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Harry gasped as the door opened and Ron took him into the room that laid beyond.
They were standing at the entrance to a huge, circular room. Everything seemed white, but cast in a blueish light, and the walls were made of a smooth seamless metal. They strode forward, bringing Harry closer to the feature that dominated the room. It was some sort of machine, metal fixtures and wires all coming together to create some sort of hanging display. Harry had the very odd thought that, with the shape of it all together, it resembled a woman hanging upside down. There was a halo of metal tubing halfway up its body to the ceiling, from which were hanging screens--flat screens, without tower or monitor to support them. Images were flashing across them rapidly, so much that he could not make out their details.
Harry had the distinct impression that they were in some sort of sci-fi movie he could have found in his DVD player. Before he could contemplate this further, though, a voice rang out from the surroundings, seeming to come from everywhere at once. It was smooth, monotone, and female, and very computer-esque.
"Greetings, test subject, and welcome to Aperture Science."
"Test subject?" Harry angrily spoke out loud. He was no test subject! That was a role reserved for everyone else!
"Good morning, GLaDOS." Ron said at his side, as if he hadn't spoken. "We're ready for the presentation."
As Harry watched, the screens up atop the halo around what must be GLaDOS stilled on a white blank, before changing to reflect a single image: a photograph of Hermione. It looked to have been taken with a simple flash camera, and unlike a wizarding photograph, it wasn't moving. The expression on her face was one of surprise and shock, however. Harry felt his stomach churning.
"This machine is GLaDOS." Ron said. "A woman whose brain has been uploaded to a computer."
"No!" Harry said. Hermione was gone already?! Stuffed into some glorified calculator?!
"Oh, stop acting concerned." Ron dismissed. "We both know you're more upset at the loss of a tool and a sex object for your pleasure than you are at the loss of a friend. But anyway, yes. Hermione is now in a similar situation to Caroline--"
There was a shuddering sound, and the images of Hermione were saturated in red up on the screens.
"Er, GLaDOS, since she doesn't like that name. Anyway, like GLaDOS, she is now a part of an immense supercomputer, possessing immense knowledge, and given the power to control the facility around her. Stationary, but still in control. She can see and hear and direct everything that goes on in the building under her care."
Harry furrowed his brow. That sounded like too good a deal. Power, knowledge, and control? Hell, if he hadn't been above degrading himself like that, he might have considered such a thing himself, particularly for Godric's Hollow and his other towns. Actually, he was right now considering how he could install such a thing. Once he got out of here, because he would definitely get out of here in a matter of time, he'd start plans for another dryad army and begin installing them as security systems...yes, that sounded good. Ron cut him off, however.
"Don't get excited. That's GLaDOS' deal. Hermione's is a bit...different."
There was a sound like a bell being rung, and then a sound like another panel sliding away. Recognizing the latter sound, Harry followed it upwards, and found that something was falling directly above them. Ron caught it, putting Harry in mind of catching a Quaffle--but this was no Quaffle in Ron's hand. Roughly the same size and shape, it was a sphere made of metal, with a single ring of lights resembling an eye, shining blue up at Ron's face.
"Follow me." Ron said, turning on his heel and striding off around the room. Harry followed him, coming to a tube of glass descending from up to the ceiling down into the floor. As they approached it, a metal floor rose, revealing that it was an elevator. A panel slid open, allowing them entrance. However, Harry did not get to follow Ron inside, but rather, was pushed. He stumbled into the elevator and heard the door closing behind him.
"Hey!" he protested. "Let me out--aaaaaaargh!"
The elevator was not just descending, it was falling. It was falling very, very fast, so much so that Harry could barely feel the floor underneath him and felt that it might just pull away from his feet and leave him suspended in space. He tried to reach out to steady himself, but he felt horrible pain in his hand when it collided with the glass tube he was falling past at such a high speed. Cradling it in his other hand, he threw himself downward onto the floor, which he then felt glued to.
