the sheets, sleepily bemused, when she heard someone walking toward her — her first thought was it was Hedwig showing up, and then twitched in surprise when she glanced up to see it was Ianin. Oh, um.

The subtle reddish tone to her skin in the dim orangish light almost made her seem to glow, just slightly. It was really pretty.

Ianin came to a halt a few steps away from where Beth was sitting on the edge of her bed...and then just stood there for a few seconds, watching. Hesitating, Beth thought. Which she guessed was understandable, Beth didn't know what the hell to say either — she was pretty sure they hadn't spoken since that painfully awkward morning after like a month ago now. Finally, she muttered (keeping her voice low for the people sleeping), "Hello again, Beth." It came out more like Bẹt, how a lot of locals pronounced her name, which was close enough.

After a couple seconds staring back up at her, Beth said just, "Ianin." She remembered something, after a thought added, "Look at that, I remembered your name this time." There'd been a lot of drinking that night, she hadn't actually remembered Ianin's name in the morning, had had to super awkwardly ask while they were trying to sort out their clothes...

Luckily, Ianin seemed to find the reminder vaguely amusing, her lips twitching with a reluctant smile — sometimes Beth being an embarrassing mess was actually good for something. "I wanted to... Do you mind if I sit?" she asked, her head tilting to indicated the bed to Beth's right.

...Um. "No? Sure, go ahead."

She suspected Ianin was conscious of the fact that people were trying to sleep, and also maybe wanted privacy for whatever this conversation was going to be about, could more easily keep her voice down sitting closer. Not that she sat that close, keeping a good handspan between the two of them, seeming somewhat self-conscious about it. Which wasn't a big surprise, she remembered how uncomfortable Ianin had been when she learned how young Beth was...

Once Ianin was sitting down next to her, Beth suddenly felt incredibly exposed — she hadn't thought twice about walking here through the common room from the bathroom in a vest and a pair of shorts, but it abruptly seemed like too little to be wearing. Also, she hadn't bothered putting any knickers on under the shorts, she was uncomfortably aware of that fact now, and fuck, that was seriously awkward...

Ianin sat there for a moment, probably trying to figure out how to start whatever she wanted to say, while Beth tried very hard not to give away how suddenly self-conscious she was feeling. (Could they have had this talk at any time other than just before Beth was going to bed? Ugh...) Finally, Ianin whispered, "I heard your people were sent south, to the Delta."

Beth nodded. "Mhmm. Were you down there too?"

"No, we stayed here. Hunting down stragglers, helping with the cleanup, trying to help people get situated and get farms going again. Of course that was wasted effort now."

"...Right."

"I heard the fighting down there was pretty awful."

"Yeah, it was a mess. I was actually hospitalised twice before it was over."

Ianin twitched, turning to look more directly at her. "Really?"

"Mhmm. Got one of those bug grenades dug into my side here," she said, pointing at the spot over her hip on the right. "Second time, some aliens jumped out of some rubble to ambush us, and I popped over at an angle to box them in, and got nailed with friendly fire like an idiot. Set on fire, shot a few times. Terribly stupid of me, I jumped without thinking, almost got myself killed..."

"...You seem well now."

"Magical healing. I was hurt pretty bad that second time, even by magical standards, was out long enough I missed the end of the battle — I was still being kept in a healing coma at the time."

"The things magic can do, I'm still not used to that. Someone in my squad lost an arm once, and the healer with our company reattached it right there in the field. He was sent back for some additional treatment, the recovery wasn't instant, but he still has the arm."

"Yeah, I'm told as long as you have enough of the pieces that's easy to do. Once all the bones in my arm were vanished in a magical accident, and my school nurse had them all regrown overnight."

There was dead silence for a moment, Beth glanced that was to see Ianin staring at her wide-eyed. Then she shook her head, let out a little sigh. "Magic."

"Yep."

Another brief, awkward pause. "So, how have you been?"

"Tired. They've had me bouncing around checking everyone coming into shelters for, um... Not sure. What day is it?"

