ATOMIX; Ch 05: I am a Businessman

Hello my dear Patron family, here's chapter Five of ATOMIX. I hope you like it!

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Author out!

"I am Talking."

'I am Thinking'

Spells

ATOMIX

-Dev Sagittarius Black

~~Chapter 05: I am a Businessman~~

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Step One: Close your eyes, take a deep breath and calm yourself as much as you can...

I followed the first step easily enough. It wasn’t that hard to close my eyes or to ‘try’ to calm myself. My mind was a jungle of thoughts, before one could properly finish there was a new thought waiting for me. Concentrating on things with open eyes isn’t a hard thing, but to do the same with closed eyes? It took me a whole lot more force to just stay at one thought and not see anything in front of me. 

That was the first step anyways: Don’t see with your eyes. 

Once I had felt that my thought process had slowed down and I could easily hold one or two thoughts at a single time. After that, instead of divulging, the book said to converge the thoughts to yourself and to what you could feel. That wasn’t hard either, I started to feel the things around me. 

Like the slightly lumpy bed beneath me, the faint smell of wood and dust in the air, the prickling sensation of air currents that tickled my skin and gave me goosebumps. I started to feel things that were around me and I was quite happy because I could easily feel my thoughts center around myself. 

Step Two: Ignore all the noise around you, nothing matters anymore….

This step was a bit hard because no matter how much I tried, the chirping of cicadas outside in the garden, the traffic outside on the roads and even the sound of my breathing was quite audible. Sometimes, I could even hear some weird insects chirping in the floorboards or the ceiling, which was quite normal considering the house I was in. 

I don’t know how long I stayed like this. It was getting kind of weird to sit in a single position for who knows how long. My legs were going numb. That wasn’t good, right? Your legs shouldn’t go numb like this. The book didn’t say anything about parts of my body going numb. 

Well, actually…that was kind of a good thing because not only my legs but my ears were going numb too. Thankfully that meant that I couldn’t hear the noise around me. It was supposed to make me happy because the book said it would take me hours to reach this step and here I did it in…. uhh…... how long has it been again? 

Step Three: Instead of watching, hearing and smelling, start feeling everything…

That was one hell of a weird step. How could I feel the smell? I knew that there were a few people who could do it but I wasn’t them! I was just Harry, a simple guy who was trying to know a few answers because of a weird phenomenon that kept occuring around me. 

For a few moments, I felt something pull at my mind. It was like a small tug that wanted me to open my eyes and see, but I resisted and then it went away. Unfortunately, it was also the last thing that was any different from my constant struggle to keep the thoughts to myself and empty so as to feel the smell, sound and keep myself from opening my eyes.

“Ugh this is fruitless!” I opened my eyes and glared at the book that was beside me. The book said that the third step would take me days if not weeks to master and I for sure didn’t have that much time. Who knew how many times I’d accidentally fall into the zone by that time? I needed someone to help me through this, at least the practical part because it was too confusing. 

It had been so much easier when I had accidentally stepped into the Zone a few times before, all I had to do….WAIT! That’s it! I couldn’t help but cheer internally at the serendipitous discovery. The phenomenon! That was the answer as well as the question. It had been the same thing that pushed me into ‘The Zone’ before so it was quite simple that it should be the same thing that helps me reach the Zone methodically, right?

Oh wow, I am a genius! Brilliant move, Potter! Now, if only it actually worked as well….

So, here I was, instead of following through the book that I had spent the better part of my day doodling over, I was now searching for the memories of events that helped me get into the Zone before.

They weren’t satisfactory for me because the first time it had happened I was in the hospital and had just received the news that my relatives had died. The second time it happened I was being threatened by a house-elf and the third time I was…. cleaning a shelf? 

Now, I know that cleaning a shelf does sound like a life-changing event but does that sound like a trigger for entering the Zone? Obviously not. The first event seemed like grief and… I guess, elation of some kind? The second was definitely fear because that was what I had felt back then.

However, the third one didn’t really contain any feeling. I was frustrated with the talk and I used it to fuel my attention on cleaning the dust. Does that mean that all I need is an extreme emotion? Or is there a way to trigger the Zone by entering a specific set of emotions?

I decided to go with one extreme emotion, because well… that’s way more easier than focusing on several others at a single time and triggering it in the correct sequence to get the desired result, but which emotion would help me most? Grief like the first time? Fear like the second one or frustration like the third? Subconsciously, I also noted that all the emotions that I had thought of were negative ones, did that mean that the zone could only be reached through negative emotions? 

