Yer A Witch, Gura

“Pandora Lovegood is a minor character whose only purpose in the books was to provide a reason for her daughter, Luna Lovegood, a reason to be a bit off- a little strange. A traumatized little girl, who saw her mother die in front of her,” I explained to Dumbledore as we walked towards the gates of Hogwarts. “But, in one of the many fics I’ve read, she was uhhh what’s the name for person who works with runes and stuff?”

“Arithmancer? Or Runologist?”

“Arithmancer, probably. Not too sure, but in of the fics, she was working on trying to get technology to work with magic and died for it. I’m not too sure on the details, but something went wrong, she died, and Luna watched. Now!” I held out my wand to summon the Knight Bus with a BANG! “Ottery Saint Catchpole, please!” I told the conductor on the bus, letting Albus pay the fee. “What we’re here to do, is to prevent Pandora’s death, and help her with melding technology and magic! It’s the first step in my Modular Multi-Step Plan to get the Wizarding World on the level of the world outside, or, at the very least, get some technology introduced into the wizarding world.” We got off the bus at our stop. Looking around the street, I realized my first problem. “I have no idea where to go from here.”

Wulfric chuckled and patted my shoulder. “It’s no problem. I know where the Weasleys live, so we could go from there, if you’d like?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know where the Lovegood’s house is roughly, but not exactly where it’s at. All I know is that it’s near The Burrow.”

“Then let us be off towards the Weasley’s house!” A snap, crack, and me dry heaving on the grass later, we were at The Burrow.

“Please warn me next time when you do that, Wulfric,” I groaned pitifully, rolling onto my back.

“Yes, that’s the usual reaction to Apparition,” Wulfric chuckled mercilessly.

Groaning again, I gingerly stood and looked around. An empty lot of land with some trees off to the side, what looked like an orchard a bit further off(?), and directly in the middle of it all was a massive, unsteady, and mishmashed building. I nodded. “Yeah, that’s The Burrow, all right.”

“Oh? You’ve seen it before?” Wulfric asked as he started walking towards it.

“No, but I’ve heard it described and yeah. The movie version of it doesn’t do it justice with how chaotic- IS THAT A PULLY SYSTEM?!” I shouted pointing at the aforementioned pully system.

“Hm. So it is.”

“Do you know what it does?”

“Pull.”

I punched Wulfric. “Well duh. Do you know what else it does? Because I doubt there’s a pulley system right there without any rhyme or reason.”

Wulfric laughed. “Well, let’s ask the ones who built the house,” he said as a woman with bright orange hair came bustling out of the house.

“Professor Dumbledore! You should’ve told me you were coming; I would’ve prepared something for you!” she called as we neared each other.

“There is no need to, Mrs. Weasley, we’re only here for a short stop before arriving at our destination.”

“Oh, I must insist on having a bit of tea, no?”

“Alas, we’re on a tight schedule, so perhaps when we return? I do have a few things to discuss with you, after all.”

“Oh, alright, I’ll set some tea for your return.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Weasley. Ah, but if you could point us in the direction of the Lovegood’s home, we’d appreciate it.”

“Oh, of course. It’s just over there.” She pointed towards the back of her home. If I squinted, I could barely make out a worn path through the trees. “Just follow the path, and you’ll be upon it in no time.”

“Thank you again, Mrs. Weasley. We’ll be off then.” We set off towards the indicated path.

Making our way through the small copse of trees, another clearing presented itself with a small hill with a house in the shape of a rook sitting atop it. “There it is.” I nodded towards the building. “In fanon, we called it The Rookery, since it looks like a chess rook. C’mon, let’s go!” I started running up the hill. Wulfric followed at a more sedate pace, but no less hurried. I still have no idea when Pandora had her accident, and I have no intention of finding out. I briefly considered knocking but decided if it was funnier if I did: “Kon’nichiwa! Same no Gawr Guradesu!”