He was falling for much too long. He tried to count, but each time he thought he had been here for a whole minute, just falling into the void, the floor underneath him would shutter, or he would pass a section of glass not blocked by stone on the other side, and he'd get distracted and lose count. Finally, he seemed to feel himself slowing down. Then again... No, there it was. Little by little, he was slowing down. He felt the familiar sensation as he had in elevators before, just on a much higher scale. The wind rushing past his ears slowed, and all of a sudden he could take deep, heaving breaths. Steadily, the elevator slowed to a halt, and by the time it stopped completely, Harry was testing his weight again and found that he could stand up safely, and the walls around him did not move at all. And just when he had stood up...
Crack!
"Aagh!" Harry yelped. Ron had just appeared out of thin air beside him, apparently having Apparated down here. The metal orb from before was still in his hand. With the free hand, he grabbed Harry by the wrist, dragging him out of an elevator door that he hadn't noticed before. And when it opened, Harry was unable to restrain another gasp.
They were in a massive underground chamber, that so dwarfed the room housing GLaDOS that he could hardly wrap his head around it. It had to be bigger than the Quidditch pitch, perhaps as big as five Quidditch pitches! Among all the rock and stone were metal buildings, railings and balconies, and endless girders and pylons. Everything looked like an abandoned construction project, with a tower in the middle constructed around a central pillar of metal, which was laden with wires and screens. Harry immediately realized that it was a much, much bigger GLaDOS, or rather, it was Hermione--on every screen he could find was an image of her, which he realized to be not a photo, but a live-action camera feed, complete with numbers recording the passing time in the corner. When he looked closely, he saw that only her head was visible from within the mass of wires she appeared to be entangled in. The head was shaved, and without her bushy, beautiful hair, Harry could barely identify her, but it had to have been her.
"Hermione...?" he murmured.
At the sound of his voice, the bald woman on the screen jerked her head up, and Harry saw that the wires were flowing under her very flesh. From all around him, he heard a terrified girl's voice.
"̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖?̖ H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖,̖ I̖'̖m̖ h̖e̖r̖e̖!̖"̖
It was chilling. It was undercut not only with the electronic feed that laced GLaDOS' voice, but with a hiss that he recognized as matching his own when he had been called...when he had been called someone who wasn't Harry.
"Not so grand and amazing now, is it?" Ron said from beside him. "This is old Aperture, the facility Cave Johnson first had built for scientific exploits. There's absolutely no one down here except her and us, and there's nothing for her to do down here. Everything she could control is busted or broken and she has no way of fixing it. This will be her prison cell forever. And you can stop looking all outraged," Ron said, turning to face him, "because I know why you're really acting that way. You're not upset at what a terrible fate it is--you're upset that it's happening to her, and that much only because, by extension, it's happening to you."
Harry snarled wordlessly, fingers twitching. No wand, and he couldn't beat Ron in a fight, but he would make him pay for this. He would, even if it took a hundred years.
"̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖"̖
Ron scoffed. "She's still calling you by that name. And it's all she can do. All she ever did in your sick little world was love you and rely on you. But it doesn't reward you or her anymore, does it? Anyway, this is only half of her punishment. The other half, is this." He indicated the metal sphere in his hand, with its blue LED eye staring up at him. Ron tapped it, and it began to speak, a similar monotone to that of GLaDOS, but male, and much, much deeper.
"Harry Potter had an epiphany. It was really a very simple one, actually. Once he'd inflated his Aunt Marge in the first week after school let out he'd fled to the Leaky Cauldron and met Minister Fudge, then he'd been told that a very dangerous criminal was on the loose, and after him. But they hadn't told him very much, only that he was in danger."
"What's it doing?" Harry asked, disturbed, as the little blue-eyed orb continued to drone on, referencing things that had happened in his own life.
"It's reciting the events of the last year, as you revised them." Ron said over the sphere's monotone babble. "This is a personality core, which were created and hung onto GLaDOS to dampen her homicidal tendencies. They've been...adapted. We've gone through great pains to write down every awful thing you did, starting with your third year here, where you inserted yourself into this world. Trust me, it took a long, long time. We did our best to get your droning, condescending tone right, too. Of course, it's a corrupted core, so it will still diverge wildly and go off topic at points. In our test runs, given that each core could only contain so much information, it took 103 cores to fill the entire story up to where the true Dumbledore decided to finally cut it off."