"The Twenty-Fifth. Tết was just last week."

"Oh, right, I think I noticed something about that..." She remembered they'd made a deal that the Westerners coming in to help would get Christmas off in exchange for the locals getting Tết off, but apparently the aliens had ruined that for them — needing to evacuate people and build the shelters and get out as many supplies as they could meant that few people would have had the freedom to celebrate the holiday properly. Oops. "So, um, like three weeks straight, I guess. There aren't really enough omniglots and mind mages to go around, I haven't been getting much sleep."

"Ah," Ianin gasped, twitching a little, "I should let you rest, I'm sorry."

"It's fine, I'm just saying. What did you want to talk about?"

"I don't want to—" Ianin cut herself off, hesitated for a moment. "There is no telling how long we are going to be down here together. I wanted to clear the air, and to make sure it...that there would not be difficulty."

"...I'm fine." She meant, she'd been rather taken aback when she'd spotted Ianin down here, and it was kind of hard to avoid getting distracted remembering that night, but she— It wasn't a big deal, it was fine. "Really, I... It's not like I was freaking out over it or anything. I'm probably going to be painfully awkward about it sometimes, because I can be an awkward bitch like that, but, just, ignore me when I'm like that, and I'll get over it. It's fine, don't worry about it."

Sounding a little awkward, for some unfathomable reason, Ianin muttered, "Right. Good. I... I should let you sleep."

Beth got the very clear feeling that wasn't what she'd been about to say, editing herself at the last second. She was vaguely curious, but she probably wouldn't get anywhere if she aked. "Yeah, sleep would be nice."

"Good night, Beth."

"Good night."

After another brief pause, Ianin stood up and started off — but then she stopped only a couple steps away. Turning to half-face Beth over her shoulder, she muttered, "It is good to know that you survived the war in the south. I did worry."

...Um.

Thankfully, Ianin rescued her from figuring out how the fuck Beth was supposed to respond to that by just turning and walking away without another word. That was probably for the best, Beth could be pretty good at putting her foot in her mouth at the best of times. Just, shite, that had been awkward...

She was still watching Ianin walk away when Hedwig, just, appeared out of nowhere, standing looming over Beth. Not literally, she was sure — there were no apparation wards over the shelters, but they still weren't supposed to for safety reasons (and also Hedwig didn't know how) — Beth had just been too focussed on Ianin. She didn't even mean for pervy reasons, just, she was slightly dazed, and confused, that was all. Being very sleepy probably didn't help.

"You are good?" Hedwig asked, voice at a hissing whisper Beth could barely make out.

"Yeah, I'm fine." Grimacing a little, "How much of that were you here for?

"Some." Right, of course, awesome. After a second, Hedwig sat down next to her, rather closer than Ianin had a minute ago, their hips and thighs and arms touching — Hedwig had about a little respect for Beth's personal space when human-shaped as she did while an owl. Which, this wasn't really Beth complaining, it was super awkward at first but she got used to it. She was just Hedwig, after all. "It is not bad, with her here."

Beth shrugged, nudging Hedwig's shoulder a little. "I mean, it's a little awkward, but I'll be fine. It's really not a big deal. Just going to, you know, be reminded of it every time I see her, it's distracting, that's all. Still wish I could remember it better..."

"You can ask to go again?"

She let out an awkward little cough-snort of laughter — the very flat, deadpan way Hedwig said that was just weirdly funny. "Um, no, we had a whole talk about that just after. She was kind of freaking out a little, thinks I'm too young." Beth did get that, sure, but honestly it was slightly irritating to think about. As far as she was concerned, she was already an adult in practically every way that mattered — never had much of a childhood in the first place, not like other people — so the rest was just legal technicalities. She'd spent almost half a year now in various warzones fighting omnicidal aliens, for fuck's sake, as surreal as it was to think about on some level having sex seemed like...not as big of a deal by comparison? It was a little annoying, but, she did get how a normal, responsible adult might not be comfortable with it, so she wasn't going to argue the point.