I heard a shout of surprise and the sound and feel of magic fizzling out. Wulfric peered in behind me. “It seems we made it just in time.”

“Made it in time for what?” a little girl’s voice asked.

“Why, saving your mother, miss Lovegood.”

The small Luna, who was sitting on a chair next to where her rather stunned mother was standing, blinked and tilted her head cutely.

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Hiya! I’m Gawr Gura of Hololive English -Myth-! Shark Atlantean, and bearer of, uh, stuff!” I struck a pose with my hand outstretched in a peace sign.

Pandora Lovegood and Luna Lovegood stared at me for a few seconds before they broke down giggling. My pose slackened.

“Was- was that too much?” I felt an almost-veritable cloud of depression settle on me. Before I could become any more dispirited, Pandora waved it off.

“Don’t worry, you just look unbearably cute.” I froze up as she came closer and squished my cheeks. “Oh? What’s this? You’re an Atlantean, aren’t you? Got the teeth of one, and the tail. The eyes, too.” She hummed softly. “What are you doing so far away from the ocean, little one?”

“Gah!” She let me break out of her grip, and I started rubbing my cheeks with a dour look. She smiled back, unaffected.

“Miss Gawr here was found on the front lawn of Hogwarts in the rain several weeks back. She is amnesiac to her Atlantean history,” Wulfric informed.

“Oh? Did you require my help in regaining lost memories?” She set her hand against her face.

“No, I do not believe so.”

“Ah, that’s too bad. I wouldn’t be able to do it anyway.”

I gaped at her. “Are- are- were you advertising a service that you couldn’t provide?!”

“What if I wasn’t?”

I moved to speak back, but some remnant of past-me’s autism worked itself up and my mind froze trying to process her words. My mind finally kicked into gear, and I asked, “Was that a double negative?!”

Before Pandora could respond, Wulfric coughed politely. “I believe that we were here to do something important, Gura?”

I blinked. “Oh right!” I peered over the table at the random jumble of notes on the table. “Were you trying to make a spell or something to make technology work in magic?”

“I am doing some research into that, yes,” Pandora replied, also looking over the notes with me now.

I nodded. “Was that spell you were going to do part of it?”

“Hm? Oh, no. That was a spell to toast bread perfectly.”

I looked up at her, dumbfounded. That’s what killed her? I looked down at the notes- research and arithmetic- and could see crisscrossing lines and runes. I couldn’t understand most of it, but some of the math I could read. I looked back up at her, still so very befuddled. “Why?”

Luna finally spoke up, “I was wondering if there’s a mathematically perfect toasted bread, and we were calculating it here, and here we arranged the runes, and I was really craving some toast.”

Sighing, I slumped my head onto the table with a ‘Thump’ and sighed again because dramatics. Swallowing, I started speaking slowly, “There cannot be a mathematically perfect toasted bread because each person’s perfect is different. However, if you include some runes about taking the user’s preferences into account when casting the spell, then you might be able to make mathematically perfect toasted bread.” I started pointing at some runes they could change, talking out of my tail, and then modified the arithmetic to account for the caster’s preferences. Changing a few equation symbols out for placeholder symbols, the like.

Eventually, we figured out the words for the spell along with the motions, and as Pandora started casting, my heartrate spiked rapidly and I panicked, thinking that we were going to summon an eldritch or something, but then the bread toasted nicely. Luna started poking the bread with her finger, testing it. Deeming it safe to hold, she held it up to her face and sniffed it, then took a bite of it. Then she shoved it in her mouth, crumbs falling en masse around her face.

“I guess that means it was a success,” Pandora commented. Luna smiled brightly and nodded, holding a thumbs up- more crumbs were dislodged from around her mouth.

I heaved a sigh of relief. No summoning eldritch beasts today! Nor Pandora dying, which is also good. I perked up again. “Oh right! What I was going to ask you before we got sidetracked on making mathematically perfect bread-”

“You were asking around about my research into making technology compatible with magic, yes?”