Well, that wasn’t exactly a satisfying thought….

Still, I tried to focus my mind once more. I quickly went through the first two steps that were mentioned in the books, but this time when it was time to start step three, I decided to do something else entirely. I started to experiment with step two. 

Instead of doing the ‘Ignore noise and nothing matters’, I started doing the ‘Ignore everything except anger and frustration, only they matter’. I chose these two because they were interlinked close enough to be done together, and fear wasn’t an option unless I wanted a senile elf to kill me. Now, I don’t know about anyone else but I do not like choking.

Ironically enough, it was quite frustrating to focus on anger and frustration, and since here I was shooting arrows in the dark without any guidance I didn’t know when to stop or what level of frustration and anger I should be feeling to be able to reach the Zone again. 

Therefore, I started taking help from my memories. Instead of staying still and keeping my mind empty, I started focusing on events that angered me. Small things that I have tried to ignore which made me want to kick a bucket or kick a puppy. The latter was obviously not feasible every time, but it was the thought that mattered, right? Right. 

Living with the Dursleys, it was THE requirement to suppress my anger at things that made absolutely no sense or even if they did make sense, but now I didn’t need to do that, did I? Then, the anger slowly started to bleed out of the container which I usually kept locked.

Ron’s betrayal last year and then his subsequent approach to our friendship by prioritizing Dumbledore’s words over his own thinking… this disappointed me and angered me at the same time. 

Hermione and her incessant need to scold me every time we did something wrong by mistake or her usual attitude that silently assumed she was better than us. It annoyed me quite a bit. Well, I was stretching the cords now, so to say, but this was needed. I needed to get angry at everything while focusing on connecting with my surroundings at the same time. 

Yeah, it sounded way easier than it actually was but somehow, focusing my entire attention on getting angry as I remembered my past months helped a lot with the second step to ignore all other things. Now, the problem was that I was still unable to connect with ‘The Zone’.

 I started thinking of more and more things that would anger me like the reactions of the general Hogwarts’ student populace to me being a champion, Mrs Weasley and her incessant need to treat me as an ignorant child. 

The more I thought, the more anger coursed through me. I wanted to do nothing more than to let go of all this fall on the soft bed beneath me and go back to sleep, I would have followed through with that too, if not for the fact that all of a sudden the various sounds around me actually decreased to a bare minimum. So much that I could hear my own respiration and the blood pounding in my heart. 

The area of cognition expanded tremendously and almost immediately I could feel everything. As if I was quite literally connected to everything around me. I could feel the thickness of the mattress beneath me, the sparse amount of dust in the room, I could even feel the wall behind me and the exact distance of all the cracks and crevices in it. This feeling, the feel of being connected, the power to do anything that I wanted to do with it. 

It was absolutely mind-blowing and utterly intoxicating! Something that I wanted to do repeatedly just for the fun of it. Yeah, I totally didn’t sound like a drug addict there.

I felt as if I was some form of extraterrestrial being who could do anything with a snap of his fingers and no one could stop him. Somehow, I remembered how the dust from the shelf had vanished into thin air when I had wanted to clean the shelf. I concentrated on the small area that I was connected to and forced myself to think that the entire dust in the area should be pushed away. 

Almost immediately, I felt the particles being thrown away, I couldn’t see them, but I knew the particles that were passively floating in the air currents had been pushed away and the two meter area around me was absolutely dust free. This feeling was too good, I could do almost anything in this small two meter area around me. 

⁂

A few days passed the same way, almost like a routine. Yeah, a rare thing in an average teenager’s life, but – and not to sound rude – I am Harry Potter, the boy with power to control everything around him any way he wanted. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? 

Unfortunately, my routine wasn’t as awesome as I was, and a few people didn’t like how I spent my days. Yeah, a certain selected few people with whom I wasn’t talking to. 

Everyday, I woke up at seven, which was way earlier than I used to. I freshened up and went downstairs to see what Mrs Weasley had for breakfast because I was absolutely famished almost everyday nowadays for some reason. I mean, I wouldn't be able to compete with Ron but I was sure I could give him some serious competition for the first fifteen minutes… or well ten minutes? Ah shoot, okay, maybe for the first five minutes? 

Then I used to go back to my room to study more of the books that Sirius provided, sometimes Hermione or Remus would join me and we would discuss a few possible theories on the things that I discovered in those tomes. 

Remus wasn’t that glad that Sirius gave me the book on Animagus transformation, but after a small talk with me and my overly enthusiastic godfather, he relented and even went as far as to agree to help me with my transformation process. 

