Caw! the phoenix said. There was a blast of fire and bird and girl were gone.

"Holy crap!" Pat yelled, leaping to his feet so fast his chair went flying. Once upright he froze...what could he actually do? The girl wasn't here anymore, and he didn't have any way to bring her back. Should I call her parents? he thought, panic rising up his throat. Who else? Is there anyone who could get her back? She's got maybe thirty seconds, who can I call?! The universe seemed to freeze around him as he dithered, trying to force his brain to come up with the solution to an insoluble problem while the last seconds of Hermione's life ticked past.

With a loud bamf and a flash of fire, bird and girl were back. Hermione hit the floor like a brick.

"MEDIC!" Pat bellowed, his Royal Air Force training yanking him into familiar habits. "I've got a girl down!" Doors slammed open in the hall and feet came pounding towards him; he didn't wait, but dropped to his knees to look Hermione over.

Coo, said the bird, waddling forward to lay its cheek on Hermione's head, its eyes glistening with gathering tears. Pat pushed the creature away, hard. He needed to see how badly Hermione was hurt, and he didn't need some damn bird getting in the way.

He turned Hermione over carefully, giving her a quick check for obvious injuries. Judging from her gasping, raspy breathing, she'd held her breath—the instinctive reaction, and exactly the wrong thing to do in vacuum. Her lungs had clearly taken damage, possibly a full rupture, but there was no easy way to tell exactly how bad it was without equipment and training he didn't have. She was pawing clumsily at her eyes; he pulled her hands away and looked. The water in her eyes had flash-boiled away in vacuum, leaving the eyeballs dry and cracked. The inside of her nose was probably the same way.

Her body was warm, but she was shivering; a quick glance showed that her hands were badly frostbitten, the skin waxy and blackened, and the rubber soles of her trainers were frozen and cracked. With no convection to carry heat away, the vacuum on the Moon wouldn't have been cold on her exposed skin, but Mare Imbrium must have been on the dark side at the time, and the surface would have been several hundred degrees below zero. Heat had conducted out of her soles at lightning speed, freezing and cracking the rubber soles. She must have fallen from the shock and put her hands out to catch herself. Fortunately, she hadn't been there more than fifteen or twenty seconds; hopefully the shoes had protected her feet long enough that she wouldn't lose them to frostbite. There was a pretty good chance she would lose her hands, though.

People were boiling in the door. Pat looked up, his face frozen in horror. "I showed her a picture of the Moon," he said blankly. "She asked the bird if it could take her there, and it did. She's ripped up; we need to get her to a hospital, fast."

John, the head of Power Systems, nodded crisply, dropping to his knees beside them and opening up the first-aid kit he was clutching in one hand. "Alex, go call 911 and get an ambulance here," he said, voice clipped as he focused on the problem at hand. "Bill, call the base doctor and get her up here, fast. The rest of you, out. We need room." A former Sergeant Major in the Marines, he still had the habit of command; everyone jumped to obey.

The bird—Xare—was back, again trying to lay its head on Hermione's. Pat turned on it in a rage, backhanding it hard into the wall. "GET THE HELL AWAY FROM HER!" he bellowed. "This is your fault!"

Caw! it challenged, mantling and disappearing in a flash of fire to reappear standing on Hermione's chest. The thing was only the size of a falcon, but the wing that it struck him with hit like a rhino and sent him tumbling. Before Pat could get back up or John could interfere, it leaned down, its tears spilling into Hermione's eyes.

Right in front of them, the damage vanished. Hermione's eyes were fixed first, the cracks disappearing and a healthy wetness taking their place. The tears continued to fall, and a few moments later her breathing evened out and she reached up, her hands stroking Xare gently. As she did, the flesh of her hands softened back into a healthy pink and the shivering stopped.

Everyone froze in shock.

Hermione sighed and sat up, hugging Xare to her chest. "Let's not do that again," she said shakily. Xare cooed apologetically and bumped her head up under Hermione's chin.

"This place is amazing," Aubrey said, looking around the immense conference room admiringly. "Not just the room, the whole castle. I think I annoyed my guide a great deal because I had to stop and talk to the portraits—and then the moving staircases and the hallway where you end up walking on what used to be the ceiling when you started out...just incredible. How long has it been here, anyway?"

