History and Theories

Once she finishes, talking, to her father, Natah calls for Pandora to meet her in the living room with Harry and Hermione.

Once Pandora arrives, Natah says, "Pandora! Aurora approached Harry and Hermione about taking the elixir that we gave Minerva. In and of itself this isn't that problematic, and I would be inclined to do it anyway as there's only a handful of Sapient Sentients left in the solar system. However, she handed me a nearly blank marriage contract with her signature already on it."

"Would you mind if I had a look?"

"Certainly." Natah hands the contract over to Pandora.

Pandora opens the contract and starts reading, "Oh, she didn't. She did! This is priceless." After a few comments she puts the contract down and starts laughing while the others just look at each other.

Kitty, who still hasn't let Harry out of her sight, asks, "What's so funny?"

Once Pandora finishes laughing, she wipes a few tears from her eyes, and separates from her main chassis so she can sit down.

"Right, where should I start... Aurora is a pureblood, albeit from a minor house. A sheltered one at that. While there are some, like myself or Andromeda Black, now Tonks, who married for love. For the vast majority, love is a secondary concern compared to business. In the muggle world this style of marriage was quite common amongst the upper classes, around the time that the Statute of Secrecy was enacted. For them, placing a marriage contract on the table as an opening gambit shows how much they want something, or that the deal is secondary to securing the continuation of the family. In this case, the expectation would be that either a name gets added and then signed. This would signify that the contract was considered sufficient payment for the services requested. You'll note that Aurora explicitly said that she would still be able to study the stars. This is her hedging her bets against an unfavourable match, as if her husband to be prevents her from that, it would void the contract, and free her.

"Or, if they wished to add additional terms, such as limiting when she could study the stars, that would be the start of negotiations. During which the marriage contract could be withdrawn. I was laughing because it's such a pureblood thing to do, to assume that another culture would work the same way. I was picturing what Nef or the Grineer Queen would do with that contract. Where is Aurora anyway?"

Natah smiles, "I had Digger and Roofie show her around Fortuna."

Pandora winces, remembering her own visit with Xeno. Only the fact that they were Sentients saving them from a lynching or worse, being taken in for a systems check by the taxmen, and not having the needed coin to release herself. It's one of the more insidious ways that the Corpus get those that have recently become debt free, and are now trying to leave Corpus territory.

"Don't worry, she's been provided clothes, and they're not going to leave her to her own devices."

Kitty shakes her head, "Sorry, I'm still trying to get my head around the contract."

Pandora smiles sadly, "In the magical societies of earth, knowledge is quite literally power. The noble families all stay that way by being the only ones that know how to do certain things. Whether it's the Potters techniques for brewing potions that shouldn't work, the Blacks Curses, or the Greengrass's Greenhouses. Often their secrets and techniques are written in books. Books that can only be opened by those of the right bloodline; as recognised by the head of house ring. I would imagine that Aurora equated the elixir as a secret of a noble house, and so felt she needed to show she was willing to join the house in order to gain it. Again, it's a form of arrogance in believing that other cultures would work the same way and respect her own cultural norms."

Natah sighs, "She also said that you'd been excluded from your society."

Pandora smiles and nods, "At some point in the past the Lovegood matriarch at the time seduced a fae. A being of the void. According to the family history, they stayed with them for as long as they could and fed off the Matriarch's life. Things went as they normally do in a relationship, and they were blessed with children, both of whom were seers. For a while, other families tried to marry into the family, or have a Lovegood marrying into theirs. This lasted until the flip side of their heritage made itself known, they are able to perceive things that the rest of us can't. They also tend to lose their connection with reality as they get older, as their seer gifts, combined with their ability to perceive other things, distorts their view of the world. Many of Xeno's moments occur because he's acting on information that isn't true yet, or acting on information that is no longer true.