In the evening, before I went to bed, I would practice my ‘powers’. Yeah, I had decided to call it that till I found a specific term for the magic. One might wonder how unoriginal it sounded, but well… I am Harry Potter, not Gilderoy Lockhart with his flamboyant self-imposed titles. Thankfully. 

The best thing was that I had been able to work my powers quite a bit. Reaching ‘The Zone’ was relatively easier now. It certainly wasn’t instantaneous but now, I had chalked up the basic pathway to get into the Zone, which helped me reach it in a minute or so. The only drawback was I still hadn’t figured out how to reach the Zone with open eyes or while in motion. Something that I knew was possible because I had accidentally done that too. 

My mind was going through a blizzard of plans and ideas for my ideas as I moved through the stairs. It was moments like these when I wanted to learn how to apparate. It would have been so much easier to simply ‘Pop’ from the dining area like the Weasley twins did, would also help me evade Ron’s glare which was slowly annoying me more and more. 

All of sudden there were two ‘pop’ beside me. 

“Hello-” “-Harry” 

I blinked at that and almost missed a step. It would've been pretty bad if I accidentally fell down two flights of stairs just because two redheads popped beside me. 

“Hey, how may I help you two gentlemen today?” 

“Gentlemen, he says,” quipped one of them. “Are we gentle enough to be called ‘gentleman’, my less handsome brother?”

“I don’t know, my less smarter brother, but I am quite sure we are man enough. Maybe we should ask the soon-to-be-richest guy in Magical Britain regarding that?” The other one smirked before both of them placed their hands across my shoulders. 

“So, what do you say, Potter?” “Are we gentle enough to be called a gentleman?” 

I shook my head, these two were incorrigible. “What do you want, guys? I am a bit in a rush here.” And we were standing in the middle of a staircase like loons. 

“Aww… well, we wanted to talk to you, there’s something that we wanted to show you,” one of them said and we started walking once more.

“What is it?” 

"Harry, Harry, Harry, we wanted to 'show' you. Don't be a Ron; you're better than that."

I chuckled at that. It was true, but I had hoped they would take the hint and leave me be, instead of pulling me into any of their weird pranks. Because I knew them, I could guess that was what they were up to. 

We kept on chatting. More like I asked them what they wanted from me and they, like they had been doing, avoided it and instead answered and asked questions to each other, each question was more idiotic than the one before. 

“Which came first, an egg or a chicken?” Ugh…the egg? No wait, the chicken?.... damn it!

“If Professor Snape used shampoo, would he look like Alan Rickman?” Who was Alan Rickman and how did the twins even know about him?! 

“What if Dumbledore’s secret to a long beard is a wig? Can you imagine Professor Dumbledore without his beard?” No, that was a tough one, and we laughed loudly when Fred said his face would probably look like an old dried prune.

So yeah, the questions went on and got more and more weird. By the time we reached the duo’s room, I was quite literally praying for mercy from their banter. Did they ever learn to stay silent? No wonder McGonagall was so pissed off at them. I couldn’t imagine how they would be in class if they were like this at home. 

For the life of me, I just couldn’t imagine the twins as straight and silent students who learned everything that was taught in the class without cracking jokes. What a terrible line of thought…. 

⁂

The twins’ room was just as I had imagined it to be. A double bed in one corner, three tables joined together to form a workbench sort of thing. A special corner where there were handpicked wooden boxes of some kind. There were posters on the wall and a large blackboard in the corner that had scribbles from top to bottom. 

Oh, and almost every walking space was littered with something or the other. Unfinished projects, stacks of papers and what not. It looked like a typical muggle scientist’s room that was shown on the TV shows which aunt Petunia made Dudley watch in summers. I tried to stop that line of thought before I ended up falling into a downward spiral of useless memories. 

It was my first time inside their room because, even at the Burrow, I usually stayed away from their room because of the heavy possibility of triggering some sort of trap that they placed inside it if anyone else entered the room.   

I remember Ron once told me that he had tried to do that and they had used him as a lab rat for one week where he was constantly harassed by their pranks, so much that even Mr Weasley was annoyed with the constant change in Ron’s attire and behavior.

“So, now that we are here,” George began as we plopped on the bed while Fred locked the door behind us. “What do you think you were doing when you gave us all the money from the tournament?” 