"And what's the point of that?" Harry demanded. "To inscribe my life so that you can punish me accordingly for it? Like a list of charges?"
"Not quite." said Ron. "We're going to hang them on Hermione there, you see?"
Harry followed where Ron was gazing, and found that indeed, the central tower inside which Hermione was plugged into the system was decorated with several more cores, albeit these ones were unlit. A sense of dread filled him.
"She will live out the next 103 years in this state. One core will be hung on her, driving this information into her brain each year. A droning, unstoppable recitation of events that, given the nature of the core, will slowly corrupt her mainframe. It was deemed a fitting punishment, considering her role in the 'brainwashed dryad slaves' plot of yours." Ron said. "By the time all of the cores are hung on her a little over a century later, she will be completely corrupted, and the binding on her mind--that is to say, your binding that holds your spawn in the persona of Hermione Granger--will be completely unwound, exposing the evil within."
Harry hissed and snarled, unable to stop himself anymore, but Ron spoke over him.
"And that, we have to punish separately. I'll go return this, and I'll be right back."
Another loud crack! later and Ron was gone, only to reappear within moments. This time, he held out an arm, and grabbed Harry's own. Harry pulled away, struggling, clawing at Ron's arm with his free hand, but he was not released. Before he could try and cast a spell or even just bite down on Ron's hand, they were Apparating, and Harry was shoved into a whirl of color and space, feeling like he was being constricted by an immensely narrow tube squeezing him on all sides. It was torture; he could not seem to breathe, and his eyeballs were being pressed back into his skull. He had just had the single momentary thought that he should have made himself immune to constriction when it all went away. He collapsed forward, and his hands found metal, and he gasped for his breath.
"Never Apparated before? That's what you get for staying in third year. Get up."
Harry pulled himself to his feet. looking around wildly. Where were they now? Everything was dark, but unlike the void from before, he could see the vague outlines of everything around him. They seemed to be standing on a metal platform in a wide room.
"Lumos."
Ron had a wand out and was now using it to cast light around the room. Harry followed the beam's gaze (after eyeing the wand carefully and weighing his chances of stealing it). They seemed to be in a massive, circular room, with the balcony they were on ringing the room. Harry could see barred cells set into the walls from floor to ceiling, all of them empty as far as he could tell. There was also a central tower, extending the same length. There were a few ramps leading down to it that looked quite unsteady.
"Where are we now?" Harry demanded.
"We're in Millbank Prison." Ron told him. "It's in London, but it's an old building that's underground. A research institute was built on top of it. Come on."
Ron began to walk and Harry followed him, casting his gaze at the high ceiling and numerous cells. He could use a place like this. If Azkaban ever fell through, this would be a great prison for his enemies. Or perhaps for werewolves who violated his laws... Ron indicated the tower, which they were now on the other side of, and gestured for him to move down the ramp onto the tower. Harry did not want to, but Ron flicked his wand, and he felt himself pushed with great force, almost flying, and crossing the ramp at high speed with his feet barely grazing it: a Banishing Charm. Harry hit the floor of the ramp and clung to it, terrified--he had not bothered to make himself immune to huge impacts, so if he fell, he might actually die. Once he was sure in his security, he scrambled upward and ran onto the tower's outer ring.
Ron followed him on foot, pointing his wand to make sure Harry was kept in front of him, and Harry walked with an obedience he hated, his teeth gritted. There was a door nearby, and it opened ahead of Harry, who entered the central tower. What met him was a gruesome sight.
"And what's this?" Harry asked, staring at the body. It was an old corpse, oddly preserved but definitely dead. It was held into the chair that figured as the central feature in the room by many chains, and its eyes were gone. Once Harry had taken in the sight, he could cast his gaze around the walls, which had eyes scratched into them, all staring at the corpse thanks to the circular shape of the room.
"Millbank Prison's construction was overseen by a man who worshipped a god of terror." Ron said. "Kind of like your faeries--living on the other side of the veil and influencing this side in strange ways. One of a few. His patron was a god of knowledge and fear, embodying the terror of a person being watched at all times. This panopticon was constructed to support a ritual of his. It technically failed, but it left him deeply empowered. This corpse is his original body, and it's technically not a corpse. It's still alive, and supports him from afar. It's like a battery for him...or it was."