“Yea! Due to some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey dimensional rift shenanigans, I know things! The truth of some of those things still remain to be seen, but I have ideas. And some of those ideas relate to your magi-tech stuff!”

Pandora idly cast the toast-making spell on another piece of bread that Luna greedily gobbled up. She hummed thoughtfully as she watched. “I suppose… but be warned that I’ve not had much luck in figuring it out. My lab’s at the edge of the forest- let’s head there now.”

“Right-o!” Me, Wulfric, and Luna followed Pandora out the door and towards the building we didn’t notice when we came in. “If it is what I think it is, it might fix it, or at least get it to somewhat work. I really don’t know, but suggestions are suggestions for a reason!”

“That they are,” Pandora commented, unlocking the door with a series of complex hand-to-wand movements and a physical key. Swinging the door outward, she ushered us in.

Inside was- a little anti-climactic, if I’m gonna be honest. It was a rather small room with a door on an adjacent wall, scattered around were pages of pages of random arithmetic and runes- from what I could tell at a glance- and a bunch of red string connecting different pieces of paper together on one wall’s corkboard. A desk took up the wall in front of us, the door was to the right, and the corkboard was to the left.

“Here it is. The actual lab where I test is to the right behind that door, but here is where I do the theory and rune-arithmancy work.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay, where’s your most recent notes and test?”

I joined Pandora at the desk as she ruffled through some papers, before pulling out three sheets of parchment, and a charred SNES. My retro gamer heart twinged at the burnt console, but I ignored it, it was science time. Pandora cleared out a small portion of the desk away to make room for the burnt console and the notes.

As I started looking over them, she spoke: “What I did as an initial test is to see how magic interacts with technology. What I’ve found out from that is magic is an energy, much like the famed electricity of muggles, and that too much of it will overload the device when exposed to it for any periods of time. If there’s ambient magic- such as in a regular muggle household- magic will not overload the device, as that magic is inert magic, magic that isn’t being used. However, when exposed to active magic- such as building wards and spells- it will quickly overload.”

I nodded with her explanation, it’s what I’d already figured.

“I’ve done a few tests with different levels of magic- low activity magic, or passive magic; medium activity magic, weak wards or a small lumos in its vicinity; and high activity magic, which is something like a stunner or the wards surrounding a house, Hogwarts, et cetera.” She pulled up some more sheafs of paper and set them on the desk. “What I’ve found,” She continued as she handed me a few of them, “is that low activity magic will take less time to overload the device, while high energy magic will overload the device immediately and likely cause it to spark, smoke, or explode in some rare cases. In the lab room, there’s some devices set up right now in passive, inert, and medium magical energy levels.”

“Did you use any sort of rune diagram that goes onto the device, or are you just seeing what works and what doesn’t?”

“What I’m currently trying is some sort of ward schema that disallows for a certain level of magic activity to enter the device, but so far, it’s ended in failure with the devices still overloading when high activity magic is performed near or on it. I previously tried using a spell, but because that was high activity magic-”

“It overloaded the device immediately,” I finished, interrupting.

“Yes, which is part of the entire problem.”

I mulled over her notes and words for a bit, looking through it all a bit more. “And you haven’t tried a rune sequence at all yet? Yes or no.”

“No.”

I nodded. “Could you get me some blank pieces of paper and a big ol’ book of runes? I think I’ll need it.”

Pandora did as I requested, and I goggled at the size of the book before shaking my surprise off. Of course it was big- it was parchment, not paper. Grabbing a pencil from the holder- oh goodie she actually has pencils and not just quills- I started scribbling on the paper. Pandora said something about going into the lab, but I ignored her in favor of keeping my fervor up.

“This rune goes into this one by way of conduction, as it leads the magic into energy conversion, while also steaming some of it off; this rune is one of emotion, and it connects to these three others in the sequence, which captures the emotions of the magic and funnels it right back out, released into some sort of- gas? Probably, make it dihydrogen monoxide, that way it’s nonlethal. Use this rune to convert all excess energy back into the- fuck that creates a feedback loop uhh.”

