Chapter 90: A Simple Greeting
"I think we need to talk, Potter."
Tamara stared at the dirt-caked Savior standing before her. He was grinning like an absolute fool, leaning forward as if expecting a warm embrace. A wave of deep disgust washed over her. She extended a single, pristine finger, pressing it firmly against his collarbone to halt his advance.
"But before that, go change out of those clothes. You look like you just rolled in a pigsty." She paused, her nose wrinkling slightly. "And wash your hands."
Harry froze. He blinked, slowly looking down at his mud-splattered, oversized T-shirt and his filthy, scraped palms. The realization hit him, and a furious blush crept up his neck, turning the tips of his ears a burning scarlet.
"Oh! Sorry! I... I was just too excited!"
He wiped his grimy hands against the sides of his equally ruined trousers, a helpless gesture that only made him look more thoroughly pathetic.
"I'll go right now! Upstairs! My room is upstairs!"
"Lead the way."
Tamara kept her words clipped. She had absolutely no desire to remain on the ground floor for a single second longer.
By the kitchen door, Petunia Dursley was shrinking back against the wallpaper. The bony woman stared at Tamara with the wide, white-rimmed eyes of someone watching a lit stick of dynamite. Vernon, meanwhile, was still wheezing heavily, his massive chest heaving. Despite his lack of breath, his small, piggish eyes were already narrowing, brewing a desperate, cowardly intent to kick this unnatural freak out of his perfectly normal house.
Ignoring the pathetic Muggles, Tamara followed Harry. Her polished shoes stepped onto the thick, slightly worn carpet of the stairs, ascending to the second floor.
"It's right here... it's a bit messy. I hope you don't mind."
Harry pushed open a narrow door. The white paint was peeling off the wood in dry flakes. He offered a sheepish, apologetic smile.
Tamara stepped inside.
It was indeed very messy.
Or rather, it was utterly wretched.
A sagging iron bed frame groaned just from the draft. A dilapidated wardrobe stood in the corner, its doors slightly askew. The floor was a chaotic obstacle course of discarded spellbooks, crumpled parchment, and oversized, threadbare clothing. Over in a rusted birdcage, the snowy owl, Hedwig, slept with her head tucked securely under her wing, ignoring the world.
The air in the cramped space was thick and stagnant, smelling strongly of stale dust, old socks, and molted owl feathers.
Tamara surveyed the space with a hyper-critical eye. Her gaze swept over the rickety bed and the piles of useless clutter. True, her own room at Wool's Orphanage had hardly been a palace, but that minor detail did not stop the Dark Lord from casting a look of supreme contempt at the Boy Who Lived.
In her mind, suffering was merely the crucible that tempered the strong. But this? This submissive, cowardly acceptance of squalor? That was the original sin of the weak.
"The famous Harry Potter..."
She turned slowly, the corners of her mouth curling into a sharp, mocking arc.
"To think you are as docile as a domesticated pet in front of mere Muggles." Her dark eyes glinted with cold amusement. "It seems you quite enjoy being ordered around like a common slave?"
Harry scratched the back of his messy hair, looking thoroughly awkward. "Uh... actually, it's alright. At least it's much better than the cupboard downstairs..."
He turned toward the broken wardrobe, intending to dig out something vaguely clean to wear.
However.
The very second he turned his back.
"Ah!"
Harry let out a sharp yelp. He jumped backward so violently he nearly collided with Tamara.
"What is that?!"
Tamara shifted her weight, nimbly sidestepping the flailing boy. Her brow furrowed in deep irritation as she followed his panicked gaze toward the mattress.
There, perched right in the middle of the rumpled bedsheets, sat a little monster.
The creature possessed two massive, bat-like ears that drooped heavily on either side of its head, and bulging, watery green eyes the size of tennis balls. It was draped in a filthy, tattered pillowcase with holes torn out for its arms and legs—the universal, degrading uniform of a House-elf.
Right now, the little beast was staring back at them with those gigantic eyes, looking utterly terrified by the two humans who had just barged in.