Dumbledore's eyes sparkled behind the half-moon glasses. He stroked his long white beard, hiding a smile behind it. "About two weeks," he said casually.

Aubry goggled. "Two weeks?!" he gasped. "This place is obviously old—there's no way it's only been here two weeks."

"I assure you, two weeks," Dumbledore said gravely. "The original Hogwarts was centuries old, but it was destroyed by a nuclear bomb a short time ago. We only rebuilt it...hm." His eyes went distant for a moment as he calculated. "Fifteen days ago. So, I suppose you're right—not two weeks. It took almost a hundred of us working together for a week to do something the four Founders did overnight. Still, we finished it just fifteen days ago." The smile was now plainly visible on the old wizard's face.

Aubrey stroked the beard that spilled halfway down his chest, eyeing Dumbledore. Eventually, he nodded. "Fine," he said, accepting but still seeming nervous. "Just, please tell me this isn't the original site? If so, the radiation..."

Dumbledore's briefly looked disappointed; clearly, he'd been winding Aubrey up just a little bit and hoping for more of a reaction. "Yes, it's the original site. Don't worry, though—we got rid of the radiation. It was time-consuming, but not difficult."

Aubrey blinked. "You got rid of the radiation." He blinked again. "From a nuclear bomb."

Dumbledore smiled; this was more like it! "Yes, we did. Mr. Potter spoke to the Queen and brought in some Muggles in odd suits with..." He paused, reaching for a word. "Geiger counters. They located the areas that were afflicted with radiation. We placed ward charms around them to keep the effects contained until they could be dealt with, then we went around to each spot and Transfigured the earth to cleanse it."

Aubrey frowned. "I thought science wasn't something that wizards knew about? How did you ward against radiation if you don't know what it is?"

"It took some discussion, but eventually the Muggles were able to explain that this 'radiation' comes in two forms—solid particles and light," Dumbledore explained. "There is a combination of spells—Protego Maxima, Fianto Duri, Repello Inimicum—that create very secure shields around an area. Anything attempting to pass through the shield is disintegrated. We tested it with a geiger counter; it's quite able to destroy the particle-based forms of radiation, and a simple Invisibility charm can stop light from passing through an area in one direction; we simple ensured that the barrier side was facing in. The first few attempts didn't work because the radiation wasn't a normal form of light, but it didn't take long to create a version that stopped all forms of light."

Aubrey nodded, thinking it through. With a sudden frown, he hastily flipped open the briefing packet that he'd been clutching, and paged through to the information on Transfiguration. He ran one finger down the text until he got to the bit he'd half-remembered. "It says here that Transfiguration isn't permanent," he said accusingly. "How did turning the radioactive dirt into something else solve the problem?"

Dumbledore smiled tolerantly. "We Transfigured the affected earth into ice—we were careful to place containment charms around it first in case any of it sublimated. Fawkes and I then transported it to a volcano in Antartica. I Finited the incantation before I threw it in, of course, so the dirt melted instead of the ice evaporating. It took quite a large number of trips—as I said, time-consuming but not difficult."

Aubrey was silent, stroking his beard while staring into the distance glassy-eyed. "That's...amazing. Have you considered using this in other applications? Chernobyl, Three Mile Island...don't know how much radiation remains there, but still..."

Dumbledore nodded. "Indeed. We've had orders from the British government to aid in waste disposal from nuclear reactors. The Americans have also requested help in eliminating the contents of several of their nuclear waste repositories, and we're expecting more requests as time goes on. Now that we have established an exchange rate between Galleons and pounds sterling we are discovering that radioactive waste disposal is quite profitable; a large number of wizards and witches are setting themselves up in the business. So many, in fact, that the Ministry has had to pass emergency laws requiring that wizards and witches demonstrate minimal competence in radiation-related science before being allowed to do the job."

Aubrey nodded, stunned. "You can block all forms of radiation." He cocked his head in thought. "That's...huge. And you said the initial versions blocked some wavelengths but not others? When the light hits the surface, does it bounce off, route around, disappear—what?"

Dumbleore frowned. "I'm not really sure...I suppose we can test it somehow."

