Chapter 50.

Space Travel, Part VII: Domestic Problems

1:13 pm, July 24th, 1993 (London time)

Harry had a very wide smile as he emerged in Stella's phoenix flames together with Hermione and Severus in his headquarter office. He had just had the greatest book raid ever - Severus had just led them for a tour to the British Library. With the help of Severus, Mad-Eye, three Auror trios, a number of bewitched Muggle librarians, and several duplicated Stones, they now had an extended library with approximately eight hundred thousand books on mathematics, physics, chemistry, material science, biology, medicine, engineering, psychology, history, linguistics, and archeology, among other fields. According to Severus' and Mad-Eye's estimates, the duplicated Stone could at least stabilize the duplicated non-magical books for a couple dozen years.

For the past five hours, the adult wizards duplicated shelves and shelves of books, while Harry and Hermione were responsible for pointing out which subject they needed to duplicate, applying the duplicated Stone on the duplicated shelves, and transferring the duplicated shelves into the many trunks they brought there. Harry and Hermione had wanted to duplicate more books - they hadn't even got anywhere near the science fictions region yet. However, all the adults - including Severus, who had a phoenix to sustain him - had shown signs of magical exhaustion by 1 pm, and the three Auror trios had already drank several bottles of magic-replenishing potions, so they had to come back for security reasons.

Although not completely satisfied, for you could never have enough books, Harry had already rated today among one of the top ten days in his life.

After landing, Harry turned around and cheerfully thanked Severus: "Professor Snape, thank you so much! Duplicating the British Library - this is one of the top fifty most brilliant ideas that I ever know."

Severus smugly smiled, and tilted his head.

Harry noted to himself that Severus seemed to enjoy praises, and exclaimed happily: "Now we can continue our work on the space stuff with answers in almost any field of Muggle science. After Draco, my father and Hermione's parents get here, I guess we can start again."

As house-elves began to serve them with lunch, and Harry started working on the fireplace, Severus used this time to test Hermione on the written Parseltongue they had learned yesterday. "Miss Granger, please use this time to write down the all letters of Parseltongue in the correct order."

When Hermione began to draw the snake-like letters, Harry had a strange feeling. This was one of the few times that Harry had learned things faster and better than Hermione did. For Harry and Draco, the twenty-eight letters of Parseltongue seemed something resembling Greek letters, which were definitely different from the English letters, but not that difficult to learn or to recognize. Once they knew the letters, to spell out Parseltongue words and sentences according to a number of simple phonetic rules felt like a breeze - Parseltongue didn't even have any letter or combination of letters that should be pronounced differently under different circumstances. However, for Hermione and Mad-Eye, it was another story. Harry had already tried to teach Hermione Parseltongue before this, but even with Hermione's advanced auditory system, she still said that all the hisses sounded almost identical to her. As for the written form of Parseltongue, although Hermione's memory was better than anyone Harry knew, the Parseltongue letters still looked like doodling and sprawling snakes to her. She could remember the shapes of the letters that Severus wrote down, but if the same letters written by Harry and Draco were presented to her, or if Severus wrote down the letters again a little bit differently, it was still hard for her to recognize them. As for poor Mad-Eye, Harry couldn't help but to feel sympathy for the old Auror who seemed to prefer dueling Voldemort than learning Parseltongue.

When Hermione was one-third of the way done with the letters, Mad-Eye appeared in the green flames, followed by Dad and Draco. Mad-Eye nodded to Harry, and disappeared in the flames again, probably going to the Grangers.

Dad exchanged greetings with Severus, nodded to Hermione who was struggling with some letters, and the delightly asked: "How is your day, Harry?"

Harry could see that Dad's mood was better than he had been for quite a while. It seemed that having a student again, even if it is just Draco for a few hours, had done a lot of good to Professor Michael Verres-Evans .

Hufflepuff sadly said: You know, we should have thought of this earlier. We shouldn't wait until Hermione and we were discussing about the trajectories of satellites, while Draco knew little about Newtonian physics to think of it. We should have cared more about Mom and Dad earlier.

Slytherin untimely suggested a possible explanation: I know why we did it - until yesterday, we didn't think Mom and Dad as someone useful. As a matter of fact, for the most part of the past year, we were trying to keep everyone away from Muggle science, just in case some idiot would consider transfiguring antimatter as a good idea.

Harry hid his thoughts from the surface of his persona, and happily answered: "One of the best days ever!"

"Really? Should you tell me about even this?" Dad joked.

