School days take two, day two
After lunch, their only class is Flying until Astronomy at night. Because of this, Harry and Hermione head to the library, with Neville in tow, in order to get a head start on their homework. It doesn't take long before curious Ravenclaws and other students find their way into the library to quiz Harry and Hermione over what they're wearing, how it works, what enchantments it has, and then why it's still working. As a result, the two of them venture out to the quidditch pitch where they'll be doing their flying practice and work on their homework using their computers rather than quill and ink.
It is into this scene that Madam Hooch walks in carrying a bundle of school brooms. She sees the two students sitting in the air staring at paperweights, that are floating in front of them, and turns around to go back the way she came.
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Minerva looks up at a knock on her door.
"Come in."
Madam Hooch pokes her head around the door, "Minerva, would you be able to look out your window and tell me what you see?"
Raising an eyebrow, she takes a quick look. "Looks like a couple of students doing homework to me."
"Oh, good." Madam Hooch says quietly, "I thought they were levitating for a moment."
"Oh, they are. Don't worry about it."
"If they can do that, why are they here and not teaching somewhere like Puddlemere?"
"Because they're not using magic. They're here to learn to use magic, hopefully safely and responsibly."
"I see. Right. I will see about finding some larger brooms then."
Minerva wisely doesn't tell her about their archwings.
It turns out that both Harry and Hermione have to relearn how to fly using a broom, as their warframes have completely different reflexes and profiles to humans.
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In potions Snape seems to take great pleasure in tearing down their potions. As they're leaving they hear him mutter, "Still better than the rest of the dunderheads."
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At 11pm, the entire Gryffindor class troops down to the ground floor, out to the astronomy tower, and then up 6 floors to the top of the tower. There they join the rest of the first year students. Professor Sinistra soon joins them, her breath steaming in the night air.
"Good evening everyone. Tonight you will be looking for Saturn, I want you to use your text books to identify which constellations it will be closest to, and plot out the right ascension and declination, polar coordinates, and also the Horizontal coordinates. Once you have done that, I want you to plot out the observable stars around Saturn." – Hermione raises her hand – "Yes Miss Granger."
"I understand the significance of Astronomy in general, I was wondering if you could explain why it's used for magic?"
"Good question, the answer these days is that unless you go into a very narrow set of careers, that include curse breaking, spell research, divination, and warding, there's very little that it's used for."
Malfoy speaks up, "So why do we study it then?"
"While it isn't that useful for those who want to go into estate management. The skills that you're learning here, mathematically, creatively, and observationally, will stand you in good stead in the rest of your education. Will you exclude yourself from studying ancient runes or arithmancy because you don't have the ability to draw a straight line, or add up a column of numbers? Will you struggle with herbology because you can't tell when the local sunrise and sunset will be? Will you stop at OWL potions because you can't tell where the planets that have minute effects on certain, highly sensitive processes, are? None of those are magical uses of Astronomy, but they are all important things that you learn in my subject."
As the rest of the first years busied themselves setting up their telescopes, Sinistra comes over to Harry and Hermione, who are just looking at the sky. All be it, in the right part of the sky for Saturn. "Mr Potter, Miss Granger."
Harry looks down at her, "Sorry Professor, would you be able to refer to us using the gender of our 'armour'. It's a cultural thing."
The professor scrunches her eyes before saying, "I don't see the harm in that Miss Potter. Where are your telescopes?"
"We sort of don't need them professor."
"Young lady, the exercise isn't just about plotting the stars, it's also about learning how to use the telescope. How to make smooth minute adjustments so that you can draw the elements you can see."
Harry and Hermione share a glance and have a silent conversation. Hermione then speaks up, "I'm sure that all of the professors are aware of the fact that we have special sleeping arrangements, and that we are exempt from curfew because of it. There is more to it than just a shack in the forest. We would be honoured to show you our accommodations, and I assure you that a lot of things will make more sense. Oh, and you probably want to pack your telescope. Either way, we will need to fabricate a telescope for the next lesson."
Minerva silently alights on the parapet behind Sinistra, after receiving a chat message from Harry. Taking a heavy step onto the landing, she coughs lightly, idly noting that she is the only 'person' there who's breath isn't steaming in the cold. Taking the cue, Hermione glances up over Sinistra's shoulder, which causes the professor to turn around expecting a student.
"Minerva, to what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I just thought I'd check in to see how the two young witches are doing in their 'armour'. I also overheard their offer. I would suggest taking it, as it's out of this world."
"How long are you planning on staying?"