"I see." Hedwig went quiet a moment, Beth didn't know what was going on in there. She was slowly getting better at human-ing, but Hedwig could be so flat, it could be hard to read her at the best of times.

Without really thinking about it, Beth ended up kind of leaning into Hedwig — she was tired, and Hedwig was warm. She should probably get to sleep...

Her arm curling around Beth's back, Hedwig turned her face into her hair. Which, again, slightly weird on the surface, but it was just Hedwig — it was kind of nice, honestly, she was warm, smelled of the vaguely herby-smelling soap she'd picked up from somewhere. "I tried to be human, once, for a time, when I was your age."

"...What?"

"I was... Normal owls are...not smart, I can't... They are boring, not enough." So, she'd been lonely, she meant. "I went to... I don't remember the name. It was east from home, across the sea."

Which could mean anywhere from Holland up through Norway, it was impossible to guess just from that. "Were they mages or muggles?"

"Mages. It was a village, near the hills. I lived with them, for a time, learned to...do human things. They didn't know, I said I was from far away, they helped me catch up. There was a man, I... We were planning to marry."

Beth twitched, straightened up a little and leaned away so she could make out Hedwig's face. As usual, there wasn't that much of an expression to make out — a faint frown, maybe, intensely but blankly staring at the floor a short distance away. "Really? I...kind of got the feeling that would be, I don't know, too much for you." Too much what, Beth wasn't sure. Just too human, she guessed.

"It was. I did enjoy..." Hedwig trailed off, her frown deepening. "I can't remember his name. It was so long ago, and I was mostly always an owl in that time, and human things, they..." Her free hand came up, gesturing along her head and down her side, Beth thought, like water or something running down and off of her.

...Yeah, Beth got how that might happen. She wasn't certain how old Hedwig was, precisely — she looked like a full proper adult, maybe thirties or so if she were a muggle. But she wasn't a muggle, and mages aged rather more slowly. When she was Beth's age could easily have been thirty years ago. Spending all of that time as an owl, and probably not speaking aloud at all, yeah, it made perfect sense that she'd forget words — even important things, like people's names.

While Beth was turning that thought over — it was somewhat horrifying, honestly, bloke who was so important she was marrying him and she couldn't remember his name — Hedwig went on with the story. "The plans were on, with his family, and all the talk of what the future was to be. We went to see a house, and he was saying... I left. That night. It was all too much — like a cage, closing in, but one I was not to leave. So I left."

"Um. Did you tell him before you, just, disappeared one night?" Like, yeah, that sounded awful for that poor bastard, his fiancée just vanishing out of the blue, but honestly she was more concerned with the thought of Hedwig just leaving her one day...

"...No," Hedwig muttered, low and thick, an obvious edge of guilt on her voice. "It was wrong, to leave like that. Looking back, I wish I...did something, I don't know what. But I was young, and scared."

Well, at least she realised it was a shite thing to do now, Beth guessed. "So, I'm guessing I shouldn't take this is a warning that you're just going to fly off on me one day?"

"What? No, I—" She bit out a huff of a sigh. "I am saying that I know. That it is hard, to be young, and...these feelings. If you want to talk about it."

"Oh." That was... Honestly, it was kind of nice of her. It's not like there were a lot of older women in her life she could talk to about...this kind of thing. Basically the only family she had was Sirius, and, that just seemed like it would be super awkward. There was also Mrs Weasley, she guessed, but no, just no. (Also, Mrs Weasley struck her as vaguely homophobic, and had assumed multiple times that Beth and Ron were dating and been all weird about being corrected, she had no idea how bringing it up would go over.) Beth had no idea whether she'd ever take her up on it, but it was still nice to offer. "Well, thanks, I guess. But I really am okay, I don't need to talk about it."

"Okay. And you need to sleep anyway."