Harry felt a creeping sense of dread. Where was Ron going with this? He was trying to go through all of the information processed--a god of knowledge? He could use that, it would make him even greater and more well-prepared than he already was, but he didn't like where this seemed to be headed.
"You see, this panopticon is going to be your spawn's new home." Ron said quietly. "Once the creature--Dumbledore called it an 'X-heart' for time's sake--is completely corrupted and unshelled over in Old Aperture, she'll be moved here. She'll be installed and given the benefit of total, complete omniscience, able to observe any one thing happening on the planet at any one time. A great power, right? Much better than anything you got out of your psychotic Luna Lovegood impersonator or your twisted Trelawney. But you know by now that this comes with a price, and that price is everything else."
"What?!" Harry asked, his jaw dropped and another snarl escaping his throat.
"Everything." Ron repeated. "She will not be able to move, speak, or influence the world around her in any way, not even to amuse herself. She will not be able to breathe or utilize her knowledge in any way. For the true Hermione, this would be a Purgatory--she'd at least have something to occupy herself. For your X-heart spawn, however, this is going to be Hell. After all, your spawn is really just you, and nothing you do is ever done without the intent to benefit yourself. But she can't do that, now. She's all-knowing, but helpless, and no one can get her endless knowledge out of her, no matter what arcane rituals they use. I think it's a fitting punishment, don't you? Between the personality cores and the panopticon, it works out. After all, her only role in your story was to sit there and have things explained to her, right? Now she can do that for eternity."
"You monster!" Harry roared, horrified and enraged. That much knowledge...that much power... all going to waste, and a sexy wife of his thrown away to rot, too!
"Of course, even if she could influence the world around her, it's doubtful she would. After being broken over in Old Aperture, I think she'd be useless to anyone, no matter how much she knew. A blind idiot god, as they say. But if this much makes you this upset," Ron said, lifting his wand, "I can't wait for you to see what we have in store for the spawn you named 'Luna'."
Harry saw a jet of red light hit him, and fell unconscious.
They were standing at the entrance to a huge, circular room. Everything seemed white, but cast in a blueish light, and the walls were made of a smooth seamless metal. They strode forward, bringing Harry closer to the feature that dominated the room. It was some sort of machine, metal fixtures and wires all coming together to create some sort of hanging display. Harry had the very odd thought that, with the shape of it all together, it resembled a woman hanging upside down. There was a halo of metal tubing halfway up its body to the ceiling, from which were hanging screens--flat screens, without tower or monitor to support them. Images were flashing across them rapidly, so much that he could not make out their details.
Harry had the distinct impression that they were in some sort of sci-fi movie he could have found in his DVD player. Before he could contemplate this further, though, a voice rang out from the surroundings, seeming to come from everywhere at once. It was smooth, monotone, and female, and very computer-esque.
"Greetings, test subject, and welcome to Aperture Science."
"Test subject?" Harry angrily spoke out loud. He was no test subject! That was a role reserved for everyone else!
"Good morning, GLaDOS." Ron said at his side, as if he hadn't spoken. "We're ready for the presentation."
As Harry watched, the screens up atop the halo around what must be GLaDOS stilled on a white blank, before changing to reflect a single image: a photograph of Hermione. It looked to have been taken with a simple flash camera, and unlike a wizarding photograph, it wasn't moving. The expression on her face was one of surprise and shock, however. Harry felt his stomach churning.
"This machine is GLaDOS." Ron said. "A woman whose brain has been uploaded to a computer."
"No!" Harry said. Hermione was gone already?! Stuffed into some glorified calculator?!
"Oh, stop acting concerned." Ron dismissed. "We both know you're more upset at the loss of a tool and a sex object for your pleasure than you are at the loss of a friend. But anyway, yes. Hermione is now in a similar situation to Caroline--"
There was a shuddering sound, and the images of Hermione were saturated in red up on the screens.
"Er, GLaDOS, since she doesn't like that name. Anyway, like GLaDOS, she is now a part of an immense supercomputer, possessing immense knowledge, and given the power to control the facility around her. Stationary, but still in control. She can see and hear and direct everything that goes on in the building under her care."