I was like this for some time. For almost, like, a day I think? I lost track of time, and Luna kept feeding me toast, so I was stuck in the fugue for some time. Wulfric left in the middle of it- likely to talk to Mrs. Weasley- and came back later. Eventually, when I stopped creating feedback loops on feedback loops- it was a real problem, trust me- I slammed the pencil down and yelled out- “FINISHED! FINALLY!”

Luna jolted from the stool she was seated on and toppled to the floor, Wulfric looked up from the Rubik’s Cube he was fiddling with (I later learned that it was cursed to never be solved), and Pandora blinked blearily from where she was sleeping on the desk.

It was two in the morning, apparently.

Grinning in the wake of my success, I toppled to the floor and passed out. Turns out this body isn’t ready for all-night cramming sessions, who knew? I certainly do now. Anyway, when I finally awoke and heeded the call of nature, and drank something, since apparently, I need more water than everyone else and I was showing signs of dehydration? Huh. The more you know. I’m getting off track.

Pandora told me that 999% of my rune sequence is entirely unnecessary and that I only needed one specific rune that I skipped over.

I gaped at her. “Seriously?!”

She nodded. “Yes, seriously. It’s apparently used when different sequences and styles of magic are funneled into a single object and need to be converted to be inert so that the balance of a ritual area won’t be disrupted. The Stonehenge ritual site has several rocks with these runes inscribed into them.”

I groaned piteously.

“However, some of your rune sequence can be salvaged, since this rune does need to be adjusted for the addition of electricity into the equation.” She grabbed a clean sheet of paper. “So, it should actually look somewhat roughly like this instead.” She scribbled a significantly smaller rune sequence onto the paper, consisting of three runes. One was the inert-making rune, the second was an emotion-removing rune, and the third was one for lightning or something. “This is, however, a rough draft, and will need to be expanded upon more, but it does make things significantly easier to understand. Emotion, huh?”

“Mhm! In what I know about, emotion and technology just doesn’t mix. The example was with a car and a broom- a broom has a sort of sentience about it, linking with the person riding, while the car doesn’t. The magic user tried doing the same thing she did with the broom on the car, but she never really managed to drive it well, at first. It was this- the emotional-sentience of magic versus the inert, unemotional technology.”

“Hmm. I seem to recall Arthur Weasley mentioning something about a car a while back. Something with enchanting it, somehow?”

I paused, thinking. Arthur’s car gained sentience in Harry’s second year, but it had enchantments that allowed it to fly and to become invisible- not to mention that the wizarding world also had the Knight Bus, which is one of those tour buses but purple and can go really fast with a bunch of other modifications, too. But those… seem to put the magic into the object, rather than remove the magic from the object- they’re probably powered by magic, too. I shook my head. “No. The Knight Bus is one such example- it uses magic, is practically magic, in that it just does stuff. Like how it goes really fast or whatever, can squeeze between things, et cetera, those things are magic doing its thing. It’s not removing the magic from the object- it’s imbuing the object with magic, which then allows the object to gain some sort of sentience like how brooms have them. Small, almost miniscule, sentience, but sentience nonetheless.”

“I see. So, in this we’re removing the thing which makes magic, magic; instead converting it into some sort of emotionless energy that still allows the magic to work on the object, while not overloading the object?”

“Yea seems like. The emotionless energy is still magic, but.” I shrugged. Squigglygoop sorta stuff.

“Do you understand any of what they’re talking about, Luna?” Wulfric asked from behind us. Luna held up her pointer finger and thumb squished together. Wulfric squinted his eyes and looked closely at them. He nodded as if he learned the secrets of the world. “I’m quite the same, it seems.”

I snorted a bit at their antics. “Anyway. The peanut gallery over here is getting bored, and just removing the emotional factor from magic is all that I could really give you in terms of getting stuff to work. I really don’t know anything else, so it’s all up to you, now.” I grinned at her. “I believe in you, though!”