"Yeah, sleep sounds like a good idea." A last squeeze, again pressing her face into her hair, and Hedwig pulled away, her arm unwinding from around Beth as she stood. Before Hedwig could take hardly more than a step away, a warm lurch rocked through Beth, she reached up and snagged Hedwig's wrist. "Um." Hedwig turned to stare down at her, with her inhumanly steady yellowish eyes, which wasn't making it easier for Beth to figure out what she meant to say — she didn't really know what this tangled up warm fuzzy feeling was, just, she was too sleepy to figure this out right now. Her eyes on Hedwig's knees, Beth said, "Thanks. Just, you know."

(She loved this bloody bird, that was all.)

Hedwig's lips curled, trying to smile, but it didn't really look right — still working on that faking being human thing. "Yes." She reached forward with her free hand, fingers slipping through Beth's hair (still short from when she chopped it off this morning), that funny fuzzy feeling squirming through Beth's chest. "Good night, Beth." She stepped away, Beth let go of her wrist.

Of course, since Hedwig really was quite terrible at pretending to be human, she stripped her clothes off — seeming completely unselfconscious about the fact that she was standing out in the open, but Hedwig was never bothered by that sort of thing — hung her things up in the closet, and then transformed back into the familiar big white owl and flew up to the top bunk over Beth's head. She preferred to sleep in owl-shape, high up where she could see the whole room, that part still hadn't changed. Of course, there was a bit of muttering from a few people in the room who weren't asleep yet, a few hissed questions of whether their neighbours had seen that, what kind of magic was that?

Beth, naturally, ignored those questions. She was sure the two of them would be interrogated about it tomorrow — by which she meant Beth would be interrogated about it tomorrow, because Hedwig couldn't speak Vietnamese — but that was a tomorrow problem. That'd been enough emotionally difficult talks for the night, thanks. She ducked her head and rolled over into the funny bed-cubby thing, coming to rest on her back. Heavy eyelids immediately dropping closed, she didn't even bother reaching for a blanket or whatever, it was warm enough in here.

In minutes she was already drifting off, vaguely aware of Hedwig sitting watchful above, familiar magic pulsing cool and calm and smooth.

Chapter Text

15th March 1996 (63:10:25)
— Contact plus 00.06.12:18.45

Acid-dried vegetation seared yellow and black and brown crunching under her feet, Beth climbed to the top of the hill nearby, shielding her eyes from the merciless tropical sun with a hand.

The features of the hills of the countryside were laid bare, smooth rolling curves occasionally taking sharp angles of exposed stone faces, slanting down toward a nearby river valley. This had been a mix of forest and cultivated land not so long ago, but now there were only skeletal spines of dead trees, twisted and yellowed and fragile-looking, ruined brown and poisoned yellow as far as the eye could see.

They'd been more or less completely isolated from the outside world while in the shelter — there hadn't been time to build in the focussing enchantments to allow safe portkey travel, so they hadn't had any access to fresh supplies or the military mail system — but they did have several of Hermione's special new magic radios down there. A couple had been set up in the civilian areas, playing music and radio dramas and news updates, to help keep people's mind occupied, but the one in the military common area had access to a channel with news updates that were rather less sanitised and more detailed than the civilian channel. They'd gotten pretty thorough descriptions of the expansion of the toxic clouds here and in India and the Amazon, daunting estimates of the people who were being killed, secondary effects like riots and, just, general fucked-up-edness in India...

And they also got updates on the project going on to fix the problem. Practically every available resource and every expert with an education in a relevant field had been thrown into it, everything they had all over the world — which was totally the correct response, if they didn't all want to suffocate and/or starve to death. And it turned out science could happen very very quickly when you threw such absurd resources at something, especially with magic to help cheat. Hermione had mentioned in the last letter that Beth had gotten that they were looking into reverse-engineering the beetles somehow (something about alchemy?), but that had been...what, a month ago now? Beth had been moving around too quickly and then had been cut off in a shelter, she'd been out of contact for a while. She probably had a bunch of letters stacked up wherever they were keeping her post...