Harry furrowed his brow. That sounded like too good a deal. Power, knowledge, and control? Hell, if he hadn't been above degrading himself like that, he might have considered such a thing himself, particularly for Godric's Hollow and his other towns. Actually, he was right now considering how he could install such a thing. Once he got out of here, because he would definitely get out of here in a matter of time, he'd start plans for another dryad army and begin installing them as security systems...yes, that sounded good. Ron cut him off, however.
"Don't get excited. That's GLaDOS' deal. Hermione's is a bit...different."
There was a sound like a bell being rung, and then a sound like another panel sliding away. Recognizing the latter sound, Harry followed it upwards, and found that something was falling directly above them. Ron caught it, putting Harry in mind of catching a Quaffle--but this was no Quaffle in Ron's hand. Roughly the same size and shape, it was a sphere made of metal, with a single ring of lights resembling an eye, shining blue up at Ron's face.
"Follow me." Ron said, turning on his heel and striding off around the room. Harry followed him, coming to a tube of glass descending from up to the ceiling down into the floor. As they approached it, a metal floor rose, revealing that it was an elevator. A panel slid open, allowing them entrance. However, Harry did not get to follow Ron inside, but rather, was pushed. He stumbled into the elevator and heard the door closing behind him.
"Hey!" he protested. "Let me out--aaaaaaargh!"
The elevator was not just descending, it was falling. It was falling very, very fast, so much so that Harry could barely feel the floor underneath him and felt that it might just pull away from his feet and leave him suspended in space. He tried to reach out to steady himself, but he felt horrible pain in his hand when it collided with the glass tube he was falling past at such a high speed. Cradling it in his other hand, he threw himself downward onto the floor, which he then felt glued to.
He was falling for much too long. He tried to count, but each time he thought he had been here for a whole minute, just falling into the void, the floor underneath him would shutter, or he would pass a section of glass not blocked by stone on the other side, and he'd get distracted and lose count. Finally, he seemed to feel himself slowing down. Then again... No, there it was. Little by little, he was slowing down. He felt the familiar sensation as he had in elevators before, just on a much higher scale. The wind rushing past his ears slowed, and all of a sudden he could take deep, heaving breaths. Steadily, the elevator slowed to a halt, and by the time it stopped completely, Harry was testing his weight again and found that he could stand up safely, and the walls around him did not move at all. And just when he had stood up...
Crack!
"Aagh!" Harry yelped. Ron had just appeared out of thin air beside him, apparently having Apparated down here. The metal orb from before was still in his hand. With the free hand, he grabbed Harry by the wrist, dragging him out of an elevator door that he hadn't noticed before. And when it opened, Harry was unable to restrain another gasp.
They were in a massive underground chamber, that so dwarfed the room housing GLaDOS that he could hardly wrap his head around it. It had to be bigger than the Quidditch pitch, perhaps as big as five Quidditch pitches! Among all the rock and stone were metal buildings, railings and balconies, and endless girders and pylons. Everything looked like an abandoned construction project, with a tower in the middle constructed around a central pillar of metal, which was laden with wires and screens. Harry immediately realized that it was a much, much bigger GLaDOS, or rather, it was Hermione--on every screen he could find was an image of her, which he realized to be not a photo, but a live-action camera feed, complete with numbers recording the passing time in the corner. When he looked closely, he saw that only her head was visible from within the mass of wires she appeared to be entangled in. The head was shaved, and without her bushy, beautiful hair, Harry could barely identify her, but it had to have been her.
"Hermione...?" he murmured.
At the sound of his voice, the bald woman on the screen jerked her head up, and Harry saw that the wires were flowing under her very flesh. From all around him, he heard a terrified girl's voice.
"̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖?̖ H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖,̖ I̖'̖m̖ h̖e̖r̖e̖!̖"̖
It was chilling. It was undercut not only with the electronic feed that laced GLaDOS' voice, but with a hiss that he recognized as matching his own when he had been called...when he had been called someone who wasn't Harry.