Aubrey nodded, excitement growing. "This isn't even my field, but you really need to get with some optics guys...maybe lasers..." He shook his head. "Anyway, not right now. My thing is where computers and biology intersect; I've been thinking a lot about life extension lately, and I saw something in the packet about a cloak that keeps you from dying?"

"Okay, let's try this again," Pat said, speaking carefully. "Xare, please don't actually go anywhere. Just tell me: are you able to teleport with people when Hermione doesn't come along?"

The firebird bobbed her head, giving him a look that combined curiosity and patience.

"She teleported with me and about fifty other people, sir," Hermione offered. "Mostly children, but a few adults. We all needed to be in contact, but we found a spell that could connect us even if we weren't physically touching. Also, anything she's carrying gets lighter."

"Lighter, huh?" Eric asked. Having had a practical demonstration of Xare's abilities, the interview had now expanded to include most of the department heads, and the head of Payload Systems was always interested in how to reduce weight. "How much can she carry?"

The bird looked at him, looked at Hermione, and seemed to sigh. Caw! she said.

Hermione smiled and scratched Xare's breast feathers. "I know, but if the mission is to take humanity to the stars—or even just the Moon—then we need to answer the questions first."

Caw! The sound was almost grumpy. Pat could almost understand it himself—why can't we just go? I'll take you right now!

"It would be nice if it were that easy," John said gruffly. "What would we do if you weren't there? We need to be able to do this on our own, even if you aren't available."

Xare gave an irritable huff. Spreading her wings just slightly, she hopped from Hermione's shoulder to John's desk. The thing was institutional metal and the drawers were loaded with paper files—John used electronic storage, but he preferred to look at paper instead of a screen. It weighed easily several hundred pounds; Xare sank her claws into the edge and flapped, rising into the air and hovering with the desk effortlessly suspended below her. She looked at them calmly for a moment, then disappeared, reappearing on the other side of the room with a smug look on her avian face and the desk still suspended in her claws like it weighed no more than a feather. One more teleport and she returned the desk to its original spot.

"Wow. That's going to simplify launch," Mark said, goggle-eyed. The head of Launch Control, he believed in the dream too much to worry about the fact that both he and his entire department had just been made largely redundant.

"Okay," Pat said slowly, his brain ticking along. "So, she can teleport to the moon, she can bring a huge number of people and cargo along...we just need some life support. How would a suit handle being teleported? Or maybe we put together a vehicle?"

"Speaking of vehicles, could we use her to deploy a re-supply a space station? Because I've been thinking about O'Neill wheels..."

"Not a good plan," John said, shooting him a glance. "Even if she could deploy it, you wouldn't want her resupplying it. See that flash of fire when she emerges? It would do bad things to anything she came out next to, and it would use up a bunch of the oxygen."

"How do you know?" Eric demanded. "She's on fire right now, but she's not burning anything."

John glared back. "Fire still needs oxygen, you—"

"Aaand we're breathing," Mark said, interrupting quickly before the two could really get started on the latest round of their feud. "We're all calm, rational adults. So, we can do tests to see if the fire is dangerous. Xare says she can transfer with people other than Hermione, so we should be able to send astronauts up—"

Caaaaaw! Xare said, glaring at Mark.

"I'm sorry sir, but I don't think she's willing," Hermione said, embarrassed. "She says that she's able to, but that I'm her person. I think she wouldn't mind doing it occasionally, or in an emergency, but I don't think she wants to make it a regular thing."

They all looked at her, looked at the bird, and sighed in perfect sync.

"Lovely," John growled. "All right, we can cut a suit down easily enough, but we'll still want a vehicle. I'm not letting anyone send a young girl into space with nothing but a suit." The others nodded in perfect agreement.

"Is this right?" Nancy asked, tapping a finger on the page of the briefing packet that she'd shuffled to the top. "You can make a potion that grants perfect luck?" She carefully kept the growl out of her voice; Slughorn was a tidy, fat little package of everything she disliked—smug, smooth in an oily way, clearly out for himself, and probably a lying weasel—but she'd work with a used car salesman if it could do what this man apparently could, and she knew enough not to irritate a potential co-author...or, in this case, potion supplier.