Anyway, the beetles were supposedly some kind of magic, and they spread too quickly for actually killing them to be in any way practical — the Americans had tried to nuke the fuck out of them in the Amazon, and it'd only slowed them down — so instead they'd decided to figure out how the beetles work, and make their own beetles that, just, did the opposite of the aliens' beetles. That instinctively struck Beth as a very bad idea the first time she heard it, like, what if they got out of control, or the aliens could still... She didn't know, seemed risky.

Maybe she was just being paranoid, though, because it wasn't very long after Beth was locked up in the shelter that they started seeding the affected areas with their own beetles that hunted and killed the alien beetles. They started at the edges, and while the toxic clouds kept spreading (the beetles deeper into the affected area still going), the radio claimed that the presence of their beetles stopped the alien beetles from further spreading through the soil. Just, stopped dead, the teams planting their beetles quickly building a ring closing in the affected areas. Progressing inward from there was a slower process, since all the toxic acid everywhere made the environment rather difficult to work in — thankfully, their beetles spread on their own...and there was no reason they couldn't simply load a bunch of them up into a rocket or a fucking jar or something and lob them across the border. Hell, supposedly a bunch of beetles had been delivered by portkey, it was an easily solvable problem.

Actually fixing the air was a separate thing, involving a second kind of beetle, and...some kind of powder or spray or some shite that they'd spread through the toxic cloud. There'd been warnings before they'd gone ahead and done that, telling people to stay indoors, since the stuff basically turned the poison filling the air into extremely acidic rain that would melt you alive in seconds — not that anyone could go outdoors anyway, but thanks for the warning, she guessed. Once the stuff had fallen to the ground, then some of their reverse-engineered beetles would break it back down into safe stuff, supposedly mostly nutrients to help re-fertilise the soil to get things growing again in the aftermath.

That was another big problem, apparently — without a bunch of living roots and stuff, and the little bugs and bacteria or whatever there was in healthy soil, they were worried that just killing everything would quickly result in all the affected areas turning into uninhabitable desert wastelands. The beetles would help, designed to cover the stuff those bugs and bacteria were supposed to do until they came back on their own, but in the meanwhile they had to get as many plants in the ground as they could, quickly. That was going to be a huge project, they were still working on ramping it up as their beetles did their job.

The whole time, Beth and the others were stuck down in the shelter, following a bland, boring routine, trying to keep themselves occupied. Once Beth's break was done, she was cycled between guard duty shifts, on a rather more full schedule than most of the other military people. Beth's omniglottalism hadn't stopped being useful, after all — she was often posted in the sections for the various hill tribes and the like, since she had a better shot at being able to tell what the hell was going on than pretty much everyone else.

Not that much had really happened, most of her actual work hours were extremely uneventful, which was honestly kind of nice after fighting for months and running around helping fill shelters on very little sleep for weeks. Mostly, she just stood or sat around, intermittently chatting with the residents — picking up bits and pieces of a couple more languages while she was at it, because of course. The occasional dispute between residents did occasionally come up, Beth inserting herself to act as a somewhat ineffective mediator, since she mostly didn't speak the language(s) very well. Though, people needing to slow down and explain what was happening to the person in the room with a gun — and a wand, of course, but that was less visible from the outside — probably did more to cool tempers than anything Beth could do herself. She was not a particularly diplomatic person, after all. But whatever, none of it got that bad — a few times someone would effectively be put in a time-out up in quarantine, but nothing escalated into serious issues, at least.

Beth had no idea how long their good will would have lasted, but thankfully they'd only been trapped in there together for a few weeks. They'd probably still be living out of the shelter for a while yet, since it wasn't like they had anywhere else to go, but at least they'd be able to get some air topside when they needed it.

