Welcome to Gaia! ::

Phobius nodded, satisfied, then smirked slightly. "Meet me on the left-hand seventh-floor corridor after class, next to the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy," he told them. "I know a secret room where we'll be able to talk without being overheard." With that, they all finished their food and started heading to class, Phobius taking out a Blood Pop and starting to suck on it.

"Don't worry, I will - you and Hermione would probably kill me if I fell behind... and that's after Phobius would get done with me..." Harry shivered, instinctively glancing around warily.
Meanwhile, over in another corridor (since he had a different class this time), Phobius suddenly felt strangely pleased with himself for some reason... 'Meh, must've put an instinct-level fear of me into someone again. I know it's not Weasley, I haven't terrorized him enough yet - Malfoy, maybe...?'

"Well, yeah, but I get the impression that he enjoys it way more than he should," Harry pointed out... and he was absolutely, 100% right.
Once they were done with classes, they headed to the corridor. Harry gave his pale friend a puzzled look, but Phobius simply took to pacing in front of the wall opposite the tapestry.
After a few moments, Harry opened his mouth to ask a question, only to switch to gaping when a massive door appeared in the middle of the wall. Phobius gave the Boy-Who-Lived a small smirk before opening the door, heading inside.
inside was a relatively empty room other than four chairs, a table, and a bookshelf... a bookshelf filled with books on dark creatures. Phobius calmly sat down at the table, waiting patiently for the others to come in and close the door behind them before he spoke. "So, tell me, before I let you in on any of my secrets... what have you figured out about me so far?"
Harry kept quiet for the moment, glancing at the girls since he figured they'd made more progress than he did.

Phobius nodded slightly. "Well, you've certainly compiled a lot of data on me." He glanced over at Harry. "Harry? Anything to add?"
Harry shook his head.
Phobius then returned his attention to all three of them. "Well, firstly, there are two corrections I need to make. Firstly, my liking for Blood Pops is more a personal taste than a racial trait. Secondly, I'm not a half-breed, not in the typical sense of the word... rather, I'm only one-third human."
Harry blinked in surprise, having not expected that... how does someone even be one-third of something, anyway?
"The second part of my heritage, you'll have to keep guessing, but as for the third part..." He flicked his wand, and a book zipped off the shelves, the young man catching it in his hand and carefully opening it to a certain page. "Well, the third portion of my blood is that of a Dark Creature who is widely as both a threat and a pest, depending on how much it has fed on fear." He set the book down, allowing the others to see the page he'd turned to.
Harry leaned over and read the title of the section. "'Boggarts'... you're part boggart, then?" He frowned slightly, puzzled. "Well, that explains some of it, at least, 'specially that comment you made once about feeding on fear, but why are you so paranoid about other people finding out? How would that even work, anyway"
Phobius sighed, flipping a few pages and pointing to several pictures of examples of the species. "The Bludgeoning Boggart of Old London Town. The Screaming Bogey of Strathtully. Both boggarts that fed on enough fear to become true threats. They could not be wounded in the traditional sense for they did not have a true physical form, and being amortal non-beings like all boggarts, they could neither die nor be killed... and yet, despite all their dark power, they were easily rendered helpless by the same spell all Boggarts are weak to... a spell that I am immune to." He glanced up from the book at his friends. "The other creature part of my blood makes me dangerous enough - in fact, my Aura of Fear is a result of my Boggart powers mixing with my other creature blood powers. In time, I could be more dangerous than any pure boggart would have the potential to be if left unchecked, and I do not have the same weaknesses they do. As such, so-called 'Light' wizards would seek to kill me before I became too strong, and most Dark wizards and witches would seek to either use me or see if my abilities can be bred. Since I have no desire to see if I can be killed like a normal human, and I'm not particularly interested in being a tool or breeding stock, I prefer to keep this secret."
Harry nodded slowly, understanding that: basically, since there was no way to keep him in check short of killing him, if he went public with what he was, then people who feared what he could become in the future would start trying to kill him. "All right, but, er... exactly how does that work, anyway? I mean, the book says Boggarts don't reproduce, and that nobody's ever seen what they really look like."

