Nott writes back quickly. He is taking both Runes and Care of Magical Creatures, which is exciting, and he loves Astronomy. His favorite quidditch team is the Falmouth Falcons and he likes to play chaser but he doesn’t think he’ll try out. At the end, he admits that he didn’t get to spend much time with other kids his age growing up, and asks what it was like living with Muggles.
“At least someone’s answering me,” Harry says a bit sourly. Bear licks his foot and Hedwig clatters her beak at him as if to say, hurry up!
“All right, all right.”
Harry writes back that he’s taking both of those electives as well as Divination, and he looks forward to it, but meditation has been difficult so far. After some thought, he asks if Nott would want to study together sometime for either of their shared electives.
Answering the question about Muggles is hard. Harry eventually settles on Different, but not as much as you’d think. They use technology—machines—to do things that wizards use magic for. Otherwise they’re just people, I guess. They gossip and they get jealous and they have families like wizards do. I think Muggles are a little less tolerant of people who are different, though. For one thing, they don’t wear nearly as many colors, usually, unless you’re an artist or you’re young and rebellious.
There, that’ll do. Harry admires his much improved handwriting and sends Hedwig off.
Two days before he goes back to Hogwarts, Harry realizes he’s got a problem. “My stuff doesn’t all fit.”
Bear just gives a silent doggy laugh, tongue spilling out of his mouth. Harry stares in dismay at his trunk. It’s a two-compartment trunk, one side for school supplies and the other for personal belongings. Between the new wardrobe, the potions kit, the broomstick servicing kit Hermione sent him on his birthday, and the way he’s been hoarding books like a dragon, there’s no way everything will fit.
His mum’s trunk wasn’t much better. Harry had taken it back to Gringotts, unable to bear throwing away even the detritus of his mum’s life. It definitely wouldn’t hold up much longer, though, so he can’t go get it and use that instead.
New trunk, or used?
“C’mon, Bear,” he says with a sigh. “Let’s go.”
First year, Hagrid took him to a secondhand store not far from the Leaky. Harry goes there first and pokes around. He finds plenty of interesting stuff, including a wizarding radio that he decides would be great for following professional quidditch matches, but no trunks that suit. He buys the radio and a crystal that’s supposed to help with memory if you study with it on your desk.
He’s standing in the Alley, at a loss for where to go, when Bear grabs his blue robe and gently tugs. “What, you know a place?”
Bear barks, runs a few feet, stops, and stares back at Harry over his shoulder.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming. Geez.”
Bear takes him down Cardin Alley and then turns left onto Market Alley. Harry glances around; the shops here look very expensive, and the flats above them are all freshly painted or mortared with flowers in the window boxes and ivy climbing the balcony railings. “Bear, are you sure…?”
He trails off as Bear stops in front of Magellano’s Magical Luggage: Traveling Gear for the Adventurous Witch or Wizard! A giant moving poster in the window shows a wizard in eye-wateringly orange robes moving around a slightly cramped flat. Then the words “Keep your Home in your Pocket with our Specialty Trunks!” appear on the poster, and Harry’s mouth hangs open as the poster shows the wizard climbing up a ladder and out of a trunk.
That whole flat was in a trunk.
“I want one,” he tells Bear, who’s sitting down and panting in a self-satisfied way.
The store itself is small on the inside, just a single room with trunks lining heavy wooden shelves on both side walls. At the back is a counter staffed by an older wizard who looks up when Harry walks in. “Welcome to Magellano’s—well, you’re a bit younger than my usual clientele.”
“Sorry,” Harry says. “Only…” Bollocks, he’s got to explain this. How is he supposed to explain this?
“Not my job to ask questions,” the wizard says cheerfully. “The name’s Edgar Dunningworth, please call me Ed. What are you looking for, kid?”
“Er—can I get a flat in a trunk?”
Ed grins. “Can you ever! How big are you thinking?”
“Not too big.” Harry bites his lip. “A little one just for me to live in. Like a studio? The poster showed a whole kitchen, but I’d be fine with just a sink, something to heat food up, and a cold cupboard. Um, and if I could get one with bookshelves, that would be great.”