Actually, we shouldn't. We need to let Mad-Eye erase this part of his memory afterwards. Slytherin said.

Harry knew Slytherin was right to a certain extent, but the Harry under the mask couldn't help but to feel overwhelmed by a wave of sorrow. On the surface, Harry grinned and answered: "You bet."

Dad laughed, as if this little bit of sharing of his son's life was enough for him.

Hufflepuff almost cried: What have we done?!

"Harry, I think you should let more of your friends learn science, or is that prohibited as well?" Dad jokily said, and nodded to Severus, "Young Mr. Malfoy and I had quite a delightful morning. And your godson is quite a bright and charming young man, Professor Snape."

Draco smiled with a hint of shy and awkwardness, as a proper thirteen-year-old should do.

Harry could see that Draco had won Dad's heart within a few hours - Dad even began to praise Draco to his godfather, instead of showing off Harry, but -

Wow, see how good Draco is at satisfying Dad's desire for a "normal" child prodigy? If he is not useful for other stuff, we can at least use him to entertain our parents. Slytherin commented.

Severus' smile was quite sincere as he replied, "Thank you, Professor Verres-Evans. Your son is the most extraordinary young man that I have ever known."

Harry still had some problems with this kind of "normal" talk between guardians of child prodigies. However, he was way better at controlling himself by this point, and he decided that he could at least indulge Dad this much. As for Severus Snape, that man probably had little idea about how to actually raise a child, but he had enough experience talking to his students' parents. And being an extraordinary Legilimens, Severus definitely knew what most parents wanted to hear.

-And Severus probably wants to secure Draco's position, just in case that he dies in space exploration.

At this time, the ultimate nightmare that represented disastrous "normal" parenting appeared in green flames in the form of Roberta and Leo Granger. The very idea that he might end up with them as his parents-in-law could crush most of Harry's romantic thoughts about Hermione at a time of this.

In a brief moment, Harry regretted having including Dr. and Dr. Granger in this project, but Slytherin quickly reminded him that Dr. Roberta Granger was the only one who had some scientific upbringing and could understand Russian. Spending her youth years in the turbulent 1960s in Cambridge meant that Roberta had once been a fan of Trotsky. Harry supposed, he should be grateful that Roberta grew out of it after graduation, and she didn't end up like the Cambridge Five.

Moreover, Hufflepuff demanded: We have already caused them enough worries. If Hermione can deal with their parenting, we can deal with it as well.

Slytherin agreed: Just eat your sandwich, and let them have small talks with Severus and Draco. Draco is an expert in entertaining idiots in the way they prefer, so they will be less troublesome to us.

After Mad-Eye finished applying privacy and security charms around them, and Severus had given a perfect grade on Hermione's recitation of Parseltongue letters (which led to some horrible gloating from Leo Granger), Dad became Harry's hero: "So, what is this thing that you need our help, and then erase our memories with?"

-Oh, Dad, I love you so much.

Harry gratefully began his explanation about their plan for space travel. Of course, he just mentioned that by going to the Moon, they might reduce the interference between magic and Muggle electronics, and conveniently omitted anything about the Interdict of Merlin.

Dad's eyes sparkled and he laughed when he heard about this morning's raid of the British Library. It seemed like Dad would like to become best pals with Severus within the next second. Somehow, this effect was lost on Dr. and Dr. Granger.

To Harry's great relief, the part that Severus was going to the Moon was enough of an excitement to Dr. and Dr. Granger, which proved that their Muggle science education hadn't completely failed. Harry briefly wondered if they would be this excited when they knew that Harry's first choice of wizarding astronaut was actually their daughter. However, Harry found that he had gotten so much better at controlling his tongue than he was one and a half years ago.

"Dad, could you help us figure out a proper landing spot on the Moon?" Harry asked, and then turned to Dr. and Dr. Granger, "Uncle Leo, would you try to figure out how the life support system works in the spacesuits? And maybe also try to figure out how much oxygen, water and other things we need. Aunt Roberta, there are quite some plates in Russian on the space capsule, and I am afraid Professor Snape is not familiar with the technological terms, would you two work on that?"

Leo Granger gave Harry a strange look, as if wondering why Harry, instead of Severus or Mad-Eye, was giving the order.

-Oh, right, I haven't established my dominance in front of the Grangers, and Hermione probably has a hard time conveying this idea to them as well.

Dad became Harry's savior again, as he happily answered: "Of course!"

To Harry's relief, Dr. Leo Granger hesitantly followed suit with a nudge from his wife.