Summary: Harry's Hogwarts letter arrives and he takes a shopping trip!

Chapter 3: The Letter and a Trip

Harry Potter sighed in relief as he managed to slip away with his letter without any of the Dursley's noticing. Not that they could have done anything about it. But the uneasy truce that had been struck over the last few years was better left without additional provocation. Entering his bedroom, he focused hard on the door, lifting his hand toward it. The liquid heat of his magic flowed through the channels in his arm, escaping from his fingertips, and the wood of the door shimmered. The locking spell wouldn't last long…but it would be long enough to ensure at least a few minutes of privacy. He fell into the chair of his worn, second-hand desk and quickly opened the letter.

His skimmed its contents with soaring joy. His Hogwarts Acceptance letter reading much as he'd been told it would. He'd known that it would arrive today, on this thirteenth birthday. The magical number being the day that a young witch or wizard had their magic fully stabilize. Yet, being told about it and having it here in his hands were two entirely different things. This was real in a way that not even his clandestine visits to Diagon Alley and Godric's Hollow had been. He read every number and letter in detail, even the attached book and supply lists…though he did roll his eyes at the assumption that he would be able to reply.

"Looks like I lost that bet, huh Pandora?"

A feeling of amusement tickled through the back of his mind, even as a tiny spark of magic flashed from his left hand and the five-inch tall form of his mother's greatest creation sprung to life on his desk. Pandora's sprite form was cast in many shades of silver and blue, looking like a diminutive-but-proportional girl a year or two older than Harry himself. Her reasoning for that difference having been a blunt-but-amusing declaration of 'I want boobs, damnit.' Her 'avatar' was, he supposed, quite pretty.

"I told you they were going to be stupid about it. From everything we've seen, they've been treating you like you know all about the magical world. Even if I don't know why, I calculated 99.79% odds that they would continue to act that way."

Harry couldn't help but chuckle and shake his head, even as he looked fondly down at Pandora's half-transparent sprite-form. He still wasn't quite used to being able to physically see it, not after years of her being stuck as a voice in his head, with physical form only inside his mind-palace. She'd only become able to project like this within the last few weeks, as his magic rapidly stabilized, with Pandora no longer having to focus part of herself on smoothing out the flows of magic to help with his control. Even now, he couldn't help but be in awe of just what his mother, along with her best friend, had managed to achieve.

"To be fair, Pan…I do know all about the magical world!"

Pandora huffed, puffing her cheeks out and crossing her arms.

"Only because you have me! And they bloody well don't know about me, now do they? I'm telling you, there's a lot of stuff that's just off in regards to you. Like the fact that we still can't figure out what the hell happened to Siri!"

Harry sighed, eyed the door and the fading locking spell, and quickly put away the letter.

"I know, Pan. You know I agree with you. But you yourself have pointed out that we don't know how much, if any, of the weirdness is malicious. The Potter accounts have been well managed. No one is sitting the Potter Proxy. Heck, someone even forced all those idiots making money off my name to pay royalties. Aside from my isolation here, it seems like I've been rather well done by."

Pandora grumbled, frowned for a moment, then shrugged.

"You're right, of course. Not making sure you were trained properly to navigate in the Wizarding World is still a massive oversight by someone. But the rest of it honestly does seem like someone, probably Dumbledore, has been looking out for you. I still don't trust him though, not given the ward issues and the meddling with your mother's protection."

It was Harry's turn to shrug. Pandora was right, after all. On all counts. Harry wasn't going to assume that Dumbledore was actively malicious…but he wasn't planning on trusting him any time soon, either. Not unless he had some very good answers to some very pointed questions. Questions that Harry couldn't even ask without risking the old wizard learning about Pandora. And she was an ace-in-the-hole neither of them were planning to give up anytime soon. Shrugging off the unknowable for now, he brightened.

"Well, enough of that! Now we can get off to Diagon! Though…I think maybe I'll still be staying a bit undercover, everywhere but Olivander's."

Pandora nodded…and morphed into a mirror. Harry snorted, still getting used to this new facet of his companion's abilities, but accepted the help. He could manage a mild muggle-repelling spell when he left the house, and it was better to get his appearance squared away here. The first thing he did was tap into his minor metamorph abilities. They, along with parseltongue and higher sensitivity to magic, had been unexpected benefits to Pandora's 'ordering' of his naturally chaotic magic channels. Apparently, he had just enough Black family blood in him to be a carrier for metamorph abilities…but not enough that they were likely to have manifested on their own. Even now, he could only change minor things. Minor things, however, could add up.