Minerva shrugs, "I can stay for the rest of the lesson if it would help."
"If you wouldn't mind, Crabbe and Goyle in Slytherin could use a little extra coaching, as could Weasley from Gryffindor."
With a nod, Minerva gathers the three, and takes them to a secluded area of the tower; where, over the next hour, she finds out that Mr Weasley has just as stubborn opinions about certain members of the school as they do about him. She makes a note to suggest to Filius, to have him sit with the more tolerant members of Slytherin in future classes.
Harry and Hermione are able to draw Saturn in the correct position amongst the stars, though Sinistra does take points off for missing a few stars.
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At the end of the class Minerva escorts each of the first years to their respective dorms while Aurora Sinistra packs up her own telescope. While she's doing that, Harry and Hermione deploy their archwings so that they don't need to walk down all of the stairs.
Turning around with her Telescope over her shoulder, Aurora startles, "How?"
Hermione giggles while Harry says, "We can explain on the way. Give your telescope to Hermione, and I'll carry you, I have less sharp edges then she does."
After a rather undignified flight, they come across a white tube that opens out into an arrowhead. As they approach, a ramp folds down leading inside. Walking up the ramp, Aurora doesn't notice it close silently behind her. It's only once she has gone all the way inside on her own that the scene outside shifts, as the world just drops away leaving only a few of the stars. Curiously she leans against the window and looks up, before screaming as the line of darkness that shows the horizon at night is above her.
Into this comes Harry and Hermione, their archwings being stored automatically while they use the deployment entrance. Hermione immediately pulls Sinistra away from the view port while Harry instructs Cy to take them back to the Potter dojo. Rather than the promised talk, it takes the entire journey to calm the professor down enough to be able to talk to her.
{TheFairyQueen} Do you suppose this will be a typical reaction for witches and wizards?
{Harry} I have no idea, we can ask her later, once she's got used to the idea she's on the moon.
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Aurora's panic dies down far earlier than Harry or Hermione realised, instead it was replaced with awe and excitement as the moon came into view over the horizon, and then started to rapidly increase in size. Features that she'd only been able to see through a telescope coming into view for her naked eyes to see. Whatever this thing was, it was allowing her to visit the place that had captivated her as a child and led to her decision to follow astronomy as a career. As they approached their destination, the vehicle crossed into the shadow of a crater, leaving the only light, apart from the stars, as the interior lights. Clambering out of Hermione's grasp, she leans against the window to look at the Milky Way stretched out without a single twinkle caused by air currents. A view that surpasses the one time she used a broom to fly above the cloud cover in the deep winter.
As the vehicle flies into a manmade cavern that is brightly lit, and contains an even larger vehicle, Aurora whines in disappointment. The vehicle they're in comes to a halt in front of the larger vehicle, and then turns before moving backwards into it. Feeling like a first year that's just seen Hogwarts for the first time, Aurora allows herself to be led to the rear of the lander. There she's pushed into something that hugs her tightly before the floor opens up beneath her, and it carries her down into a much larger room. As it releases her, she staggers away and it zooms up before bringing Harry and then Hermione down.
The moment alone is enough for Aurora to regain her wits, as soon as Harry comes down she turns to her with her wand drawn. "How, how are we here?"
Harry spreads her hands in a placating gesture, "We've used part of my spaceship to come to the base where our sleeping arrangements are. I didn't grow up in this solar system. There are a variety of systems that you can't see, including a map of the solar system. One of the things we've got deeper in our base is an Orrery inside a planetarium. It should be accurate for every celestial body in the solar system."
"What's the catch?"
"No catch, we can show you to the edge of the atmospheric shield so you can stargaze to your hearts content. You can look around the Orrery. However, you won't be able to control anything, you'd need to find us if you wanted the lights turned on or off. Same as if you wanted to progress the Orrey, or change the perspective of it to one of the planets for that matter."
Aurora is fairly sanguine about the situation as they walk her through the base to the Orrery, "Why do you even have an Orrery?"
"We knew we have Astronomy as a class, for all 5 years, and possibly after that too. So we wanted somewhere to do the homework properly."
"We have some pretty impressive Orreries, however none of them are suitable for actually performing astronomy."
"I don't think you have anything like these."
5 minutes later, she's shown into a plain white hemispherical room, floating in the centre of the room is a white sphere around the size of a tennis ball. As she watches the lights in the room go out and the sphere is replaced by the sun. Around the room the stars in the sky appear in a sphere around her. A wave of vertigo comes over her as her eyes tell her one thing and her feet tell her another. Gently someone steadies her from behind as she adjusts to the sensation of standing in space. It is so dark that she can't even make out Harry or Hermione. As her eyes adjust to the darkness she looks around for Saturn against the constellations it should be passing through.