"A House-elf?"
Tamara narrowed her eyes. Her voice dropped, instantly turning as cold as a winter tomb.
As a former master of many, she was intimately familiar with this wretched breed of creature. They were the bound slaves of pure-blood Wizarding families: lowly, utterly submissive, and above all else... incredibly noisy.
"Harry Potter!"
The elf suddenly opened its mouth and shrieked. The voice was so shrill, so violently high-pitched, that it sounded exactly like rusty nails dragging down a chalkboard. The sound physically pierced Tamara's eardrums.
"Dobby has always wanted to meet you! Sir! Dobby has waited so long!"
"Dobby?" Harry stared, completely bewildered. "Who are you? What are you doing on my bed?"
"Dobby is a House-elf! Sir!"
Dobby hopped off the mattress, his ragged pillowcase flapping wildly around his knobby knees.
"Dobby has come to tell you... it is a very difficult matter... Dobby does not know where to start..."
"Then shut up."
Tamara cut him off. Her tone was absolute ice.
She could already feel a vicious migraine clawing at her temples. The little rat's voice was far too grating, and that sickeningly high-pitched, servile tone triggered a physical wave of loathing deep within her chest.
Only then did Dobby seem to register that there was a second person standing in the room.
He snapped his head around, his tennis-ball eyes locking onto Tamara.
Then, as if struck by a physical bolt of lightning, the elf recoiled violently.
Even though Tamara currently wore the skin of a beautiful, harmless young girl, creatures like House-elves possessed a near-bestial intuition for magical auras.
He could feel it.
Coiled tight within this human girl was a dark, suffocating presence... an abyss so deep and cold that it made his very soul violently tremble.
"Bad... bad Wizard..."
Dobby whimpered under his breath, his bare feet shuffling backward against the floorboards.
But the elf quickly remembered his self-appointed mission.
"No! Dobby must say it!"
Dobby suddenly became frantic. He whipped his head back toward Harry, his voice rising to an even more agonizing, glass-shattering pitch.
"Harry Potter cannot go back to Hogwarts! There is danger there! A great plot!"
"What plot?" Harry asked, stepping forward.
"Dobby cannot say! Dobby cannot betray his master!"
Dobby let out another ear-splitting shriek, and then did something entirely unhinged.
He lunged headfirst at the heavy metal desk lamp resting on the nightstand. Gripping his own ears, he began to frantically, viciously bash his skull against the solid brass base.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Bad Dobby! Bad Dobby! Dobby almost said it!"
Accompanying the dull, sickening thuds of bone on metal were Dobby's heart-wrenching, hysterical cries of self-punishment. The lamp clattered and rattled under the brutal impact, the metallic noise echoing deafeningly off the narrow walls of the bedroom.
"Stop! Stop it!"
Harry was horrified. He lunged forward, desperately trying to grab the elf's skinny arms to pull him away, but the little creature possessed a terrifying, manic strength. Dobby easily threw Harry off and continued his brutal assault on the lamp.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Dobby must punish himself! Dobby must seal his mouth!"
In any other lifetime, such a pathetic, farcical display of self-flagellation might have drawn a cruel sneer of amusement from Lord Voldemort.
But not today.
Not in this sweltering, suffocating afternoon heat. Not after enduring a miserable Muggle train journey, and certainly not after being forced by a parasitic system to complete a damned social interaction task just to maintain her virtue points.
This noise.
It was actively challenging the Dark Lord's absolute limit of patience.
Tamara closed her eyes.
She could feel the veins in her forehead throbbing in time with the elf's skull-bashing. A dark, venomous flame of pure killing intent ignited in her chest, burning hotter by the second.
Too loud.
Her pale fingers had already slipped smoothly into her sleeve, her fingertips brushing the polished wood of her wand.
To properly execute a highly magic-resistant creature like a House-elf, the meager wandless casting skills she currently possessed in this body simply wouldn't suffice. House-elves were lowly vermin, yes, but they possessed a naturally thick, innate resistance to standard spells. To instantly shatter those defenses and snap its neck, she needed the raw amplification of her wand.