"Not so grand and amazing now, is it?" Ron said from beside him. "This is old Aperture, the facility Cave Johnson first had built for scientific exploits. There's absolutely no one down here except her and us, and there's nothing for her to do down here. Everything she could control is busted or broken and she has no way of fixing it. This will be her prison cell forever. And you can stop looking all outraged," Ron said, turning to face him, "because I know why you're really acting that way. You're not upset at what a terrible fate it is--you're upset that it's happening to her, and that much only because, by extension, it's happening to you."
Harry snarled wordlessly, fingers twitching. No wand, and he couldn't beat Ron in a fight, but he would make him pay for this. He would, even if it took a hundred years.
"̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖H̖a̖r̖r̖y̖.̖.̖.̖"̖
Ron scoffed. "She's still calling you by that name. And it's all she can do. All she ever did in your sick little world was love you and rely on you. But it doesn't reward you or her anymore, does it? Anyway, this is only half of her punishment. The other half, is this." He indicated the metal sphere in his hand, with its blue LED eye staring up at him. Ron tapped it, and it began to speak, a similar monotone to that of GLaDOS, but male, and much, much deeper.
"Harry Potter had an epiphany. It was really a very simple one, actually. Once he'd inflated his Aunt Marge in the first week after school let out he'd fled to the Leaky Cauldron and met Minister Fudge, then he'd been told that a very dangerous criminal was on the loose, and after him. But they hadn't told him very much, only that he was in danger."
"What's it doing?" Harry asked, disturbed, as the little blue-eyed orb continued to drone on, referencing things that had happened in his own life.
"It's reciting the events of the last year, as you revised them." Ron said over the sphere's monotone babble. "This is a personality core, which were created and hung onto GLaDOS to dampen her homicidal tendencies. They've been...adapted. We've gone through great pains to write down every awful thing you did, starting with your third year here, where you inserted yourself into this world. Trust me, it took a long, long time. We did our best to get your droning, condescending tone right, too. Of course, it's a corrupted core, so it will still diverge wildly and go off topic at points. In our test runs, given that each core could only contain so much information, it took 103 cores to fill the entire story up to where the true Dumbledore decided to finally cut it off."
"And what's the point of that?" Harry demanded. "To inscribe my life so that you can punish me accordingly for it? Like a list of charges?"
"Not quite." said Ron. "We're going to hang them on Hermione there, you see?"
Harry followed where Ron was gazing, and found that indeed, the central tower inside which Hermione was plugged into the system was decorated with several more cores, albeit these ones were unlit. A sense of dread filled him.
"She will live out the next 103 years in this state. One core will be hung on her, driving this information into her brain each year. A droning, unstoppable recitation of events that, given the nature of the core, will slowly corrupt her mainframe. It was deemed a fitting punishment, considering her role in the 'brainwashed dryad slaves' plot of yours." Ron said. "By the time all of the cores are hung on her a little over a century later, she will be completely corrupted, and the binding on her mind--that is to say, your binding that holds your spawn in the persona of Hermione Granger--will be completely unwound, exposing the evil within."
Harry hissed and snarled, unable to stop himself anymore, but Ron spoke over him.
"And that, we have to punish separately. I'll go return this, and I'll be right back."
Another loud crack! later and Ron was gone, only to reappear within moments. This time, he held out an arm, and grabbed Harry's own. Harry pulled away, struggling, clawing at Ron's arm with his free hand, but he was not released. Before he could try and cast a spell or even just bite down on Ron's hand, they were Apparating, and Harry was shoved into a whirl of color and space, feeling like he was being constricted by an immensely narrow tube squeezing him on all sides. It was torture; he could not seem to breathe, and his eyeballs were being pressed back into his skull. He had just had the single momentary thought that he should have made himself immune to constriction when it all went away. He collapsed forward, and his hands found metal, and he gasped for his breath.
"Never Apparated before? That's what you get for staying in third year. Get up."
Harry pulled himself to his feet. looking around wildly. Where were they now? Everything was dark, but unlike the void from before, he could see the vague outlines of everything around him. They seemed to be standing on a metal platform in a wide room.
"Lumos."