I blinked at that. It was probably the last thing that I had anticipated them to ask me. At most I had thought that they would want to ask me about Ron and when would we do the heroic reconciliation that would make Mrs Weasley cry tears of joy – something that I wasn’t keen on doing by the way. 

“Err… you needed it more than I did, so I just…. gave it to you two, I guess?” 

“And you thought you would do that and get away with it?” Fred frowned, a terrifyingly serious expression on his face, “See, George, I told you. Harrykins didn’t even know what he was doing, cough up the gold.” 

George rolled his eyes and pulled out a chocolate frog card and gave it to Fred. Yeah, they were betting with each other with chocolate frog cards because and I quote ‘The money we have is ours and used together almost always, so we bet with things that can actually hold our bets like chocolate frog cards’. 

“What do you mean?” I asked them, ignoring the fact that they had just betted on me or something related to me. 

“You need to be more business minded, ickle Harrykins,” Fred smirked at me. 

“But since you’re a dumb-” 

“-Idiotic-” “-foolish-” 

“-Stupid-” “-troll-”

“-Moronic-” “denser than Hagrid’s beard-” 

“-Mindless-” “-brainless-” 

“-Idiotic….. wait, did we say that already?” 

“Yeah, we did, but it truly signifies that little Harrykins is indeed stupid, doesn’t it?” George laughed as Fred nodded sagely. 

It was probably my first time when I had learned so many different words to tell someone that he was stupid, personally I liked Hagrid’s beard one more because it was somewhat like a hidden insult if used against someone who didn’t know Hagrid. 

“Alright, alright,” I waved my hand. “You’ve established that I was stupid AND a million other synonyms,” I quickly added when I saw Fred open his mouth. “Now, I still don’t know why you're bringing that thing right now.” 

“That’s because we did some thinking,” said George. “Yeah, a lot of it, and have decided that since you basically gave us all your money-” Fred added. “-An amount that would’ve taken us years to achieve, which has helped us quite a lot, by the way.”

“Therefore, to thank you for all of it, we have decided that…..” 

“You will be our third partner in Weasley's Wizard Wheezes!” The duo announced together, a mad glint in their eyes that kind of scared me but they covered it with their enthusiasm.

“You know… I mean, you didn’t have to do that. I didn’t want anything in return for that,” I told them as honestly as I could. Because it was true, I really didn’t expect them to make me their partner in a business venture that they had been planning for so long. All I did was give them some money that I didn’t want anyways thanks to the trauma related to it. 

“Yeah, we know that.” “We also knew you would say this therefore, we already prepared ourselves to tell you that,” They cleared their throats and smirked at me, “Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes decline your rejection and attempt to sneak away from us, therefore like it or not you are our partner now. Of course, you can donate your profits to the most handsome Fred and George Weasley, thank you.” 

Their practiced speech ended with a flourishing bow before the two chuckled and looked expectantly at me.

“I don’t know, guys,” I shrugged, “I am terrible at pranking, I mean, when was the last time you-” 

“Don’t worry your little head over such trivial matters, Harry, our young apprentice,” Fred grinned, “We will do all the dirty work. You don’t even need to be present when things happen, all you need to do is just stay silent about things like you have been and count the galleons that we’d bring with our latest products! Now, don’t look like that, this is the best offer you will ever get from anyone, so just say yes to it already.” 

“Alright, I am in,” I announced, much to their delight as we shook our hands to make it a ‘formal’ deal. 

“.We would’ve sneaked in some butterbeer to celebrate your joining but all we have is Sirius’ firewhiskey-” “-Something that we can’t give you because it would be very bad if mum found out.” 

I waved them off, “It’s fine, guys, I don’t-” 

“Butttt….we have something better for you!” The twins smirked as they pulled out a box from behind them. 

It was nothing more than an average wooden box that could hold a few things with the words ‘PrAnK KiT’ written on it. As well as a large ‘W’ on the box which probably meant ‘Weasley’.

“A Prank kit?” I asked them in confusion, “Why would you build something like this?” 

“This is an exportable prank kit, Harry,” Fred answered my query, “We are hoping to start some sort of owl-services where we would take owl orders and deliver them prank kits and how to use them.” 

“But won’t it be harmful to you if others started using your inventions when you’re still at Hogwarts?” I asked them but all I received was a suspiciously insidious smile that they shared. It was as if they had planned something already but they weren’t that keen on sharing it with me, at least not yet. 

“The kit doesn’t contain anything too harmful, it’s a small assemblage of pretty tame stuff like the Boxing Telescope, three Anti-Gravity hats, four Skiving Snackboxes, a few Dungbombs and two Trick Wands.” 

