Harry Potter: A Tale of Revenge

Daphne frowned. "Yes, how? I mean, when we talked about this before I just accepted it, but it does seem a lot."

Harry paused in his tapping. "Well, look at it this way. A house elf can do the work of two full adult wizards. A normal adult wizard's salary for menial work of the kind that house elves do is around 15,000 pounds a year, that's about three hundred Galleons. Following?"

Hermione and Daphne nodded.

He continued. "And a house elf can work for upwards of fifty years. That means that when you buy a house elf you're buying around one hundred years of labour in advance."

Hermione frowned. "But wouldn't that mean that a house elf should cost 1.5 million pounds then?"

"No, because the value of one years worth of labour in fifty years is much less than one years worth of labour now."

"But, how do you figure that out?"

Harry smiled. "Remind me to give you a book on basic finance when we get out of here."

Hermione smiled and nodded.

Daphne chuckled. "So, the Dark Lord was interested in business then?"

He frowned. "You know, I have learned things since I returned."

Daphne held up her hands. "Of course, of course."

His frown turned into a sheepish smile. "But… as it turns out, in this instance, Voldy did actually study this."

"Hah!"

"Yeah. When you believe yourself to be immortal, things like compound interest suddenly become super relevant." He held the now adjusted sixth and final ward stone in his hands and turned to the ward line.

Harry placed the stone at the corner of the tunnel and tapped his wand around the stone a few times. He turned around to find the girls watching his every moment with rapt attention. "Sticking charms powered by the ward system," he said, by way of explanation.

They nodded.

Five ward stones later, the pipe-sphere held a hexagon of ward stone points, cutting at a diagonal angle parallel to the gender ward line. Harry stepped through the new hole in the ward and let out a breath. He grinned. "Success!"

The girls cheered. They made their way along the now unblocked tunnel to a bare stretch of pipe wall with a snake carving in it. They'd passed many snake carvings on their way here, but this one lay inside the gender line ward.

Harry held up his hand. "This… looks like where we need to be."

Daphne fiddled with the cuffs of her robes. "It's not going to be the chimaera on the other side of that? Is it?"

Hermione paled.

Harry tapped the wall with his wand. "Probably not."

Daphne grimaced. " Probably not?"

"Well, we haven't gone though any containment wards. If it is the chimaera we should be perfectly safe where we are."

Hermione gulped.

"Hey, you two trust me to protect you don't you?"

The girls looked at each other. Then back at him. They nodded, slowly.

"Okay then. " He whirled around. "$Open$ ."

The pipe wall expanded to form a portal, metal melting outwards like the world's biggest mouth, and facing them through the opened wall space was… nothing.

"Well, that was anticlimactic."

He stood in the pipe and surveyed the room beyond. Two doors faced each other on opposite sides of the room.

Hermione's voice cut through the silence. "That's a TV! And below that is a VCR."

He stared. On the far side of the room, there was indeed a muggle television and a tape recorder.

"What's a TV?" asked Daphne.

Harry frowned. This was unexpected. He was sure they were in the third floor corridor.

Hermione voice washed over him. "It's a muggle device for viewing moving pictures from afar. Kind of like a cross between the wizarding wireless and photographs."

He could feel a ward line in front of him, warning him against entering the room.

"Oh," Daphne replied. "That sounds interesting. What's it doing here?"

"No idea."

He turned to the girls. "I'm going to do a quick test, Okay?"

They nodded.

He un-shrunk his trunk, descended, and brought out a jar of spiders.

Daphne's eye-brows raised. "Oh, I was wondering when they were going to make an appearance. I saw them on your desk."

He nodded, reached in, grabbed one, put the jar down, poked his wand at it and muttered, imperio. For the second time that day, his world sliced in half between two views, but this time, far stranger, seeing the world through ten pairs of eyes and trying to control ten sets of legs. He jumped off his own hand and carefully dragged himself along the floor towards the ward line. He reached the edge of the pipe tunnel and fell off.

Then, pain. Total burning pain shot through his bodies. He shrieked through his human body and broke the connection.

"Harry!" Hermione and Daphne clutched at him. "What happened? Are you Okay?" they asked in succession.

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm fine." He grimaced. "There's either some kind of animal area ward, or a ward to defend against the imperius curse, or both, or something else. Nasty, whatever it is."

Daphne frowned. "So, what are we going to do?" Can we do anything more from here?"

He shook his head. "Maybe. But not with what I can think up off the top of my head."

Hermione nodded towards the opposite side of the room. "What about the TV?"

"Another time. Right now I want to keep working on figuring out how to identify what's inside the rest of the rooms." He pointed to the doors on opposite sides of the room.

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