Pandora stared at me with her eyebrows raised in something like surprise(?) before she sighed, almost disappointed.

“Well, if that’s all, then I suppose it is time for us to go. We had a meeting with Mrs. Weasley yesterday that Gura missed.”

“Oh yea, uh, oops?”

“Don’t worry, I talked with her yesterday and told her you were busy.”

“Oh good, an excuse.” Wulfric raised an eyebrow. “Uh, I mean, let’s go meet her today!”

Wulfric chuckled. “Then let us be off. Thank you for having us, Pandora, Luna, and wonderful watching you work.”

“Do you mind if I send Gura some samples of my work while she’s in Hogwarts, Albus? It might be good to have some testing done in a high-activity magic area. More so than just my own lab,” Pandora asked.

“I do not mind it, no. Just make sure it doesn’t explode while mid-flight- the owl carrying the package might not like it.”

“I imagine it wouldn’t. I’ll be running tests from now until the school starts; I’ll try to cut down on the explosions.”

“That’s all I ask. Now, time doesn’t last all day, and it is past time to leave, I believe.”

“Did you purposefully make that rhyme? Also, what does that mean?” I asked Wulfric, looking up at him confusedly.

“It means exactly what it means, Gura.”

“That makes literally no sense whatsoever,” I argued as we left the building and started towards The Burrow.

“Ah, but it does make sense to an intellectual mind. One has to only think on it.”

“I am thinking on it, and it makes no sense! Time lasts all day! Time is infinite!” Time is an asshole. “Time is perfect.”

Wulfric smiled down at me. “Then you must not have an intellectual mind.” My eye twitched. “I believe that is my cue to run.” He started sprinting.

“GET BACK HERE, OLD MAN! I’M NOT DONE WITH YOU! I’M GONNA RIP YOUR BEARD OUT HAIR BY HAIR!” I started sprinting after him. How I sprinted was rather interesting, as I didn’t run like a normal person would, instead I got low to the ground and tore through chunks of the ground to speed myself up.

Through this method, I gained on Wulfric, but witty man as he is, he jumped over me as I barreled towards him. I missed and overshot him completely, ending up rolling across the lawn towards the Weasley’s house. I hit their back door with a loud THUD and the whole house shuddered from the impact.

A few red locks of hair passed my face, but my attention focused back on the approaching adults. I was posed rather comically when Mrs. Weasley found, and Wulfric caught up to me. I was upside down, head and shoulders lain across the ground- arms spread wide- with my lower body leaned up against the door. It was rather like when cartoon characters rolled and hit a wall, honestly.

My shirt slipped up (down?) my body, which revealed part of my gills and several bad-looking scars. Mrs. Weasley gasped when she saw them. Or was it my being rather dazed that made her gasp? I don’t know for sure. I was dazed. “Are you alright, dear?” she asked.

I blinked slowly up at her- which made her breath hitch just a bit- trying to see if there were actually three of her or that I just had three eyes. “Sure,” I responded, if a bit slurred.

Four Wulfrics appeared in my vision just after. I squinted up at them. “I do believe you’re not.”

“Oh, Professor Dumbledore!”

“Hello, Molly. Do mind us, we were playing a small little game and it got a bit… out of hand, shall we say.”

“Yyyu called me dum!” I slurred out.

“I said you did not have an intellectual mind. There is a distinct difference.”

“’Distinct’ my tail!”

“Do you mind if we used your living room to allow Miss Gawr to recover? We were coming over here to talk to you anyway.”

Mrs. Weasley huffed worriedly. “Oh, alright. Come now, up you go.” Mrs. Weasley and Wulfric lifted me up- were they that strong or was I just light?- and Mrs. Weasley supported me as we slowly made our way inside from the back door. They got me set up and supported on a couch, and I don’t remember much more. I probably dozed off.