[Warning! Extremely dangerous killing intent detected!]
[This is a Muggle community! If you cast magic at full power here, the Ministry of Magic will surround this place within three seconds!]
[Please stay calm, host! Calm down!]
The System's perky, panicked voice echoed in her skull like a bucket of freezing water, slightly dousing the roaring inferno of Tamara's fury.
Yes. The Trace.
She couldn't kill the rat.
Faced with a high-magic-resistance elf, the moment she channeled a lethal curse through her wand at maximum output, the violent surge of magical fluctuations would be impossible to mask. On the monitoring arrays deep within the Ministry of Magic, her location would light up like a distress flare.
, this elf clearly belonged to a wizarding family. Slaughtering another wizard's property would bring nothing but endless bureaucratic headaches, far outweighing the brief satisfaction of venting her anger.
But...
Bang! Bang! "Dobby is not allowed to say!"
That damned, relentless banging continued.
Tamara snapped her eyes open.
Those irises, usually as dark and deep as ink, had bled into a terrifying, luminous blood-red.
She took a single, silent step forward, appearing directly beside the hysterical elf.
She leaned down, her movements unnervingly smooth. The tip of her wand slid out just enough to press firmly against the side of Dobby's sweating temple. When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper, yet it carried a sinister weight far colder than thousand-year-old ice.
"If you make one more sound..."
Her tone was soft, but it acted like an invisible Freezing Charm. The words sliced cleanly through the chaotic noise of the room, drilling with surgical precision straight into Dobby's oversized ears.
Dobby's head-banging stopped instantly.
He turned his head, his movements jerky and terrified.
He found himself staring directly into the dead, crimson eyes of the young girl.
Her face was entirely devoid of expression, yet a suffocating, physical wave of pure malice bled from her pores. To the elf's highly sensitive magical perception, that malice took the shape of countless invisible, venomous vipers, slithering out to coil tightly around his frail neck.
"I will pull every single bone out of your body..."
Tamara extended one pale, perfectly manicured finger, lightly tapping the center of Dobby's shriveled, heaving chest.
"And I will string them together to make a necklace."
She tilted her head, her red eyes unblinking. "Then, I will skin you alive, and use your pathetic hide to fashion a new lampshade for this desk lamp."
She leaned in a fraction of an inch closer. "Do you understand?"
This was not an empty threat.
It was a genuine, vivid promise dragged straight from the darkest depths of her soul.
House-elves possessed a natural, hyper-acute sense for dark magic. In Dobby's terrified perception, the illusion of the pretty young girl shattered completely. In her place stood an indescribable, towering shadow of absolute evil—a terror that had once plunged the entire Wizarding world into an era of blood and despair.
This was an entity ten thousand times more dangerous than his cruel master, Lucius Malfoy.
Dobby let out a tiny, terrified hiccup. His bulging eyes looked ready to pop out of their sockets.
His entire scrawny body locked up tight, as if he had been blasted point-blank by a Petrificus Totalus. He didn't dare twitch a single muscle.
The bedroom plunged into an absolute, deathly silence.
Over in the corner, even Hedwig seemed to sense the shift in the atmosphere, refusing to even poke her beak out from beneath her feathers.
Harry stood frozen, his jaw hanging slack. He looked from the petrified elf—who seemed to have been put on a literal pause button—to Tamara's back.
He swallowed hard, the sound loud in the quiet room.
Even though Tamara's words just now had sounded incredibly dark and wicked to the core... he had to admit, the results were undeniably effective.
"Good."
Tamara slowly withdrew her finger. With a look of deep disgust, she wiped her hand against Harry's bedsheets, as if cleaning off some invisible, infectious filth.
"Now, if you still wish to continue breathing the air in this room..." She didn't look at the elf. "Get your quiet self over to that corner."