His hair was first, changing it from black to a perfectly ordinary brown and lengthening it to his shoulders. His oh-so-distinctive eye color was next and actually took the longest to shift from green to blue. He actually wasn't sure why they seemed to resist, and neither was Pandora. But they did. And they refused to be changed any farther than to an equally striking blue. Shaking off any new musings on why that was, he went on to alter the soft tissue of his face in subtle ways. He could only do a limited amount of that, but it was enough to mimic the sort of contouring a muggle disguise artist might manage, pushing his appearance farther away from 'Harry Potter.'

The last thing he did was reach into his desk, rummaging around for a minute to find the perfectly-muggle concealer. His scar had faded a great deal since his childhood. But, in the right light, it could still be spotted. It also completely resisted being changed, despite there no longer being any magic in it. Pandora was fairly convinced that it was because that rune marking had actually been the anchor for Lily's ritual, rather than Voldemort's curse. And unlike the remnant of Voldie's magic Pandora had expelled, his mother's protection remained. Still, while magic couldn't remove it…muggle makeup worked just fine to hide it.

A little blending later and 'Harry Potter' had been replaced by 'Henry Potts,' the alias he'd used on his few previous trips to Diagon Alley. He hadn't dared risk going more than a handful of times in the past, only ever visiting when he knew that the alley would be crowded with Hogwarts students that would help him blend in. That wouldn't be the case so much today, but there was also now a far greater potential for reward. Until now, he'd been very limited in how much he could withdraw at Gringotts. Essentially having been limited to just an 'allowance,' albeit a reasonably generous one. Now, however, he would be able to access the entire yearly sum from his Trust Vault, which gave him a great deal more option in what he could acquire.

Smirking as he retrieved a list of just such 'necessities' that he and Pandora had long since worked out, Harry checked the day's public transit schedule and left Surrey behind…

...

Most of Harry's stops along the alley had been simple, if somewhat time consuming. Items like an expanded, three-compartment trunk, advanced potions set, and a lot more books than just those recommended. All such items were taken care of with the swift efficiency that resulted from being pre-planned. Even Gringotts had been a relatively straightforward stop, as Harry still couldn't do much with the Potter Family assets. There were, however, two stops that were more complicated. The only two stops, beyond the privacy of the bank at least, where he'd decided to risk making an appearance as 'Harry Potter' instead of 'Henry Potts.'

The first had been a magical optometrist. Harry actually didn't need glasses, Pandora having long since used her ability to nudge along his internal development to push his vision to better than normal human limits. They had, however, discovered in their previous outings that the magical world thought he wore glasses. They were legitimately very confused about why that was, given that Harry had never needed them at all. But Pandora, channeling her inner Euphemia, had pointed out the opportunity it represented. Everyone would think he needed the glasses…and there were a lot of really useful enchantments that could be added to a pair of glasses.

Ultimately, this had led to an hour-long stop where Harry had picked up a fashionable pair of glasses loaded up with as many enchantments as the materials could take. The primary set of enchantments were the 'curse breaker special,' which allowed the easy visualization of magic. Normally, it took years to process that visualization to the point that it would be useful…but Harry had Pandora. She might not be a computer, like a muggle AI might be, but the multiple neural-nets used in her creation had given her a processing speed that outstripped any humans. Add in knowledge from Lily Evans, Pandora Lovegood, and Euphemia Potter, all of whom had possessed pairs of the glasses, and it wouldn't take her very long to sort things out. She could them simply dump the knowledge into Harry's mental palace and it would only take some minor tweaking for him to integrate the instinctual understanding of the magics he was seeing with the glasses.

He'd gotten a few more bits added, including an X-ray vision mode which he'd somehow let Pandora talk him into, despite knowing how much he'd be tempted to…misuse it. And how much Pandora would alternate between teasing him about that and encouraging it. He'd long since realized that his AI partner was a bit of a pervert and more than a bit of a tease. The combination had made the onset of puberty interesting, to say the least. And, somehow, he just knew he was going to regret letting her talk him into adding that mode.

That, however, was a worry for Future Harry. For the moment, he had his last stop to worry about. Looking around to make sure he wasn't being watched, he let his disguise fade and stepped into Olivander's Wand shop. He braced himself as he did so, Pandora having several sets of memories available from which to warn him about the current owner's…peculiarities.

Because of that warning, he was a bit surprised to find Olivander simply looking over the books of his shop when Harry walked in. The old man looked up at the sound of the chime, blinking his own confusion. Then…pouted?