He nodded in that irritatingly smug way. "Indeed," he said with a pleased smile. "Although the stuff doesn't just make luck, it only concentrates it. Whatever good luck it gives you, you'll have an equal amount of bad luck after it wears off." He smiled slyly, taking a sip of his tea before continuing. "It's also quite difficult to brew, however. I am, if I may say so, the only one to successfully manage the trick in twenty years. I daresay there's no one else right now who can do it."

She nodded crisply. "I looked it up," she said, waving vaguely at the giant wall of books. "Didn't seem terribly complicated; takes six months, but the directions seem straightforward. What's so hard about it?"

"It's very sensitive," he said calmly. "You'll ruin it if you do anything even slightly wrong—get it the tiniest bit too hot or too cold, wave your wand in a figure eight that isn't completely flat, or that doesn't completely close, or that overlaps itself at all. Everything needs to go exactly right, or you end up with something that looks and smells exactly like Liquid Luck but is in fact incredibly toxic." He smiled. "And, before you ask, if you're under the effects of Liquid Luck when you try to brew Liquid Luck...bad things happen. It was invented by Zygmunt Budge in June of 1594; in May of 1595, Bartomias Bettleborough tried to use a small amount to make a larger batch. He lived in a small town at the foot of a mountain a bit east of Pereira, Colombia; the town isn't there anymore."

"Hm," she said, narrowing her eyes. "You do this in a cauldron, right? Big heavy metal thing, probably cast iron? Not necessarily uniform thickness or metal quality? And you heat it over a fire made with wood, right? When you say 'tiniest bit' too hot or too cold it can't really be that precise. I would imagine your average chemist could do rather better."

He chuckled and sipped his ridiculously expensive Scotch. "You and your chemists are certainly welcome to try, my dear. I doubt you've be successful without a wand, though."

"Hmph." She pondered for a minute. "Does it need a powerful wizard? Are some wizards stronger than others, or do they just know more?"

He took another sip of the tea, then paused and studied the mug. "You know, when Mr. Potter approached me about coming to this event and answering questions, I must admit that I wasn't terribly keen on the idea. He was, however, quite persuasive." He swirled the tea thoughtfully, not looking up. "I didn't expect there to be quite so many questions, though."

Nancy Keller was, by choice, bluff and direct to the point of rudeness. Despite that, she hadn't made it in academia without learning to follow subtext or play the political game. She painted a smile on her face and forced a rueful laugh. "Ah, I'm sorry, Professor. It's just so fascinating, you know? So many new things to learn, and I find potion-making especially fascinating, since it ties in so well with my own work. Tell me, what got you interested in it?"

She kept the smile on her face and the sigh inaudible while she waited for the old blowhard to get enough of listening to his own voice that they could get back to productive work. Meanwhile, she allowed her thoughts to wander to ways of automating some of this apparently complicated process. A lot of what she did relied on taking samples until you happened to get a viable gene string; if you could cheat, and make yourself so lucky that you always got a viable string on the first try...well now.

"So, you can actually bring dead people back and talk to them?" Alexi asked with carefully curbed excitement. "Can you bring anyone back?"

Harry nodded. "Yes. Whoever is operating the stone needs to have a personal connection with the spirit they want to bring back, so it's generally not practical to bring back anyone who died more than a few decades ago. Aside from that, yes. Anyone."

"Boize moi," Alexi murmured, his eyes fogging over in shock. After a moment he looked back at Harry with eager intent. "Einstein? Hilbert? Volterra? Hardy? Von Neuman? Rutherford?" His voice dropped to a reverent whisper. "Erdös?"

Harry chuckled. "Yes, sir. You're actually the third person to ask me about this today. Apparently the opportunity to gain an Erdös number of one is rather exciting. Be aware, though, that spirits know everything they knew in life but they can't change their minds about anything. Also, they learn rather slowly."

Alexi nodded, ignoring the warnings because he was too excited to speak, much less pay attention.

"No, I'm not joking," David growled. "This isn't a prank, my son legitimately has a phoenix, just like that girl in the news. I've already seen it tele—hello? Hello?"

With a snarl, he slammed the phone down and glared at it as though it were personally responsible for his frustration.