Well, that wasn’t bad. None of these items were harmful or invaded someone’s privacy, and since they were still in the school, they could even promote it as everyone – even the firsties – would know about the twin pranksters of Gryffindor. 

“But we are working on a few things that we would want to keep in our shop when we finally open one. You can check them if you want to,” George grinned at me and waved towards all the other unfinished projects that were scattered around the room. Almost every nook and cranny was occupied by at least one or two unfinished objects and their work table was loaded with side projects. 

“Are you sure that you should keep stuff like this out in the open?” I asked them as I picked up one of the black crystal balls to inspect it. “Won’t Mrs Weasley come and confiscate your things?”

“Mum knows that we take enough precautions to survive our habits,” Fred grinned at me, “You like that?”

I looked at the black crystal that was in my hand, “What’s this?” I wanted to go into ‘The Zone’ here in this room. The room was filled with objects lying around me, so it would be a really good way for me to practice my connectivity with my surroundings and to predict the correct location, shape and size of each object that was around me. 

“That's a ball filled with the replica of Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder,” George told me as he closed the Prank Kit and kept it under the bed. “Handy things. Creates instant darkness that helps you escape when caught. Unfortunately, the original powder is, obviously, made in Peru so we had to try to replicate it and then try to make it last longer as well as have a larger range.”

That was actually a good thing. My brain started thinking of ways to utilize the powder’s ability if Voldemort were to attack, but it’d probably be useless against the arch-douche. Maybe it’d work against his minion army? 

“So, does this one work as intended?”

“I guess. We’ve tried creating a few before. Unfortunately, they always blasted and filled the room with smoke. Not a good feeling, I’ll tell you that.” George shook his head and then continued, “The one in your hand is as stable as we could’ve made one our own, and that’s only because we didn't experiment with that one yet.” 

I looked at the pitch black crystal ball in my hand as various thoughts buzzed past my head. What if I was to enter the Zone right now and look for the defects in the crystal? Since I could accurately sense everything in a two meter radius down to the exact location, dimension and position when I entered the zone. I was quite sure that I could sense the defects in the crystal too. If only I knew the exact composition of the black powder, but for that I’d have to look…

“...rry? Harry?” “Oi, boy-who’s-looking-at-our-balls!” 

I snapped my eyes towards George as both the twins guffawed at my expense, a moment later I realized what he had said and I couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled up inside me. 

“Really, George? Boy-who’s-looking-at-our-balls’ I laughed as I placed the crystal ball back where I picked it from. 

“Not my fault you weren’t responding, Harrykins,” Fred smirked, “For a moment I thought you were about to French kiss the ball with the way you were looking at it, good thing it doesn’t have lips.” The git had the nerve to give a dramatic shudder while the other git laughed. I cringed hard at the image, what else could I do, try to actually kiss the crystal? Ugh…

We chatted some more and the twins showed me other products that they were working on. Some were quite ingenious like the Shield Hats, Fanged Flier and the Portable Swamp. Others were just prank materials like the ‘U-no-poo’ and Canary Creams. 

Overall, I would gladly admit that becoming their partner sounded like one of my best business ventures as I could clearly see them giving serious competition to Zonko’s in the near future. That is, of course, if Mrs Weasley allowed them to actually pursue their dreams instead of forcing the two to apply for some dumb Ministry job. 

⁂

I returned back to my room, saying hello to Mrs Weasley on my way who went past me with a bucket of daily laundry. That woman did work quite hard. Though I wondered why she would need to wash the clothes if all she needed to do was simply use Scourgify to render the clothes spotless. Maybe overuse of magic degraded the color and quality of cloth? Who knows. 

I was planning on doing a few things for today, I had nearly finished the book on meditation and was about to start the one on Occlumency. It was said to be an obscure mind art where one could defend their mind from the counterpart attack called Legilimency. My excitement to learn this new thing was quite high, and it was with such high spirits that I entered my room. 

Unfortunately, the moment I did, I knew it was a mistake. Why?

Because my dear best friend had finally decided to muster some of his lost Gryffindor courage and instead of glaring from afar like the past few days, he stood in the room as he went through my books that were kept neatly on the study table. 

“Hello, Ron,” I tried to keep my voice as calm as possible even though I wanted to shout his bloody ears off. “What brings you here today?” 

'Patience Potter, don’t you dare fuck this up.' 

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Ending Note: There you have it fellas, chapter Five of ATOMIX, hope you liked it.

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