"It's not nearly as much fun when people have so much mental control that I don't sense them coming, Mr. Potter! Not to mention, it tends to make such souls very time consuming to match! Ah well, at least you're here earlier than the usual school rush, given that."

Ollivander snapped his records book shut and waved his wand at a tape measure, which flew toward Harry and began darting around, measuring every odd thing about him. The old man himself moved into the shelves of wands and began pulling a few, calling back as he did.

"Now, even if you rudely ruined my spooky mystery bit, there are still things you need to know! Every Ollivander wand has a core of a powerful magic substance. Unicorn hair, phoenix tail features, and the heartstrings of dragons…"

…

…

…

The following three and a half hours was a wild mix of adrenaline, caused by poor reactions to wands, and growing boredom as they worked their way through what seemed to be half of the shop's stock. Finally, even Ollivander seemed to get frustrated and began pulling out odder and odder combinations, complaining all the while that it was 'like he was trying to fit a wand for two people!' The comment had caused a bit of a panic and mental stream of conversation between Harry and Pandora, as they realized what Ollivander did not. He really was trying to match two people with the same wand. Pandora, after all, had her own magical power tap. One that originally belonged to Lily Potter, but had been altered quite a bit by her own use of it over the years.

For a time, they worried that they would have to admit her existence to the wand-maker. And, possibly worse, that doing so might not even help. That the combination of magics would simply make them incompatible with wands in general! Thankfully, after another hour, they finally found a match. The moment Harry touched it, he knew…and so did the wand maker, who's jaw dropped open as a rainbow of pulsing light ran from Harry's fingertips, up the wand, then back down to cover his whole body before snuffing out.

"Well…that was certainly a spectacular match. And one for such an odd wand, too. You're a curious one, Mr. Potter, as I never thought that wand would be paired. It was, in fact, more of an experiment to see if I could do something. I was quite please to have pulled it off, even if I never expected it to find a matching wizard or witch!"

Harry blinked, pushing past the wave of happy warmth coming from the joining.

"Er…what makes it so odd, Mr. Ollivander, sir?"

Ollivander pointed to the wand. "Just look at it, Mr. Potter, and you'll see some of the cause. Though not the whole of it. See the different colors of the wand? It's made out of two entirely different woods, carved carefully to fit together…around a single unusual core."

Harry looked and, sure enough, noted that the wand had spirals of a nearly white wood and a rather darkish wood alternating all up and down its length.

"What are they?"

"For the woods, I mixed Maple and Walnut woods. I wanted to give them some chance of working together. And those two woods are alike in some ways. Maple is a wood of travelers and explorers, a wood that likes new experiences and often chooses high achievers. Walnut, meanwhile, often chooses those who are innovators and inventors."

Those…both struck a cord with Harry and Pandora, given some of their long term plans. Ones they'd dreamed up half as entertainment on boring nights…only to realize that there was a strong desire to see some of them fulfilled. Pushing contemplation of that aside, Harry asked about the core, wanting to get the complete picture.

"A thunderbird tailfeather. In truth, it's one of the few materials I've ever worked with that could match my favored three…but thunderbirds are rare and native to North America, not Europe. I've only ever had a handful to work with. One of which is in that wand." Ollivander hesitated, then seemed to make up his mind and plowed on. "They are particularly well-suited to transfiguration…and can sense danger. I normally try not to put such things into the minds of new wand owners, as it can make them imagine things that aren't true. But in this case…given who you are…"

Ollivander trailed off but Harry nodded, fully understanding what the man was implying. He would need to be cautious until he understood what that 'warning' felt like, but it could be utterly invaluable to him.

"Thank you for telling me, sir. What do I owe you for the wand? And do you sell holsters and care kits here?"

The wandmaker seemed relieved to move on from the topic, even as he continued to glance at the wand with some confusion. Perhaps, someday, Harry might be open enough about Pandora to explain just why such an odd wand fit them. Though, perhaps not, as well.

"Fourteen galleons, Mr. Potter. Unusually high for a wand, I admit…but there were more and rarer materials used in it's creation. And yes, I do sell wand care kits, and resell a selection of holsters. Though if you want anything particularly complex, you'll need to visit Abadaser's Leatherworks, over on Horizat Alley."

Harry happily paid for the wand and a care kit, though decided to visit the leatherworks for a holster with a few extras. Thanking Ollivander, he stepped out of the shop…and cursed as he heard someone recognize him five steps down the alley! Damnit, he'd forgotten to disguise himself! Quickening his step, he made for the leather shop, hoping not to get waylaid once people decided that 'yes' it was really him…