“Right then.” Ed waves his wand, and a plain brown trunk floats down to land in the center of the floor. “Follow me, laddie, let’s take a look.”
Ed climbs into the trunk and down a ladder. Harry has to force himself to follow—it’s weird, and his brain is half-convinced this is impossible—but sure enough, there’s rungs of a ladder going down, down, down.
The inside of the trunk is much smaller than the one on the poster. Like Harry said, it’s a studio, with a twin bed against the wall opposite the ladder, a kitchenette to his right, and a set of storage cabinets against the wall on either side of the ladder. There’s a big section of bookshelves above the bed and a small door on each side wall.
“This is the bathroom.” Ed opens the right-hand door, which is wedged in next to the kitchenette at the foot of the bed. “Toilet, shower stall, sink. No bath, I’m afraid.”
Since Harry doesn’t need a bath, the plain white tiled bathroom looks amazing. “How does it work? Would I need to fill water up, or…”
Edgar shows him a small wooden panel in the floor of the main room. “In here’s the water tank, see? Just a big metal container, really. Holds plenty of water and it comes full. The enchantments on the trunk’ll purify any water you use and put it back in the tank. It also collects moisture from the air around the trunk to refill itself.” He replaces the panel and takes Harry to a different one in the wall behind the ladder. “Now, if you see back here, you’ve got the runic arrays.”
Harry’s eyes widen. It’s incredibly complex. There are seven vertical slots, and in each one is a series of tablets with dozens of tiny runes engraved on each. Some of the runes are futhark, but others Harry doesn’t recognize.
“Don’t mess with these,” Edgar warns him. “They’re slotted into place in a very specific order. But, if you want to add a room, or make this one bigger, you’d have to have someone—preferably me—alter the arrays. This is also what controls the whole trunk’s magic. It filters the bad air out for fresh from around your trunk, it’ll keep the water pure and regulate the temperature, and if it registers a fire, it’ll spray fire-suppressant potion into the air. Don’t worry, it’s harmless to people. Now, up here.” He shows Harry a lever next to the runic arrays. “This is for locking the trunk down. If you’re in here, and you want everyone else to stay out there, just give the lever a yank.”
Harry suspects that’ll come in handy.
Ed replaces the panel covering the runes. “These cupboards,” he points at the ones to Harry’s left of the ladder, “are for general storage. On the outside, the trunk has a dial that you can turn to different settings. If you turn it to Gen, it’ll open from outside to a normal storage trunk—bit bigger on the inside than it should be, but standard. Anything you put in these cabinets will show up in that compartment and vice versa.
“Now, these on the other side of the ladder are for your wardrobe.” The front of the wardrobe cabinets telescopes off to one side and reveals a section for hanging robes and a bunch of smaller shelves and drawers. Even with all his new clothes Harry knows he wouldn’t be able to fill it up. “Same as with the general storage—turn the dial outside to Ward, and it’ll open to a fairly normal wardrobe compartment; anything you put in this wardrobe here will show up in the Ward compartment from outside for easy access.
“And last, the books. I pulled this trunk down because you mentioned you wanted that,” he says with a grin. “The dial’s got a Lib setting, too. It’ll show you up to a hundred or so titles at once, depending on how big they are—it picks the ones you’ve used most recently.”
“What’s that other door for?” Harry asks.
Edgar goes and tries the knob, but it doesn’t turn. “See? There’s no room there yet, although the door’s built into the basic runes I use for the main rooms of trunks this size. You can buy an extra room to put there if you like. Nothing too big, the air and temperature spells on this trunk aren’t meant to sustain a huge space, but you could have a nice little office, a potions lab, something like that.”
Okay, time for the real question. “How much would the trunk be? And how much for a potions lab or a sort of homework area?”