"No luck, Dad?" Joel asked quietly from the wing-backed armchair beside him. Peri was perched on the back of the chair, head cocked in consideration.

David rubbed his face. "No," he sighed. "Every number at NASA I could find and our Senator—apparently they've all been getting a lot of prank calls."

Caw! Peri cried, mantling fiercely. Go! Protect! Exalt! Bring all our brethren to the stars! rang the echo of the bird's call, bouncing through the depths of their souls.

"Peri, we want to, we just don't know how," Joel said, his voice pained. "I know that if we could just get to someone with the power to move things, we could make it work, but I don't know...who..." He trailed off, staring into space for a minute.

"Got an idea?" his father asked. He felt the bird's cry himself; it drove him to succeed, to do whatever it took, without question or concern for the cost. He was eager to answer the call, but the only idea he had left was to put them in the car and drive to Congressional Hill directly. It was thirteen hours, and he'd need to call in sick to work for at least two days, which could cause him problems—he was out of sick days after a bad round of pneumonia earlier in the year—but the call of a phoenix made it seem a trivial sacrifice.

"Well...what about President Bush?" Joel said slowly.

David winced; if only the phoenix had come in just a few more months! Of all the Presidents to have in office at a time like this...

"He could get us whatever we need, right Dad? And Peri could take us directly to him!"

The bird shook its head regretfully. Caw, it said.

Joel's face fell. "Oh. Only places and people that I've seen? Okay."

David frowned; as much as he could wish that the office were held by anyone else, the President really could open all the needed doors. "Do you need to have seen them personally?" he asked. "If you've just seen them on TV, would that be enough?"

Peri stared at him, first with one eye, then with the other. The expression of non-comprehension came through clearly.

Joel, on the other hand, was already running for the remote and turning the channel to C-SPAN.

"So, Professor," Robert began. "Aubrey was telling me that you built this entire castle in a week?"

Dumbledore nodded. "Indeed. It needed a hundred of the top wizards in the world—quite expensive, convincing them all to drop what they were doing for a week and Apparate over to participate in such an enormous ritual. Still, the Ministry was willing to pay." He chuckled and sipped on his pumpkin juice. "Honestly, I believe that the reason they were so excited to unknot the purse strings was because the ruin of Hogwarts was a reminder of just how badly you Muggles hurt us during the fighting. Too many wizards are still having trouble getting used to the idea that Muggle society is as advanced, or even more advanced, than our own."

Robert nodded. "Indeed. If you don't mind me asking, exactly how much did it cost?"

"Hm," Dumbledore said, frowning in thought. "I wasn't party to the negotiations, but I believe it was on the order of seven thousand Galleons for each of the other wizards—Sergei was crowing about getting paid a thousand a day."

"So, seven million Galleons, total," Robert said, frowning. "Thirty-five million dollars..." He went quiet for a moment, thinking. When he looked up his smile was wide and avaricious. "Professor Dumbledore, I believe there might be a few Muggles who would be interested in an enormous magical castle containing, among other things, a room that can be whatever they want it to be. Do you suppose that I could hire you and those other wizards for...say, one hundred thousand Galleons each?"

Dumbledore's eyebrows rose. "I thought you were here for the symposium?" he asked. "Aren't you a...'geneticist', I believe was the word?"

"Screw genetics," Robert said with fervor. "I suddenly have a hankering for real estate!"

Author's Note: I'm using the HPMOR exchange rate of 50 GBP to the Galleon instead of the canon 5:1.

In other news, this chapter was a pain in the neck to write, because I kept having to remind myself that it's set in 1992. There's no cell phones for the Space Agency folks to be using to call an ambulance, there's no ISS for Xare to endanger the oxygen of, there's no Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository for the wizards to be cleaning up, there's no Cire Perdue for Slughorn to be sipping in order to show off his wealth, and there's no YouTube for Joel and David to be looking for pictures of the Oval Office on. Oh, and Aubrey de Grey was still working on a fruit-fly database instead of techniques for human rejuvenation. Meh; at that point in his career he likely wouldn't have been invited to the symposium, but he was my first contact with the idea of real-world rejuvenation and life extension, so he needed to be there.

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