The reports they got over the radio had gradually grown more optimistic as the days went on — the civilian radio had even gotten the announcement that they'd found a fix once they'd proven that their beetles stopped the aliens' from spreading. There were still a few isolated pockets of alien beetles stubbornly holding on, but most of the toxic clouds had been stripped out of the air. The process of cleaning up the acids and poisons left on the ground was still ongoing, but whoever was in charge of this shite had started clearing areas as safe, preparing teams to send in more fertilising bugs and bringing in teams of muggles and mages and huge supplies of seeds and building materials and whatever else to start the replanting and building new farming villages from scratch. Sections of the affected areas were being cleared starting at the edges and working their way in, bit by bit, the process of cleaning the environment taking longer depending on how long they'd been contaminated — but they were certain the crisis was passed, only one or two weeks until the last of the poison was cleansed.

Of course, the devastation left behind would still need to be dealt with. Their shelter had been told that a team of muggle and magical experts, complete with some fresh supplies and a huge pallet of seeds and farming equipment to start the replanting, was in the process of being put together and should arrive in the next couple days. (Monday morning, they thought, but delays happened.) At that time they'd start reconnecting their shelter to proper communications and transportation and such...which Beth was pretty sure was all magical now? Whatever. Since most all of the people in their shelter had been farmers anyway, they'd all basically been conscripted to help with the replanting, but the impression Beth had gotten listening in is that they were mostly fine with that — after all, it was a critical infrastructure project, so at the very least they'd be fed and protected through the unrest certain to come in the wake of the disaster. They were all homeless now, and had lost everything they owned that they hadn't been able to carry with them, and the job came with a guarantee of a plot of land to live/farm on, so, not a bad deal, really. They'd probably starve to death in short order if left to their own devices, under the circumstances...

Beth had already gotten a turn on the radio to volunteer to help with reconstruction here. Now that the fighting was done, they were being cycled back to Britain for leave and reassignment anyway — after a brief talk with some assistant or something at the British command centre in Indochina, and a wait of a couple days, she was informed that some Major General had signed off on the loan of her omniglot-related services to the Vietnamese army being extended. Which wasn't unreasonable, she guessed, whatever experts they were sending in were probably going to need a translator to coordinate with the locals. The assignment would end with the initial phase of the work here, clearing the ruined land and getting new plants in the ground. At that point, she'd be being sent back home for at least a few months of leave, no matter what — apparently Ramsey had been quite insistent on that point, which was a surprise to Beth, honestly.

(She hadn't stopped being convinced that Ramsey was actually literally Voldemort, and that she was apparently insisting to their superiors that Beth be given a break for her own good was just...weird, just weird, she didn't what to do with that.)

It was hard to imagine they would have made much progress by the time she was pulled back home — this place was fucking ruined. There was nothing left.

Beth had been pretty ambivalent about the climate in Vietnam from the start, honestly. It'd been a mix of better and worse than the Congo, depending on which thing you looked at. It was fucking hot, for one thing, and humid as all hell — it was the dry season now, which meant it rained less (most places inland it didn't really rain at all), but that somehow didn't stop the air from being so thick it was practically halfway to steam. And there were the bugs, of course, had to be bugs everywhere. But a lot of the plants were kind of neat-looking, and the valleys in the mountains all sharp and dramatic, almost picturesque, like, she could imagine people making countless pretty landscape paintings out of this shite, and all the different peoples speaking a smattering of languages and their little villages decorated by hand with colourful embroidery and paint on the walls, and...

And it was gone. There was nothing left, just bare hills coloured brown and yellow with the desiccated remains of the forest that had been.

It was painfully sad. As in, it physically hurt, looking over the hills and the valley below a hot sharp lump building in Beth's chest and throat, forcing her breaths thick and half-strangled, the harsh sun overhead and the vaguely chemical-y tang to the air only partly responsible for the prickle of tears in her eyes...

All the aliens that had landed here had been killed, but they'd had still managed to take literally everything with them. Bastards.

Beth wasn't the only one who'd come up, a slow trickle of people appearing out of the hidden entrances to the shelter. A rather modest fraction of the residents, a few from each block volunteered to go out and see what had come of the place and report back — they'd been told that there wouldn't be much to see, the forest entirely killed, and after getting a look they'd have to go right back in the shelter anyway, so most hadn't wanted to bother. By the intensely emotional reaction from a fair number of them when they saw what the place had been reduced to — this had been home for a lot of the residents, only a month ago, farming the river valley below for uncounted generations — Beth assumed at least some of them were simple reluctant to see the damage that had been done, for it to be real.

