The Cupboard Series 5: United We Stand ...

Chapter 29

With a reluctant sigh, Harry turned his back on the window depicting the beautiful day outside. Gentle wisps of white were drifting lazily across the blue and, although he knew that the air would still be quite cool, it was the perfect weather for flying, something that Harry hadn't had a chance to do of late.

Unfortunately, he'd set aside his Saturday to spend in the school's computer lab, typing up the essay for Charms that was due on the coming Wednesday. The computers were a great boon in Harry's opinion, at least, being able to hand in typed pages to his teachers eliminated that scowl or sigh that he'd inevitably heard whenever they'd taken one look at his messy scrawl and realised that they were going to have to try to decipher it as well as mark it.

With notebook, textbook and the two other Charms books tucked under his arm, Harry meandered through the hallways, not seeing any hurry in reaching his destination.

His steps faltered slightly as he stepped through the door to the computer lab. It wasn't so much the fact that there were others there, after all, everyone in the school had come to see the benefit of using the computers to type up and print out their assignments. No, it was more the composition of who was there.

Dudley was the first that Harry noticed. Beside him was Justin, then Colin, Patrick and Lionel. But what even stranger was the fact that the five were lined up next to each other, not spread around the room as most people tended to do in order to ensure that they weren't disturbed.

And then the colours that were flashing on their screens caught Harry's attention and he found himself automatically being drawn towards them. Instead of the simple black text on white, he was seeing blues, greens and greys predominantly, mixed in with a myriad of other colours.

Harry couldn't take his eyes off of the screen even after he was standing right behind his cousin. It was obviously come kind of game and by the fact that all five screens looked similar, he guessed that the five boys were playing the same thing.

"Not your usual type of game, Duds," Harry remarked.

And he was right. Dudley had always favoured either the fast games with lots of racing cars or shoot-em-up type games with lots of guns, bullets and dead bodies. This one seemed to be composed of a giant map, with little named towns and icons for various pieces – a boat, a man of some kind and a horse.

"Oh, hey Harry," Dudley said, barely pausing to look around and up at his cousin. "Nah, this is something that Uncle Mike got us. Only came out a couple of months ago. It's called Civilization II."

"What do you have to do?" Harry asked.

"You get to build a civilization up from nothing to the most powerful thing in the world and kill everyone else," Dudley replied.

"Yes, that does about sum up Dudley's strategy," Justin drawled.

"Well, it works," Dudley defended. "None of you have beat me yet."

"You play against each other?" Harry asked.

"We can all play the one game at the same time," Colin piped up excitedly. "The computers are all linked together."

"Did you want to play, Harry?" Lionel asked shyly. "You can have up to eight and there's only five of us."

A large hand reached across and pulled out the seat beside him.

"Come on, Harry. Take a seat and let my guys thrash the stuffing out of your guys," Dudley said.

"What do I need to do?" Harry asked, tentatively sitting down.