Dobby scrambled down from the nightstand, his spindly legs trembling so violently they could barely support his weight.
He didn't even dare to walk upright. Instead, like a kicked dog that knew it had misbehaved, he dropped to the floor and silently rolled himself into the furthest, darkest corner of the room. He wrapped his long arms around his head, curled into a tight, shivering ball, and didn't even dare to breathe loud enough to be heard.
The world was finally, blissfully quiet.
[Ding! Mission Settlement: Maintain Peace and Quiet.]
[You have successfully stopped noise pollution that could have triggered a neighborhood dispute, albeit using extremely terrifying dark-force methods.]
[Reward: Wisdom +1.]
[Current Wisdom: 33.]
[Unlocked Passive Skill: Fear of the House-elf.]
[Effect: All House-elves will feel instinctive fear in your presence. This will greatly increase the success rate of your commands to them while reducing their will to resist. (Note: Effect is halved for free elves).]
Listening to the cheerful chime of the notification echoing in her mind, Tamara's foul mood lifted by a fraction of a degree.
Fear of the House-elf?
That was actually a highly practical passive ability.
After all, when she inevitably moved to seize control of the Malfoy estate or subjugate the other sacred pure-blood families in the future, absolute command over their network of servants would be a crucial tactical advantage.
"Alright, Potter."
Tamara turned her back on the cowering elf and looked at the still-dazed Harry. Her eyes had returned to their normal dark hue, and her tone shifted back to its usual brand of arrogant, icy dismissal.
"Since I have visually confirmed that you are still breathing and haven't been flushed down a Muggle sewer..." She smoothed the front of her skirt. "Then my mission... I mean, my brief lapse into superfluous kindness has officially run its course."
She didn't even bother to ask what the so-called 'great plot' the elf had been screaming about was.
It was undoubtedly just some clumsy, transparent scheme cooked up by that blonde idiot, Lucius. If there really was mortal danger waiting at the school, all the better. It would be absolutely perfect if it scared the Savior into dropping out, or better yet, if he died tragically on the Hogwarts Express. She would wake up laughing from her dreams.
"I'm leaving."
Tamara spun on her heel and headed for the door, entirely unwilling to share oxygen with these people for another second.
"Wait! Tamara!"
Harry finally snapped out of his stupor and hurriedly chased after her toward the landing.
"You... you're just leaving like that? Won't you stay and have a cup of tea? Or... uh, can we talk?"
"Talk to you about what?"
Tamara paused in the doorway, glancing back over her shoulder. Her dark eyes swam with open mockery.
"Talk about how to properly serve as a slave to Muggles? Or perhaps exchange tips on how to keep such a neurotic, self-harming pet?"
She gestured vaguely toward the corner where Dobby was still violently shivering.
"Stop dreaming, Potter."
"If you are truly that bored, you would be far better off writing more pathetic letters to your idiot friends, or researching a spell to make that noisy little rat shut up forever."
With that final, biting remark, she swept out of the room and down the stairs without a single backward glance.
Harry was left standing alone in the doorway, watching her cool, departing silhouette vanish into the shadows of the stairwell.
Even though he had just been thoroughly scolded and insulted, a strange, warm current surged through his chest.
Harry murmured to himself, the corners of his mouth twitching upward into a helpless, foolish smile.
"Though her tongue is a bit sharp, she really did come all this way just to see me."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "Maybe she's just... a good person with a really strange way of showing she cares."
Meanwhile, deep in the shadows of the corner.
Dobby quietly peeked out from between his knobby fingers. His massive, watery eyes were filled to the brim with absolute terror and deep confusion.
That terrifying, evil girl... why on earth would the great Harry Potter think she was a good person?
Dobby didn't understand.
Dobby felt that the world of human wizards was far too complicated and dangerous.
He decided he'd better go back to punishing himself.
Thud.
He tapped his head against the floorboards. But he only dared to bump it very, very lightly, absolutely terrified that the demon girl would hear the noise, march back up the stairs, and turn his bones into jewelry.
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