"Because of this, others see them as insane. Gifted but insane. This leads into their next fascination, continuation of their lines. While it's true that you are more likely to get a magical child if both parents are magical, the existence of muggleborn children proves that it's not a rule. So once again, something that used to be a matter of keeping the family strong before we officially withdrew from the world, became a social norm, and then an expectation. However, if you have family members that are on the wrong side of conventional sanity, it becomes difficult to find them spouses. Families, like the Blacks, had the power and influence needed to pay the exorbitant bride prices that were needed to get their less stable family members married off. Families like the Lovegood's couldn't afford it."

Hermione looks up from where she had been nodding along, "Bride price?"

"Oh, yes, the father of the bride is expected to pay a dowery to the husband's family. Originally, it was supposed to be an insurance so that their daughter could support themselves if something happened. Now, it goes straight into the family's vaults."

Harry groans, "Totally changing the subject here, but last night we found out that Hermione's Titania can cast Lumos on her own."

Hermione puts her head in her hands as Kitty, Pandora, and Natah all look at her in surprise.

Pandora starts to cast some diagnostic spells, "I'm dreading the answer, but how did you find this out?"

Harry explains the situation with his Wisp and then the subsequent test he did with Hermione's Titania. Natah then goes on to explain the A/B test that she performed after seeing the anomalous readings from Hermione's Titania and Harry's original testing.

Pandora stands up abruptly, "Right, we're all going to your Railjack, and we're going to run some tests. Hermione, once we're there I'm going to perform a couple more scans. Then you need to take your Harrow out to get used to him. I will need to see if it's proximity."

"Titania doesn't like that idea."

"Why?"

"She's, showing me memories... It's of her time defending the forest, and I'm kneeling in the grove instead of Silvana's body. How do you know what I look like? I didn't realise that. Apparently, they get memories from us as well as the ones we get from them."

Harry and Kitty both nod, "That makes sense."

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A few hours later, Harry finds herself cuddling a distraught Titania who is desperate for Hermione. On the other side of the room, Pandora and Natah are discussing the results while Kitty is listening and providing clarifications from the view of an Operator.

"According to my scans, Titania has a newborn magical core."

Natah looks confused, "What's a magical core?"

"This could get a little complicated, so bear with me. We, researchers and healers, refer to a magical core for convenience. It makes a lot of the spellwork and diagnosis easier if you assume a core. Instead, a persons magic is suffused throughout their body and generally concentrates more around the heart and the brain. However, by the fact we use our wands in our hands and not our mouths, it's demonstrably not only in those two places. In our studies we've found that it is separate from the soul, yet it seems to manifest from it."

"How did you determine that?"

Pandora shudders, "Dementors, they are a magical abomination that we have no means to destroy. They feed on souls and they project an aura of despair around them to prevent their prey from running. Incidentally, it's also how we know that muggles have souls, as there's 2 or 3 deaths a year from a rogue Dementor."

"How do you have a rogue Dementor?"

"Long enough ago that the records are now lost, every Dementor in the world was located and forced onto an island off the coast of Scotland. There is an ancient fortress there that was erected to try to contain them. When that proved to be impossible, they turned it into a prison, and the prisoners the bait that stops the Dementors from roaming. Every few decades a young witch or wizard will demand that we stop using the prison, and they will get the same answer every time. 'Find a way to kill the Dementors and we will'. It's also how we know that the soul is either infinite or it heals itself faster than a Dementors passive feeding. While we have developed tools that allow us to control Dementors over the years, those tools aren't perfect, and they aren't permanent. As such we only ever use them sparingly. Because of that, a Dementor will occasionally leave the island to find a more filling meal. This leads to a rash of mysterious deaths until we find out they're missing, and return them."

Kitty asks, "Why not just chuck them in the sun or something?"

Pandora chuckles, "Humans have only recently visited the moon. Magicals haven't even got that far."

"Oh, yeah, I looked at their landing site. Sorry, it's just so hard to imagine not being able to visit the solar system."

Natah nods, "I agree with Kitty, but I think we've got side tracked. You were talking about how magic is separate from the soul."