Ron had a wand out and was now using it to cast light around the room. Harry followed the beam's gaze (after eyeing the wand carefully and weighing his chances of stealing it). They seemed to be in a massive, circular room, with the balcony they were on ringing the room. Harry could see barred cells set into the walls from floor to ceiling, all of them empty as far as he could tell. There was also a central tower, extending the same length. There were a few ramps leading down to it that looked quite unsteady.
"Where are we now?" Harry demanded.
"We're in Millbank Prison." Ron told him. "It's in London, but it's an old building that's underground. A research institute was built on top of it. Come on."
Ron began to walk and Harry followed him, casting his gaze at the high ceiling and numerous cells. He could use a place like this. If Azkaban ever fell through, this would be a great prison for his enemies. Or perhaps for werewolves who violated his laws... Ron indicated the tower, which they were now on the other side of, and gestured for him to move down the ramp onto the tower. Harry did not want to, but Ron flicked his wand, and he felt himself pushed with great force, almost flying, and crossing the ramp at high speed with his feet barely grazing it: a Banishing Charm. Harry hit the floor of the ramp and clung to it, terrified--he had not bothered to make himself immune to huge impacts, so if he fell, he might actually die. Once he was sure in his security, he scrambled upward and ran onto the tower's outer ring.
Ron followed him on foot, pointing his wand to make sure Harry was kept in front of him, and Harry walked with an obedience he hated, his teeth gritted. There was a door nearby, and it opened ahead of Harry, who entered the central tower. What met him was a gruesome sight.
"And what's this?" Harry asked, staring at the body. It was an old corpse, oddly preserved but definitely dead. It was held into the chair that figured as the central feature in the room by many chains, and its eyes were gone. Once Harry had taken in the sight, he could cast his gaze around the walls, which had eyes scratched into them, all staring at the corpse thanks to the circular shape of the room.
"Millbank Prison's construction was overseen by a man who worshipped a god of terror." Ron said. "Kind of like your faeries--living on the other side of the veil and influencing this side in strange ways. One of a few. His patron was a god of knowledge and fear, embodying the terror of a person being watched at all times. This panopticon was constructed to support a ritual of his. It technically failed, but it left him deeply empowered. This corpse is his original body, and it's technically not a corpse. It's still alive, and supports him from afar. It's like a battery for him...or it was."
Harry felt a creeping sense of dread. Where was Ron going with this? He was trying to go through all of the information processed--a god of knowledge? He could use that, it would make him even greater and more well-prepared than he already was, but he didn't like where this seemed to be headed.
"You see, this panopticon is going to be your spawn's new home." Ron said quietly. "Once the creature--Dumbledore called it an 'X-heart' for time's sake--is completely corrupted and unshelled over in Old Aperture, she'll be moved here. She'll be installed and given the benefit of total, complete omniscience, able to observe any one thing happening on the planet at any one time. A great power, right? Much better than anything you got out of your psychotic Luna Lovegood impersonator or your twisted Trelawney. But you know by now that this comes with a price, and that price is everything else."
"What?!" Harry asked, his jaw dropped and another snarl escaping his throat.
"Everything." Ron repeated. "She will not be able to move, speak, or influence the world around her in any way, not even to amuse herself. She will not be able to breathe or utilize her knowledge in any way. For the true Hermione, this would be a Purgatory--she'd at least have something to occupy herself. For your X-heart spawn, however, this is going to be Hell. After all, your spawn is really just you, and nothing you do is ever done without the intent to benefit yourself. But she can't do that, now. She's all-knowing, but helpless, and no one can get her endless knowledge out of her, no matter what arcane rituals they use. I think it's a fitting punishment, don't you? Between the personality cores and the panopticon, it works out. After all, her only role in your story was to sit there and have things explained to her, right? Now she can do that for eternity."
"You monster!" Harry roared, horrified and enraged. That much knowledge...that much power... all going to waste, and a sexy wife of his thrown away to rot, too!
"Of course, even if she could influence the world around her, it's doubtful she would. After being broken over in Old Aperture, I think she'd be useless to anyone, no matter how much she knew. A blind idiot god, as they say. But if this much makes you this upset," Ron said, lifting his wand, "I can't wait for you to see what we have in store for the spawn you named 'Luna'."
Harry saw a jet of red light hit him, and fell unconscious.