It was hard enough for Beth to look at, and she didn't even live here.

The scene was unnaturally quiet. There was some low chatter from the people around, the occasional shout or cry, the crackling crunch of dead things underfoot. Perhaps a faint skittering sound as the dried leaves were shifted by the gentle breeze, empty branches cracking and creaking. No hissing rustle of leaves, no twittering of birds — Hedwig likely the only bird for miles around, drifting in gentle curves against the blue sky overhead — no chittering and buzzing of insects.

There was a little centre of life and activity around the shelter, but beyond that nothing, eerie dead silence.

It was hard to imagine this place would ever come alive again. Beth knew you could pull off a lot of crazy shite with magic, but...

She heard footsteps coming up behind her, glanced over her shoulder — Phương, Diệu, and Tuấn, not entirely surprised to see them. She'd ended up getting to know plenty of people in the shelter, since they were stuck together in rather close quarters, but she'd ended up spending the most time with Phương and Diệu. No particular reason, she didn't think, it'd just ended up that way. (They were some of the youngest military types here, only a few years older than Beth, and that wasn't a bad reason by itself.) She honestly suspected she might have a little bit of a crush on Diệu, she tried not to be creepy about it — especially since people did know she was gay, with Ianin around and Beth being weird about bathing the secret hadn't lasted very long — but she really had absolutely no idea if it was obvious to everyone else. Tuấn was around sometimes because he was related to Diệu somehow (Beth wasn't sure how exactly, some kind of cousins), and Phương and Tuấn were kind of dancing around each other, being all subtly flirty. She was pretty sure they hadn't actually done anything yet, since there wasn't exactly a lot of privacy down there, but she wouldn't be surprised if Phương and Tuấn ended up dating before too long...or whatever the appropriate term was for the culture and their present circumstances, she had no idea.

As they approached, Tuấn called, "I'm guessing the view isn't any better up there."

"No, there's just more of it."

"It's an awful mess," Phương agreed, nudging the stem of...some kind of bush or something — even a light impact of her boot was enough to make it crack and fall apart. She grimaced, biting out a sigh. "I knew it would be bad, but... The bombings back in the war took long enough to come back from, this is so much worse."

No one seemed to have anything to say to that, staring morosely out at the ruined forest. Beth didn't know much about the long war the locals had fought for independence, but she didn't have to to know this was worse — a firebomb burning down a stretch of forest of farmland wasn't even on the same scale as poison and acid killing literally everything, over like a third of the country. Maybe half? Beth still wasn't sure where precisely they were, honestly.

After a brief silence Tuấn drew attention back with a little hum. "We'll need to set up a spot for the replanting team to come in. By the river's better, you think?"

It took a couple seconds for Beth to realise he was asking her — she was the only mage of the four of them. "Oh, er, probably. Depending on the size of the team they have coming in, we'll probably want a clear area five metres to a side, as flat as possible. The hills are pretty uneven, it'll probably have to go down by the river." That was where they'd need most of the supplies to start off anyway, so, convenient.

There was a little bit of a chatter then, Beth only really half listening. Tuấn wanted to gather up some people to go down to the river and start preparing the landing site — antsy from being trapped in the shelter so long, she suspected, just wanted to do something. Nah, Beth wasn't coming with, she thought she'd start digging out trees. They would need to get rid of all the dead shite, and they wouldn't be able to get serious equipment in here, so uprooting the big stuff was going to require magic. She might as well start near the shelter. Before too long, Phương and Tuấn were walking off, shouting over to other people, starting to bring together a group.

Diệu didn't move, though, still lingering at the bottom of the tiny little rise Beth was standing on. Silently, just... Kind of making Beth a little self-conscious, honestly. Trying not to look awkward, she grabbed a few stems of...something — impossible to tell what it used to be — the surface harsh and jagged in her hand. A couple breaking and digging charms at the ground, a tug, the desiccated material flaking in her hand, and the dead plants came free, a fair bit of the roots coming with the stems, gnarled and tangled and equally dead-looking.