Ed looks around. “This one I’d sell for three thousand five hundred galleons, which includes the bed, bathroom fixings, cold cupboard, and hot plate.” Harry’s eyes bug out of his head. “For another thousand I could hook you up with a potions lab—those need extra enchanting work for ventilation and safety—and for about four hundred I could make this room a little bigger and add a desk area back in that corner, between the wall shared with the lab and the head of the bed.”
God. Four thousand nine hundred galleons… it’s more than half what was left in his mum’s vault and almost all of what he can withdraw this year. But it means he’ll have a home. A place that’s his, all his, that he can take wherever he goes. A bed, a way to store food… and a potions lab is expensive but Harry’s determined to prove Snape wrong about him now that he has a better kit and he could spend some time studying. Plus it would be great to make healing potions for himself. Merlin knows he needs them a lot.
“Okay,” he hears himself say. “I’ll do both of those—the lab and the added desk.”
Ed’s eyes light up. “Excellent! You’re welcome to hang ‘round while I make the alterations, but you’ll have to leave the trunk for safety.”
Altering the main room involves carving new, custom runes and numbers into what Ed calls a “modifier stone.” “Only a few modifications should really be made to the base, otherwise it just gets clumsy and it’s better to start over,” he says.
Harry asks why he had to leave for safety.
“Oh, there’s always a chance the magic will implode.”
Harry’s rendered speechless with horror. Ed looks up, sees his face, and laughs. “Don’t worry, now, there’s safety features. If that happens, the trunk automagically ejects any life from inside, along with as much of its contents as it can. Never fear. I’ve not had a trunk implode on me since I was an apprentice back in the forties. The potions lab room’s extra because it’ll do the same if you’ve an incident in there bad enough to destabilize the space enchantments, except it dumps you in the trunk’s main room and the lab self-destructs. That’s why you shouldn’t muck around with the runes on your own, by the way. If you put them back in the wrong order, things might start to collapse.”
Good enough for Harry.
He fiddles with the dial while Ed carves runes and Bear watches patiently. Ward, Gen, and Lib function as advertised. He’s relieved to see Gen has a whole section designed specifically for stationery; that’ll be good for school stuff, like quills and parchment. Which reminds him, he needs to get parchment, ink, and maybe one or two nice quills with metal nibs now that he knows how to use one. And some journals? If he takes notes for classes in journals, it should be easier to keep them organized.
There’s two other settings. One is a rune Harry recognizes–othala, which he thinks means home, hearth, friendship, and family. That one shows him the ladder down into the trunk. Logical. The last one, though, says Mug, and when he turns the dial there and opens the trunk, it just shows an utterly mundane trunk. No shelves or cubbies, just the inside of the trunk. It even looks about the same size on the inside as on the outside.
“Found that, did you? Good.” Harry jumps; Ed’s come up behind him without a sound. “Just toss some random stuff in there—for a few sickles, we can give you Muggle books, clothes, papers and so on to toss in. This is a traveler’s trunk, laddie. Never know when you got to deal with some Muggle official who wants to see what you’re bringing across borders. Muggles won’t even see the dial.”
“Brilliant,” Harry says. He can hide his stuff from the Dursleys now!
Ed goes down into the trunk. It shudders a bit, and Harry leans back, but then the dial makes a ping sound and another option appears. Inching forward, Harry discovers a new setting, Ptns.
The lid pops open and Harry falls over onto his rear. Ed climbs out and offers him a hand up. “Potions lab’s all set up—it includes another compartment. S’long as you leave your cauldron and supplies in the right places, they’ll appear in the potions compartment as well as down in the lab. Now, if you know the color-change charm, you can set the walls and furnishings however you like them, but we do sell self-applying wallpaper if a pattern’s more your style. I’ll change the color of the outside for free.”
Harry eyes the trunk; it’s a nice warm brown color, with varnish rubbed into the sturdy wooden sides and brass fittings. “I think I like the color.” Oh, boy, he should’ve thought of this sooner. “D’you take Gringotts checks?”
Please say yes, please say yes—
“‘Course we do.”