"Oh, yes. The department of Mysteries has done extensive family tracing for some of the muggleborn that enter our society, and have found no magic born in their history as far back as they can tell. Couple this with the fact that a dementor feeding removes the soul, but the diffuse magic in the body remains, and will continue to remain for as long as the body survives. It suggests that magic doesn't actually come from bloodlines, rather it's something that appears spontaneously, or is possibly induced in a developing foetus. Now that I know about DNA, I'd love to scan some squibs. They are people that are born to magical families but have no magic of their own, beyond slightly elevated levels of magic defused through their bodies, compared to muggles that is.

"As you can probably guess, the shorthand of Magical Core came from the fact that only magicals have those two concentrations, or cores of magic. We also know that bodies need magic, but not souls to survive, as the killing curse works by momentarily removing all the magic from a body. The only person thought to have survived that is Harry, and that's only the most popular theory. It is more likely that his mother, Lily Potter, developed a hither to unknown protection. Albus likes to say it was her love, but while emotions have power, they don't have that sort of power."

Harry calls across the room, "What was that about Potter?"

They all go over to where Harry's sitting, "I was saying that I think your birth mother developed a spell or ritual to protect you from the Killing Curse."

"How would I know one is being used?"

"It's a very distinctive green, and."

"I've seen it."

"You have?"

"We were taught different techniques to try and control our void abilities before they resorted to wiping our memories. Some combination of them has allowed me perfect recall of most of my life. Though I don't know what people were saying when I was a baby before the Zariman, probably because I didn't learn English until I got my Hogwarts letter."

Natah nods, lost in thought. Thinking aloud she says, "I wonder if the Oro is related to the soul as well. As the Orokin used continuance to continue to live past the death of their body, but Tenno never have."

Pandora asks, "What's that?"

"Oh? What? The Oro?" – Pandora nods, so Natah continues – "It's a void construct. Everyone that has survived void exposure, like the Tenno, and now myself, have one inside them. I actually needed to construct a synthetic version while I was creating souls in Sentients. It was the only way to anchor the soul long enough for it to latch onto the Sentient, you have one too. One thing that's true is that every living creature that has an Oro is effectively immortal, as the Oro returns to the body once dislodged and they come back to life. I can also confirm that the artificial one doesn't protect against void damage."

Kitty laughs, "That explains Vor then. He haunts the towers in the void near Pluto, and keeps talking about how he has the true key to the void."

Pandora muses, "You know, it might be possible to transplant an Oro. That way we could find out if it's linked to the soul or not."

Natah adds, "Are you suggesting that it might be how Titania gained her own magic?"

"Yes! That could well be it, it could act as a tether and conduit to the soul. Allowing magic to transfer from one soul to another."

"So, if we transplanted an Oro it could give someone else magic?"

"Or move the original person into the new body."

"Either way, we'd know one way or another."

Kitty looks at them both, "Try it."

"What!?"

"I know your type, you've probably got more than a dozen theories going around your heads, and you're developing more as we speak. Given you're both Sentients, I wouldn't be surprised if you're sharing data right now, refining the theories and coming up with ways it could work or not.

"But you can't know unless you test it. So take Harry's Oro and put it in me. If she gets up then you know it holds the soul, if I get up then you know it's something else. Either way, you can just put them back again."

The two of them share a slightly guilty glance, and Pandora cautions, "This is to do with your soul, we have no idea what it might do. For all we know it could kill you, permanently."

"I don't think it's going to do that, if being hit by an Eidolon's blast didn't kill me I don't think moving my Oro will."

"It could drive you insane, it could do anything."

"And you won't know until you try it. I also know that there aren't that many people that aren't Tenno you can try it on, and you can't do it on one of you two. As if something goes wrong, you're the ones that will have to fix it."

Harry says, "If my opinion counts, I don't mind helping. It might allow us to find out what drives warframes insane, and why Titania here is actually gaining sanity."

Titania looks up as Hermione comes in wearing his Harrow, "What did I miss?"

"Mine, need mine."