The acid-scorched and dry earth let out a puff of dust as the roots were yanked out, Beth held her breath, beetles that looked very much like the aliens' scurrying around in the disturbed dirt, blue and dark brown and green and orange. Mostly the ones designed to get nutrients back in the soil, she thought — supposedly the different colours all did different things, but Beth wasn't sure which was which. She tossed the dead stalks aside, falling with a series of cracking noises into a jagged pile. And she moved on to the next handful.

She was working at loosening up the roots of a tree — leaning precariously at the edge of the little rise, stripped bare, half of the length of the branches broken off — when she heard a crunching of feet, Diệu climbing up the little rise. Feeling uncomfortably observed, Beth tried to ignore her, cast a couple more charms at the ground under the tree, beetles showing themselves just to burrow out of sight again, the tree listing further at a push against the trunk, a couple more charms...

She twitched at the unexpected touch on her arm, just above her elbow. "It'll be all right." Glancing to her left, Diệu was leaning over a little, to get a better angle on her face. It was hard to read her expression exactly, eyes attentive, a curl to her lips that could mean anything.

Beth belatedly realised she was paying rather more attention to Diệu's lips than necessary, forced herself to look away. "Does anything seem all right to you?"

"No. But it'll come back. Not the same as it was before, true, but it'll come back. We are still here — the rest we can sort out later."

"...I know that." With a flick of her wand hand (Diệu had grabbed her other arm), Beth tossed a bludgeoning charm at the tree. The force badly cracked the trunk, dried wood splintering, but it was enough to tip it over, ponderously leaning, the roots tearing up the ground with more little puffs of dust, before finally crashing to the ground with a cacophony of twigs snapping.

"Why did you volunteer to stay behind?"

Beth twitched, glanced at Diệu. "What?"

"The rest of your countrymen are going back home, right? Why did you ask to stay?"

...Well, that was kind of hard to explain, actually. Feeling especially self-conscious with Diệu bloody well watching her (very aware of her hand on Beth's arm), she stared off over the ruined hills, shrugging. "I dunno. I guess it... It doesn't seem like it's done. We killed the bastards, yeah, but they still..." She gestured vaguely off at the devastation with her wand hand. "I didn't want to leave with the job half-finished. Felt wrong somehow."

Also, if she was being completely honest, she was kind of scared to go home. She'd been away what felt like a terribly long time, and she'd done a lot, and... And Britain was probably a rather different place than it'd been before she left — not as changed as Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia, obviously, since the damage was much less, but certainly different — and she'd only talked to her friends by letter for, like, half a year at this point. She couldn't help the feeling that she might not...fit, anymore.

Not that that was an unusual feeling, honestly — she often felt like she didn't quite fit, just somewhat out of place, like something growing in one of Petunia's bloody flower beds that wasn't supposed to be there. Which she knew was fucked-up brain stuff from her miserable bloody childhood, but just because she knew it was irrational didn't mean she could stop.

"The job is never finished. Not really."

Beth wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean.

Diệu gave her shoulder a little pat before letting go, taking a step away. "Remember to come in for tea. We're on duty this afternoon."

"Yeah, yeah, I'll remember. See you later." She listened for Diệu's crunching footsteps to move away before reaching for the next handful of dead plant.

It didn't take very long working under the tropical sun — tearing up bushes and vines or whatever, digging up trees and sending them crashing to the ground, gradually building up piles of bleached and blackened and cracking wood — before Beth was hot and flushed, sweating in the merciless dry season heat. But she kept working anyway, tearing a ring around the entrances to the shelter, moving one strand of bushes to the next, trees falling one after another, wiping the sweat out of her eyes and hitting herself with an occasional cooling charm before moving on again.

She'd bled to help save this country — she could afford to spend some of her sweat to help fix it up afterward.