"Actually," Phobius corrected them quietly, his voice and expression neutral, "Harry is the one who is correct this time - normally, Boggarts cannot procreate with any species, let alone humans. They are also incapable of feeling, at least not in the way humans understand it; it is only due to my human side that I can feel anything at all. However... my mother's fear back then was rather unique in that she had two things tied for her greatest fear - a creature and an action. And so my so-called 'father', a Boggart that just so happened to find its way into her mysteriously Silenced and Locked dorm at Hogwarts when she awoke in the morning, turned into a copy of the creature, accounting for the second part of my creature blood... and then it performed the action she was most afraid of." Phobius watched them carefully, waiting for the penny to drop.
Harry blinked, confused... before he paled slightly, Phobius's implication hitting home. "Oh... you mean..."
"Yes," Phobius confirmed softly, his face now akin to stone. "My conception didn't happen out of love - it happened because being raped was one of the two things my mother used to fear the most, and a Boggart that oh-so-conveniently happened to be in her bedroom decided to take advantage of that so it could feed off her fear." He then smiled, but it was a hollow smile, devoid of anything but bitterness and a silent hatred - hatred of the Boggart that had helped conceive him, hatred of whoever had snuck the Boggart into his mother's room back then, hatred of whoever her head of house had been for allowing it to happen under their watch, and beneath it all, a core of self-hatred that had been there for years. "I suppose it's fitting, in a sick and twisted sort of way - like almost every other aspect of my life, even the very act that resulted in my birth had fear at the heart of it."
Harry just sat there silently, not sure what to say - exactly how were you supposed to react to the news that your best mate was conceived via a Boggart raping his mother?

"I said it was the Boggart that changed form before conception, not my mother," Phobius corrected absentmindedly, relaxing in Hermione's grasp, a look of faint surprise on his face. "As for who planted the Boggart, well, we already know who did it; we just can't touch him - the old coot has too much political clout."
Harry blinked several times as he processed that before gaping in shock. "'Old coot'... Dumbledore?!?"
Phobius nodded. "I'm not going to lie to you - Mother's a dark witch, has been for years; she just doesn't use the Dark Arts for evil like the Death Eaters... and heaven forbid Dumbledore's precious Gryffindor house produce even a single Dark witch." He gave a bitter smile again. "He'd been trying to get her to ReSort herself into one of the other houses for years at that point - threats, blackmail, bribery, the works. The Boggart was just his final attempt to drive her out of the House."
Harry blinked again, digesting this.

"If you can manage that, then I'll probably make a real smile, as opposed to a smirk," Phobius replied dryly, pretending not to notice her sniffing him.
Harry grinned slightly as well at Hermione's actions before glancing at Phobius. "So... what's it like - being a part-Boggart, I mean?"
Phobius shrugged. "A fair portion of my emotional capacity is either nonexistent or small, allowing for clarity of thought most of the time, and I need to feed on fear every now and then. Due to being a Dark Creature, I have a stronger alignment for dark magic than most. I have to constantly keep a lid on my abilities, as mentioned previously, and I stay under a mild glamour at all times to keep myself looking fully human - you saw my true appearance back when I allowed my Aura to leak out. All in all, could be better, but could certainly be worse - I could be Mitis."
Harry blinked. "Er, who...?"
"A part-human a year younger than me whose very existence breaks several rules of physics, biology, nature, magic, and reality itself. Mitis is Mitis. Any attempts to understand him beyond that could quite possibly result in heavy mental scarring... or the universe as we know it being replaced by a new world order in which puffskeins are deadly predators and rule the world, manticores are cute and cuddly, and logic and rationality are replaced by insanity and a tendency to chase anything shiny, haven't figured out which. In short: you don't want to know, and pray to whatever higher power you worship that you never have to know," was the creepy monotone reply.
Harry stared a moment, then promptly decided that Phobius was right - he didn't want to know.