Oh thank God. Merlin? Wizards say Merlin. Harry digs the checkbook out. Ed hands over a quill and Harry starts to write, then pauses. “Er—my school bag’s pretty worn out.” Understatement; the leather had been cracked and fraying when he got it in first year, and it never has enough space. “Do you sell those?”
“Backpack or messenger-style?” Ed asks.
Harry thinks. Messenger is more common but backpacks are more convenient. “Backpack, please.”
The one he gets is a rich deep brown with a gold latch. The inside is expanded and has a weight-reducing charm on it. There’s a stiff leather honeycomb sort of thing on the inside for storing scrolls and plenty of space for his books and notebooks, plus a pocket on the outside for quills and ink. It brings his total to four thousand nine hundred fifty-one galleons and eight sickles. Harry charges it to his mum’s old vault and watches gleefully as Ed shows him how to tap the top of his trunk with his wand once to make it featherlight and twice to shrink it down so it’s about the size of a brick. Ed warns him never to leave it shrunken for more than a week, since the enchantments don’t like being compressed, and sends him on his way.
Harry feels much better about himself as he and Bear stroll back towards the Leaky. Good enough that he drops into a stationery shop in Cardin Alley and buys three quills—a sturdy falcon feather that promises to lend speed to his writing hand, a sleek black-and-white magpie feather with a faint iridescent shimmer that won’t write for anyone else, and a rich blue feather from a parrot that will make his calligraphy extra fancy. He stocks up on black ink and discovers that magical journals are, in fact, a thing, and they’re wonderful. Each one is thin enough to hold easily but charmed to contain up to a thousand pages, and if he writes something in the box at the top of each page, it’ll automagically be added with a page number to the table of contents at the front, along with the date of the entry. It’s a better way than he’d even hoped to find for managing his class notes, and Harry buys one for each class. The clerk who rings him up shows him how to press a bit of parchment to the metal plaque on the front and spine of each journal so the words on the parchment are copied onto the plaque. It only works once but he can label the journals when he gets back.
Harry does exactly that, once he’s ensconced in his room at the Leaky with Bear and Hedwig watching. Luckily the spell just copies the content and not his handwriting. When he’s done, he has a neat set of ten black leather journals, and the spines and covers are all labeled in a nice all-caps serif font. “This will make school so much easier,” he says, and Bear snuffles approvingly at the journals.
All his clothes fit perfectly into the wardrobe compartment, and even with all the book buying he’s done, Harry doesn’t quite fill the library compartment, which means the shelves below have plenty of space. Maybe he should get a catalogue? He’s seen those a few times around the various Alleys.
Since it’s a bit late, Harry goes out to do that before finishing with his packing. He collects catalogues from Flourish & Blotts, Twilfit and Tattings, Quality Quidditch Supplies, Gusteau’s Potions, Slug & Jigger, and The Mandy Market Used Goods Store. After some thought, he decides if he needs books from Silas Pumperknell’s, he can just owl Mr. Pumperknell directly. That store is such a maze Harry doesn’t think he would trust any catalogue to be accurate anyways.
The catalogues get stuffed into his general compartment, which also holds all his notebooks, his quills, reams of parchment, ink pots, his blotter, his telescope and broom, the tarot cards and rune stones, his broomstick servicing kit, and his new-old wizarding wireless.
When he moves on to the potions compartment, placing the cauldron is easy, but Harry’s unsure what to do with his potions kit. He doesn’t want to have to unpack the thing every time he comes back from class, but the compartment has slots for vials and ingredients storage, nowhere large enough for a whole case.
Harry lifts the case in to see if it’ll fit next to his cauldron. The trunk shudders, and before Harry can move back, the various storage spaces shift around, making a slot on the left side perfectly sized for the potions kit to slide into standing upright.
“Oh. That’s–helpful. Okay. I love magic.”
Bear barks his approval.
And… that’s it. Harry looks around, double and triple checking, but nope, he really got everything.
Wait. Not toiletries. He’s been using the ones the Leaky provides. Harry could slap himself.
Well, that’s a job for tomorrow, anyway.
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