Dumbledore and Harry's Adventures

Leaving Egypt

Harry looked around the hut in which he had spent the past two months of his life. It was the day before Halloween, and they were leaving for England after the final test of Harry's progress with warding (both creating and dismantling). Albus had already packed all his own possessions, which only left Harry's possessions.

Harry focused on the packing spell as he concentrated on the final state of his trunk. With a swirl of his wand, all his possessions zoomed from every corner of the room towards the open lid. The clothes neatly folded on their own, with precise folds to ensure the most efficient packing while avoiding crumpling. His books hovered over the trunk until the clothes were properly placed, and then they shuffled into the trunk in neat alphabetized stacks. His remaining possessions then fit themselves in to the free space, leaving an open area for his box of letters which he had kept from being packed. The Sword of Gryffindor ended up leaning against the trunk, held in a dragon hide sheath that Deathspear had gifted him.

He smiled at the packed trunk. His first attempts at the spell had ended up leaving him with a mass of wadded up clothes, haphazardly placed books, and a trunk that was so overstuffed that closing it would require forceful magic which would likely break the spines of most of his books. Well, it could be closed if Albus expanded the interior, all Harry had to do was to admit "being defeated by a box" (Harry knew he was being manipulated, but it still worked to get him to keep working on the spell).

At first, he had tried to focus on every detail of the packing process. He hadn't realized how many steps there were in folding a single shirt until he had to explicitly picture every miniscule detail that he normally was able to do by hand without thought. Annoyingly, getting one shirt folded properly did not apply to the other shirts, so just folding his shirts required him to precisely memorize over a hundred steps. Even with his Occlumency skills, it was easy to forget one step, which would then cascade into chaos.

As it turned out, he figured out the trick as he reviewed his warding notes and remembered Albus talking about magic trading off between power and versatility.

Since that conversation (and subsequent pranking of Sirius and Remus), he had mainly concerned himself with improving the power of his wandless magic (which still required direct touching), by intentionally focusing all the weakness of the magic into a single spot. It had worked wonders when he had performed a wandless levitation on the clothesline and clothes (Albus had cast the spells to reinforce the clothes from tearing). His wandless spells were already difficult to cancel by others, but the act of focusing all weakness into one randomly placed and absurdly weak spot caused the rest of the spelled item to become nearly impervious to cancellation spells (they weren't impervious to Albus's overpowered cancellation spells, but that was hardly a fair baseline).

He had been so focused on sacrificing versatility to increase power, that he hadn't thought of sacrificing power for versatility. As Albus had said, "Magic only cares about fulfilling the goal of the wards, it doesn't care about the details."

With that realization, the packing process became better with each attempt. As his picture of the end goal of the packed truck became clearer, the neater the folding became along with the increased precision of the packing itself.

He had his breakthrough eight days prior and had taken many notes whenever he had thoughts on when less powerful and more versatile versions of his spell repertoire could come in handy. Specifically, to figure out a way to pull another prank on Albus. The man was incredibly wily, and so Harry was keeping his newfound versatility to himself until the time was right to strike.

With a satisfied sigh, he turned away from his trunk to look at his box of letters.

Opening the box, he looked at the expanded interior and the neat stacks of letters. One stack contained his personal correspondence. All the other stacks contained the MANY fan letters.