"Saturn is in the wrong place."
She hears a chuckle from Harry, "No it isn't, you are. I'm going to dim the sun and make the earth glow green."
The sun does indeed dim to a low red while a tiny green dot glows on the other side of the sun compared to where she's standing. Shuffling around the sun to the green dot that is the earth, she looks again and can see the brighter star that is Saturn.
"Hermione, would you be able to show the professor to the Observatory in the Dojo while I go and change into something more comfortable?"
"Sure, go ahead Harry, if we're not there, then I have no doubt we'll still be here."
Aurora is too absorbed by trying to find any discrepancy in the constellations or planetary locations to note more than the light of the door opening and closing, in fact she's so engrossed in things that she jumps when Hermione grabs her shoulder, "Careful, the rooms only large enough to hold the inner planets to scale, everything else is a 3d projection. You were about to walk into a wall."
"I wanted to look at Saturn."
"One moment, let me find the control panel and I'll change the focal body to Saturn rather than the Sun."
Aurora watches in wonder as the whole system moves smoothly to have Saturn appear to move from it's location ahead of her, past her as it grows and then appears to shrink into the distance. The sun seeming to shrink to the size of a pea in the distance. Shuffling over, she walks around Saturn in amazement as the detail is far higher than anything she could have possibly imagined. Doing some quick math, she hurries over to where Jupiter should be, only to be caught by Hermione again.
"How are you able to see me? I can't see a thing in here except the stars and planets?"
"I have implants that the room is using to show me where everyone is without obstructing my view of the stars or planets. I also see the floor as a very faint red grid. It's beautiful here, but sometimes, at home. My new home. I would take Ordis out to the asteroid belt and go out in my archwing and just watch the stars and planets for a while. Especially when I had a lot to think about, and I didn't want to be around people. I think the first time I did that was just after I passed on a message from Silvana to Luna, and it dawned on me just how she'd have taken the scene and presentation... It turns out it was the right thing to do, as Luna was trying to avoid the consequences of an action she took to avoid a horrible fate, and it was trying to avoid it that was driving to that fate. I'll show you my favourite thinking spot, one moment."
"How do you navigate?"
"Ok, let me recentre on the sun and dim out all the unnecessary stars. I'll also speed up the system by a factor of 100... Bare in mind that I only know enough to navigate, but we use 6 known pulsars that are at different locations in the sky, for time and navigation. These are Tau, Rath, Vela, Lemos, Orion, and Gro." – as she says each name, a spot in the sky lights up brighter than the others – "I'm not entirely sure on the specifics, but the unit they are measured in is called a Lei, and is something to do with the distance that the sun travels in a straight line over the period of an earth day. If you want an in-depth answer talk to Cy when we go back to the Dojo. You can derive the distance by measuring the comparative blue and redshift of those 6 stars over that time period, somehow." – Unseen she shakes her head – "Again, the math is just too complicated for me to understand just yet. I'm still getting my head around general and special relativity, and how they're wrong. Granted I'm only spending an hour or so on it a week, so I suppose I could learn it faster. I'm just trying to avoid the 4 dimensional math that's needed to understand why it's wrong. That's 4 dimensions plus time, not 3 plus time."
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Harry makes his way to the Arsenal to change frames, as being in a female frame is starting to become uncomfortable. As he's about to switch to his Oberon he gets a feeling of reluctance from his wisp. Frowning he walks off of the Arsenal pad in the Observatory and transfers out before hopping onto the central console.
"Can you understand me?"
The wisp just stands there impassively. He meditates for a while trying to come up with a way to communicate with the frame without being in the frame. Hitting on a solution, he follows the mental pathways that lead to his implants, and reaches out to his wisp with them.
"Can you understand me?" There, there's certainly a response that shouldn't be there.
Quickly transferring ownership of the Harrow Prime, that he put together while he was looking for pieces of Titania Prime, to Hermione in the dojo's systems. He dives into the arsenal systems to find out how to summon his Oberon without returning the wisp, completely forgetting the Cy could do it for him. A few minutes later he's in his Oberon rushing back to the Orrery, leaving wisp standing in the Observatory.
"Hermione urk!" He comes through the door and is pulled off his feet towards Professor Sinistra. Once he's in front of her she grabs his head and looks into his face.
"You will give me whatever I need to use this room myself, do you understand?"